Conspiracy theorist: “A psychologically disturbed person who poses a danger to society by virtue of the fact that he frequently questions or refuses to accept the views or opinions of society’s authorities” – The consensus definition of ‘conspiracy theorist’ promoted by society’s authorities.
You don’t have to be a so-called “conspiracy theorist” these days to believe that a major function of the U.S. military is – and has been for a long time – to ensure a plentiful supply of oil for U.S. corporations and consumers, not to mention for the U.S. military itself.
John McCain himself, the 2008 Republican nominee for President, so much as
admitted this when he said in May of this year, in the course of bragging about his woefully deficient energy plan:
My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East that will – that will then prevent us – that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East," McCain said.
I don’t know whether that was just a plain old gaff or some sort of trial balloon to see to what degree the American people are willing to consider wars for oil to be a legitimate purpose of our military. Either way, it was an admission of something that many Americans have believed for a long time and that has become increasingly obvious over time.
A brief and incomplete history of U.S. military and CIA actions to secure access to foreign oilIran 1953In 1953 our
CIA intervened in Iran to overthrow a popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had done much to improve the lot of the Iranian people. Here is how Stephen Kinzer describes Mossadegh in his book, “
All the Shah’s Men – An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror”:
His achievements were profound and even earth-shattering. He set his people off on what would be a long and difficult voyage toward democracy and self-sufficiency… He dealt a devastating blow to the imperial system and hastened its final collapse. He inspired people around the world who believe that nations can and must struggle for the right to govern themselves in freedom.
In Mossadegh’s place we installed the dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah. The stated reason for our overthrow of Mossadegh was that we were concerned that he would open his country to Communist influence. Nevertheless, Mossadegh’s nationalization of the Iranian oil industry was also undoubtedly at least part of, if not the most important reason for his overthrow. This is how Kinzer sums up the effect of that intervention:
In Iran, almost everyone has for decades known that the United States was responsible for putting an end to democratic rule in 1953 and installing what became the long dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah. His dictatorship produced the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which brought to power a passionately anti-American theocracy that embraced terrorism as a tool of statecraft. Its radicalism inspired anti-Western fanatics in many countries…
The violent anti-Americanism that emerged from Iran after 1979 shocked most people in the United States. Americans had no idea of what might have set off such bitter hatred in a country where they had always imagined themselves more or less well liked. That was because almost no one in the United States knew what the CIA did there in 1953.
The first Gulf WarThe United States has long been interested in Iraq because of its geostrategic location and because it was the world’s second largest producer of oil.
John Perkins’ book, “
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”, is a description from personal experience of how the United States attempts to exert its influence in the world, short of war if possible. Perkins describes in that book U.S. interests in Iraq and its problems with Saddam Hussein:
I kept in touch with old friends who worked for… Bechtel, Halliburton… I was very aware that the economic hit men (EHMs) were hard at work in Iraq. The Reagan and Bush administrations were determined to turn Iraq into another Saudi Arabia (with respect to compliance with U.S. wishes)… The EHM presence in Baghdad was very strong during the 1980s. They believed that Saddam eventually would see the light…
However, by the late 1980s it was apparent that Saddam was not buying into the EHM scenario. This was a major frustration and great embarrassment to the first Bush administration.
The opportunity to do something about Saddam Hussein presented itself when the relationship between Iraq and Kuwait soured. However, Saddam could not invade Iraq without U.S. acquiescence. Here are
excerpts from a meeting that show April Glaspie, then U.S. ambassador to Iraq, giving Saddam Hussein a green light to invade Kuwait, shortly before the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, which led directly to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
GLASPIE: I have direct instructions from President Bush to improve our relations with Iraq. We have considerable sympathy for your quest for higher oil prices, the cause of your confrontation with Kuwait… We can see that you’ve employed massive numbers of troops in the south… I have received instructions to ask you, in the spirit of friendship… Why are your troops massed so very close to Kuwait’s border?
SADDAM HUSSEIN: I am prepared to give negotiations one more brief chance. But if we are unable to find a solution it would be natural that Iraq would not accept death.
GLASPIE: What solutions would be acceptable?
SADDAM HUSSEIN: (Gives a list of conditions). What is the U.S. opinion on this?
GLASPIE: We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary of State James Baker has directed me to emphasize that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.
In “
State of Darkness – U.S. Complicity in Genocides Since 1945” – David Model describes how President Bush rejected all efforts by Hussein to negotiate a peaceful settlement, before giving the order to invade Iraq on August 7, 1990.
AfghanistanTwo French intelligence analysts, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, offer clues to the reasons for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in their book, ''
Bin Laden, la verité interdite'' (''Bin Laden, the forbidden truth''). They were told by former FBI Deputy Director John O’Neil that ''the main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it''.
Julio Godoy
summarizes Brisard’s and Dasquie’s book with respect to the background behind the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan:
The two claim the U.S. government's main objective in Afghanistan was to consolidate the position of the Taliban regime to obtain access to the oil and gas reserves in Central Asia… Until August, the U.S. government saw the Taliban regime ''as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia'', from the rich oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean.
But, confronted with Taliban's refusal to accept U.S. conditions, ''This rationale of energy security changed into a military one… At one moment during the negotiations, the U.S. representatives told the Taliban, 'either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs'.''…
The government of Bush began to negotiate with the Taliban immediately after coming into power… The last meeting between U.S. and Taliban representatives took place in August, five weeks before the attacks on New York and Washington.
Evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in those attacks was
flimsy at best. Nevertheless, the Taliban
agreed to extradite bin Laden to Pakistan – an American ally – to stand trial for charges of participation in 9/11. They agreed that if the court found sufficient evidence that bin Laden would then be extradited to the United States. But George Bush turned down all Taliban offers,
saying “We know he’s guilty. Turn him over”. Bush later elaborated further on that, saying, “
When I said no negotiations, I meant no negotiations”.
The 2003 Iraq WarThe evidence that the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with the reasons that it gave, and everything to do with oil and other issues related to imperial conquest, is overwhelming. Here’s a small sample:
According to Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neil, the Bush administration began planning for war with Iraq
within days of Bush’s inauguration. A document from Dick Cheney’s March 2001 Energy Task Force Meeting, titled “
Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts”, included a map of areas for potential oil exploration. According to Richard Clarke, Bush’s counterterrorism coordinator at the time of the 9/11 attacks,
Bush asked him to find an excuse for war against Iraq almost immediately following the attacks. And Seymour Hersh unearthed
a systematic effort by the Bush administration to pressure its intelligence agencies to produce evidence to help make its case for war, as suggested in this excerpt from his book, “
Chain of Command – The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib”:
According to a former high level CIA official… senior CIA analysts dealing with Iraq were constantly being urged by the Vice President’s office to provide worst-case assessments on Iraqi weapons issues. They got pounded on, day after day….Pretty soon you say Fuck it. And they began to provide the intelligence that was wanted.
Shortly after the U.S. military captured Baghdad, troops where dispensed to
guard the oil ministry, while much of the rest of Baghdad was looted.
Antonia Juhasz, in her book “
The Bush Agenda – Invading the World One Economy at a Time”, notes that prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, U.S. oil companies had little or no access to Iraqi oil:
Since the 2003 invasion, however, imports have been far more steady and at consistently sizeable levels….Iraq’s oil has therefore already contributed to
skyrocketing oil company profits. So, too, it seems, has the myth of a dramatically reduced oil supply from the Middle East due to the Iraq War….
The model that won out was the
Production Sharing Agreement (PSA)… PSAs turn the entire exploration, drilling, and infrastructure building process over to private companies… that lock in the laws in effect at the time the contract was signed…
Before new oil contracts could be signed, the existing contracts had to be erased. This all-important step was taken back in May 2003… The U.S.-appointed senior advisor to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, Thamer al-Ghadban, announced that few, if any, of the dozens of contracts signed with foreign oil companies under the Hussein regime would be ]honored…
Though the United States comprises only about 5% of the world’s population, it
uses 25% of the world’s oil. Our military accounts for a good portion of that. Michael Klare, in an article titled “
The Pentagon Vs Peak Oil”, describes the magnitude of oil use by our military:
Sixteen gallons of oil. That’s how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis – either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan and 30,000 in the surrounding region and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone. Multiply that daily tab by 365 and you get 1.3 billion gallons: the estimated annual oil expenditure for U.S. combat operations in Southwest Asia. That’s greater than the total annual oil usage of Bangladesh, population 150 million – and yet it’s a gross underestimate of the Pentagon’s wartime consumption.
Klare goes on to explain why his estimate represents only a small fraction of
total oil use by our military, and he cites a
report suggesting that our military might consume as much as 14 million gallons of oil a day.
He then discusses the fact that the time is soon coming when world oil production will peak, which will lead to rapidly rising oil costs (unless we find enough suitable alternatives to oil.) The Pentagon recently studied this matter, resulting in a
report titled “Transforming the Way that DoD Looks at Energy”, which concluded that “current planning presents a situation in which the aggregate operational capability of the force may be unsustainable in the long term.” That follows from a consideration of our military’s current mode of operation under the Bush administration:
Our forces must expand geographically and be more mobile and expeditionary so that they can be engaged in more theaters and prepared for expedient deployment anywhere in the world… They must transition from a reactive to a proactive force posture to deter enemy forces from organizing for and conducting potentially catastrophic attacks… To carry out these activities, the U.S. military will have to be even more energy intense…
How will our military deal with declining availability and rising costs of oil?Klare discusses two possible ways in which our military could deal with the declining availability and rising cost of oil. One would be to “go green” – that is, to develop alternative energy sources for the running of our military. But that would not appear to be a feasible means of meeting the monstrous energy needs of our military any time in the near future.
Klare discusses a much scarier prospect:
To ensure itself a “reliable” source of oil in perpetuity, the Pentagon will increase its efforts to maintain control over foreign sources of supply, notably oil fields and refineries in the Persian Gulf region… This would help explain the recent talk of U.S. plans to retain “
enduring" bases in Iraq, along with its already impressive and elaborate basing infrastructure in other countries.
That appears to be the way that our military is currently headed. Klare notes the fact that we often use our “War on Terror” as an excuse for foreign military intervention. However, we sometimes have trouble telling the difference between fighting terror and our desire for oil, as Klare discussed in a
2004 article:
A close reading of Pentagon and State Department documents shows that antiterrorism and the protection of oil supplies are closely related in administration thinking. When requesting funds in 2004 to establish a "rapid-reaction brigade" in Kazakhstan, for example, the State Department told Congress that such a force is needed to "enhance Kazakhstan's capability to respond to major terrorist threats to oil platforms" in the Caspian Sea.
A very similar trajectory is now under way in Colombia. The American military presence in oil-producing areas of Africa, though less conspicuous, is growing rapidly. The Department of Defense has stepped up its arms deliveries to military forces in Angola and Nigeria, and is helping to train their officers and enlisted personnel; meanwhile, Pentagon officials have begun to look for permanent U.S. bases in the area, focusing on Senegal, Ghana, Mali, Uganda, and Kenya. Although these officials tend to talk only about terrorism when explaining the need for such facilities, one officer told Greg Jaffe of the Wall Street Journal in June 2003 that "a key mission for U.S. forces (in Africa) would be to ensure that Nigeria's oil fields, which in the future could account for as much as 25 percent of all U.S. oil imports, are secure."
Klare concludes with the ultimate nightmare scenario:
It would be both sad and ironic if the military now began fighting wars mainly so that it could be guaranteed the fuel to run its own planes, ships and tanks – consuming hundreds of billions of dollars a year that could instead be spent on the development of petroleum alternatives.
My thoughts on the idea of U.S. wars for oilWhen I was a child, my parents told me that our country only fought wars for good reasons. It’s hard to imagine that they told me that. They were liberal and well informed when they were alive. They actively protested against the Vietnam War.
But the guardians of our nation’s cultural heritage have made a tremendous effort to keep the American people ignorant and quiet about our nation’s wars. One way they do this is by exhibiting contempt for those of us who are too negative on the subject. They call us “isolationist”, “naïve”, “unpatriotic”, or when we question the motives or truthfulness of our leaders, “conspiracy theorists”.
Another way they keep us in the dark is by keeping a firm handle on the educational curricula of our youth. In the early 1990s, an historical policy-setting body was established, called the National Council for History Standards (NCHS), consisting of the presidents of nine major organizations and twenty-two other nationally recognized administrators, historians, and teachers, with substantial input from thirty-one national organizations. In November 1994, NCHS released its document, titled
National Standards for United States History, which was meant to provide purely voluntary guidelines for national curricula in history for grades 5-12. As
explained by Gary Nash, who led the effort, these standards were meant to have one thing in common: “to provide students with a more comprehensive, challenging, and thought-provoking education in the nation's public schools.” Their signature features were said to include “a new framework for critical thinking and active learning” and “repeated references to primary documents that would allow students to read and hear authentic voices from the past”.
The document was widely criticized by those who felt threatened by it. For example, Lynn Cheney aggressively criticized it as containing “multicultural excess”, a “grim and gloomy portrayal of American history”, “a politicized history”, and a disparaging of the West. In 1995 the U.S. Senate rejected the document by a
vote of 99-1.
Our nation MUST get over this way of thinking. We can’t just keep on moving from one mindless imperial war to the next. It is bankrupting our nation and preventing the world’s nations from coming together to solve the crucial problems confronting us all, such as global climate change and world-wide poverty and hunger. Most important of all, the death and destruction that we rain down on our victims is blatantly immoral. History shows that nations that engage in imperial over-reach eventually decline and crash. As we do that, we just might take the rest of the world down with us.
I believe that President-Elect Obama is fundamentally a good and peace loving man. But he is now the President of a nation that is well on the road to imperialistic conquest and tyranny and whose military machine is out of control. The pressure to continue on that course will be tremendous.
The American people need to learn a different way of viewing war. They need to know that it isn’t necessary for us to spend nearly as much on our military
as the rest of the world combined. They need to reject wars for oil or other nefarious purposes. But any President or Presidential candidate who tells them that will be politically crucified for it. It will take tremendous political courage and skills to do that successfully. Our new President will have a tremendous challenge in front of him.
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