[Peace-discuss] Membership, AWARE endorsement

[C. G. Estabrook]

The point is that it would be wrong to deny that the Civil War was about 
slavery, although one could specify at some length how it was about slavery.

Similarly, one could specify how the Iraq war is about oil.  It is not, 
for example, primarily about US access to Iraqi oil.  The U.S. receives 
less than 10% of its foreign oil from the Middle East, and we were just 
as concerned about control of ME oil when we were a net oil exporter.

The primary US interest, and that's true throughout the Middle East, 
even in Saudi Arabia, the major energy producer, has always been 
control, not access, and not profit. Profit is a secondary interest and 
access is a tertiary interest.

So in the years when the U.S. was not using Middle East oil at all, the 
U.S. was the largest producer and the largest exporter, it still had the 
same policies. It wanted to control the sources of oil and the reasons 
are understood. In the mid-1940s, the State Department made it clear 
that the oil resources of the region, primarily then Saudi Arabia, were 
a stupendous source of strategic power which made the Middle East the 
most strategically important area of the world. They also added that its 
one of the greatest material prizes in world history. But the basic 
point is that it's a source of strategic power, meaning that if you 
control the energy resources, then you can control the world, because 
the world needs the energy resources.

This was made explicit by George Kennan when he was one of the Middle 
East planners in the U.S. State Department. He said that control over 
Middle East oil will give us veto power over our rivals. He was 
specifically talking about Japan, in case Japan industrialized, it was 
devastated by the war still, we'll have veto power as long we control 
the oil. And that's been understood through the years. So in the early 
stages of the Iraq war former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew 
Brzezinski -- one of the more astute of the planners and not terribly 
enthusiastic about the war -- said that if the U.S. wins the war, which 
means that it succeeds in imposing a client regime in Iraq, then the 
U.S. will have critical leverage over its industrial rivals in Europe 
and Asia because it will have its hand on the spigot.

And that is also understood very well at the highest level of the 
administration. So a few months ago, Dick Cheney said that control over 
oil pipelines can be "tools for intimidation and blackmail."  He was 
talking about control over pipelines in the hands of others, so if our 
enemies have it, it's a tool of intimidation and coercion. But of course 
the same is true if it is in our hands. We're not supposed to think that 
because we're supposed to be noble, but the rest of the world certainly 
understands it. Yes, it's a tool of intimidation and coercion, whether 
it's the direction of pipelines or whether its control over the 
production or over the regimes in question, and control can take many forms.

So that's the primary concern -- control. A secondary concern is 
undoubtedly profit for U.S.-based corporations and British based 
corporations and several others of course. And in the case of the Iraqi 
oil law that's a possibility. The Production Sharing Agreements and the 
other arrangements for long-term contracts at ridiculous rates, those 
are expected to be sources of immense profit as they have been in the 
past, so for example a couple of weeks ago Exxon-Mobil posted its 
profits for 2006 which are the highest for any corporation in U.S. 
history. That broke the record of the preceding year, which also 
happened to be Exxon-Mobil and the other energy corporations are doing 
just great -- they have money pouring out of their ears. And the same 
with the corporations that link to them, like Haliburton, Bechtel and so on.

The material prize of oil production is not just from energy. It's also 
from many other things. Take Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates. 
They have huge constriction projects paid for by petro-dollars which 
recycle back to Bechtel and other major construction companies. A lot of 
it goes right back to U.S. military industry. So these are huge markets 
for U.S. military exports and the military industry in the United States 
is very closely linked to the high-tech economy generally. So it's a 
sort of a cycle -- high prices for oil, the petro-dollars pour back to 
the U.S. for major construction projects for high-tech industry, for 
development, for purchasing treasury securities which helps bolster the 
economy -- it's a major part of the economy and of course it's not just 
the United States. Britain, France and others are trying very hard to 
sell them the same things and sometimes succeeding. There was a big 
bribery scandal in Britain recently because of efforts to bribe Saudi 
officials into buying jet aircraft and so on. So the basic idea of the 
energy system is that it should be under the control of loyal clients of 
the United States, and they're allowed to enrich themselves, become 
super rich in fact, but the petro-dollars are basically to cycle back to 
the West, primarily the United States in various forms. So that's a 
secondary concern.

A tertiary concern is access. That's much less of a concern. One of the 
reasons is that the distribution systems are pretty much in the hands of 
big energy corporations anyway and once oil is on the high seas, it can 
go anywhere. So access is not considered a major problem. Political 
scientists, when they make fun of the idea that the U.S. invaded Iraq to 
gain its oil, they point out is that the U.S. can get Middle East oil in 
other ways so therefore that can't be the reason. That's true, but it's 
irrelevant because the true issues are and always have been control and 
secondarily profit and in fact U.S. intelligence projections for the 
coming years have emphasized that while the U.S. should control Middle 
East energy for the traditional reasons, it should rely primarily on 
more stable Atlantic basin resources, namely West Africa and the Western 
hemisphere. They're more secure, presumably and therefore we can use 
those, but we should control the Middle East oil because it is a 
stupendous source of strategic power.

--CGE (all but the first two grafs are from a recent interview with Noam 
Chomsky)

Ron Szoke wrote:
> The point would seem to be whether the Civil War was "about" nothing
> other than slavery.  I suspect everyone involved had their own agenda
> concerning what it was "about," with slavery being a fairly prominent
> consideration in many if not most cases.
> 
> In the same vein, there are two other unacknowledged components of
> the Iraq invasion:  a psychological theory about restoring America's
> symbolic testicles after Vietnam & the partial victory in Gulf I, &
> the influence of the Israel lobby -- which of course cannot be
> discussed without loud shrieks of "anti-Semitism" being heard.
> 
> -- Ron Szoke