BIG OIL VS. BIG NEOCONS

Paul Wolfowitz's nomination to head the World Bank and John Bolton's to represent the United States at the U.N., far from being promotions, signal a purge of neocons from policy-making positions in the Bush regime.

So says investigative reporter Greg Palast, left, who was interviewed on Democracy Now! about his recent BBC Newsnight report detailing secret U.S. plans to privatize Iraq's oil resources and the political fight it sparked with the oil companies. They resisted privatization because it would upset the OPEC monopoly and reduce profits for the oil companies.

Wolfowitz is being "tossed out" of the Pentagon, Palast says, essentially at the behest of the supposedly non-partisan James Baker Institute, which represents Saudi Arabia and the big oil companies among its clients. In his BBC report, broadcast this morning on D-Now!, Palast interviews Philip J. Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA, among others, to back up documents he has obtained about the secret privatization plans.

Carroll, who took control of Iraq's oil production a month after the invasion, "stalled the sell-off scheme," Palast reports, and Carroll's "chosen successor," a Conoco Oil executive, Robert McKee, "ordered up a new plan [from the Baker Institute] for a state oil company preferred by the [oil] industry."

In his BBC story posted last week on the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Palast wrote:

Two years ago today -- when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad -- protestors claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered.

In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists."

"Big Oil" appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants.

In addition to watching his interview on Democracy Now!, you can go to Palast's Web site to see some of the documents. He also links to his BBC online story and to a tease of his magazine story in the April issue of Harper's. "The neo-cons, once in command, are now in full retreat," according to insiders and the documents. "With pipelines exploding daily, the fantasy of remaking Iraq's oil industry also went up in flames."

The tale has so many serpentine twists it's counter-counterintuitive. And Palast shows once again why he is a snake charmer in a class by himself.

March 21, 2005 12:47 PM |

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Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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