Page 4 of 4 Are they really oil wars?
By Ismael Hossein-zadeh
exaggerated notion, as pointed out earlier, that both Bush and Cheney were "oil
men" before coming to the White House.
But the major reason for the persistence of this pervasive myth seems to stem
from certain deliberate efforts that are designed to perpetuate the legend in
order to camouflage some real economic and geopolitical special interests that
drive US military adventures in the Middle East. There is evidence that both
the military-industrial complex and hard-line Zionist proponents of "greater
Israel" disingenuously use oil (as an issue of national interest) in order to
disguise their own nefarious special interests and objectives: justification of
continued expansion of military spending, extension of sales markets for
military hardware, and
recasting the geopolitical map of the Middle East in favor of Israel.
There is also evidence that for every dollar's worth of oil imported from the
Persian Gulf region the Pentagon takes $5 out of the Federal budget to "secure"
the flow of that oil. This is a clear indication that the claim that the US
military presence in the Middle East is due to oil consideration is a fraud.
[26]
While anecdotal, an example of how partisans of war and militarism use oil as a
pretext to cover up the real forces behind war and militarism can be
instructive. In the early stages of the invasion of Iraq, when the
anti-occupation resistance in Iraq had not yet taken shape and the invasion
seemed to be proceeding smoothly, two of the leading champions of the invasion,
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, often
boasting of the apparent or pre-mature success of the invasion at those early
stages, gave frequent news conferences and press reports.
During one of those press reports (at the end of an address to delegates at an
Asian security summit in Singapore in early June 2003), Wolfowitz was asked why
North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons
of mass destruction had been found. Wolfowitz's response was: "Let's
look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq
is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea
of oil."[27]
Many opponents of the war jumped on this statement, so to speak, as
corroboration of what they had been saying or suspecting all along: that the
war on Iraq was prompted by oil interests. Yet, there is strong evidence - some
of which was presented above - that for the last several decades oil interests
have not favored war and turbulence in the Middle East, including the current
invasion of Iraq. Nor is war any longer the way to gain access to oil. Major
oil companies, along with many other non-military transnational corporations,
have lobbied both the Clinton and Bush administrations in support of changing
the aggressive, militaristic US policy toward countries like Iran, Iraq and
Libya in favor of establishing normal, non-confrontational trade and diplomatic
relations. Such efforts at normalization of trade and diplomatic relations,
however, have failed time and again precisely because Wolfowitz and his
cohorts, working through AIPAC and other war-mongering think tanks such as the
American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Project for the New American Century
(PNAC), and Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) oppose them.
These think tanks, in collaboration with a whole host of similar militaristic
lobbying entities like Center for Security Affairs (CSA) and National Institute
for Public Policy (NIPP), working largely as institutional facades to serve the
de facto alliance of the military-industrial complex and the pro-Israel lobby,
have repeatedly thwarted efforts at peace and reconciliation in the Middle East
- often over the objections and frustrations of major US oil companies.
It is well established that Wolfowitz has been a devoted champion of these
jingoistic think-tanks and their aggressive unilateral policies in the Middle
East. In light of his professional record and political loyalties, his claim
that he championed the war on Iraq because of oil considerations can be
characterized only as demagogic: it contradicts his political record and defies
the policies he has been advocating for the last several decades; it is
designed to divert attention from the main forces behind the war, the armaments
lobby and the pro-Israel lobby.
These powerful interests are careful not to draw attention to the fact that
they are the prime instigators of war and militarism in the Middle East.
Therefore, they tend to deliberately perpetuate the popular perception that oil
is the driving force behind the war in the region. They even do not mind having
their aggressive foreign policies labeled as imperialistic as long as
imperialism implies some vague or general connotations of hegemony and
domination, that is, as long as it thus camouflages the real, special interests
behind the war and political turbulence in the Middle East.
The oil and other non-military transnational corporations' aversion to war and
military adventures in the Middle East stem, of course, from the logical
behavior of global or transnational capital in the era of integrated world
markets, which tends to be loath to war and international political
convulsions. Considering the fact that both importers and exporters of oil
prefer peace and stability to war and militarism, why would, then, the flow of
oil be in jeopardy if the powerful beneficiaries of war and political tension
in the Middle East stopped their aggressive policies in the region?
Partisans of war in the Middle East tend to portray US military operations in
the region as reactions to terrorism and political turbulence in order to
"safeguard the interests of the United States and its allies". Yet a close
scrutiny of action-reaction or cause-effect relationship between US military
adventures and socio-political turbulence in the region reveals that perhaps
the causality is the other way around.
That is, social upheavals and political convulsions in the Middle East are more
likely to be the result, not the cause, of US foreign policy in the region,
especially its one-sided, prejudicial Israeli-Palestinian policy. The US policy
of war and militarism in the region seems to resemble the behavior of a corrupt
cop, or a mafia godfather, who would instigate fights and frictions in the
neighborhood or community in order to then portray his parasitic role as
necessary for the safety and security of the community and, in the process,
fill out his deep pockets.
No matter how crucial oil is to the world economy, the fact remains that it is,
after all, a commodity. As such, international trade in oil is as important to
its importers as it is to its exporters. There is absolutely no reason that, in
a world free of the influence of the beneficiaries of war and militarism and
their powerful lobbies (the armaments and the pro-Israel lobbies), the flow of
oil could not be guaranteed by international trade conventions and commercial
treaties.
Notes:
[1] Ron Andreas, reporter/researcher, e-mail correspondence with the author.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Michael T Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict
(New York: Holt paperbacks 2002); James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency:
Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century (Grove/Atlantic,
2005).
[4] Eliyahu Kanovsky, "Oil: Who's
Really Over a Barrel?" Middle East Quarterly (spring 2003).
[5] Ibid.
[6] The Wall Street Journal (May 17, 2001); cited in Eliyahu Kantovsky, Ibid.
[7] The Wall Street Journal (March 10, 1998); cited in Eliyahu Kantovsky, Ibid.
[8] F William Engdahl,
"Perhaps 60% of Today's Oil Price Is Pure Speculation" financialsense.com
(May 2, 2008),
[9] Ibid
[10] Ibid
[11] Stanley Reed, "Help from the House of Saud: Why the leading oil producer
wants to cool off the market," Business Week (May 29, 2008).
[12] Ibid
[13] Cyrus Bina and Minh Vo, "OPEC in the Epoch of Globalization: An Event
Study of Global Oil Prices," Global Economy Journal, Vol 7, Issue 1 (2007); for
a discussion of the theory and history of oil price determination see also,
Cyrus Bina, "The Rhetoric of Oil and the Dilemma of War and American Hegemony,"
Arab Studies Quarterly 15, no 3 (summer 1993); also Cyrus Bina, "Limits of OPEC
Pricing: OPEC Profits and the Nature of Global Oil Accumulation," OPEC Review
14, no 1 (spring 1990).
[14] F William Engdahl,
"Perhaps 60% of Today's Oil Price Is Pure Speculation" financialsense.com
(May 2, 2008).
[15] Cyrus Bina and Minh Vo, "OPEC in the Epoch of Globalization: An Event
Study of Global Oil Prices," Global Economy Journal, Vol. 7, Issue 1 (2007).
[16] Gary S Becker, "Why War with Iraq Is Not about Oil," Business Week (Mar
17, 2003): 30.
[17] Johnathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler. The Global Political Economy of
Israel (London and Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press, 2002).
[18] Melinda K Ruby, "Is Oil the Driving Force to War?" unpublished Senior
thesis, Dept. of Economics and Finance, Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa
(spring 2004), 10.
[19] As quoted in Ruby, Ibid, p13.
[20] As cited by Roger Burbach,
"Bush Ideologues vs. Big Oil: The Iraq Game Gets Even Stranger".
[21] Israel Shamir,
The Writings of Israel Shamir, Contributor 45.
[22] Stephen F Cohen "The New
American Cold War" The Nation (July 10, 2006); as quoted in Shamir,
Ibid.
[23] Shamir, Ibid.
[24] Ruby, "Is Oil the Driving Force to War?" pp14-15; see also Herman Franssen
and Elaine Morton, "A Review of US Unilateral Sanctions Against Iran," Middle
East Economic Survey 45, no 34 (Aug 26, 2002), pp D1-D5 (D section contains op
eds. as opposed to staff-written articles).
[25] Ruby, "Is Oil the Driving Force to War?" pp 16-17; see also David
Ivanovich, "Conoco's Chief Blasts Sanctions," Houston Chronicle (Feb 12, 1997).
[27] The statement was widely reported by many news papers and other media
outlets. See, for example,
The Guardian (June 4, 2003).
Ismael
Hossein-zadeh , author of the recently published The Political
Economy of US Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan 2007), teaches economics at Drake
University, Des Moines, Iowa.
(Copyright 2008 Ismael Hossein-zadeh.)
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