Petróleo, Petróleo, Petróleo
by
Robert Jensen
Dissident Voice
March 12, 2003
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 mostl 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, an associate professor of
journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of Writing
Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream and a
member of the Nowar Collective. Email: rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Other articles are available at his website: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/home.htm.