Key Highlights
- invasion of Iraq, I spent several weeks travelling around the country’s oil fields, some of which were still littered with live ordnance, speaking with members of the U. S.-led Task Force Rio—the “Rio” stood for “Restore Iraqi Oil”—and local workers.
- I also went to Baghdad, where I interviewed officials from the Iraqi oil ministry. Venezuela isn’t Iraq, of course, and so far, at least, there hasn’t been a U. S.
- occupation.
- (Although Trump remarked, “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground.”) Nonetheless, this is the second time in twenty-three years that the United States has deposed the authoritarian leader of an oil-rich nation—the third if you count the NATO strikes on Libya in 2011, which hastened the fall of Muammar Gaddafi.
- History has some lessons to offer. Unlike Trump, who is an unashamed petro-imperialist, members of the Bush Administration insisted that their push for regime change in Iraq was unconnected to hydrocarbons—Donald Rumsfeld famously said it had “literally nothing to do with oil”—and that the postwar reconstruction of Iraq’s oil industry was designed purely to help the country.
