PRESIDENT Donald Trump has opened a Pandora box. While addressing the intelligence community in Washington DC, a day after swearing in, the president said: "We should've kept the oil when we got out of Iraq", regretting the slip, he then said, "OK, maybe we'll have another chance." This is dangerous. To say the US may "have another chance" to seize oil in Iraq suggests Trump doesn't understand the risks of war or the damage such statements could do to the global standing of the US. Later, in an interview with ABC, he emphasized "to the victor belong the spoils. And you know, it's very interesting, had we taken the oil, you wouldn't have ISIS (today) because they fuel themselves with the oil. That's where they got the money. They got the money [...] when we left, we left Iraq, which wasn't a government. With the US budget drained by its involvement in the wars in the Middle East, Trump went on to add another dimension to the debate. "If we took the oil you wouldn't have ISIS (today). And we would have had wealth. We have spent right now $6 trillion in the Middle East. And our country is falling apart." When asked by the news anchor whether he plans to fix that mistake and claim Iraq's oil, the president said he would rather not give away his military plans. Clarifying the scenario later, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer stressed the economic argument behind Trump's statement. "We're going into a country for a cause. Trump wants to be sure America is getting something out of it for the commitment and sacrifice it is making." The statement by the president, however, ignores history. The US still has troops in Germany and Japan but did not take into possession their natural resources. And mind it, taking Iraq's reserves, the world's fifth largest could never have been a walkover. It required an immense investment of resources and manpower in a country that the United States couldn't quell after spending more than $2 trillion and deploying at one point more than 170,000 troops. Trump statement brought about a sharp response from both, the Iraq leadership and the common man on the streets of Iraq. Iraq's oil is the property of Iraqis, Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi said last Tuesday. "It wasn't clear what he meant," Abadi added. "Did he mean in 2003 or to prevent the terrorists from seizing Iraq's oil?" Trump words shook common Iraqis too. BuzzFeed News quoted a 27-year-old, Iraqi security official as saying: "We kept our ammunition and weapons from the time the Americans left, for fighting ISIS. But once ISIS is gone, we will save our weapons for the Americans." This debate is not new – and I stand a witness to it. The Iraq war is for oil, many argued then. "Though most Americans don't believe this war is about oil, much of the rest of the world does," Steven Clemmens wrote in The New York Times on April 9, 2003, the same day US troops helped topple a giant statue of former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein. All this was not without a basis. Even people in Washington, commonly referred to as part of the establishment have been conceding the role of oil in the Iraq (mis)adventure. Washington insider, the former US Federal Reserve chairman,Alan Greenspan in his 2007 memoirs ‘The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World', concedes "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." The commander of the US CENTCOM during the Iraq War, General John Abizaid, too agreed in a BBC commentary: "Of course [the Iraq war] is about oil, we can't deny that." Writing for The Guardian on the 11th anniversary of the 2003 Iraq war, Dr. Nafeez Ahmed too underlined: "So Saddam's WMD was not really the issue (behind the Gulf war) - and neither was Saddam himself. The real issue, he argued is candidly described in a 2001 report on "energy security" - commissioned by then US Vice-President Dick Cheney and published by the Council on Foreign Relations and the James Baker Institute for Public Policy." The paper warned of an impending global energy crisis that would increase "The US and global vulnerability to disruption", and leave the US facing "unprecedented energy price volatility." Dr. Ahmed then argues, Iraq appeared as the answer to the US woes and hence the invasion was planned. "Eleven years on, there should be no doubt that the 2003 Iraq War was among the first major resource wars of the 21st century. It is unlikely to be the last," Dr. Ahmed underlined. And he has a point. Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq's domestic oil industry was fully nationalized and closed to Western oil companies. Some 13 years later, it is largely privatized and utterly dominated by foreign firms. From ExxonMobil and Chevron to BP and Shell, the West's largest oil companies have set up shop in Iraq. The objective seems to have been achieved. And who knows in better than Rex Tillerson, the new Secretary of State. All this is not out of blue. Even in 1973, when the Arab world used oil as a strategic weapon against the west for siding with Israel, Washington considered taking over Arab oil fields. British government documents declassified in 2004 reveal that the United States had considered a military seizure of Middle Eastern oil. Though no explicit military plan was mentioned, but the documents do show that British leaders were worried by a conversation between US Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and Lord Cromer, the British ambassador to the United States. Schlesinger told Cromer then, "It was no longer obvious to him that the US could not use force." British Prime Minister Edward Heath too was worried by Schlesinger's tough talk, as well as hints of military action from the then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. A British intelligence report then concluded that the United States "might consider it could not tolerate a situation in which the US and its allies were at the mercy of a small group of unreasonable countries. We believe the American preference would be for a rapid operation conducted by themselves to seize (Arab) oilfields." However, the report warned that "the American occupation would need to last 10 years as the West developed alternative energy sources, and would result in the ‘total alienation' of the Arabs and much of the rest of the Third World." British analysts also worried about the Soviet reaction, though they concluded that Moscow would be more likely to respond with propaganda than force. America could have seized the oil fields with little problem, the reports underlined. President Trump is now reigniting those fears. And these carry grave consequences – one could say with some certainty. Geopolitics is up in the air. Is the newly elected president aware of those – still remains to be seen?
