Two years ago today - when President
George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protesters claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered. In fact there were
two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination
of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists". "Big Oil"
appears to have won.
The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight
from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants. Insiders told Newsnight
that planning began "within weeks" of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US. Mr Aljibury himself told Newsnight that
he interviewed potential successors to Saddam Hussein on behalf of the Bush administration.
Secret sell-off plan
The industry-favoured plan was
pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields. The new plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec
quotas. The sell-off was given the green light in a secret meeting in London headed by Fadhil Chalabi shortly after the US entered Baghdad, according to Robert Ebel.
Mr Ebel, a former Energy and CIA oil analyst, now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in
Washington, told Newsnight he flew to the London meeting at the request of the State Department. Mr
Aljibury, once Ronald Reagan's "back-channel" to Saddam, claims that plans to sell off Iraq's oil, pushed by the US-installed Governing Council in 2003, helped instigate the
insurgency and attacks on US and British occupying forces.
"Insurgents used this, saying,
'Look, you're losing your country, you're losing your resources to a bunch of wealthy billionaires who want to take you over
and make your life miserable,'" said Mr Aljibury from his home near San Francisco. "We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines,
built on the premise that privatisation is coming."
Privatisation blocked by industry
Philip Carroll, the former CEO
of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off
scheme. Mr Carroll told us he made it clear to Paul Bremer, the US occupation
chief who arrived in Iraq in May 2003, that: "There was to be no privatisation of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while
I was involved."
Ariel Cohen, of the neo-conservative
Heritage Foundation, told Newsnight that an opportunity had been missed to privatise Iraq's oil fields. He advocated the plan as
a means to help the US defeat Opec, and said America should have gone ahead with what he called a "no-brainer" decision. Mr Carroll hit back, telling Newsnight, "I would agree with that statement. To privatize would be a no-brainer.
It would only be thought about by someone with no brain."
New plans, obtained from the State
Department by Newsnight and Harper's Magazine under the US Freedom of Information Act, called for creation of a state-owned
oil company favoured by the US oil industry.
It was completed in January 2004 under the guidance of Amy Jaffe of the James Baker Institute in Texas. Formerly US Secretary of State, Baker is now an attorney representing Exxon-Mobil and the Saudi
Arabian government.
View segments of Iraq oil plans at www.GregPalast.com
Questioned by Newsnight, Ms Jaffe
said the oil industry prefers state control of Iraq's oil over a sell-off because it fears a repeat of Russia's energy privatisation. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union,
US oil companies were barred from bidding for the reserves. Ms Jaffe
says US oil companies are not warm to any plan that would undermine Opec
and the current high oil price: "I'm not sure that if I'm the chair of an American company, and you put me on a lie detector
test, I would say high oil prices are bad for me or my company."
The former Shell oil boss agrees.
In Houston, he told Newsnight: "Many neo conservatives are people who
have certain ideological beliefs about markets, about democracy, about this, that and the other. International oil companies,
without exception, are very pragmatic commercial organizations. They don't have a theology."
A State Department spokesman
told Newsnight they intended "to provide all possibilities to the Oil Ministry of Iraq and advocate none".