Iraq policy floating on a sea of oil -- I
Sunday, 4 November 2007
Michael Schwartz
LATELY, even Democratic candidates for president have been weighing in on why the U.S. must maintain a long-term, powerful military presence in Iraq. Hillary Clinton, for example, used phrases like protecting our "vital national security interests" and preventing Iraq from becoming a "petri dish for insurgents," in a major policy statement. Barack Obama, in his most important speech on the subject, talked of "maintaining our influence" and allowing "our troops to strike directly at al Qaeda." These arguments, like the constantly migrating justifications for invading Iraq, serially articulated by the Bush administration, manage to be vaguely plausible (with an emphasis on the "vaguely") and also strangely inconsistent (with an emphasis on the "inconsistent").
That these justifications for invading, or remaining, are unsatisfying is hardly surprising, given the reluctance of American politicians to mention the approximately $10-$30 trillion of oil lurking just beneath the surface of the Iraq "debate" -- and not much further beneath the surface of Iraqi soil. Obama, for example, did not mention oil at all in his speech, while Clinton mentioned it twice in passing. President Bush and his top officials and spokespeople have been just as reticent on the subject.
Why then did the U.S. invade Iraq? Why is occupying Iraq so "vital" to those "national security interests" of ours? None of this makes sense if you don't have the patience to drill a little beneath the surface - and into the past; if you don't take into account that, as former Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz once put it, Iraq "floats on a sea of oil"; and if you don't consider the decades-long U.S. campaign to control, in some fashion, Middle East energy reservoirs. If not, then you can't understand the incredible tenaciousness with which George W. Bush and his top officials have pursued their Iraqi dreams or why -- now that those dreams are clearly so many nightmares -- even the Democrats can't give up the ghost.
The United States viewed Middle Eastern oil as a precious prize long before the Iraq war. During World War II, that interest had already sprung to life: When British officials declared Middle Eastern oil "a vital prize for any power interested in world influence or domination," American officials agreed, calling it "a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history."
This led to a scramble for access during which the United States established itself as the preeminent power of the future. Crucially, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt successfully negotiated an "oil for protection" agreement with King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. That was 1945. From then on, the U.S. found itself actively (if often secretly) engaged in the region. American agents were deeply involved in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 (to reverse the nationalization of Iran's oil fields), as well as in the fateful establishment of a Baathist Party dictatorship in Iraq in the early 1960s (to prevent the ascendancy of leftists who, it was feared, would align the country with the Soviet Union, putting the country's oil in hock to the Soviet bloc). US influence in the Middle East began to wane in the 1970s, when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was first formed to coordinate the production and pricing of oil on a worldwide basis. OPEC's power was consolidated as various countries created their own oil companies, nationalized their oil holdings, and wrested decision-making away from the "Seven Sisters," the Western oil giants -- among them Shell, Texaco, and Standard Oil of New Jersey -- that had previously dominated exploration, extraction, and sales of black gold.
With all the key oil exporters on board, OPEC began deciding just how much oil would be extracted and sold onto international markets. Once the group established that all members would follow collective decisions -- because even a single major dissenter might fatally undermine the ability to turn the energy "spigot" on or off -- it could use the threat of production restrictions, or the promise of expansion, to bargain with its most powerful trading partners. In effect, a new power bloc had emerged on the international scene that could -- in some circumstances -- exact tangible concessions even from the United States and the Soviet Union, the two superpowers of the time. Though the United States was largely self-sufficient in oil when OPEC was first formed, the American economy was still dependent on trading partners, particularly Japan and Europe, which themselves were dependent on Middle Eastern oil. The oil crises of the early 1970s, including the sometimes endless gas lines in the U.S., demonstrated OPEC's potential.
It was in this context that the American alliance with the Saudi royal family first became so crucial. With the largest petroleum reserves on the planet and the largest production capacity among OPEC members, Saudi Arabia was usually able to shape the cartel's policies to conform to its wishes. In response to this simple but essential fact, successive American presidents strengthened the Rooseveltian alliance, deepening economic and military relationships between the two countries. The Saudis, in turn, could normally be depended upon to use their leverage within OPEC to fit the group's actions into the broader aims of U.S. policy. In other words, Washington gained favorable OPEC policies mainly by arming, and propping up a Saudi regime that was chronically fragile.
Backed by a tiny elite that used immense oil revenues to service its own narrow interests, the Saudi royals subjected their impoverished population to an oppressively authoritarian regime. Not surprisingly, then, the "alliance" required increasing infusions of American military aid as well political support in situations that were often uncomfortable, sometimes untenable, for Washington. On its part, in an era of growing nationalism, the Saudis found overt pro-American policies difficult to sustain, given the pressures and proclivities of its OPEC partners and its own population.
The key year in the Middle East would be 1979, when Iranians, who had lost their government to an American and British inspired coup in 1953, poured into the streets. The American-backed Shah's brutal regime fell to a popular revolution; American diplomats were taken hostage by Iranian student demonstrators; and Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs took power. The Iranian revolution added a combustible new element to an already complex and unstable equation. It was, in a sense, the match lit near the pipeline. A regime hostile to Washington, and not particularly amenable to Saudi pressure, had now become an active member of OPEC, aspiring to use the organization to challenge American economic hegemony.
It was at this moment, not surprisingly, that the militarization of American Middle Eastern policy came out of the shadows. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter -- before his Habitat for Humanity days -- enunciated what would become known as the "Carter Doctrine": that Persian Gulf oil was "vital" to American national interests and that the U.S. would use "any means necessary, including military force" to sustain access to it. To assure that "access," he announced the creation of a Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, a new military command structure that would be able to deliver personnel from all the armed services, together with state-of-the-art military equipment, to any location in the Middle East at top speed.
Nurtured and expanded by succeeding presidents, this evolved into the United States Central Command (Centcom), which ended up in charge of all U.S. military activity in the Middle East and surrounding regions. It would prove the military foundation for the Gulf War of 1990, which rolled back Saddam Hussein's occupation of Kuwait, and therefore prevented him from gaining control of that country's oil reserves. Though it was not emphasized at the time, that first Gulf War was a crystalline application of the Carter Doctrine -- that "any means necessary, including military force," should be used to guarantee American access to Middle Eastern oil. That war, in turn, convinced a shaky Saudi royal family -- that saw Iraqi troops reach its border - to accept an ongoing American military presence within the country, a development meant to facilitate future applications of the Carter Doctrine, but which would have devastating unintended consequences.
The peaceful disintegration of the Soviet Union at almost the same moment seemed to signal that Washington now had uncontested global military supremacy, triggering a debate within American policy circles about how to utilize and preserve what Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer first called the "unipolar moment." Future members of the administration of Bush the younger were especially fierce advocates for making aggressive use of this military superiority to enhance U.S. power everywhere, but especially in the Middle East. They eventually formed a policy advocacy group, The Project for a New American Century, to develop, and lobby for, their views. The group, whose membership included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and dozens of other key individuals who would hold important positions in the executive branch after George W. Bush took office, wrote an open letter to President Clinton in 1998 urging him to turn his "administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power." They cited both the Iraqi dictator's military belligerence and his control over "a significant portion of the world's supply of oil."
Two years later, the group issued a ringing policy statement that would be the guiding text for the new administration. Entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses, it advocated what would become known as a Rumsfeldian-style transformation of the Pentagon. U.S. military preeminence was to be utilized to "secure and expand'' American influence globally and possibly, in the cases of North Korea and Iraq, used "to remove these regimes from power and conduct post-combat stability operations." (The document even commented on the problem of defusing American domestic resistance to such an aggressive stance, noting ominously that public approval could not be obtained without "some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor.") The second Bush administration ascended to the presidency just as American influence in the Middle East looked to be on the decline. Despite victory in the first Gulf War and the fall of the Soviet Union, American influence over OPEC and oil policies seemed under threat. That sucking sound everyone suddenly heard was a tremendous increase in the global demand for oil. With fears rising that, in the very near future, such demand could put a strain on OPEC's resources, member states began negotiating ever more vigorously for a range of concessions and expanded political power in exchange for expanded energy production. By this time, of course, the United States had joined the ranks of the energy deficient and dependent, as imported oil surged past the 50% mark.
In the meantime, key ally Saudi Arabia was further weakened by the rise of al-Qaeda, which took as its main goal the overthrow of the royal family, and its key target -- think of those unintended consequences -- the American troops triumphantly stationed at permanent bases in the country after Gulf War I. They seemed to confirm the accusations of Osama bin Laden and other Saudi dissidents that the royal family had indeed become little but a tool of American imperialism. This, in turn, made the Saudi royals increasingly reluctant hosts for those troops and ever more hesitant supporters of pro-American policies within OPEC. To be continued. (Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared on numerous Internet sites, including Tomdispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, and ZNET)
Internet
LATELY, even Democratic candidates for president have been weighing in on why the U.S. must maintain a long-term, powerful military presence in Iraq. Hillary Clinton, for example, used phrases like protecting our "vital national security interests" and preventing Iraq from becoming a "petri dish for insurgents," in a major policy statement. Barack Obama, in his most important speech on the subject, talked of "maintaining our influence" and allowing "our troops to strike directly at al Qaeda." These arguments, like the constantly migrating justifications for invading Iraq, serially articulated by the Bush administration, manage to be vaguely plausible (with an emphasis on the "vaguely") and also strangely inconsistent (with an emphasis on the "inconsistent").
That these justifications for invading, or remaining, are unsatisfying is hardly surprising, given the reluctance of American politicians to mention the approximately $10-$30 trillion of oil lurking just beneath the surface of the Iraq "debate" -- and not much further beneath the surface of Iraqi soil. Obama, for example, did not mention oil at all in his speech, while Clinton mentioned it twice in passing. President Bush and his top officials and spokespeople have been just as reticent on the subject.
Why then did the U.S. invade Iraq? Why is occupying Iraq so "vital" to those "national security interests" of ours? None of this makes sense if you don't have the patience to drill a little beneath the surface - and into the past; if you don't take into account that, as former Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz once put it, Iraq "floats on a sea of oil"; and if you don't consider the decades-long U.S. campaign to control, in some fashion, Middle East energy reservoirs. If not, then you can't understand the incredible tenaciousness with which George W. Bush and his top officials have pursued their Iraqi dreams or why -- now that those dreams are clearly so many nightmares -- even the Democrats can't give up the ghost.
The United States viewed Middle Eastern oil as a precious prize long before the Iraq war. During World War II, that interest had already sprung to life: When British officials declared Middle Eastern oil "a vital prize for any power interested in world influence or domination," American officials agreed, calling it "a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history."
This led to a scramble for access during which the United States established itself as the preeminent power of the future. Crucially, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt successfully negotiated an "oil for protection" agreement with King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. That was 1945. From then on, the U.S. found itself actively (if often secretly) engaged in the region. American agents were deeply involved in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 (to reverse the nationalization of Iran's oil fields), as well as in the fateful establishment of a Baathist Party dictatorship in Iraq in the early 1960s (to prevent the ascendancy of leftists who, it was feared, would align the country with the Soviet Union, putting the country's oil in hock to the Soviet bloc). US influence in the Middle East began to wane in the 1970s, when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was first formed to coordinate the production and pricing of oil on a worldwide basis. OPEC's power was consolidated as various countries created their own oil companies, nationalized their oil holdings, and wrested decision-making away from the "Seven Sisters," the Western oil giants -- among them Shell, Texaco, and Standard Oil of New Jersey -- that had previously dominated exploration, extraction, and sales of black gold.
With all the key oil exporters on board, OPEC began deciding just how much oil would be extracted and sold onto international markets. Once the group established that all members would follow collective decisions -- because even a single major dissenter might fatally undermine the ability to turn the energy "spigot" on or off -- it could use the threat of production restrictions, or the promise of expansion, to bargain with its most powerful trading partners. In effect, a new power bloc had emerged on the international scene that could -- in some circumstances -- exact tangible concessions even from the United States and the Soviet Union, the two superpowers of the time. Though the United States was largely self-sufficient in oil when OPEC was first formed, the American economy was still dependent on trading partners, particularly Japan and Europe, which themselves were dependent on Middle Eastern oil. The oil crises of the early 1970s, including the sometimes endless gas lines in the U.S., demonstrated OPEC's potential.
It was in this context that the American alliance with the Saudi royal family first became so crucial. With the largest petroleum reserves on the planet and the largest production capacity among OPEC members, Saudi Arabia was usually able to shape the cartel's policies to conform to its wishes. In response to this simple but essential fact, successive American presidents strengthened the Rooseveltian alliance, deepening economic and military relationships between the two countries. The Saudis, in turn, could normally be depended upon to use their leverage within OPEC to fit the group's actions into the broader aims of U.S. policy. In other words, Washington gained favorable OPEC policies mainly by arming, and propping up a Saudi regime that was chronically fragile.
Backed by a tiny elite that used immense oil revenues to service its own narrow interests, the Saudi royals subjected their impoverished population to an oppressively authoritarian regime. Not surprisingly, then, the "alliance" required increasing infusions of American military aid as well political support in situations that were often uncomfortable, sometimes untenable, for Washington. On its part, in an era of growing nationalism, the Saudis found overt pro-American policies difficult to sustain, given the pressures and proclivities of its OPEC partners and its own population.
The key year in the Middle East would be 1979, when Iranians, who had lost their government to an American and British inspired coup in 1953, poured into the streets. The American-backed Shah's brutal regime fell to a popular revolution; American diplomats were taken hostage by Iranian student demonstrators; and Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs took power. The Iranian revolution added a combustible new element to an already complex and unstable equation. It was, in a sense, the match lit near the pipeline. A regime hostile to Washington, and not particularly amenable to Saudi pressure, had now become an active member of OPEC, aspiring to use the organization to challenge American economic hegemony.
It was at this moment, not surprisingly, that the militarization of American Middle Eastern policy came out of the shadows. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter -- before his Habitat for Humanity days -- enunciated what would become known as the "Carter Doctrine": that Persian Gulf oil was "vital" to American national interests and that the U.S. would use "any means necessary, including military force" to sustain access to it. To assure that "access," he announced the creation of a Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, a new military command structure that would be able to deliver personnel from all the armed services, together with state-of-the-art military equipment, to any location in the Middle East at top speed.
Nurtured and expanded by succeeding presidents, this evolved into the United States Central Command (Centcom), which ended up in charge of all U.S. military activity in the Middle East and surrounding regions. It would prove the military foundation for the Gulf War of 1990, which rolled back Saddam Hussein's occupation of Kuwait, and therefore prevented him from gaining control of that country's oil reserves. Though it was not emphasized at the time, that first Gulf War was a crystalline application of the Carter Doctrine -- that "any means necessary, including military force," should be used to guarantee American access to Middle Eastern oil. That war, in turn, convinced a shaky Saudi royal family -- that saw Iraqi troops reach its border - to accept an ongoing American military presence within the country, a development meant to facilitate future applications of the Carter Doctrine, but which would have devastating unintended consequences.
The peaceful disintegration of the Soviet Union at almost the same moment seemed to signal that Washington now had uncontested global military supremacy, triggering a debate within American policy circles about how to utilize and preserve what Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer first called the "unipolar moment." Future members of the administration of Bush the younger were especially fierce advocates for making aggressive use of this military superiority to enhance U.S. power everywhere, but especially in the Middle East. They eventually formed a policy advocacy group, The Project for a New American Century, to develop, and lobby for, their views. The group, whose membership included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and dozens of other key individuals who would hold important positions in the executive branch after George W. Bush took office, wrote an open letter to President Clinton in 1998 urging him to turn his "administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power." They cited both the Iraqi dictator's military belligerence and his control over "a significant portion of the world's supply of oil."
Two years later, the group issued a ringing policy statement that would be the guiding text for the new administration. Entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses, it advocated what would become known as a Rumsfeldian-style transformation of the Pentagon. U.S. military preeminence was to be utilized to "secure and expand'' American influence globally and possibly, in the cases of North Korea and Iraq, used "to remove these regimes from power and conduct post-combat stability operations." (The document even commented on the problem of defusing American domestic resistance to such an aggressive stance, noting ominously that public approval could not be obtained without "some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor.") The second Bush administration ascended to the presidency just as American influence in the Middle East looked to be on the decline. Despite victory in the first Gulf War and the fall of the Soviet Union, American influence over OPEC and oil policies seemed under threat. That sucking sound everyone suddenly heard was a tremendous increase in the global demand for oil. With fears rising that, in the very near future, such demand could put a strain on OPEC's resources, member states began negotiating ever more vigorously for a range of concessions and expanded political power in exchange for expanded energy production. By this time, of course, the United States had joined the ranks of the energy deficient and dependent, as imported oil surged past the 50% mark.
In the meantime, key ally Saudi Arabia was further weakened by the rise of al-Qaeda, which took as its main goal the overthrow of the royal family, and its key target -- think of those unintended consequences -- the American troops triumphantly stationed at permanent bases in the country after Gulf War I. They seemed to confirm the accusations of Osama bin Laden and other Saudi dissidents that the royal family had indeed become little but a tool of American imperialism. This, in turn, made the Saudi royals increasingly reluctant hosts for those troops and ever more hesitant supporters of pro-American policies within OPEC. To be continued. (Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared on numerous Internet sites, including Tomdispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, and ZNET)
Internet