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

Through one of those chains of thoughts that sometimes send one from book to book, I ended up browsing through Tony Judt’s magnificent [amazon_link id=”009954203X” target=”_blank” ]Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945[/amazon_link] over my second cup of coffee this morning. Looking for his take on post-war austerity, I ended up instead in the 1970s and its crisis of capitalism. And here (p462 in my 2007 UK paperback) is this passage:

“The greatest beneficiaries of the modern welfare state… were the middle classes. When the post-war system started to unravel in the 1970s it was those same middle classes who felt not so much threatened as cheated: by inflation, by tax-financed subsidies to failing industries and by the reduction or elimination of public services to meet budgetary and monetary constraints. As in the past, the redistributive impact of inflation, made worse by the endemic high taxation of the modern service state, was most severely felt by citizens of the middling sort. It was the middle classes, too, who were most disturbed by the issue of ‘ungovernability’….”

And, he continues, politicians appeared to have lost all capacity to do anything, as the world financial system unravelled.

An reminder of the extraordinary similarities between the last major crisis of capitalism and the present one – the main difference being that the failing industry now soaking up those tax-financed subsidies is banking, rather than steel and coal. On a little reflection, though, every crisis squeezes the middling sort, those with something to lose but not so much that they needn’t really worry. The same was true in the 1930s. Marx of course claimed that: [amazon_link id=”0140447571″ target=”_blank” ]”The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”[/amazon_link] But he wrote that at exactly the point when history was becoming the history of middle-class struggle.

[amazon_image id=”009954203X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945[/amazon_image]

My in-pile is looking uncomfortably small – I get a bit antsy when there are so few books in it (the left hand side consists of non-economics books).

Part of the reason is that I’ve just sent out a batch of interesting books for review by other people for the next edition of The Business Economist. Of course, I can tackle the non-economics books too, and indeed am part way through Jann Parry’s brilliant biography of Kenneth Macmillan, [amazon_link id=”0571243037″ target=”_blank” ]Different Drummer[/amazon_link]. And there are some obvious treats in this pile, including Robert Franks’ forthcoming [amazon_link id=”B005DI9RH6″ target=”_blank” ]The Darwin Economy[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”B005DI9RH6″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good[/amazon_image]

But with two long flights coming up, I need to add to the ‘work’ pile urgently.So – recommendations please!

In one of those holiday discussions, over a glass of wine or two in the evening, I learned that neither my 20-year old son nor his girlfriend have read Simone De Beauvoir’s [amazon_link id=”0140034633″ target=”_blank” ]The Second Sex.[/amazon_link] Perhaps not surprising, as it was first published in 1949, and I read it in 1979. More alarmingly, they had never heard of Simone De Beauvoir (although the name Jean Paul Sartre rang a bell), nor could they bring to mind any books which a young woman today would regard as an inspirational feminist text. I did a bit of searching on Amazon and found few recent feminist titles, and those there were did not seem to have made an impact. (If anyone knows of counter-examples, do let me know!) What a contrast to my late teens and early 20s when we had classics such as Germaine Greer’s [amazon_link id=”0007205015″ target=”_blank” ]The Female Eunuch[/amazon_link] (1970), Kate Millett’s [amazon_link id=”0252068890″ target=”_blank” ]Sexual Politics [/amazon_link](1970) and Marylin French’s [amazon_link id=”1860492827″ target=”_blank” ]The Women’s Room[/amazon_link] (1977) fairly recently off the presses.

This came to mind reading reviews in The Guardian – and an unsympathetic interview by Zoe Williams in the magazine  –  and also the FT today of a new book, [amazon_link id=”1846144191″ target=”_blank” ]Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital[/amazon_link], by LSE sociologist Catherine Hakim. As far as I can gather from the reviews, she adds to Bourdieu’s list of types of capital the idea of ‘erotic capital’ and argues that women should enhance their erotic capital by wearing nice clothes and staying slim. OK, I exaggerate a bit, but it doesn’t seem promising. On the one hand, it’s almost banal to say paying attention to how you present to other people will affect your success in employment. On the other, it’s depressing that the latest career advice for women seems to be about making sure to be attractive to men.

Any women reading who are seeking advice, I’d commend heartily instead [amazon_link id=”069108940X” target=”_blank” ]Women Don’t Ask[/amazon_link] by Linda Babcock and Sarah Laschever, who document the fact that the pay gap between male and female executives is largely attributable to the failure of women to ask for salary increases. (This is not to overlook the empirical evidence that there is also a big earnings penalty attached to career breaks in order to have children.) Also look at this fantastic post in the FT’s Women at the Top blog this week. It sums up a book I haven’t read, [amazon_link id=”111806254X” target=”_blank” ]Break Your Own Rules: How to Change the Patterns of Thinking That Block Women’s Paths to Power[/amazon_link] by Jill Flynn and others.

And meanwhile, consider Simone De Beauvoir’s warning:

“In so far as a woman wishes to be a woman, her independent status gives rise to an inferiority complex. … In consequence of this defeatism, woman is easily reconciled to moderate success; she does not dare aim too high.”

Consider it, and ask which needs more attention – female ambition, or female appearance? If we all pick the same answer, perhaps it’s time to revive feminism.

[amazon_image id=”0140034633″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Second Sex (Penguin Modern Classics)[/amazon_image]

Update: Since writing this yesterday, I came across a review by Jessa Crispin (of bookslut.com) of a book called [amazon_link id=”074564757X” target=”_blank” ]The Future of Feminism[/amazon_link] by Sylvia Walby. The review doesn’t make it sound a rip-roaring read but, hey, it’s there and full of economics. I will have to take a look.

A further update: A friend has just pointed out to me this recent review of a new translation of [amazon_link id=”0307265560″ target=”_blank” ]The Second Sex[/amazon_link].

Fintan O’Toole’s [amazon_link id=”0571270093″ target=”_blank” ]Enough is Enough[/amazon_link] was one of the books in my poolside pile on holiday, and a very enjoyable rant it was. The book, a bestseller in its own country for obvious reasons,  does for Ireland’s elite what Matt Taibbi’s brilliantly splenetic [amazon_link id=”0385529953″ target=”_blank” ]Griftopia [/amazon_link]does for the same class in the United States. And right at the start, O’Toole puts his finger on the problem. Why are things not getting better? “There never was much chance that the elite that created the catastrophe would be able to resolve it.” (p7)

As it happens, the recent news on the Irish economy has been slightly better. Exports are up and, thanks to emigration, unemployment is not as high as it might have been. But this does not feel like economic success to the nation’s inhabitants, whose living standards are down, wealth collapsed, and public services axed. Enough is Enough makes two big points. One is that the sources of the economic catastrophe are political. O’Toole is scathing about the Irish political system, painting it as pure clientilism – heavily influenced still by the Catholic church – rather than anything resembling true democratic scrutiny in the public interest. I know too little about it to judge how exaggerated this is, but certainly politics has been entwined with economics as not only Griftopia but books like Raghuram Rajan’s [amazon_link id=”0691146837″ target=”_blank” ]Fault Lines[/amazon_link] and Simon Johnson & James Kwak’s [amazon_link id=”0307379051″ target=”_blank” ]13 Bankers[/amazon_link] make clear.

The second big theme in the book is that Ireland was never the miracle economy it was made out to be in the Celtic Tiger era. O’Toole writes: “[The] private sector productive capital stock grew by just 16% in eight years, a miserable figure for an economy in the midst of the greatest boom in its history.” (p115) Most of the nation’s investment went into property and retail. And he goes on to analyse a number of deep-seated structural problems such as the inefficiency of the healthcare system and education system.

The book is more than just a torrent of negative analysis. O’Toole offers many policy prescriptions to help the country dig out of trouble. Would they work? He seems to doubt whether there will even be scope to try after the implementation of spending cuts under the current bailout package: “The judgment is that all this can be done [ie the cuts] and that at the distant end of the process there will still be a funcitoning democratic society in Ireland, there will still be an ‘us’ that includes both those who ran up the debts and those who have to pay them off.” (p13)

I don’t know how pessimistic to feel about the likely social and political fallout from the continuing Great Financial Crisis. But I do agree with O’Toole – and many other commentators on our current situation – on the need for the elites that got us in to this mess to acknowledge that things have got to change fundamentally. Many are still in denial about the fact that economic recovery will depend on political reform and changes in the structure of power and the distribution of income in our societies.

[amazon_image id=”0571270093″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic[/amazon_image]