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CounterPunch
March 13,
2003
Petróleo, Petróleo,
Petróleo
When Galeano
Spoke the Magic Word
by ROBERT JENSEN
Bush administration officials' mantra these days
is that a war on Iraq will have nothing to do with oil. Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said such a suggestion is "nonsense."
"It has nothing to do with oil,"
Rumsfeld said. "Literally nothing to do with it."
The problem is -- literally -- that no
one in the world believes that.
It's not that people around the world
don't acknowledge weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and
the human-rights abuses in Iraq as problems. It's just that people
also realize that war is not the solution for those problems,
and if not for oil the United States would not be pressing for
war.
How much the world understands this was
made clear at last month's World Social Forum in Porto Alegre,
Brazil. The legendary Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano offered
three reasons the United States wants to attack Iraq: "Petróleo,
petróleo, petróleo."
The crowd in the packed arena -- 15,000
from around the world -- endorsed Galeano's analysis with thunderous
applause.
This focus on the relevance of oil doesn't
mean Galeano, or anyone else, believes that U.S. policymakers
want to occupy Iraq and literally steal the oil; it's hard to
imagine even the most arrogant Bush official proposing that.
When President Bush says "We have
no territorial ambitions; we don't seek an empire," he is
telling half a truth. Certainly the United States isn't looking
to make Iraq the 51st state. But that's not the way of empire
today -- it's about control, not about territory.
Rumsfeld, trying to bolster his claim
about the innocence of U.S. intentions, said, "Oil is fungible,
and people who own it want to sell it and it'll be available,"
implying that the United States need not worry about being shut
out from buying on the open market. That's mostly correct, but
irrelevant.
So, if policymakers do not seek to occupy
Iraq permanently and take direct possession of its vast oil reserves
(at least 112 billion barrels, second to Saudi Arabia), and if
U.S. access to oil on the international market is not the issue,
then what might be U.S. interests?
Many argue that the close ties between
Bush and the oil industry suggest a war will be fought to give
U.S. companies the inside track on exploiting oil in a post-Saddam
Iraq. U.S. firms no doubt don't like the privileged position
that French and Russian companies have had, but focusing too
much on short-term concerns misses a bigger U.S. strategic goal
that has been part of policy for a more than half a century,
through Republican and Democratic administrations.
The key is not who owns the oil but who
controls the flow of oil and oil profits. After World War II,
when the United States was one of the world's leading oil producers
and had little need for imported oil, the U.S. government trained
attention on the Middle East. In 1945 the State Department explained
that the oil constitutes "a stupendous source of strategic
power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history."
In a world that runs on oil, the nation
that controls the flow of oil has that strategic power. U.S.
policymakers want leverage over the economies of our biggest
competitors -- Western Europe, Japan and China -- which are more
dependent on Middle Eastern oil. From this logic flows the U.S.
policy of support for reactionary regimes (Saudi Arabia), dictatorships
(Iran under the Shah) and regional military surrogates (Israel),
always aimed at maintaining control.
This analysis should not be difficult
to accept given the Bush administration's National Security Strategy
report released last fall, which explicitly calls for U.S. forces
to be strong enough to deter any nation from challenging American
dominance. U.S. policymakers state it explicitly: We will run
the world. Or, in the words of the first President Bush after
the first U.S. Gulf War, "What we say goes."
Such a policy requires not only overwhelming
military dominance but economic control as well. Mao said power
flows from the barrel of a gun, but U.S. policymakers also understand
it flows from control over barrels of oil.
Robert Jensen
is an associate professor of journalism at the University of
Texas at Austin, a member of the Nowar Collective, and author
of the book Writing
Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream
and the pamphlet "Citizens of the Empire." He can be
reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
Yesterday's
Features
Bill and Kathleen Christison
On
the Road to Iraq: First Stop Amman
Uri Avnery
An Approaching Emergency
Ray Close
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Michael Neumann
An
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Gary Leupp
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Kurt Nimmo
Perle's Slurs: Smearing Sy Hersh
Terry Jones
Bush
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CounterPunch Wire
Vietnam 2 Pre-Flight Check
Alexander Cockburn
What Will the US Find If It Invades Iraq?
Robert Fisk
Blix
Undermines Bush War Plan
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