Cheney’s Energy Task Force Planned Iraq Invasion?

For months there has been a debate in Washington about when the Bush Administration decided to go to war against Saddam. In Ron Suskind's recent book "The Price of Loyalty," former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill charges that Cheney agitated for U.S. intervention well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Additional evidence that Cheney played an early planning role is contained in a previously undisclosed National Security Council document, dated February 3, 2001. The top-secret document, written by a high-level N.S.C. official, concerned Cheney's newly formed Energy Task Force. It directed the N.S.C. staff to coöperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the "melding" of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies towards rogue states," such as Iraq, and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."

A source who worked at the N.S.C. at the time doubted that there were links between Cheney's Energy Task Force and the overthrow of Saddam. But Mark Medish, who served as senior director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs at the N.S.C. during the Clinton Administration, told me that he regards the document as potentially "huge." He said, "People think Cheney's Energy Task Force has been secretive about domestic issues," referring to the fact that the Vice-President has been unwilling to reveal information about private task-force meetings that took place in 2001, when information was being gathered to help develop President Bush's energy policy. "But if this little group was discussing geostrategic plans for oil, it puts the issue of war in the context of the captains of the oil industry sitting down with Cheney and laying grand, global plans."

After months spent trying to obtain more information about the classified Halliburton deals, Representative Waxman's staff discovered that the original oil-well-fire contract entrusted Halliburton with a full restoration of the Iraqi oil industry. "We thought it was supposed to be a short-term, small contract, but now it turns out Halliburton is restoring the entire oil infrastructure in Iraq," Waxman said.

The Defense Department's only public acknowledgments of this wide-ranging deal had been two press releases announcing that it had asked Halliburton to prepare to help put out oil-well fires. The most recent budget request provided by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq mentions the building of a new oil refinery and the drilling of new wells. "They said originally they were just going to bring it up to prewar levels. Now they're getting money to dramatically improve it," Waxman complained. Who is going to own these upgrades, after the United States government has finished paying Halliburton to build them? "Who knows?" Waxman said. "Nobody is saying."

It is not surprising that Cheney, after five years of running Halliburton, a company that considers war as providing "growth opportunities," regards winning the peace in Iraq as a challenge for private enterprise as well as for government. Yet it is reasonable to ask if Cheney's faith in companies like Halliburton contributed to his conviction that the occupation of Iraq would be a tidy, easily managed affair.

Now that Cheney's vision has been shown to be overly optimistic, and Iraqis and American soldiers are still getting killed ten months after Saddam's overthrow, critics are questioning the propriety of a reconstruction effort that is fuelled by the profit motive. "I'm appalled that the war is being used by people close to the Bush Administration to make money for themselves," Waxman said. "At a time when we're asking young men and women to make perhaps the ultimate sacrifice, it's just unseemly."

Many of those involved, however, see themselves as part of a democratic vanguard. Jack Kemp's spokesman, P. J. Johnson, told me, "We're doing good by doing well." Joe Allbaugh, Bush's former campaign manager, who has established New Bridge Strategies, a firm aimed specifically at setting up for-profit ventures in Iraq, makes no apologies. "We are proud of the leadership the American private sector is taking in the reconstruction of Iraq," he said.