Page 3 of 4 The Pentagon's energy-protection
racket By Michael T Klare
performing this role in the Gulf. To fill
this gap, Carter created a new entity, the Rapid
Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF), an ad hoc
assortment of US-based forces designated for
possible employment in the Middle East.
In
1983, president Ronald Reagan transformed the
RDJTF into the Central Command (Centcom), the name
it bears today. Centcom exercises command
authority over all US combat forces deployed in
the greater Persian Gulf area, including
Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. At present,
Centcom is largely preoccupied with
the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it has never
given up its original role of guarding the oil
flow from the Persian Gulf in accordance with the
Carter Doctrine.
The greatest danger to
the Persian Gulf oil flow is now said to emanate
from Iran, which has threatened to choke off all
oil shipments through the vital Strait of Hormuz
(the narrow passageway at the mouth of the Gulf)
in the event of a US air assault on its nuclear
facilities. In possible anticipation of such a
move, the Pentagon recently ordered additional air
and naval forces into the Gulf and replaced
General John Abizaid, the Centcom commander, who
favored diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria,
with Admiral William Fallon, the commander of the
Pacific Command (Pacom) and an expert in combined
air and naval operations.
Fallon arrived
at Centcom just as Bush, in a nationally televised
speech last Wednesday, announced the deployment of
an additional aircraft-carrier battle group to the
Gulf and warned of harsh military action against
Iran if it failed to halt its support for
insurgents in Iraq and its pursuit of
uranium-enrichment technology.
When first
promulgated in 1980, the Carter Doctrine was aimed
principally at the Persian Gulf and surrounding
waters. In recent years, however, American
policymakers have concluded that the US must
extend this kind of protection to every major
oil-producing region in the developing world. The
logic for a Carter Doctrine on a global scale was
first spelled out in a report by a bipartisan task
force, "The Geopolitics of Energy", published by
the Washington-based Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS) in November 2000.
Because the US and its allies are becoming
increasingly dependent on energy supplies from
unstable overseas suppliers, the report concluded,
"The geopolitical risks attendant to energy
availability are not likely to abate." Under these
circumstances, "the United States, as the world's
only superpower, must accept its special
responsibilities for preserving access to
worldwide energy supply".
This sort of
thinking - embraced by senior Democrats and
Republicans alike - appears to have governed US
strategic thinking since the late 1990s. It was
president Bill Clinton who first put this policy
into effect, by extending the Carter Doctrine to
the Caspian Sea basin. It was Clinton who
originally declared that the flow of oil and gas
from the Caspian Sea to the West was a US security
priority, and who, on this basis, established
military ties with the governments of Azerbaijan,
Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
Bush has substantially upgraded these ties
- thereby laying the groundwork for a permanent US
military presence in the region - but it is
important to view this as a bipartisan effort in
accordance with a shared belief that protection of
the global oil flow is increasingly not just
a vital function, but the vital
function of the US military.
More
recently, Bush has extended the reach of the
Carter Doctrine to West Africa, now one of
America's major sources of oil. Particular
emphasis is being placed on Nigeria, where unrest
in the Niger Delta (which holds most of the
country's onshore petroleum fields) has produced a
substantial decline in oil output. "Nigeria is the
fifth-largest source of US oil imports," the State
Department's Fiscal Year 2007 Congressional Budget
Justification for Foreign Operations declares,
"and disruption of supply from Nigeria would
represent a major blow to US oil-security
strategy."
To prevent such a disruption,
the US Department of Defense is providing Nigerian
military and internal security forces with
substantial arms and equipment intended to quell
unrest in the delta region; the Pentagon is also
collaborating with Nigerian forces in a number of
regional patrol and surveillance efforts aimed at
improving security in the Gulf of Guinea, where
most of West Africa's offshore oil and gas fields
are located.
Of course, senior officials
and foreign-policy elites are generally loath to
acknowledge such crass motivations for the
utilization of military force - they much prefer
to talk about spreading democracy and fighting
terrorism. Every once in a while, however, a hint
of this deep energy-based conviction rises to the
surface.
Especially revealing is a
November task-force report from the Council on
Foreign Relations on "National Security
Consequences of US Oil Dependency".
Co-chaired by former secretary of defense
James R Schlesinger and former Central
Intelligence Agency director John Deutsch, and
endorsed by a slew of elite policy wonks from both
parties, the report trumpeted the usual
to-be-ignored calls for energy
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