by The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan

[Editor's note: With President George W. Bush beating the war drums for an attack on Iraq, The Final Call
reprints excerpts from Min. Louis Farrakhan's Saviours' Day address questioning the motive for war. The speech
was delivered Feb. 17, 2002 at the Great Western Forum in Los Angeles.]
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In the Name of Allah, The Beneficent. The Merciful.

America has come to a crossroads.  You must understand that power is linked, in world politics, to oil.  And as the greatest industrial nation on the Earth, America has an insatiable appetite for oil.  When coal was the number one energy in the world, Great Britain ruled the world.  She had the greatest deposits of coal.  But when the power to move engines moved from coal to oil, England and America began vying for control of the places on this Earth that produce oil. 

Who are the rogue states that America says she does not like, and let�s see how oil is connected here.  I want you to consider Libya in North Africa. This little desert country where most of the people live along the coast has the sweetest crude oil. There�s a song we sing: �From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.�  Where�s Tripoli?  �We will fight our country�s battles on the land and on the sea.�  What are you doing over here?  Did these people bother you?  No.  They have oil.  America had military bases here. For what?  Oil!  They had a king named Idriss and Muammar Gadhafi, as a young man in a bloodless coup, overthrew the king and then kicked the British out, the Americans out, and nationalized the oil.  Now he could raise the standard of living of all the Libyans, and with money left over he could aid the liberation struggle of people all over the world.  America got very upset with that.  �You�re messing with us, Gadhafi.  You�re a terrorist.�

Iraq has a lot of oil, and next door is Iran which has lots of oil.  In Iran, there was a man by the name of Mohammad Mossadegh and he nationalized the oil. He wanted to use the oil to raise the standard of living of the Iranian people. 

What�s wrong with that? There�s nothing wrong with that to our eyes, but something was wrong with that to the eyes of the rich and the powerful. So they organized a coup and overthrew him and placed a man on the throne called the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. As that was their man in Iran, they gave him weapons, modern planes, but he was a Muslim, but he was not deep in the religion.  So under him, the religion suffered.  So the people that wanted their religion to come back to purity started organizing.  The leader of that was Imam Khomeini.

Look at a map of the Middle Eastern part of the world. In Saudi Arabia, there is a whole lot of oil. President (Franklin Delano) Roosevelt struck up a good relationship with the king, and Aramco (Corporation) had access to all this oil. The kings lived well, they did well for their people, but there was no democracy. America doesn�t care anything about that, just keep pumping the oil.

Every one of us has somebody in our family that is a victim of drugs. There�s something about a drug addict�if it�s your son, if it�s your daughter�they become artful liars. They can make up the fanciest stories just to get money to get to the drug. If you don�t give them the money, when you turn your back, your fur coat is gone. When you turn your back this is gone, that is gone. They become thieves and soon, if they get real bad, they become murderers.

America is an oil junkie. She doesn�t care how she gets it, she must have it.

Did you know that they found the largest deposit of oil anywhere in the world? Guess where they found it? In the southern Sudan. And what America is trying to do is foster the revolution to break off the southern Sudan from the Islamic regime in Khartoum so that America can have access to the oil. But they say it�s them Moslems killing Christians, making slaves out of these people in the South. America sent arms to Eritrea and Ethiopia and Uganda. So all along the border of Sudan, war was started with the Sudan. But something happened. Eritrea started using her weapons against Ethiopia, and vice versa. So (Eritrea and Ethiopia) couldn�t give the Sudan the trouble that America wanted.

You don�t know these things because you don�t travel. You don�t know these things because you�re not interested. You don�t know these things because foreign policy is not for the common American. And that we have to change. I believe that if the American people knew, foreign policy (would reflect) that which is better for the American people.

Let�s go to Nigeria. There�s some sweet oil here. Do you know what America tried to do? They tried to separate the eastern region and call it Biafra, which started a civil war in Nigeria, causing thousands upon thousands of lives to be lost because of American foreign policy. Let�s go back to Afghanistan. Do you see this place called Baku? Oil has been coming out of this area for years and years. But the Soviet Union had control of the oil in Kazakhstan, in Uzbekistan and in Tajikistan. All this area the Soviet Union had.

Have you ever heard of Zbignew Brezinski? Zbignew got us in trouble. He was the national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter. Guess what? Show me Afghanistan. Did you know that in the city of Kabul, some 20 years ago, the Muslims, women were in government, they were in school, they were in medicine. But something was wrong with Afghanistan. Do you know what was wrong? The government in Kabul leaned more toward the Soviet Union. They were Muslims but they had a socialist leaning that America didn�t like. So Zbignew Brezinski and American policy sent money into Afghanistan to destabilize the government in Kabul. When they brought up and paid for opposition to the government in Kabul, Russia, the Soviet Union, sent their troops into Afghanistan and the war began.

When the war started, Osama bin Laden was in Arabia growing up. He loves Islam, he loves Muslims, he sees the Soviet Union taking over Afghanistan and there�s war in Afghanistan to get the Soviet Union out, and America says, �We�re going to back those Muslim mujahideen.� So American money and American weapons trained them and they drove the Soviet Union out after ten years of war, which left Afghanistan in ruins. Then they looked to America to help them, but America backed out and left them in that condition and a civil war broke out in Afghanistan. The country is already in ruins, now a civil war. Then you have the Taliban that comes to power. And they want a pure Islamic state.

I read a book written by two Frenchman called, �Osama bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth.� And they said that early on in the Bush administration he was negotiating with the Taliban and he said [the Taliban] were a source of stability. Why was he negotiating? Let me tell you. All of this, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, this is oil. And guess what? A company called Unical owns 75 percent of the oil up here. And what they wanted was a pipeline to come down through Afghanistan into Pakistan into the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, as an outlet for the oil of that area. The Taliban didn�t agree.

Back in July, an American representative met with the Taliban, sometimes in the UN, sometimes right in Peshawar, in Pakistan. The representative said either you accept a carpet of gold or we will bury you under a carpet of bombs. This was in July. Then came September 11, and now it�s Osama bin Laden. The government didn�t know anything about any terrorists the day before. But on September 11, 12, and 13, they have 19 faces in the paper saying these are the guys. When did you learn that? How did you learn that? Something is wrong with this picture. Muslims and Arabs got all the blame and they went immediately to the Congress beating the drums of war.

Do you want to know why people in the world hate America? You don�t understand the dirt that goes on in your name. And that�s why the American people have to be awakened. Am I upsetting? I�m not trying to upset you. But now that they�ve destroyed the Taliban, Mr. Hamid Karzai, whom America set up, he now will get the carpet of gold and let�s see if that pipeline won�t come through Afghanistan. It�s all about oil and power.

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Photo: Minister Farrakhan utilized a large map to illustrate how oil and politics influence U.S. policy.
Credit: Kenneth Muhammad