Crude World (22 page)
Mossadegh, who became prime minister after the nationalization vote, quickly enforced it. Iranian troops and officials seized Anglo-American facilities, including the massive refinery in Abadan. The British government, astounded at the temerity of its former vassal, imposed a blockade and persuaded major oil firms to boycott Iranian crude. Iran might now control its oil, but it could not sell any. London was motivated by a fading empire’ unfortunate mixture of vanity and vulnerability. As Hugh Thomas wrote in the droll fashion of twentieth-century British historians, “Ever since Churchill converted the Navy to the use of oil in 1911, British politicians have seemed to have had a feeling about oil supplies comparable to the fear of castration.”
Mossadegh did not give in. In 1952, he severed relations with Britain and closed its embassy in Iran, forcing the withdrawal of Her Majesty’s diplomats and spies. The British felt that only America could get rid of Mossadegh, but President Harry Truman, believing the problem wasn’t Iranian impertinence but British pride, would not back a coup. The calculus shifted when Dwight Eisenhower became president and his administration fell under the spell of British claims that Mossadegh would let Iran slip into the Soviet orbit. Iran’s Cold War importance was hard to exaggerate. In addition to having a lengthy border with the Soviet Union and possessing the world’s second-largest reserves of oil, it sat along the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the Middle East’s oil was shipped. Although it was greatly implausible that Mossadegh, a die-hard nationalist, would turn pro-Soviet or join hands with Iran’s pro-Communist Tudeh Party, Eisenhower, at the dawn of the Cold War, did not want to risk “losing” Iran. He green-lighted a coup that would be overseen by a CIA agent who was a grandson of Teddy Roosevelt’s.
Mossadegh was, in many ways, an easy target. He had an erratic personality, laughing uncontrollably at times, crying and fainting, often communicating in whispers with the foreign envoys he received in his bedroom, where he conducted affairs of state while dressed in pajamas. It was not hard for Kermit Roosevelt Jr., with hundreds of thousands of dollars at his disposal, to bribe military officers, politicians and editors. Most of Tehran’s newspapers, which accused Mossadegh of being a Communist and a Jew, came under CIA influence, and most of the anti-Mossadegh protests that preceded the coup were stirred up by these bribed politicians and journalists.
The coup began on the night of August 15, 1953. John le Carré could not have invented a better plot. Roosevelt waited at a CIA safe-house, sipping vodka with colleagues and singing show tunes, including “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.” Shah Reza Pahlavi, the timid monarch who was a figurehead but whose status would be vastly enhanced by the coup, waited at a seaside villa. Partial to race cars and nightclubs, the reluctant shah had had to be flattered, bribed and cajoled by Roosevelt before agreeing to join the coup. The plan was for a group of pro-shah
soldiers to arrest Mossadegh, and for the shah to take charge of the country.
Instead, the pro-shah soldiers were arrested outside Mossadegh’s residence. When dawn broke with news of the failed coup, the shah boarded a twin-engine Beechcraft and fled to Baghdad. Roosevelt, however, did not retreat. Although troops loyal to Mossadegh were deployed throughout Tehran, Roosevelt instructed his agents to organize so-called black crowds to shout support for Mossadegh and communism while beating up bystanders and looting shops. It was a violent smear job. As Roosevelt later wrote, “The more they ravaged the city, the more they angered the great bulk of its inhabitants.”
Roosevelt also paid for other crowds to hit the streets—except these were in favor of law and order and the man who, they proclaimed, would bring it to the now-chaotic city: Shah Reza Pahlavi. A $10,000 bribe was even given to a religious leader to bulk up the proshah crowds with Islamic devotees. Roosevelt had shown a dark genius. Chants of “Death to Mossadegh!” mingled with “Long live the shah!” As CIA rent-a-crowds seized government buildings, pro-shah troops ransacked Mossadegh’s house. With his control of the city lost, the prime minister surrendered. The shah, returning home in triumph, told Roosevelt, “I owe my throne to God, my people, my army—and to you!”
The White House was not foolish enough to raise a “Mission Accomplished” banner, but it was delighted with the ousting of the inconvenient Mossadegh. Yet like the invasion of Iraq a half century later, the intervention led to disaster for America and the Mideast nation whose destiny and oil it hoped to control.
Though on opposing sides of the desert front line in 1990, George H. W. Bush and Saddam Hussein shared a predicament: they could not call the war by its name. Even for a dictator, it is not acceptable to announce that you are going to war to seize another country’s oil. Principled excuses must be offered. Saddam spoke of Iraq’s long-dismissed claim to Kuwait and portrayed the invasion as restoring territory that colonial mapmakers had lopped away. He also accused Kuwait of stealing
oil by slant-drilling across the border (that is, drilling at an angle rather than straight down). Officially at least, invading Kuwait for its oil and the power and glory it would bring to Iraq was the last thing on Saddam’s mind.
American marines in the burning oilfields of Kuwait during the Gulf War of 1990-91
Bush was in a bind too, because Americans, horrified when they hear that Kathie Lee Gifford’s clothing line is made with child labor, also do not want to hear that the gas in their SUVs requires the shedding of blood. Such truths were unspeakable, literally. This was acted out years before in the brilliant film
Three Days of the Condor
, which starred Robert Redford as a naïve CIA researcher and Cliff Robertson as his cynical boss. Redford, learning of CIA killings related to the Middle East, tells Robertson that Americans will not support murder for petroleum. “Ask ’em when they’re running out,” Robertson replies archly. “Ask ’em when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask ’em when their engines stop. Ask ’em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won’t want us to ask ’em. They’ll just want us to get it for ’em.”
A month after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, President Bush made his
case in a speech to Congress. The war would not be for oil but for the rule of law and the sanctity of human rights. Bush quoted from a letter an American soldier, based in Saudi Arabia, had sent to his parents. “I am proud of my country and its firm stance against inhumane aggression,” Private Wade Merritt had written. Bush outlined the steps he would take to “defend civilized values around the world,” and he spoke for the first time of the grand design the war would buttress. “Out of these troubled times,” he said, “a new world order can emerge. … A world quite different from the one we’ve known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle.” He did not mention oil until one-third of the way through his speech, then quickly moved on.
It was true that Iraq’s invasion was illegal and brutish, and that if it was allowed to stand, the post-Cold War era would begin with a major violation of international laws. But international laws were violated every day across the globe. Liberia was being savaged in an atrocity-filled conflict that the White House rarely bothered to condemn. The call to high morals was particularly odd because American soldiers would sacrifice their lives in Kuwait to restore an all-powerful monarchy that had disbanded the parliament and banned political parties. And for years the U.S. government had abetted Saddam’s regime. It was an odd time and an odd place to champion war for democracy. It didn’t add up.
Americans sensed this; they were not persuaded about the need to go to war, according to opinion polls at the time. Something else was needed. A month after Bush’s “new world order” speech, a poster child for war emerged. Nayirah, a teenage Kuwaiti girl, testified at a congressional hearing. She tearfully recounted what she’d seen while visiting Al-Adan Hospital before slipping out of occupied Kuwait: “I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor.” Nayirah’s last name was not disclosed because, the hearing’s organizers said, her relatives trapped in Kuwait would face retribution from the Iraqis.
Nayirah’s testimony spread across America in TV broadcasts and newspaper stories. It went viral. An Amnesty International report (later
retracted) raised to more than three hundred the number of infants removed from incubators. Bush reinforced the theme, saying during a speech at Pearl Harbor (no less) that dialysis patients were ripped from their machines and twenty-two babies died after being taken from incubators. In the debate before the Senate voted by a slim margin, 52–47, to approve the Gulf War, seven senators cited the incubator story.
There was just one problem. Like the tales of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies during World War I, and like the stories of weapons of mass destruction in 2003, it wasn’t true.
Nayirah was the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States and a member of the royal family. Her testimony was arranged by Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which, despite its populist name, was a front created by the royal family to channel more than $10 million to the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton for a campaign in favor of war. Nayirah’s story was shown to be a fabrication. The hospital had only a few incubators at the time, and according to the hospital staff Iraqi soldiers did not throw babies onto the floor.
To generate support for the war, President Bush was obliged to obscure the truth from the public, just as his son would feel obliged to massage the facts twelve years later. Privately, President Bush was honest. Before major military or diplomatic moves, American presidents tend to issue national security directives that circulate at the highest levels of government. If you want to know the truth of war and peace, these secret directives are more useful than public speeches, and thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, it is occasionally possible to know their contents. In National Security Directive 54, issued a month before the liberation of Kuwait, President Bush mentioned oil in the first line and never mentioned incubators or democracy. “Access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in the area are vital to U.S. national security,” NSD 54 began. “The United States remains committed to defending its vital interests in the region, if necessary through the use of military force, against any power with interests inimical to our own.”
On February 24, 1991, a coalition led by a half million American troops crossed into Kuwait and routed Iraqi forces in one hundred
hours of ground warfare. As they retreated, Saddam’s army set alight more than six hundred wells. The battlefield was bathed in oil.
For Iraqis, the Gulf War of 1990-91 was not an anomaly in the annals of oil and invasion. Osama Kashmoula was thinking of even more distant events when I found him at the Oil Ministry in 2003.
The ministry’s leadership, handpicked by Saddam, had gone into hiding, leaving senior technocrats like Kashmoula to do what they could to get things going in the postinvasion vacuum. It had been just a few days since the events of Firdos Square. I heard Kashmoula’s voice at the end of a corridor that had the vacant, unpeopled feel of a ghost town. A breeze rustled through windows shattered by the shock waves of bombs. His office door was open and he was shouting into a satellite phone that had been lent to him by an American officer. Kashmoula was a short and thickset man in his fifties, and like most of Iraq’s engineers he was fluent in English. It was one of the odd facts of life that outlaw Iraq was home to some of the best engineers in the gulf. Saddam’s regime, before achieving its rogue status, had sent its most promising students to British and American universities for postgraduate training, and decades of war and sanctions had turned these men and women into ingenious desperados. They were the MacGyvers of the oil world.
The least surprising thing about Kashmoula was that he was an optimist. Nationality does not matter; all oilmen are optimists. It stems from digging a dozen dry holes before striking oil, and from the tremendous hazards that are regularly overcome to extract the treasured liquid. Oil is beneath layers of Alaskan ice? No problem. It is under treacherous seas off Sakhalin Island? A way will be found to get it. In the middle of a desert? It shall be extracted forthwith. Trained with this mind-set, Kashmoula was hopeful for the future because United Nations sanctions that had strangled Iraq would be lifted and America, with its world-class technology, would open its arms. He recalled visiting Russia a few years earlier and realizing that Russia’s best machinery came from Germany. If things worked out right, Iraq would be rebuilt with Western hardware and would produce more oil than ever before and make everyone happy—not just Iraqis, who would
become rich, but also Americans, who would have a new friend in the Mideast and cheap gas in their cars.
Yet Kashmoula was bothered by one thing.