AQ: If you are talking about America, the reputation of the American – not only in Iraq, but throughout the Middle East – was very positive. Everyone remembers Wilson's principle – self-determination – and many Iraqis would have preferred America to be the mandate power rather than the British. But that goodwill started to evaporate in the Forties, and certainly with the establishment of the state of Israel. Unfortunately, the United States did not stop with the mere establishment of the state of Israel. American support for Israel, materially, commercially, economically and so forth, has increased over the years, thereby increasing the antagonism and the deep anti-American feeling found in the Middle East. It has poisoned the relationship tremendously.
LID: Would you say that it starts with the Palestinians being forcibly moved out of their country?
AQ: When the state of Israel was established, there were 600,000 Jews and 12,200,000 Palestinians. Israel then proceeded to kick out of their homes in one fashion or another some 800,000 of these Palestinians. Some of these refugees settled in Jordan; some of them settled in Syria; some of them elsewhere – but funny thing: despite the United Nations stressing that these Palestinians have the right to go home, Israel has refused to accept them. So they have never been back since then, and their numbers have grown to several million people.
LID: These were largely Muslims, but also some Eastern Rite Catholics and Nestorians?
AQ: They're basically Muslims and Christians. The Christian community in Palestine used to be a very big community. It represented 20 to 30 percent of the total population. But because of ongoing persecution, many of them were kicked out, and their cities in Palestine – like Ramallah and Bethlehem, completely Christian communities – have lost their Christian character. Ramallah was completely Christian; now it's completely Muslim because of outside immigration.
LID: It must be very difficult for Christian Palestinians to understand that there is a faction of supposed Christians in America who are actively supporting their oppressors.
AQ: That's correct. You see that bewilderment especially among the priests and the ministers of the Palestinian Christian community. They wonder why their co-religionists in the West are not active in spreading the word that Israeli policy is not a discrimination only against the Muslim but also against the Christian community; that not only the Muslim suffers, but also the Christian suffers. I remember talking to one member of the Christian community in Palestine – he said that if the situation continues, he can envision a time when there will be no Christian community there whatsoever. All that we will have is the church buildings staffed with a few people and nothing else, because the Christian community is finding it very difficult to live. Consequently many of them are emigrating.
LID: Let's talk about the intensifying of U.S. support for the Israeli state militarily and financially. We pour billions of dollars every year into that country, do we not?
AQ: We are giving Israel on average four billion dollars a year. That is the largest grant or loan to a foreign country in history. Technically, Israel is not eligible for foreign aid because it is a developed country. Foreign aid was established to help undeveloped countries, people who are in dire need. On average, every Israeli citizen receives about a thousand dollars of foreign aid.
LID: Let's look at U.S. foreign policy regarding the nuclear situation in the Middle East. We already know where the “weapons of mass destruction” are: Israel has weapons of mass destruction, has nuclear weapons.
AQ: Not only nuclear. They also possess chemical and biological weapons.
LID: We are putting pressure on Iran not to develop nuclear weapons, but no one is discussing Israel at all. The phrase “weapons of mass destruction” was only used in relation to Iraq in the recent past and now in the context of Iran, and never in respect of Israel with its obvious potential threat to peace in the Middle East.
AQ: You see, that's one of the tragedies, why people don't trust the U.S., and why they think that the U.S. is hypocritical because of their one-sided policy. For starters, if we, Americans, have weapons of mass destruction ourselves – if we have the nuclear bomb, if we have chemical and biological weapons – what right do we have to ask other countries not to have the same? Ethically speaking, if I have something, other people should have the right to the same thing. So, firstly, we cannot object on that basis. Secondly, when you talk about Iran – and I'm not defending the government of Iran – you must understand that if you are living in Iran – surrounded by countries like India, Pakistan and Russia which all have the nuclear bomb; when Iraq is occupied by a nuclear power, America; when Israel has a nuclear bomb – by what right can the U.S. tell other nations living in this situation that they, too, cannot have a nuclear bomb? If I were an Iranian I would pursue the bomb. In order to be trusted, the U.S. must pursue a coherent policy of seeking a nuclear-free zone throughout Middle East. Otherwise there is no way on earth they will be able to stop Iran pursuing the bomb unless, of course, they want to invade Iran.
LID: Why did we really invade Iraq given that the “weapons of mass destruction” was a pretext, and that there was no link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein?
AQ: I can think of at least five or six different reasons.
LID: Okay, let's go into them all.
AQ: The first reason is oil. The second reason is to reduce Iraq's potential to be a regional power. The third reason is to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict on Israeli terms. The fourth reason is to fuel the American industrial-military complex. The fifth reason is to stop a trend which Iraq started: using the Euro instead of the Dollar to price oil. The sixth reason is to transfer military bases from Saudi Arabia to Iraq. We can talk about each one of them briefly if you want.
LID: Certainly.
AQ: Why is oil important? Oil is important because Iraq officially has the world's second largest proven reserves of oil. It has approximately 112 billion barrels or 13% of the world's proven reserve of oil. That's second only to Saudi Arabia, which has officially 260 billion. Now what does 112 billion mean? It means almost three or four times the proven reserves of oil in America. We have approximately 30 billion. But there's something else about the Iraqi oil. Because of the political instability in Iraq over the last forty years or so, oil exploration has been almost zero. Many oil experts who have some familiarity with Iraq think that Iraq is swimming with oil. There are some experts who say that Iraq's oil may even exceed Saudi Arabia's supply. The Iraqi oil is not only in the North. It is in the South, and they have it in the middle near Baghdad also. They have it everywhere.
There's another thing. The U.S. wants to control the Iraqi oil, not merely to have access to it. Whoever runs Iraq is still going to sell it on the market. So we will have access no matter who is in charge of Iraq. But control is our objective, which is quite different from access.
LID: It's power and profit.
AQ: It gives you all sorts of things. Iraqi oil is very cheap to produce. Until the latest war it cost about two dollars to produce a barrel of crude oil. In the U.S., it costs approximately 15 – 20 dollars. That gives you an idea why Standard Oil of California, along with other big fat oil corporations, wants to have its hands on Iraqi oil. The potential for profit is beyond belief.
Iraq also has gas. About 3 or 4 percent of the world's proven reserves of gas is in Iraq. So you put your hands not only on oil, but also on a lot of gas. What does this mean on the international oil market? It means you can almost control OPEC – the oil producing/exporting countries – because the country which really manipulates the market now is Saudi Arabia. They are the “swingers.” They can destroy anyone; they can support anyone. They have the capacity to produce about ten million barrels a day. Iraq doesn't have it right now, because the oil industry was devastated during the sanctions period of the 1990s. But if they modernized the oil industry and if they updated the equipment, they could produce 6–7 million in three or four years time.
LID: But we got the pipeline built following
the invasion of Afghanistan.
AQ: But that's not Iraq, that's Afghanistan. Iraq has several pipelines already, but they need to be updated. There's one through Turkey, one through Saudi Arabia, and there's one through Syria. But we stopped the Syrian oil flow, because we wanted to punish Syria. If Iraq can do these things, it can affect the market. It can also be a “swinger” like the Saudis.
LID: If we have that capacity under our control, and we have the Afghanistan pipeline, what would be the significance of the two together?
AQ: Since Saudi Arabia is certainly still under our control, we would be able to control the oil market.
LID: That gives an immense amount of power to its holder.
AQ: Of course. Not only that. We can affect industrial Europe and we can affect industrial development in China, because we are going to be in charge of pricing the oil and also “suggesting” how much is going to be on the market. Thus controlling Iraqi oil gives us the ability to manipulate OPEC, and to become less and less dependent on Saudi Arabia. Once we become less beholden to the Saudis, we can talk openly about changing their government.
LID: At that point we would be in a wholly different relationship with them.
AQ: That was the aim, of course, but the trouble is that plans in Iraq did not develop the way they wanted.
LID: You mean Halliburton and the Dick Cheney connection?
AQ: Yes. We have the corporations. There is another reason why we want to control Iraq, which is very important in the world view of the neoconservatives. They want to privatize that industry because the oil industry in Iraq is a state industry, as it is elsewhere throughout the Middle East. We wanted to start with Iraq and use it as a model to be followed by other Middle Eastern countries. As a matter of fact, one of the things which Bremer did with Coalition Provisional Authority Order Numbers 37, 39, and 40 was to try and privatize the whole Iraqi economy. The jewel of privatization was to be the oil industry, of course, but they haven't started the process yet because of the formidable Iraqi resistance.
LID: But of course it's about more than just the oil.
AQ: Of course. The second reason we invaded Iraq, which nobody really wants to talk about, is that we wanted to reduce Iraq's capacity to be a regional power. Iraq has the potential to be a regional power for three reasons. One: they have oil, which puts them ahead of the pack, and two: they have arable land, much more than other people. Iraq is not a desert – there is a big desert, but there are two rivers, and there is other arable land, and if that land is used efficiently and carefully, Iraq could be the breadbasket for the whole Middle East. The third reason: Iraq has the manpower, which is more or less well educated. Many people left Iraq in the 1990s because of the sanctions, but these are the three elements. Whosoever wields power in Iraq will feel the urge to exercise some regional influence. It didn't happen only under Saddam. It happened with Qassim, it happened with the monarchy. Regional power of this kind is not necessarily something to America's advantage. If there were to be any sort of unity between the Arab counties, that is not something which we could look upon indifferently – because unity means power. Part of the reason we opposed Saddam invading Kuwait was not because we loved the Kuwaitis, but because he would have had his hands on 25% of the world's proven reserves of oil. That would have made him a significant power. It's as simple as that. Iraq has that potential, and America is against any such form of unity on principle.
LID: Pan-Arabism?
AQ: Pan-Arabism, or any “ism:” Pan-Islamism, Pan-Arabism, Pan-whatever-it-is. We are against them all. We did not like Gamal Abdel-Nasser, Egypt's President, (1918–1970) because he was a Pan-Arabist. We oppose Arab nationalism because their unity means power. Imagine if all the Arab countries federated. Right now such a federation would include 300 million people. Area-wise it would be one and a half times the size of the U.S., and it would control 60% of the world's proven reserves of oil. They would be a power. You would have to listen to them. So it's not to our advantage. Go to the library and look at some of the books written by CIA people, about how much we want such unity out of our way, about how much we wanted to dismantle the unity between Egypt and Syria in 1958.
So we want to stop Iraq from realizing that potential. What are we doing about it? Many things. Firstly, we are encouraging sectarian tendencies, encouraging ethnic tendencies, in Iraq. I think we are, perhaps, going to divide Iraq. Possibly into a minimum of two states. There will be a Kurdish state in the North; in the South, God knows what it is going to be. But the Kurdish state is a matter of time. When is it going to be announced? I would say five to ten years from now. It all depends on Turkey. A time is coming when we will decide that Turkey is no longer a strategic ally for us. We will use the new Kurdish state as a place for ourselves, to build military bases and to influence neighboring countries.
LID: Because of its geographical position?
AQ: Well, it's going to be a very small state. It's going to be only inside Iraq, not in Turkey or Iran at that point. The new Kurdish state will not be stable in terms of borders – it will fight with the coming new government in Iraq over Kirkuk and other cities – so they will be in constant dispute. Then, because they will be a small state, they are going to ask a superpower to come and protect them, like Qatar is doing now.
Now if we split a Kurdish state off from Iraq, then Iraq becomes much smaller, because you remove about four or five million Kurds from a population of 24 million people. Iraq would be constantly “fighting the Kurdish state,” and so we will severely hamper Iraq's potential to be a regional power. We want Iraq to become smaller and be busy fighting its neighbors. We are encouraging ethnic and sectarian tendencies. Suddenly now we are talking about Shiite and Sunni; we don't talk any longer about the Arabs of Iraq. We call them Shiite and Sunni. We are establishing a new construct, a new identity for the Iraqi people. And surprisingly we use it only in the context of the Arabs. Between 5 and 10 percent of the Kurds are Shiite, but we never call them Shiite. There are some Shiites among the Turkomen, perhaps up to 20 to 30 percent – yet we never call them Shiite or Sunni. We just call them Turkomen. We are playing games and employing gimmicks. We used the term “de-Ba'athification” for a while, and the purpose of that was to “de-Arabize” the country, to remove everything related to Arabism.
We are also, in one fashion or another, seeking to “normalize” Iraq's relationship with Israel. We are allowing the Israelis a free hand in Iraq. They are everywhere. The Mossad is everywhere, and there are many rumors that the Mossad was behind the killing of over 250 Iraqi professors and scientists. There are reports which indicate that the Mossad is very active in the Kurdish area of Iraq, along the border with Turkey, along the border with Iran, and they may in one fashion or another be stirring up some unrest among the Turkish Kurds, among the Iranian Kurds. It's already started happening among the Syrian Kurds.
LID: Sharon has successfully used September 11 to make a comparison: “We, the Israelis, also have to fight our 'war on terror' and so we will use this to solve our Palestinian problem once and for all.”
AQ: That is correct. Another reason for the war in Iraq is to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict on Israeli terms, because the Israelis regard Iraq as the only throne left. They have already taken Egypt and Jordan out of the equation; and Syria is not seen as that important since they are busy with Lebanon.
The Israelis will never forget that Iraq launched Scud missiles at them in the 1991 war. They have been acutely aware of Iraq's potential too.
Essentially, the Israelis thought that by taking Saddam out of the picture – taking Iraq out of the picture – the Palestinians would have no other support and would say, “Yes sir, we will sign whatever you want us to sign.” The Israelis failed to predict correctly just as have the neoconservatives. The Palestinians did not give up despite all that is happening.
A fourth reason we went to war against Iraq – which apparently nobody talks about, save a few – is that we need a war every once in
a while in order to fuel the industrial-military complex. Our last budget was 419 billion dollars, and it was passed with no discussion at all because “we are in a war situation.” We need a war to test our weapons, but we also need a war to brag about our weapons so that we can sell them. We are the largest purveyor of military arms worldwide. I think it was two or three years ago, we sold in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 billion dollars worth of arms. This is partly because we brag about our weapons – “Hey, they are very effective. Look what they did in 1991. Look what they did last year.” We need a war to find out how effective these weapons really are. War is good for business.
LID: A lot of “high tech” equipment was tested in this recent war.
AQ: Definitely. We tested some of it in 1990, and we tested more of it in 2003; and probably ten years from now we will come up with another war, so as to run more “tests” once again.
When you have a war, it's easy to pass laws, and it's easy to pass budgets. I remember the hassle which took place after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the controversy over continuing to justify a large military. But now nobody talks about it. We can keep raising the budget and nobody will talk about it. Democrat or Republican.
LID: Neither side.
AQ: No. This is a very important reason and few pay attention to it. Here's another reason for this war. At the end of the year 2000, Saddam started the trend of using the Euro to price oil in the international market. There was some discussion at that time that Venezuela and Iran might follow suit. If this had happened throughout OPEC it would have had a devastating impact on the dollar and on the U.S. economy.
LID: And the final reason for the war in your opinion?
AQ: Finally, we invaded Iraq in order to transfer the military bases from Saudi Arabia to Iraq. You see, having bases in Saudi Arabia is a problem. In a sense, that's what created bin Laden to some extent. He argued “Are you the protector of the Holy Places? You have the infidels here!” It must also be remembered that Saudi Arabia is much more restrictive and traditional. Iraq tended to be more open, more secular, etc., so the U.S. can “wheel and deal” within Iraq in a freer fashion. Both men and women can mingle and do all sorts of things. But what's happening now in Iraq is exactly the opposite. It's becoming more and more Islamisized. Another of their – the neoconservatives and Israelis – unforeseen, unintended consequences. And where will the unforeseen and unintended end?
Neo-Conned! Again Page 89
