A fundamentalist group, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), has seized Iraq’s second biggest city, Mosul, and its biggest refinery. Though still a minor capitalist player, ISIS adds a volatile element to the local and inter-imperialist competition over Iraqi oil, and its influence is growing. If the group reaches the point of threatening Baghdad, raiding ExxonMobil’s Iraqi installations or imperiling Saudi Arabia, the current conflict could soon escalate.
Intensifying competition for Iraq’s oil further destabilizes a nation long ravaged by U.S. imperialism. From 1990 to 2012, invasions by the administrations of presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush and their British allies, along with President Bill Clinton’s food and medicine embargo, killed 3.3 million people in Iraq — including half a million children — and forced four million to flee their homes (Global Research). More than 4,000 U.S. soldiers died in those wars. Hundreds of thousands returned home with severe injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. Hundreds committed suicide.
Liberal Obama and Mass Murder
All of these workers are victims of capitalism. A system run for maximum profit creates the imperialist rivalries that lead inevitably to war. Millions of U.S. workers protested against the bosses who launched the wars in Iraq, which stopped with Obama’s election. But now it should be clear that you cannot stop imperialist carnage by electing Democratic Party liberals like Barack Obama against Republicans like the Bushes. Obama expanded the war in Afghanistan. He sent drones to kill by air over Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. His next move may be to bomb ISIS forces and kill more masses of innocent civilians — a script that was written three years ago, when the U.S. pulled out of Iraq after wrecking the country and feeding into mass sectarian murder. The rulers’ system inevitably creates imperialist  rivalries and economic crises that can only be settled by war. Two hundred seventy-five ground troops are already being sent back to Iraq.
Untold others will be slaughtered in the next shoot-out over oil. Meanwhile, U.S. rulers will use the ISIS threat to their interests to divide workers with anti-Muslim racism. Only communist-led revolution, smashing all bosses and profits, can end these horrors. Only the workers’ seizure of state power can eliminate mass poverty and unemployment, racism and sexism and war. In more than twenty countries, on five continents, that’s what Progressive Labor Party is fighting for. Join us!
Oil Plan for I$I$
ISIS claims it wants to set up a religious Sunni sovereign state under strict Islamic rule. In fact, it has less spiritual ambitions. Vox Media (sponsored by U.S. imperialists’ General Electric) dug up a 2006 ISIS map of its projected realm (see map).
Vox reported that ISIS’s plan, “given the contours of the map, is to take over oil lands in eastern Iraq and western Syria.” The fundamentalist oil barons revealed their profit plans on June 13, when they grabbed the huge refinery at Baiji in Salahaddin province. The next day, the Kurdish news outlet Rudaw reported that “the facility, which … processes 320,000 barrels per day, is fully intact and continues to operate under orders from [ISIS].” In addition, they “also were in control of the nearby Ajeel oil field.”
Behind this upheaval are the big imperialists’ proxy wars, as the U.S. giant ExxonMobil and Russian counterpart Lukoil maneuver to make deals with Iraq and Iran. The second Iraq War won Exxon the rights to drill Iraq’s vast West Qurna field in the south. But the Iraqi president, Iran-leaning Nouri al-Maliki, imposed harsh terms. At current prices, Maliki gets about $100 per barrel of oil; Exxon gets only $2.
Cashing in on Kurdistan
Exxon has cut far more profitable production deals with the semi-autonomous Kurds, deals Baghdad deems illegal. In defiance of Maliki’s laws [see box], Exxon is exporting oil from Kurdistan through Turkey, with the added strategic incentive of landing Turkey on the U.S. side in any potential global conflict.
So far, the ISIS crisis has benefitted the Exxon-Kurdish-Turkish axis. According to Quartz (6/13), a website owned by mainstream imperialist Atlantic Media, President Maliki is an “early apparent loser in the Iraq upheaval.” Among the early winners, Quartz reported, were Kurdistan and the “international oil companies that have defied Baghdad to work there [and] now appear to have a clearer shot at exporting their crude.”
The Kurd-Exxon link explains why New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman, a prominent mouthpiece for U.S. imperialism, was cheering on Kurdistan’s bosses: “Other than the Kurds, we have no friends in this fight” (6/15/14). For Friedman, “we” stands for bosses like Exxon and the media that serves them, not the working class they exploit. Meanwhile, according to Rudaw (6/10), “The Kurdish government has tightened security around an oilfield operated by ExxonMobil in Baashiqa, a town that falls within ‘disputed territories’ claimed by both Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government.”
Maliki has accused Exxon of aiding ISIS, at least indirectly by backing the Nujaifi brother who are pro-Exxon Sunni politicians. One is the governor of Nineveh province — where Mosul, the capital, is now in ISIS hands. The other is a member of Iraq’s parliament. As Reuters reported (6/13/14), “[Maliki] considered the fledgling alliance between the Kurds and Nujaifis in welcoming Exxon Mobil to Nineveh Province to extract oil as a threat to a centralized state. He also noted that the Nujaifis had spoken of creating an independent Sunni region and characterized it as a betrayal.”
ISIS: Exxon’s Frankenstein
By allying with Sunnis against Shiite prime minister Maliki, Exxon may have helped create a monster it cannot control. If ISIS were to move north and overcome Kurdish fighters, U.S. rulers would lose their main ally in Iraq in any broader conflict with China or Russia. This might explain the Exxon-backed Kurds’ seizure of Kirkuk, the region’s primary oil city, as a wedge against both ISIS and Iran-leaning Maliki.
If ISIS threatens Baghdad, Obama could find himself depending on anti-U.S. Iranian forces to prop up fellow Shiite Maliki. Teheran has already sent two thousand soldiers to Iraq. Iran’s prestige will soar if these troops see action, which in turn would benefit the ayatollahs’ allies in Beijing and Moscow.
U.S. rulers are reduced to trying to buttress a weak Maliki government. They have no real alternative. The weakness of their position is revealed in their agreement to open talks with Iran, the same regime they’ve targeted with sanctions in their nuclear dispute.
The worst scenario for Obama and the bosses he serves would be the spread of ISIS fundamentalism into Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer. Although the Saudis initially supported the Sunni rebels in Syria, including the group that became ISIS, they now consider ISIS “and its goal of a hard-line caliphate [a sovereign state under strict Islamic rule] too extreme and a threat” (New York Times, 6/13).
In its wars for control over Iraq and the fifth-largest oil reserves in the world, U.S. imperialism murdered more than three million workers. Imagine what our class would suffer if the grand prize in Saudi Arabia were at stake!