Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>
> Ahmed Rashid argues in his book on the Taliban - which, by the way,
> is subtitled Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia -
> argues that the US supported the Taliban takeover in the mid-1990s
> because it was thought that the Taliban would be good for the Unocal
> pipeline. Clearly there's something to the oil angle after all.
>
>
In indirect and direct ways, oil has probably had "something" to do with every international 'episode' for the last century plus. But in all cases, including World War I and the overthrow of Mossedegh 40 years later, the nature of that "something" is always a matter of speculation rather than actual knowledge. Moreover, even in the clearest cases (e.g., overthrow of Mossedegh) there is always the obscurity of whether the "interest" in oil being pursued is the "national interest" (as perceived by a consensus of the ruling class) or the interest of a particular 'sub-interest' being served. Was it STandard Oil or the oil industry as a whole or u.s. capitalism or concerns about wartime supply etc. being served in a particular case?
It would be a tedious but if performed interesting task to do a quantitative study of the relative share in lbo posts of (a) speculation about empirical facts that can't be determined by speculation and (b) discussion of the known activities of the u.s. government. Those activities are criminal and must be opposed regardless of their motives.
Carrol