Blood, oil, tears and sweat

Rod Liddle says that the most obvious spoils of war are going to American, not British, companies Aquestion for you. How much money do you think has been secured in contracts by British oil firms to rebuild and develop the Iraqi oil industry after the war is over? Here's a clue. It's a round number. A smallish round number. Yes, I know, that's giving it away. The answer, of course, is nothing; zero.

Meanwhile, how are the American oil companies doing? Actually, they're doing rather well. So far, contracts have been signed for well in excess of £1 billion, probably rather nearer £1.5 billion. I'm sorry I can't be more precise about the figures, but, hell, what's half a billion between friends?

That figure covers just preliminary work while the war is going on. The real goldmine lies in the rights to exploit Iraq's oil reserves once Saddam has been gently persuaded not to run for a ninth term in office, but instead to take a comfortable duplex retirement home in Ndjamena or Minsk. And the American companies are first in the queue for this bonanza, too. There are no British firms at all in the running at present.

I don't know how much Iraq's oil is worth in the long run. Nobody will even hazard a guess. Maybe I should just quote you the words of an industry analyst, when I asked him for the specifics.

'You're a journalist, aren't you?' he said. `So do what you usually do and make it up. Just choose a number. It'll still be a lot, lot less than the real amount.'

It may be that even now the disgust is rising in your throat at the direction this article seems to be taking. It certainly will be if, like me, you have the vestigial tail of infantile leftism wagging, every now and then, from your behind. The expensive rockets are flattening Baghdad, and presumably some of the people in it; captured American troops are being paraded on prime-time television. There is an awful lot of killing to be done before Iraq becomes, as they say, 'liberated'.

So it seems a bit venal to be carping over the fact that our oil companies look as though they're going to be missing out on the extremely lucrative spoils of this war, just as they missed out on the spoils of the last Gulf war, winning contracts in Kuwait worth — another precise figure for you here — sod all.

But while faded pinkos like me wring their hands, our oil companies, pragmatic beasts that they are, have become enraged by what they see as official lassitude. They have been begging the government to make the appropriate representations to the US for months, and the British government has done, they argue, nothing.

Its main reason for doing nothing was that, in the words of one oil-company boss, to have started lobbying the Yanks for oil contracts would have meant conceding that war with Iraq was inevitable or likely. Which gives you an insight into the markedly different mindsets of the allied British and American governments. How long ago was it that war with Iraq was not inevitable? Last April?

Anyway, back in November last year, a number of oil-company people met government ministers from the Department of Trade and Industry and asked for help in persuading the Americans who would be on the ground in Iraq to consider British companies as potential tenders. In addition, the Foreign Office was told that the Americans had already set up a secret department to dole out the oil contracts. Our government, though, did nothing. Since then the oil companies have repeatedly requested help. Their last letter was not even answered.

Trade Partners UK is the body funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the DTI to do precisely such lobbying on behalf of our companies. Let's be clear; according to one oil-industry spokesmen I contacted, to win such contracts from the Americans requires serious political clout at a high level.

It doesn't look as if it will be coming from Trade Partners UK. The man I spoke to seemed unaware that any such beseeching had been made by the oil companies and wasn't hugely impressed when told that it had been a continual cri de coeur for the past six months.

'The Iraqi oil,' he said, with the slightest inflection of distaste for my question, 'belongs to the people of Iraq.'

And later, when asked again why no lobbying had taken place, he replied, 'There is a time for that sort of thing and now is not the time.'

Well, if I'm honest, I don't disagree with him. He had plenty of statistics about how British companies have become involved in humanitarian aid. And there you have the essential difference between our two countries — the USA and Britain — and quite possibly the differing motives for prosecuting this war.

The American company Halliburton will undoubtedly be one of the most gleeful benefactors of a successful war in Iraq. It will secure more contracts than you could shake a stick at. As you may be aware, it is the company which, until a couple of years ago, was run by the US vice-president Dick Cheney. That gives Halliburton a degree of political clout, you have to say.

Halliburton has an enviable record for pragmatism. It has done lucrative deals with the Libyans. It has done even more lucrative deals with those twin pillars of the Axis of Evil: Iran and, yes, of course, Iraq. While Cheney was still in charge, Halliburton, through its subsidiaries, sold $73 million-worth of oil-production equipment and spare parts to Saddam Hussein. Cheney shrugged his shoulders and said, sorry, but he didn't know anything about all that. The deal was done while he was looking the other way, maybe taking a coffee break or something.

The suspicion has become planted in my mind — and, by all means, call me a cynic — that were Osama bin Laden suddenly to require loads of stuff with which to drill for oil, Halliburton would be first in the queue for the contract and would probably throttle its own grandmother in order to get it. This is a company that has been investigated for its accounting procedures; and, after 9/11, two New York City pension funds have demanded that Halliburton review its overseas business dealings because of concerns 'about corporate ties to states sponsoring terrorist activities'.

That's what the British oil companies are up against: a rapacious and unapologetic capitalistic enterprise which seems to have the unquestioning support of its government.

Here, it's different. With Tony Benn (and others) wandering from television studio to television studio telling us that `Itsh all about oil', the government is placed in a position of having to say over and over again, no, actually, it isn't. Oil hardly comes into it. And the truth is that for our Prime Minister, I suspect, it doesn't. Dick Cheney and the White House boys, though, may have different priorities.

Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.