Don't blame the oil men for talking up a war

As George W Bush uncompromisingly confronts both Iraq and Saudi Arabia - the two great gas stations, as some Americans are calling them - the question looms larger: if war comes, will it really be a war to control the oil?

Mo Mowlam, the former cabinet minister, has no doubts. "Under the cover of the war on terrorism," she wrote in The Guardian yesterday, "the war to secure oil supplies could be waged. This whole affair has nothing to do with a threat from Iraq - there isn't one."

Certainly George Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney, both former oilmen, are fully aware of the need to safeguard Iraq's oil supplies for the West. "He sits on top of 10 per cent of the world's oil reserves," Cheney said last month. "He has enormous wealth being generated by that."

And Washington's concern about maintaining supplies from Saudi Arabia is equally compelling, as they see it torn between a corrupt monarchy, and fundamentalist supporters of Bin Laden determined to control the world's biggest oil reserves.

But is there a realistic prospect of actually controlling the oilfields by armed force, which Mo Mowlam sees as Bush's real objective? A permanent military presence in both Saudi Arabia and Iraq would present the greatest possible provocation to the rest of the Islamic world, which includes most of the other crucial oil producers on which America depends. And it would also seriously threaten the international financial system, in which the Saudi royal family is closely interlocked.

It is this danger which explains the public worries of some of the closest advisors to George Bush senior. The former president is a much more experienced oilman than his son, with his own close links with the Saudis and other Arab oil countries, and he is now thought to have grave concerns about his son's hawkish attitudes - as have many of his old cronies.

James Baker, the former secretary of state, a shrewd Texan lawyer steeped in the politics of oil, has given serious warnings about a unilateral war with Iraq. Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser, has gone much further. And even Henry Kissinger, a traditional hawk, has advised caution.

All these men are very close to American big business, including the oil giants. And they all fear, on behalf of their clients, that Washington's-military intervention-in both Iraq and Saudi Arabia, could lead, not to more secure oil supplies, but to a new era of chaos in the Middle East where American big business could be the greatest losers.

Brent Scowcroft was closely involved in the decision not to topple Saddam in the previous Gulf War. American troops could then have easily gone on to Baghdad and destroyed Saddam's army; but he explained later that the danger of a vacuum in Iraq could have been more dangerous than Saddam himself. Today it is the prospect of chaos which most alarms big companies in the Middle East, which have built up their profits on the relatively ordered system of the last few years.

The danger was underlined by Nelson Mandela, who struck up a surprising friendship with George Bush senior when he was president of South Africa. On Monday he warned Washington not to "introduce chaos to the international community" by attacking Iraq without UN approval. Mandela revealed that he had telephoned the older Bush to warn him of the peril, and asked him to speak to his son. "I think his advisers are misleadinghim," he explained. The idea that George Bush effectively represents the interests of Western oil companies is simplistic. It is true that the oil giants have reaped big profits from the rapid increase in the oil price, up to $30 a barrel. But their long-term prospects depend on operating in a stable environment, where investments and contracts will be secure.

The business pressure for war comes rather from arms companies and the Pentagon, personified by Donald Rumsfeld, the most hawkish member of the American cabinet, who can make more profits from chaos than from stability. It is the traditional military- industrial complex which has gained most from Washington's militancy since last September, which achieved huge increases in the defence budget.

Dick Cheney, who is almost equally hawkish, was formerly chief executive of the American oil company Halliburton, heavily involved in the Middle East. But many of his former colleagues are now very critical of his militant attitudes.

The British oil companies, Shell and BP, are as apprehensive as the Americans about the dangers of an all-out confrontation with Islamic countries, whether in the Middle East or in Central Asia, where they have huge contracts for oil and natural gas at stake; while a military move against Saudi Arabia would undermine the massive Al-Yamamah arms-and-oil deal which has been so valuable to both British Aerospace and Shell - which also provided huge commissions for the Saudi royal family.

Oil politics certainly remain a crucial factor in Western attitudes to Iraq. Ever since the Western powers created the new nation in 1920 they have seen it as part of their reservoir of oil which had been so valuable to their armed forces in the First World War. And today Iraq becomes more important as Saudi Arabia becomes more uncertain.

But the oil companies have learnt painfully since the Second World War that their supplies do not depend on military occupation, but on diplomacy and stable relations with countries which need to sell their oil as much as the companies need to buy it. And the decision on whether to attack Iraq, or invade Saudi Arabia, may yet rest less on Congressmen in Washington, or MPs in Britain, than on American corporations who realise that the war would be bad for business.

Anthony Sampson is author of The Seven Sisters, an investigation of oil and politics in the Middle East