It’s amazing how one of the most obvious things about are involvement in the Middle East is rarely spoken about in the mainstream media–oil. Even liberal commentators shy away from it. I think in large part it has to do with the Michael Moore factor that has made it a radioactive subject. "Blood for oil" has become a leftist cliche that makes it impossible for most people to take it seriously. It’s one of those things that we just don’t want to think about. It doesn’t make us feel good like the idea of toppling dictators and spreading democracy .
It’s just so obvious. But nobody wants to be dismissed as a Michael Moore conspiracy theorist. So I was surprised this morning to see the liberal but sensible Cynthia Tucker from the Atlanta Journal Constitution address the issue squarely in her column today. To save you the hassle of an AJC registration, I’ll excerpt liberally here:
While several agendas converged to drive the war wagon to Baghdad, providing the United States access to Middle East oil reserves was always a critical factor. It’s not just liberals — Democrats, environmentalists, Hummer-haters — who say so. So do candid conservatives.
In a book titled "The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War," Boston University professor and West Point grad Andrew Bacevich analyzed four military interventions of the Reagan era: "None of the four episodes can be fully understood except in relation to global reserves of fossil fuels and America’s growing dependence on imported oil."
Kevin Phillips, a former Republican political strategist, is blunt in his latest book, "American Theocracy": "Oil abundance has always been part of what America fights for, as well as with." Most Americans don’t want to concede that. Perhaps that’s why Bush was able to con the voters into re-electing him: Americans wanted to believe that we went to Iraq to clean out a terrorist infrastructure and to establish a base camp for democracy in the Middle East. No matter that the facts didn’t point in that direction; it was easier for us to believe that than to believe we went to secure U.S. access to Mideast oil reserves.
Yet history is clear on the point. The CIA intervened in Iran in the 1950s, clearing a path for the shah, because Iran had nationalized its oil fields, displeasing Anglo-American petroleum interests. Phillips notes that in 1973, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and others in President Nixon’s Cabinet "promoted, just short of openly, a plan for using U.S. airborne forces to seize the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi." And surely no one still thinks the United States would have driven Saddam out of Kuwait in 1991 had petroleum reserves not been at stake.
The current administration kept oil at the forefront of its planning after 9/11, too. In a speech last year, retired Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Colin Powell, revealed discussions about "mounting an operation to take the oil fields in the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N. trusteeship, and administer the oil and the revenues accordingly."
Bush and his Cabinet deserve their share of blame for failing to confront Americans with the consequences of our addiction to oil. But we’ve gone along with their deception. Until we admit the blood price we pay for petroleum, we’ll never be able to construct a sane policy toward the Middle East.
Amen. The dots are there, but we don’t want to connect them. I think that our involvement now in Iraq is a complex convergence of several agendas–Israel, neocon grandiosity, terrorism–and that no one factor completely explains it. But one thing is for sure: We wouldn’t be there if it were not for all the oil there. Maybe there’s a case to be made for it, but it hasn’t been made, and it therefore hasn’t been debated in congress or in the media.
But if we are to have a grownup political culture in this country, we have to face the facts about our oil dependency, and have a good argument about what it means and what we should do about it. As it stands now the American electorate is being fed pablum and told to behave like good children, trust Daddy, and all shall be well.
More on this as we go along.
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