Two years after Rumsfeld first pitched the plan, Saddam issued a terse rejection. U.S.
companies never regained a foothold in Saddam’s oil industry. However, Bechtel
remained active and benefited from subsequent Reagan and Bush administration policies
of “constructive engagement” with Saddam right until the invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
Bechtel signed a contract with Saddam’s chemical weapons top official to build a
petrochemical plant in 1988, shortly after “Chemical Ali” gassed the Kurds.
8. Many of the same U.S. officials and quasi-officials involved in the Aqaba pipeline
project later orchestrated the current Bush/Cheney foray into Iraq. In the months leading
to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, these men denied any linkage between oil and war; but in
previous years, these men repeatedly invoked the Iraqi threat to global energy security as
a just cause for war.
May 1981: State Department official Thomas Eagleton meets with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister
Tariq Aziz, and signals a thaw in U.S.-Iraqi oil business relations.
December 2, 1983: State Department invites Bechtel officials to discuss a new oil pipeline to
run from Iraq to the Gulf of Aqaba, Jordan.
January 14, 1984: State Department memo encourages “virtually all sales of non-munitions list
dual use equipment to Iraq,” and adds, “there are recent reports that Iraq is giving priority to
pursuing an Aqaba pipeline as an additional oil export outlet.”
January 1985: Swiss billionaire Bruce Rappaport, friend of Israeli Prime Minister Simon Peres,
negotiates deal with Bechtel that would give him an exclusive oil-lift agreement and a 10 percent
discount on the oil purchase price. Rappaport calls this “a quid pro quo for a written security
guarantee” from Israel
June 2003: U.S. Export-Import Bank considers plan, pushed by lobbying group including
Bechtel, to finance Bechtel subcontractors’ work in Iraq with future oil revenues of Iraq.
Recently-released corporate and government documents reveal the ways in which oil interests, to
a large degree, became entwined with “national security” objectives under Reagan. At Bechtel’s
behest, Reagan officials courted Saddam Hussein, then tried to ensure that the Iraqi dictator’s
main concern —that the pipeline would be vulnerable to Israeli attack -- was addressed. Agents
for the project obtained an Israeli guarantee of pipeline protection in exchange for a pledge to
steer sizable oil profits from the Aqaba pipeline into Prime Minister Shimon Peres’ Labor Party
When Saddam was talking business with the U.S., these officials saw his use of weapons of mass
destruction only as a potential “embarrassment.” Since then, U.S. corporations have seen
lucrative oil production and pipeline projects contracted out to other interests, particularly the
French, Russians, and Chinese. Now these same U.S. officials consider Saddam’s weapons to be
a cause for war.
In the U.S./British conquest of Iraq, a certain company regained purchase in the Iraqi desert:
Bechtel Corporation.
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