A guest review of [amazon_link id=”1847921116″ target=”_blank” ]Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in the Occupied Iraq[/amazon_link] by Gregg Muttitt

Ever since British and American missiles planes started bombing Iraq in March 2003, critics of the conflict have insisted that the West’s thirst for oil was one of the – if not the – key motivation.

But the case has never been proven. Other explanations such as the Bush family’s unfinished business from the first Gulf War, claims of a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks, and most notoriously the allegations that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, have all been aired. But as these and other rationales have been disproved or crumbled, the link between the war and Iraq’s vast oil reserves has seemed ever more convincing.

Greg Muttitt’s book, which is a thorough examination of the politics leading up to the 2003 Iraqi conflict and its deadly aftermath, is the closest anyone has got to nailing the truth. At the heart of the book lie hundreds of previously unreleased British and American documents that throw a harsh light on the dealings between government and Big Oil in the months leading up to the war.

In particular there are memos obtained under the Freedom of Information Act – after a five-year battle – of meetings between executives from BP and Shell trade minister Baroness Symons and senior Foreign Office officials. The depth of the research – the footnotes and index take up 80 pages– means that the book will be vital source material for historians over the coming decades. The memos, which were revealed in a front page story in The Independent earlier this year, showed the British government was working to ensure UK oil companies got a “fair slice of the action” in a post-Saddam Iraq as early as October 2002.

The sheer volume of evidence – from Pentagon emails, government memos, draft oil company press releases, interviews with key protagonists and selection of press articles and books from around the world – builds a wholly convincing picture of the role oil played in the war.

Defenders of the project may say, as the British Government has done, that the material shows only that the parties were simply considering the commercial implications of geopolitical events, rather than allowing them to determine policy. Where that argument is most effectively undermined is in the excellent description of the collusion between oilmen, politicians and bureaucrats in occupied Iraq. The book shows in detail how the Coalition Provisional Authority drove an agenda of privatisation and awards of 20-year contracts for 60 billion barrels of oil production to foreign multinationals in the face of Iraqi opposition.

Worse than that, however, was the insistence by the CPA of enforcing sectarian divisions that the book shows were not a dominant feature of Iraqi life until after the invasion. This first-hand exchange is typical. UN official: “What’s your religion?” Iraqi: “Muslim.” “Are you Shi’a or Sunni? “Just Muslim.” “Look, I have to write something on this form: shall I put Shi’a?” While not going as far as to stating that this was a strategy, Muttitt asks reasonably whether a united populist government would have forced an end to the occupation, noting that was never likely while Shi’a, Sunni and Kurd were at each others’ throats.

Muttitt describes the history of the region and of British and American petrochemical companies’ dealings, which predate not only Saddam Hussein, but the founding of Iraq itself. He shows how the Allied powers and their national companies divided up the oil rights in post-WWI Mesopotamia. Muttitt notes wryly: “The sequence of events will be familiar to those who have followed events since the 2003 war.”

But what makes this book such a compelling case for the oil theory behind the war is that Muttitt understands that what was – and still is – at stake is not just extracting a barrel or two of extra oil out of the ground. The value lies in the long-term right to extract from an oil field. “The real prize is not a shipload but a piece of paper,” Muttitt writes. “Yes, oil was one of the main reasons for the war,” the former head of the Iraqi oil ministry tells him. “But it’s not as simple as that…it’s much more complex.”

Yet despite the unremitting gloom and doom of the first 430 pages, Muttitt signs off on a note of optimism for a country and a people that he has clearly grown fond of. He believes that what he describes as “the Iraqi soul” will ensure that the people do not allow themselves to be trampled underfoot once the Americans finally leave. His hope is that oil can be a source of unifying strength for the Iraqi people as it has hitherto been a divisive one for politicians.

[amazon_image id=”1847921116″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq[/amazon_image]

The reviewer was Economics Correspondent for The Independent between 1999 and 2007