blood for oil

Further to this earlier blog, more evidence that much of the motivation for the war against Iraq was indeed control of its oil resources.

MI6 plotted the toppling of Saddam Hussein nearly 18 months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, secret papers revealed. The intelligence service also made clear in newly declassified papers that the ‘prize’ for removing the Iraqi dictator was ‘new security to oil supplies’.

Tony Blair's special envoy to Iraq, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who as Britain's ambassador to the United Nations had made the case for invading Iraq, lobbied the Iraq's Prime Minister on oil contracts for BP just three months after leaving government service. He and the then BP chief executive Lord Browne, met Mr Allawi during his visit to London.

A Department of Trade and Industry memorandum claimed that Lord Browne was privately keen to do business in occupied Iraq while publicly denying that was the case. The company was particularly keen to develop Rumaila, near Basra, Iraq's largest oilfield.

Other released documents also contained an email from Sir Edward Chaplin, then the British ambassador to Iraq, to BP executive Tony Renton, in August 2004 showing that he lobbied the Iraqi oil ministry on behalf of BP. In the email Sir Edward mentions his meeting with oil minister Thamer Ghadban: "I raised the Rumaila bid at the end of our meeting, stressing the importance I saw in having a major British oil company involved early in the development of Iraq's oil industry."

In 2009 BP won a 20-year deal to manage the Rumaila field.

Evidence by Major General Michael Laurie, proves that Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell were slippery, unashamed and able to mislead not only the Inquiry but the families of about 200 British soldiers who laid down their lives in this illegal bloody war.

In a statement published on Iraq Inquiry website, General Michael Laurie who was in charge of commanding and delivering raw and analyzed intelligence, said, "I am writing to comment on the position taken by Alastair Campbell during his evidence to you … when he stated that the purpose of the dossier was not to make a case for war; I and those involved in its production saw it exactly as that, and that was the direction we were given." Laurie said "We could find no evidence of planes, missiles or equipment that related to WMD, generally concluding that they must have been dismantled, buried or taken abroad. There has probably never been a greater detailed scrutiny of every piece of ground in any country."