Seeker Blog

It’s all About Oil

February 20, the New Sisyphus wrote a marvelous piece on the hypocracy of the MSM/Legacy Media. And surfaces Mark Steyn’s work on what may turn out to be a true story of “all about oil”.

The first half of the essay relates how the contra-factual “it’s all about oil” meme became a popular legacy media topic:

But this theme, this meme, was picked up by the opposition, both domestically and in other countries, and, since it was an objective fact that many had these concerns, the MSM picked them up and amplified them. It no longer was sufficient to prove such improprieties or conflicts of interest, the story was that millions believed they existed. The result has been, for just about every day since Iraq became an issue, a relentless pounding of the President and Vice President, not on the basis of fact, but on the basis of allegation and innuendo.

After all, it’s news when the NGOs and foreign political parties think that the war is an oil grab; it’s news when thousands shout “No Blood for Oil!,” it’s news when a new report from the Soros group of NGOs charge shoddy contracting practices with regard to Halliburton, it’s news when the Pentagon finds over-charging in Halliburton contracts.

So, no problem, right? No bias here. Nothing to see here. Please move along.

Now the essay get’s very interesting. We move from a story accepted by the media as true (odd, since the story makes no sense on first principles), to a very plausible story, so far as I can tell, totally ignored by the media. I didn’t say “true story” as we don’t know that yet, but this story is logical and consistent with what we already know about Saddam’s deals.

First, recall that Canada’s opposition to the Iraq War was reported and accepted to be “on principle”. We also knew of the sweetheart contract Total Group had cut with Saddam - a huge windfall that couldn’t be reaped until after Saddam was free of the troublesome UN Sanctions. Though it was never really discussed in the press, I think most informed people realized that some proportion of France’s support for Saddam was driven by her economic interests.

But I certainly did not know how this connected to Canadian interests:

As the great Mark Steyn explained in fine detail in the February 14th issue of Canada’s conservative journal of opinion, the Western Standard (you do subscribe, right?), there exists strong reasons not to accept either the PM’s or his government’s opposition at face value.

It all begins with a gentleman named Paul Desmarais, a power-broker in the intimate world of the Liberal Party and Canadian politics. Desmarais owns the deliciously-named Power Corporation, which in turn owns the largest chunk of stock in the French energy company Total Group (formerly TotalFinaElf). Total had secured from the regime of Saddam Hussein the rights to develop a whopping 25% of Iraq’s oil reserves, a fact that catapulted Total into the ranks of the world’s oil giants, like ExxonMobil and British Petroleum.

Desmarais was a huge campaign contributor to both the Liberal Party in general and Chrétien in particular. In addition, Chretien’s daughter is the wife of Desmarais’ son, who stands to inherit both a controlling interest and the day-to-day control of Power Corporation. As Steyn explains:

For a year, the antiwar crowd had told us it was “all about oil”–that the only reason Iraq was being “liberated” was so Bush, Cheney, Halliburton and the rest of the gang could annex in perpetuity the second biggest oil reserves in the world. But, if it was all about oil, then the fact–fact–is that the only Western leader with a direct stake in the issue was not the Texas oilpatch stooge in Washington, but Jean Chrétien: his daughter, his son-in-law and his grandchildren stood to be massively enriched by the Total-Saddam agreement. It depended on two factors: Saddam remaining in power, and the feeble UN sanctions being either weakened into meaninglessness or quietly dropped. M. Chrétien may have refused to join the Iraq war on “principle,” but fortunately his principles happened to coincide with the business interests of both TotalFinaElf and the Baath party.

It’s such a happy occasion when one’s principled stand just happens to match one’s direct financial interests, isn’t it?

There’s much, much, more, so please read the entire New Sisyphus essay, and of course the Mark Steyn piece for Western Standard. Note that Sisyphus doesn’t walk away from the story with a smug “well, now we know”. More important is what this teaches us about the choices the Legacy Media makes: what is “a story” and what is “not a story”.