Waiting for a new Iraq

May 15, 2000
The oil business generates many surprises. Iraq should not be one of them.

The oil business generates many surprises. Iraq should not be one of them.

Iraq is a time bomb. Unless pressures created by Pres. Saddam Hussein soon find paths of relief, Iraq will one day erupt in a violent struggle for power and retaliation against oppression. And in the middle of the conflagration will be oil.

When Saddam loses power for whatever reason, there probably will be a market disruption. And there certainly will be a period of political instability, during which Iraq might not be a comfortable place in which to work.

Options for companies

Oil companies can wait and respond as though surprised when the inevitable power shift occurs. More constructively, they can seek ways to ease Iraqi pressures now in hopes they can help manage events to a nonviolent outcome.

They can, for example, put maximum distance between their interests and Saddam. To this end, they should let others argue over trade sanctions imposed by the United Nations after Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait in 1990. Because the Iraqi president blames his country's ever-worsening deprivation on the sanctions, oil companies opposing sanctions can be made-especially but not only within Iraq-to look like they support his evil regime. They must avoid the trap. Individuals and groups that don't stand to profit from an end to sanctions can oppose sanctions and Saddam at the same time. Politics and Iraqi petroleum potential don't give oil companies that luxury.

Companies need to make clear that Saddam, not sanctions, deserves blame for the human tragedy in Iraq. Conditions there, 5 years after oil exports began under a UN program designed to finance imports of food and medicine, aren't improving.

According to Amatzia Baram of the University of Haifa, Iraqi society remains where it has been since 1990-"on hold." Writing in the Spring 2000 issue of the Middle East Journal, he said he couldn't recall any part of the world "where the general standard of living deteriorated so rapidly and so deeply" as in Iraq after 1990. The burden falls most heavily on the middle and lower-middle classes, including high school and university graduates, he noted. "Financially, they are ruined, and they see no professional future."

Baram cited reports of Denis Halliday, who resigned his senior position in the UN to protest the sanctions after spending long periods in Iraq, that the economic crisis has increased divorce rates, homelessness, and prostitution; discouraged marriage; and created steep rises in crime levels. "To this," Baram wrote, "one might add around 450,000 Iraqis of all walks of society languishing in Jordan, unwilling to go back and unable to go elsewhere."

That Saddam is complicit in his people's suffering is clear. Alina L. Romanowski, a US deputy assistant secretary of defense, told a House committee recently that the illegal exports through which Saddam has enriched his regime include not only oil but also food and medicine purchased under the oil-for-food program. Interception of ships attempting to reexport goods that were supposed to have helped struggling civilians, Romanowski said, "irrefutably demonstrates that Saddam and his regime are manipulating the welfare of the Iraqi people for their own personal gain."

In the May 4 Financial Times, Samuel Berger, assistant to the US president for national security affairs, reported that last year Iraqi farmers received orders to reduce rice planting to conserve water during the worst drought in 50 years. Yet the government filled man-made lakes around Saddam's palaces-many of them new-and reservoirs in his home town.

Whether or not sanctions seem in retrospect to have been the proper response to Iraqi aggression in 1990, their removal will not end the suffering of Iraqis as long as Saddam remains in power.

Focusing on Iraqis

Amid their enthusiasm over Iraq's lavish oil resource, companies should avoid behavior that might be mistaken as support of a leader who enriches himself while his people starve. The Iraq in which they should wish to work is an Iraq without Saddam.

As they try to imagine such a place and plan for their work within it, the focus for oil companies should be Iraqis. It will be oil and oil projects financed by outsiders that ultimately bring the Iraqi economy back to life. But it will be demonstrations of humanitarian concern for suffering Iraqis now that earns oil companies their welcome when the time comes.