Greg Muttitt worked for many years with the arts and social justice charity Platform, exposing the global impact of the oil industry. His first book, based on almost a decade of research, is Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq. It provides a forensic, behind-the-scenes account of the struggles over Iraq’s oil prior to the 2003 invasion and during the ensuing occupation.

In the last of a three-part interview with NLP’s Ed Lewis, Muttitt discusses Iraqi civil society's struggle against the oil law, the current state of play regarding control of the country's oil, and the lessons Iraq teaches us about Libya. Parts 1 and 2 can be read here and here.

Can you tell us anything more about the nature of the struggle against the oil law? You’ve mentioned that there was a groundswell of opposition and it partly came out of oil worker unions.  But what struck you about the movement that you witnessed?

Let me illustrate it. In December 2006 I attended a meeting in Jordan in Amman of the leaders of all five of Iraq’s trade union federations on the subject of the oil law. It was a three day strategy meeting. This was really the major starting point for them working together on it. The oil workers union had done stuff before that, they were ahead of the game, but this was a key moment for them. I’d already been working on Iraq long enough by then to know that sectarianism was not to the degree or of the nature that was suggested in the media over here. 

But I imagined on the question of oil there would be an ethnic difference. Most Kurdish people, ultimately, in the long term, they would like to see an independent Kurdistan. I think it’s fair to say that’s fact. The Kurdish politicians have argued throughout these struggles that control over the oil industry, which in their case means being the ones to choose which companies to sign contracts with, that should be devolved to the regional level. There’s a Kurdistan Regional Government, and that should be the one which signs contracts with foreign governments, not the national government in Baghdad. Now, of the five union federations, two of them were Kurdish federations, the others were non-Kurdish. I don’t call them Arab because that’s not how they thought of themselves - they thought of themselves as Iraqi. But two of them were specifically Kurdish.  So I was wondering if we were going get into a debate about should management of the oil industry be devolved from central government to regional – after all, that’s what a lot of the squabbles between politicians were about, and what the oil law was publicly portrayed as being about. And actually what I found was the issue didn’t come up. It didn’t come up. Even though ethnic identity is a much more significant cultural and political factor than sectarian identity is in Iraq. But ethnic identity was utterly overriden by their view that: firstly, they’re all trade unionists and saw themselves as brothers within the labour movement.

Secondly, they all themselves as Iraqis and believed that privatisation was wrong for Iraq. And that was what they talked about, and they came out with a statement at the end of it on which they all agreed. Again this just thoroughly sweeps out the idea of fractious ethno-sectarian groupings within Iraq. 

This was an issue on which Iraqis were agreed, including in Kurdistan, where you might have expected not only this favouring of devolution. In addition, the Kurdistan regional government has been much more pro foreign investment than the national government, since during the Saddam era most of the specialists were Arabs not Kurds, so they didn’t have their own indigenous Kurdish capacity and they didn’t want the Arabs in Baghdad to be running their oil industry. So they preferred to go with foreigners. 

But at the union level it was different.

Yes. And from trips to Kurdistan as well, talking to ordinary Kurds, that’s a popular view too. We conducted a poll in 2007 of opinions on what should happen to the oil and even in Kurdistan a clear majority said keep it in Iraqi hands. The poll question said ‘Iraqi’, it didn’t say ‘Kurdish’. And for a lot of Kurds, the word Iraqi sends warning signals, because they’ve always been repressed from Baghdad, especially under Saddam. But they still preferred Iraqi to foreign. This is totally at odds with what the politicians were doing, of course.

And then did the movement spread through strikes, demonstrations, industrial sabotage?

Let me summarise how it happened, in terms of the political dynamic. As I mentioned, it started to become a popular issue around which opposition politicians organised. The way it was ultimately stopped was that a majority in the parliament was opposed to the oil law. They could only pass the oil law by getting a majority to vote in favour of it, and they could never achieve that.

But they’re presumably under lots of US and British pressure, these politicians.

Yes, but the US had much more leverage over the executive branch, naturally because it’s a smaller number of people. There are ten or twenty people they had to influence, compared to 275 people in the parliament. Also, the parliament was elected. Ok, in elections the dynamics of which were shaped by the Americans, but still they were elected and what you found was that the balance of opinion in parliament was comparatively closer to what most Iraqis thought, whereas the balance of opinion in the executive branch was closer to what the Americans thought in this dichotomy. 

So yes, of course they tied to pressure them but pressuring 275 people who will eventually have to stand for election again…

…and when there’s a large popular movement.

Yes. And I’m not in any way saying Iraq is a democratic utopia. It’s not, it’s an utterly dysfunctional semi-democracy. But in certain senses it is a democracy, unlike what it was before 2003.

Given that they weren’t able to push the oil law through, what is the current state of play with Iraq’s oil?

In the second half of 2009, the Iraqi government held two auctions of oil fields, and in those they awarded contracts for 60% of their known oil to be managed for a 20 year period by foreign companies. BP got the first, the largest contract, Shell got one, Exxon got one and so on. So in a certain sense you could say perhaps the oil companies have got what they wanted from the war, but in another sense they didn’t.

Firstly those contracts were much less profitable than they’d hoped: they didn’t give the bulk of the upside profits to the multinationals, as they’d always hoped. It was a different structure of contract. And that was exactly because of this civil society popular campaign. 

The second respect in which they didn’t get everything they wanted was that these contracts are still illegal! As I said, the law, which still is in force now because it hasn’t been repealed states that such contracts are only valid if approved by the parliament. And the executive branch of the Iraqi government says, the ministries say, that they are not going to run these contracts past parliament. Therefore technically they are illegal. And that means that a future Iraqi government could tear them up and the companies wouldn’t have legal defence. Of course they’d have political defence of perhaps even military defence, but they don’t have the legal defence and that is because civil society was successful, remarkably, in stopping the oil law. I say remarkably because you imagine the conditions in which they’re campaigning, it’s not like campaigning in Britain, these people are getting death threats, getting arrested, some of their colleagues are getting killed etc.

How do you interpret the intervention in Libya, where there are also oil interests? Do you see significant parallels, or is it an altogether different situation? How do you interpret what’s going on in light of what you’ve learnt about Iraq?

There are very important parallels. It’s not the same, of course there are differences as well. But I think there are three important parallels. One relates to interests, Western interests, the second relates to local democracy and perhaps local interests, and the third relates to how the Western powers pursue the first while pretending to be concerned about the second.

The first one, on Western interests - what happened in Iraq should have killed the doctrine of liberal interventionism. In my book it’s utterly clear how the occupation powers consistently worked in their own interests - oil privatisation, maintaining bases and so on - however much they talked about humanitarian concerns or wanting to build a democracy. 

We were told our military got involved in Libya is to prevent a civilian bloodshed. It didn’t stack up to me – using air power to attack cities is always very costly in civilian casualties, even more so with unmanned drones (which they used a lot in Libya). And of course within a couple of weeks they were talking about regime change.

When Western powers look at the Middle East they always see it through the lens of oil. Put differently, they might talk about “democracy” or “human rights” but those are always refracted through oil interests, so it becomes – at best - “a certain type of democracy” or “human rights for certain people”. 

There’s a difference there between Iraq and Libya, in that Iraq has more than ten per cent of the world’s oil reserves, whereas Libya has three and a half per cent. Clearly the Libyan war was opportunistic and reactive, whereas Iraq had been planned for years. They were concerned about short-term disruptions affecting the oil price, concerned about being politically obliged to impose sanctions on Gaddafi and so constraining medium-term supplies. And in parallel, removing a precedent of a country that since Blair in 2004 let multinationals run the oil industry but on very restrictive and not very profitable terms. Then there’s rescuing the doctrine of liberal interventionism and repositioning the West in relation to the Arab Spring – both of which fit into and around the oil interests. Like Iraq, it’s certainly not as simple as going in and seizing the oil, or even going in and awarding contracts to BP and Exxon. But also like Iraq, oil is at the centre of it.

The second thing is about local democracy, and again there’s a really powerful lesson here from Iraq which I try to draw out in the book, which is as they try to create a political system in Iraq that reflected their interests, they created something that was a disaster for Iraqis. It led to sectarian killing on a horrific scale, and now a completely dysfunctional and corrupt government that is neither willing nor able to provide the services its people need. Most people still, after eight and a half years, have electricity for less than four hours a day; and many don’t have safe drinking water. We’ve seen demonstrations in Iraq this year, as across the region  even though Iraq had an election last year. So the lesson from Iraq is that Western ideas of what a Libyan democracy should look like are unlikely to be in the interests of Libyans, and may lead to greater problems over the long-term. 

The third lesson, as I say, is about how to square the two. In Iraq in 2003, 2004, 2005, there was this constant refrain of “advice” – something we’re hearing a lot of in Libya, from Britain’s stabilisation experts to the UN and World Bank and so on. In theory in Iraq it would be Iraqis who made the decisions, but advisers (to whom Iraqi decision-makers owed their power, and who could remove it if they chose) would tell them how to do so. Of course it’s a really patronising view, and perhaps rather racist – that only Americans and Europeans know how to run a democracy or an oil industry – but in Iraq’s case it also got things badly wrong. The occupation powers were utterly ignorant of Iraqi politics and culture. Meanwhile they shaped Iraqi politics based on a combination of their own interests, their ignorance and their racism, and created something with divisions at its core. In Libya any dividing lines will be different of course – rather than sect, it might be tribe or ethnicity or geography – but when you hear Western liberals saying the new Libyan government must be “inclusive”, it has to reflect all of the Libyan people, that’s exactly the language that was used in Iraq to promote sectarianism.

So everyone’s saying now, when we shape Libya’s stabilisation and Libya’s democracy we have to learn the lessons from Iraq. I agree that we do, but the real lesson is not how to intervene better – it is to stop intervening. The real lesson is that Libya’s future is best left to the Libyans to decide.