What the Pentagon calls "the Long War" is the insistence that the US control, by whatever means, a vast region around the Persian Gulf -- from Palestine to Pakistan, and from Central Asia to the Horn of Africa. The real reason for the Long War stretches back deep into the twentieth century. During World War II the US State Department described the Mideast is the “most strategically important area of the world,” and the area's vast energy resources – oil and natural gas – as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” In the years since then, oil companies and their associates have reaped colossal profits; but, even more importantly to the US, control over two-thirds of the world’s estimated hydrocarbon reserves – uniquely cheap and easy to exploit – provides what Brzezinski called “critical leverage” over European and Asian rivals, what the State Department many years earlier had called “veto power” over them.
Noam Chomsky points out, "Note that the critical issue is control, not access. US policies towards the Middle East were the same when the US was a net exporter of oil, and remain the same today when US intelligence projects that the US itself will rely on more stable Atlantic Basin resources [i.e., those of the Western hemisphere plus west Africa]. Policies would be likely to be about the same if the US were to switch to renewable energy. The need to control the 'stupendous source of strategic power' and to gain 'profits beyond the dreams of avarice' would remain. Jockeying over Central Asia and pipeline routes [notably in Afghanistan] reflects similar concerns."
With Israel as its "local cop on the beat," as the Nixon administration put it, the US has conducted a generations-long war for the control of energy resources – but not because the US is dependent on Mideast oil: less than 10% of the oil the US imports for domestic consumption comes for the Middle East.
And it should by now be clear that – whether we call them al-Qaeda, Taliban, insurgents, terrorists, or militants – the people whom we're trying to kill in the Middle East are those who want us out of their countries and off of their resources. In order to convince Americans to kill and die and suffer in this cause, the Bush administration repeatedly lied about the situation, from trumpeting the non-existent weapons of mass destruction to outright forgery. But the Obama administration continues to utter the biggest lie, that the US is stopping "terrorism," as it expands the war to Pakistan, which they see as the center of opposition to US control of the region.
Obama is clearly committed to the long-term and invariant US policy of controlling the energy resources of the Middle East. And the means have been clear for two generations: military power, exerted directly by the US or by its clients – notably Iran (1953-79), Israel (from 1967), and the "moderate" Arab regimes (Saudi Arabia, Egypt after 1979, Iraq until 1990).
The policy faces opposition from two groups: the American people, who are reluctant to go to war; and the people of the region, who are reluctant to be colonized. In a devastating guerrilla raid in that war, a resistance group killed thousands of Americans in the home country on 11 September 2001. Al-Qaeda said that they did it because of (a) the murderous sanctions on Iraq, (b) the oppression of the Palestinians, and (c) the American military presence in the Muslim holy places.
In his campaign for president, Obama proposed to deal with the two groups by killing the latter ("take them out," in a favorite phrase of his) and persuading the former, the American people -- whom he took to be the greater danger. In his audition piece for the US elite, the well-named "Audacity of Hope," he advertised his ability to co-opt them. In that book Obama wrote -- setting aside three million dead and a devastated country -- that "the biggest casualty of [the Vietnam] war was the bond of trust between the American people and their government"!
He presented himself as the agent to restore that "bond of trust" – i.e., to convince the bulk of the American population that their interests coincided with those of the elite policy-makers, when in fact it was clear that they were directly opposed. In this case Americans' opposition to going to war clashed with the elite desire to control the Middle East -- and there was no draft to rely on, because the US conscript army had revolted during the war in Vietnam. And the greatest anti-war demonstrations in history had occurred around the world before Bush's invasion of Iraq.
Obama demonstrated his ability to co-opt the US anti-war movement by convincing Americans that he was the "peace candidate," even though in office he has shown himself more aggressive and violent than Bush, from Palestine to Pakistan. But he has so far been more adept that Bush in implementing that constant policy, at home and abroad. --CGE
Carrol Cox wrote:
> It seems to me that so far the Bush/Obama Administration is a roaring
> success. U.S. troops are (for the time being) permanently established in
> Iraq, with a reasonably 'safe' government 'in charge' there. That war has
> been won (though like most wars it can always be reopened). It probably could
> not have been launched except by an administration able to ignore nuances &
> barge ahead regardless of world opinion, and it required a better and more
> sophisticated "Man in Charge" (Obama) to 'finalize' the deal as they say in
> business. And now, with troop needs and scare headlines both reduced in Iraq,
> Obama can turn the full u.s. power on pacifying Afghanistan. The population
> is small enough there so methods of mass slaughter will not appear to be such
> ... The question is why the U.S. is acting in a certain way. Brzezinski
> explains that.
[...Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of Washington’s most aggressive strategists ... wrote in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, about the ‘chief geopolitical prize’:
"How America ‘manages’ Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A glance at the map suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. About 75% of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60% of the world’s GNP and about three‑fourths of the world’s known energy resources...
"The world’s energy consumption is bound to vastly increase over the next two or three decades. Estimates by the US Department of Energy anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50% between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East. The momentum of Asia’s economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea... "It follows that America’s primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it... To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.(i)"
(i). Brzezinski, Z. (1997), The Grand Chessboard, New York, pp.30-31, 125, 40.]