War on Iraq: an Account of what really lead to it

Throughout the 1980s, Washington supported Saddam's war on Iran. Not only was he our vehicle for revenge against the ayatollahs who had deposed the shah, stormed our embassy, humiliated American hostages, and expelled our oil companies, but also he sat on the world's second-largest oil reserves. The Economic Hit Man's (EHMs) went to work on him. We gave him billions of dollars. Bechtel built him chemical plants that we knew would produce sarin and mustard gas for killing Iranians, Kurds, and Shi'a rebels. We provided him with fighter jets, tanks, and missiles and trained his military to operate them. We pressured the Saudis and Kuwaitis to lend him $50 billion. 

Watching events unfold in Iraq, I often thought back to the words of that Iranian engineer, back when the Shah ruled Iran, who escorted me and the other two MAIN employees from Kerman to Bandar-e Abbas. "Iranians are not Arabs, we're Persians, Arians," he had said. "The Arabs threaten us. We're with you guys 100 percent." Suddenly after Iranian revolution, the tables had turned. The Iranians had become the bad guys and an Arab named Saddam was our ally. 

The eight-year Iraq-Iran war was one of the longest, costliest, and bloodiest in modern history. By the time it ended in 1988, more than a million people were dead. Villages, farms, and the economies of both countries were devastated. But the corporatocracy had enjoyed another victory. Military suppliers and contractors profited handsomely. Oil prices were up. Throughout, the EHMs tried to convince Saddam to accept a deal similar to SAMA, the one I had helped forge with the House of Saud. They wanted him to join the empire. 

But Saddam kept refusing. If he had complied, like the Saudis, he would have received our guarantees of protection as well as more U.S.-supplied chemical plants and weapons. When it became obvious that he was entrenched in his independent ways, Washington sent in the jackals. Assassinations of men like Saddam, usually have to involve collusion by bodyguards. In the cases I knew personally - Ecuador's Roldós and Panama's Torrijos - I was certain that bodyguards trained at the United States' School of the Americas were bribed to sabotage the airplanes. Saddam understood jackals and their techniques. He had been hired by the CIA in the sixties to assassinate Qasim and had learned from us, his ally, during the eighties. He screened his men rigorously. He also hired look-alike doubles. His bodyguards were never sure if they were protecting him or an actor. 

The jackals failed. So in 1991, Washington chose the option of last resort. We used the Kuwaiti's as a bait to provoke him. Saddam fell in trap and made the mistake of attacking Kuwait. The first President Bush sent in the U. S. military. At this point the White House did not want to take Saddam out. He was their type of leader: a strongman who could control his people and act as a deterrent against Iran. The Pentagon assumed that by destroying his army, they had chastised him; now he would come around. Down the line it was believed sanctions might break his backbone and hence he would fall in line. EHMs went back to work on him during the nineties. He did not buy their package. Once again the jackals failed. A second President Bush deployed the military. Saddam was deposed and executed. It has been a warning to other states who do not cooperate.

Making of the Kings: Sauds and Dollar Supremacy

Washington's first ally in the struggle to defend the sovereignty of the dollar was Israel. Most people, including the majority of Israelis, believed that Tel Aviv's decision to launch attacks against Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian troops along its borders in what came to be known as the Six-Day War of 1967 was driven by Israel's determination to protect its borders. Territorial expansion was the most obvious reason; by the end of that bloody week, Israel had quadrupled its land holdings, at the expense of people living in East Jerusalem, parts of the West Bank, Egypt's Sinai, and Syria's Golan Heights. However, the Six-Day War served another purpose, it lead to the supremacy of dollar as the standard of trade. 

Arabs were humiliated and infuriated by the loss of their territories. Much of their anger was aimed at the United States; they knew that Israel could never have succeeded without American financial and political support, as well as the not-so-veiled threat that our troops were standing by in the unlikely event that Israel needed them. Few Arabs understood that Washington had motives that were far more selfish than defending the Jewish homeland, or that the White House would turn Arab anger to its advantage. We had pulled out of the Gold Exchange on August 15, 1971. Gold was no longer our standard against which currency would be printed. 

Nixon's second, and wholly unsuspecting; ally was the entire Islamic Middle East. In response to the Six-Day War of 1967, Egypt and Syria simultaneously attacked Israel on October 6, 1973 (Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish holidays). Knowing that strategically he was on shaky ground, Egypt's President Anwar Sadat pressured Saudi Arabia's King Faisal to strike against the United States and therefore Israel in a -different way-by employing what Sadat referred to as "the oil weapon." On October 16, Saudi Arabia and four other Arab states in the Persian Gulf announced a 70 percent increase in the posted price of oil; Iran (which is Muslim but not Arab) in an act of Islamic solidarity joined them. During the ensuing days, Arab oil ministers, agreeing that the United States should be punished for its pro-Israel stance, unanimously backed the idea of an oil embargo. 

It was a classic game of international chess. President Nixon asked Congress for $2.2 billion in aid to Israel on October 19. The next day, led by Saudi Arabia, Arab oil producers imposed a total embargo on oil shipments to the United States. At the time, few people perceived the cunning behind Washington's move, or the fact that it was driven by a determination to shore up a weakened dollar. The impact was immense. The selling price of Saudi oil leaped to new records; by January 1, 1974, it had soared to nearly seven times its price four years earlier. The media warned that the U.S. economy was on the verge of collapse. Long lines of cars formed at gas stations across the nation, while economists expressed fears of the possibility of another 1929-style depression. Protecting our oil supplies had been a priority; suddenly, it became an obsession. 

We know now that the corporatocracy played an active role in driving oil prices to these record highs. We had created and used the Middle East Crisis to strengthen our dollar.  Although business and political leaders, including oil executives, feigned outrage, they were the puppet masters pulling the strings. Nixon and his advisors realized that the $2.2 billion aid package to Israel would force the Arabs into taking drastic actions. By supporting Israel, the administration engineered a situation that generated what was the craftiest and most significant Economic Hit Man (EHMs) deal of the twentieth century. 

The U.S. Treasury Department contacted MAIN and other firms with proven records as corporatocracy henchmen. Our assignment was twofold: to formulate a strategy to ensure that OPEC would funnel the billions of dollars we spent on oil back to U.S. companies and to establish a new "oil standard" that would replace the former "gold standard." We EHMs knew that the key to any such plan was Saudi Arabia; because it possessed more oil than any other country, it controlled OPEC; the Saudi "royal" family was corrupt and highly vulnerable. Like other "kings" in the Middle East, the Sauds understood the politics of colonialism. Royalty had been bestowed on the House of Saud by the British. 

Details behind the strategy I helped engineer-the Saudi Arabian Money-laundering Affair (SAMA) are provided in by book "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man". In summary, as far as the media was concerned, the House of Saud agreed to three important conditions; it would: 

1) invest a large portion of its petrodollars in U.S. government securities; 

2) allow the U.S. Treasury Department to use the trillions of dollars in interest from these securities to hire U.S. corporations to westernize Saudi Arabia; and 

3) maintain the price of oil within limits acceptable to the corporatocracy. 

For its part, the U.S. government promised to keep the Saud family in power. They had no choice for they knew about our history in taking out the authorities that did not support our interest. (Recent examples of 50's and 60's, in the Middle East had been overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, Hassimites dynasty in Iraq and later Prime Minister Qasim of Iraq) 

There was an additional agreement, one that made few headlines but was crucial to the corporatocracy's need to maintain the dollar as the standard global currency. Saudi Arabia committed to trading oil exclusively in U.S. dollars. With the scratch of a pen, the dollar's sovereignty was re-established. Oil replaced gold as the measure of a currency's value. 

……. A side benefit-one appreciated only by the most savvy economists-also allowed Washington to continue imposing a hidden tax on every foreign creditor. Because the dollar reigned supreme, we bought their goods and services on credit. By the time they used that credit to purchase oil (or something else) from our companies, the value of their funds had diminished, due to inflation; the difference between these amounts was cash-in-the-pocket for the corporatocracy - a tax without the need for tax collectors. 

……. When Tel Aviv and Washington drove the Arab world into a corner, Arabs had little choice but to strike back, in the Yom Kippur War and through the OPEC embargo. This propelled the U.S. Treasury Department into action. EHMs were enlisted to forge a deal with Saudi Arabia that wed the dollar to oil. The dollar was crowned king, and has reigned supreme ever since. 

SAMA changed geopolitics. It helped bring down the U.S.S.R., established the United States as an unchallenged superpower, and angered Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire who would mastermind 9/Il.