--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote: "it (the US)could deny oil imports to just about anyone through blockades and bombardment."
Well, maybe excepting China and India!
And why do we persist in calling this a "neocon" policy, when the Democrats have also signed on to it?
It really is a puzzle where "US capital" is in this picture. The good thing about capitalism is that it's rational and empirical, within its narrow objectives. So how could it have embarked on such an ir-rational venture?
BobW
>
> On Nov 4, 2007, at 10:22 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
>
> > What do you make of Greenspan's rather startling
> "war
> > for oil" trope?
>
> It's obviously true in some sense - who'd care about
> Iraq if it
> weren't floating on oil? But after that, I don't get
> what it means.
> Most sectors of U.S. capital like moderate oil
> prices, so the high
> price regime of the last couple of years isn't doing
> them much good.
> What does it mean to "control" Middle Eastern oil?
> As long as the
> U.S. has no serious military rivals, it could deny
> oil imports to
> just about anyone through blockades and bombardment,
> without going
> through all the trouble of invasion and colonial
> control. It's not
> like you can turn off a tap in Baghdad and suddenly
> pumps in Beijing
> are going to go dry. (And Russia has plenty of its
> own oil anyway.)
> Chomsky always quotes a 50-year-old passage about ME
> oil being a
> "great strategic prize," but that was 50 years ago.
> The debasement of
> the dollar has rendered oil a lot cheaper, at least
> in relative
> terms, when priced in euro or yen - we take a much
> bigger hit than
> our principal rivals, and they're a lot more
> energy-efficient than we
> are too. It's like the neocons are living in a world
> of 19th century
> colonialism, where the direct control of real estate
> is supposed to
> confer some great advantage that I don't really see.
>
> Doug
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