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4 The Pentagon's energy-protection
racket By Michael T Klare
efficiency and conservation at
home, but then struck just the militaristic note
first voiced in the 2000 CSIS report (which
Schlesinger also co-chaired): "Several standard
operations of US regionally deployed forces
[presumably Centcom and Pacom] have made important
contributions to improving energy security, and
the continuation of such efforts will be necessary
in the future. US naval protection of the sea
lanes that transport oil is of paramount
importance."
The report also called for
stepped-up US naval engagement in the Gulf of
Guinea off the coast of Nigeria.
When
expressing such views, US policymakers often adopt
an
altruistic stance, claiming
that the US is performing a "social good" by
protecting the global oil flow on behalf of the
world community. But this haughty, altruistic
posture ignores crucial aspects of the situation:
First, the US is the world's leading gas
guzzler, accounting for one out of every four
barrels of oil consumed daily around the world.
Second, the pipelines and sea lanes being
protected by American soldiers and sailors at risk
of life and limb are largely those oriented toward
the US and close allies such as Japan and the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries.
Third, it is often specifically US-based
corporations whose overseas operations are being
protected by US forces in turbulent areas abroad,
again at significant risk to the military
personnel involved.
Fourth, the Pentagon is itself one of the
world's great oil guzzlers, consuming 134 million
barrels of oil in 2005, as much as the entire
nation of Sweden.
So while it is true that
other countries may obtain some benefits from the
activities of the US military, the primary
beneficiaries are the US economy and giant US
corporations; the primary losers are the American
soldiers who risk their lives every day to protect
the pipelines and refineries, the poor of these
countries who see little or no benefit from the
extraction of their natural resources, and the
global environment as a whole.
The cost of
this immense undertaking, in both blood and
treasure, is enormous, and it's still on the rise.
There is, first of all, the war in Iraq, which may
have been sparked by a variety of motives, but
cannot in the end be separated from the historic
mission first laid out by Carter of eliminating
any potential threat to the free flow of oil from
the Persian Gulf.
An assault on Iran would
also have a number of motives, but it, too, would
be tied to this mission in the final analysis -
even if it had the perverse effect of closing off
oil supplies, driving up energy prices, and
throwing the global economy into a tailspin. And
there are sure to be more wars over oil after
these, with more US casualties and more victims of
US missiles and bullets.
The cost in
dollars will also be great. Even if the war in
Iraq is excluded from the tally, the US spends
about one-fourth of its defense budget, or some
US$100 billion per year, on Persian Gulf-related
expenses - the approximate annual price tag for
enforcement of the Carter Doctrine. One can argue
about what percentage of the approximately $1
trillion cost of the war in Iraq should be added
to this tally, but surely we are minimally talking
about many hundreds of billions of dollars with no
end in sight. Protection of pipelines and tanker
routes in the Indian Ocean, the Pacific, the Gulf
of Guinea, Colombia and the Caspian Sea region
adds additional billions to this figure.
These costs will snowball as the US
becomes predictably more dependent on energy from
the global South, as resistance to Western
exploitation of its oilfields grows, as an energy
race with newly ascendant China and India revs up,
and as US foreign-policy elites come to rely
increasingly on the military to overcome this
resistance.
Eventually, the escalation of
these costs will require higher domestic taxes or
diminished social benefits, or both; at some
point, the growing need for manpower to guard all
these overseas oilfields, refineries, pipelines
and tanker routes could entail resumption of the
military draft.
This would generate
widespread resistance to these policies at home -
and this, in turn, might trigger the sorts of
repressive government crackdowns that would throw
an ever-darkening shadow of energo-fascism over
our world.
Michael T Klare is a
professor of peace and world security studies at
Hampshire College and the author of Blood and
Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's
Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum (Owl
Books).
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