06-05-2004, 09:44 PM
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#4 (permalink)
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Insane
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Quote:
Originally posted by boatin
If you buy the war for oil logic, the point is not to get gas for americans. The point is to make the oil companies (and their owners) richer. My understanding is that as the gas prices go up, the amount of profit the refining companies make goes up as well.
If true, the theory goes, Bush cronies get richer - thereby justifying the war.
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No, that is not the war for oil logic. The war was about control of oil.
Chomsky says it best:
Quote:
- What are the goals of the American existence in the Iraq and Middle East?
The primary goal, uncontroversially, is to control the immense energy reserves of the Persian Gulf region, Iraq included. That has been a prime concern of the Western industrial powers since the time when Iraq was created by the British, to ensure that Iraqi oil reserves would be in British hands and the newly-created state of Iraq would be barred from free access to the Gulf. At that time the US was not a leading actor in world affairs. But after World War II, the US was by far the dominant world power, and control of Middle East energy reserves became a leading foreign policy goal, as it had been for its predecessors. In the 1940s, US planners recognized that (in their words) Gulf energy resources are "a stupendous source of strategic power" and "one of the greatest material prizes in world history." Naturally, they intended to control it -- though for many years they did not make much use of it themselves, and in the future, according to US intelligence, the US itself will rely on more stable Atlantic Basin resources (West Africa and the Western hemisphere).
Nevertheless, it remains a very high priority to control the Gulf resources, which are expected to provide 2/3 of world energy needs for some time to come. Quite apart from yielding "profits beyond the dreams of avarice," as one leading history of the oil industry puts the matter, the region still remains "a stupendous source of strategic power," a lever of world control. Control over Gulf energy reserves provides "veto power" over the actions of rivals, as the leading planner George Kennan pointed out half a century ago.
Europe and Asia understand very well, and have long been seeking independent access to energy resources. Much of the jockeying for power in the Middle East and Central Asia has to do with these issues. The populations of the region are regarded as incidental, as long as they are passive and obedient. Few know this as well as the Kurds, at least if they remember their own history.
US planners surely intend to establish a client state in Iraq, with democratic forms if that is possible, if only for propaganda purposes. But Iraq is to be what the British, when they ran the region, called an "Arab facade," with British power in the background if the country seeks too much independence. That is a familiar part of the history of the region for the past century.
It is also the way the US has run it's own domains in the Western hemisphere for a century. There is no indication whatsoever of any miraculous change. The US occupying forces have imposed on Iraq an economic program that no sovereign country would ever accept: it virtually guarantees that the Iraqi economy will be taken over by Western (mostly US) multinational corporations and banks. It is a policy that has been disastrous for the countries on which it has been imposed; in fact, such policies are a prime reason for the current sharp difference between today's wealthy countries and their former colonies.
There is, of course, always a domestic sector that enriches itself by collaborating in running the "facade." So far, the oil industry has been excluded from foreign takeover, because that would be too blatant. But it is likely to follow, when attention turns elsewhere. Furthermore, Washington has already announced that it intends to impose a "status of forces agreement" that will grant the US the right to maintain military forces in Iraq and, crucially, military bases, the first stable US military bases right at the heart of the world's major energy reserves.
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http://www.zmag.org/content/showarti...36&ItemID=4780 |
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