David M. Boje, Ph.D. New Mexico State University
Jan 15 2003 - To
appear in Business Research Yearbook, 2003 - and presentation at International
Academy of Business Disciplines, April in Orlando Florida.
Photo 1 - Bush Oil War Explained
Before my Dad died, he said, “David, I want you to study the relationship between the President and oil.” Every Wednesday I grab my “Stop the Oil War” sign and head for the Las Cruces, New Mexico Peace Vigil (see PeaceAware.com). For every 100 motorists who commented on our carnivalesque street theatre, 95 raised two fingers in peace, and 5 did one-finger flip-offs. We are one of hundreds of vigils done each week across America, the minority who do not buy Bush administration’s marketing campaign. We think the hidden agenda is US corporate access to oil, and nothing to do with defeating Al Qaeda or Saddam. Homeland Security is the newest cold war version of McCarthyism.
US democracy is a façade masking a shadow government of oil lobby money and Texas oilmen and women occupying the White House. George W. Bush, 1978-84 was senior executive, Arbusto Energy/Bush Exploration and Spectrum 7 oil companies; 1986-90 Bush was senior executive of the Harken oil company (part of their purchase of Spectrum 7). In 1978, Bush Jr. set up a series of limited partnerships - Arbusto '78, Arbusto '79, and Arbusto '80- to drill for oil. Salem bin Laden (Osama's older brother) invested in Arbusto Energy (means 'Bush' in Spanish). Salem died in an plane crash in Texas in 1988 (Wiles, 2001). Bush change Arbusto's name to Bush Exploration; it was merged into Spectrum 7 Energy Coroporation in 1984, then folded into Harken Energy Corp., where Bush received 212,000 Harken stock shares and was a director in 1986. Bush sold his Harken shares June 20, 1990.
VP Dick Cheney, 1995-2000 was CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil service company. Both firms are immersed in accounting scandals. Condoleeza Rice, 1991-2000 was senior executive with Chevron Oil, which named an oil tanker after her.
Oil is electing presidents, senators, and congress (Boje, 2002a,b,c). ExxonMobil contributed $1.2 million to the Republican Party in 2000, second only to Enron; ExxonMobil spent $47 million lobbying the US Congress and Presidential Administrations since 1997 (stopExxonMobil.org). Oil and Enron scripted US energy policy (Cheney, 2001). Bush administration hired five Enron executives.
Bush marketeers persuade us that the US must attack, invade, occupy, and change the regime of Iraq because of a War on Terrorism. Takes a lot of marketing to sell this. Table 1 suggests the US will run out of oil; Iraq War is due to refusal of American people to break their oil-dependency. VP Cheney says, Iraq is “the great prize” and as pitchman, Kissinger says, “oil is too important to left to the Arabs.” Iraq is world's second largest reserves of oil and 11% percent of world’s known oil reserves (112.5 billion barrels).
Table 1: Ten
Oily Dates to Remember about the Iraq War
Iraq is postmodern war, part of the entertainment economy of Disneyfied and McDonaldized US. Americans hear corporate media's increasingly narrow pitch on international affairs; we are under-informed and misinformed about the relation between oil, war, and genocide. A French group, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) asserts, three major U.S. television network news programs devoted more airtime (26 minutes) to the activities of British royalty during the first 10 months of the year than to eight of the top 10 international humanitarian crises combined (25 minutes) [Lobe, 2002]. US public is being manipulated by the White House and Department of Homeland Security sales propaganda. For example, FBI agents contend Homeland Security regularly scripts and issues phony terrorist warnings without concrete data for political hysterics effect (Dougherty, 2003). CIA is under pressure to confirm these phony reports. Best and Kellner (2001: 73) say the Gulf War “was ‘postmodern’ in that, first, it was a media event that was experienced as a live occurrence for the whole global village. Second, it managed to blur the distinction between truth and reality in a triumph of the orchestrated image and spectacle. Third, the conflict exhibited a heightened merging of individuals and technology, previewing a new type of cyberwar that featured information technology and ‘smart’ weapons.” I think Iraq II is McWar. McWar, here will mean the McDonaldization, Las Vegasization, and Disneyfication theatrics that transform war through cyber and biotech into something postmodern infecting the social body. McWar relies upon the Disneyfication-theming of good and bad on the global and digital stage, the McDonaldization-scripting of the mechanistic-scripting of war as romantic, and the Las Vegasization-disciplining of individual passions, the management and control of spectators and actors (or just spect-actors) by directors.
100 officials in the Bush White House have put the majority of their personal investments, up to $144.6 million, into the old-guard energy sector (Gonsalves, 2002b). Bush oil empire has been conducting an undeclared covert war since 1991. Since the Gulf war, in defiance of the US, US jets enforce no-fly zones in Northern and Southern Iraq. US jets conduct weekly bombings of civilian targets: water treatment plant, electric power, and even Bedouin tents. "We're bombing practically every day as we patrol the no-fly zones, taking out air defense batteries, and there are all kinds of CIA and Special Forces operations going on," said Timur Eads, a former US special operations officer (Donnelly & Allard, 2003). The war machine is massing for a declared war. 60,000 troops are in the Gulf region, as of January 2003; the Pentagon says this number will double in a few weeks. In addition, “100 United States special forces personnel and more than 50 CIA officers have been inside Iraq for at least four months, looking for missile-launchers, monitoring oil fields, marking minefields and helping their pilots target air-defense systems” (Donnelly & Allard, 2003).
For the past 12 years, US sanctions program spearheaded the genocide of 1.5 million Iraqi, close to a million are children under ten. According to a UN study, the Iraq war will result in "the outbreak of diseases in epidemic if not pandemic proportions" (UN Document, 2002). Sanctions keep Iraq from restarting its oil production but at terrible price to civilians.
January 27 UN inspectors will report on whether they have found evidence of a program to develop chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. Regardless, the US is expected to announce Iraq is in "material breach" of UN resolutions and invade Iraq to replace President Saddam Hussein’s regime. The Bush administration is derailing plans by chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, to issue his report on Iraqi disarmament to Security Council on 27 March, as this would delay US timetable for war over banned weapons programs (Lynch, 2003). US wants the report on 27 January, in time for Bush’s state of the union message for 28 January, and a Jan. 31 meeting at Camp David with British Prime Minister Tony Blair (Lynch, 2003).
Dec 31, 2000, President Bush appointed a former aide to the American oil company Unocal, Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, as special envoy to Afghanistan (Martin, 2002). On Dec 27 2002 Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan signed the agreement with Unocal of the US and Saudi Arabia's Delta oil company, major partners in a planned consortium to build the $2.5 billion gas pipeline (Badri, 2002). Unocal alum, Hamid Karzai, is the U.S.-anointed president of Afghanistan. On May 20, 2002 Unocal Chairman Charles R. Williamson told Unocal stockholders that Unocal has no plans or interest in becoming involved in any projects in Afghanistan, including natural gas or crude oil pipelines (Unocal web site). Right. In a 1998 speech at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, Chevron CEO Kenneth Derr candidly remarked: "Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas - reserves I'd love Chevron to have access to” (Gonsalves, 2002a). "[Going to war with Iraq] is clearly a decision that is motivated by George W. Bush's desire to please the arms and oil industries in the United States of America." - Nelson Mandela, September, 2002. Pope John Paul on Jan 13 2002 said the Iraq war was avoidable and would be a "defeat for humanity." Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress favors the creation of a consortium of US oil companies to develop Iraq's oil. The Iraq war lets the top five oil and gas corporations move in on Iraq reserves, and net $1.1 trillion in contracts (i.e. Exxon-Mobil, Royal Dutch-Shell, British Petroleum-Amoco, Chevron-Texaco and TotalElfFina). Please stop the oil war; end the sanctions.
Americans live in the Society of the Spectacle, a phantasmagoric
theatre in which Bush and Cheney script themselves as the heroes saving the
public from terror. A bit of reading in alternative media easily deconstructs
the charade. 696,661 U.S. troops served in the Gulf War between August 2,
1990 and July 31, 1991; 185,780
(36%) filed for disability and 9,592
died as of Jan 1 2000. US used uranium 238 in its munitions. The 315 tons of
radioactive waste polluted areas occupied by 436,000 US troops, almost
all without any awareness, training, protective equipment, or medical
evaluations (www.ngwrc.org). Meanwhile
American ignorance of oil and arms lobby’s scripting of foreign affairs and
fear fed by the White House propaganda machine fuels genocide of Iraqi children,
denied medicine and sanitary conditions by US sanctions. Down the street from
our Peace Vigil, was a man holding a sign, directed at us, “terrorists holding
signs just ahead; shoot them!” I believe we in the International Academy of
Business Disciplines have a responsibility to raise our voices in opposition to
the ignorance, prejudice and genocide of oil’s war machine. As long as the oil
lobby runs this country, defeats efforts to move away from oil/gas dependency,
and puts puppets in the White House, peace has little chance.
Badri,
Namek (2002). Gas transit fee for Afghanistan.
Angel Fire.com June 2. http://www.angelfire.com/nb/junbesh/NKB/gas_transit_fee_for_afghanistan.htm
Best,
S. & D. Kellner (2001). Postmodern Adventure. UK/NY: Guilford Press.
Boje,
D. M. (2002a). Critical Dramaturgical Analysis of Enron Antenarratives and
Metatheatre. Plenary presentation to 5th International Conference on
Organizational Discourse: From Micro-Utterances to Macro-Inferences, Wednesday
24th - Friday 26th July (London).
http://cbae.nmsu.edu/~dboje/papers/ENRON_critical_dramaturgical_analysis.htm
Boje,
D. M. (2002b). Oil and Empire: Say No to the Oil War. October 2, 2002;
Revised 18 Oct. http://www.zianet.com/boje/1/pages/oil_wars.htm
Boje,
D. M. (2002c). Postmodern Oil War: Part II: Empire Strikes Back. http://www.zianet.com/boje/peace/facts_and_myths_about_iraq_war.htm
Cheney,
Richard (2001). Report on the National Energy Policy
Development Group. http://www.whitehouse.gov/energy/
Donnelly,
John & Tom Allard (2003). Undercover war begins as US forces enter Iraq.
January 6. Boston Globe. On line at http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/05/1041566310159.html
Dougherty,
Jon (2003). Homeland Insecurity: Terror alerts manufactured?
World Net Daily. January 4. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30312
Gonsalves,
Sean (2002a). Corporate Interest in Iraqi Oil. Seattle Post-Intelligencer. 20
August 2002. Sean is a columnist with the Cape Cod Times. http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/cra0794.htm
Gonsalves,
Sean (2002b). Connecting the energy dots to Afghanistan. Alternet. September 5. http://www.oceanbooks.com.au/iraq/articles2/264.html
Holhut,
Randolph T. (2003). On Native Ground: The real ‘luckie duckies.’ The
American Reporter. Vol. 9, No. 2017, January 14.
http://www.american-reporter.com/2017/11.html
Lobe,
Jim (2002). Africa Eclipsed in 2002 U.S. Media Coverage, Says Report. One
World.net Report. Dec 3 http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/oneworld/20021231/wl_oneworld/1032_1041292700
Lynch,
Colum (2003). US fights timing of weapons reports. Washington Post. Jan 15 on
line at http://msnbc.com/news/860023.asp?0cv=CA01#BODY
Martin,
Patrick (2002). Oil company adviser named US representative to Afghanistan, 3
January. World Socialist Website. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jan2002/oil-j03.shtml
UN
document (2002). Likely Humanitarian Scenarios. 10 Dec On line at http://www.casi.org.uk/info/undocs/war021210.pdf http://www.casi.org.uk/
UNOCAL
web site http://www.unocal.com/uclnews/98news/centgas.htm