[lbo-talk] No oil for blood

C. G. Estabrook galliher at illinois.edu
Thu Jul 2 08:36:32 PDT 2009


Oil (and gas) was certainly part of the essential background of the war. If the primary product of Iraq were asparagus, we wouldn't have half the American military there. The control of what the US State Department, in 1945, described as "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history" -- Mideast energy resources -- has been the cornerstone of US policy in the region ever since.

Just after 9/11 but before the invasion of Iraq, Noam Chomsky wrote "the September 11 terrorist atrocities provided an opportunity and pretext to implement long-standing plans to take control of Iraq's immense oil wealth ... US intelligence predicts that these will be of even greater significance in the years ahead. The issue has never been access. The same intelligence analyses anticipate that the US will rely on more secure Atlantic Basin supplies. The same was true after World War II. The US moved quickly to gain control over Gulf resources, but not for its own use; North America was the major producer for decades afterwards, and since then Venezuela has generally been the leading exporter to the US. What matters is control over the 'material prize,' which funnels enormous wealth to the US in many ways, and the 'stupendous source of strategic power,' which translates into a lever of 'unilateral world domination.'" --CGE

Marv Gandall wrote:
> If the invasion of Iraq was aimed at seizing it's oil supplies on behalf of
> US oil interests, as some on the left then simplistically contended, it has
> has yet to yield any results. The US-installed Maliki government yesterday
> granted the right to develop the prize Rumaila field to a group led by BP and
> the largest state-owned Chinese oil corporation rather than to consortia led
> by US firms ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. The invasion was primarily meant
> as a demonstration of overwhelming US military power by the Bush
> administration designed to cow America's enemies into submission - a colossal
> strategic blunder which had the opposite effect of what was intended.
> ========================================
>
> BP, China win right to develop Iraq's Rumalia oil field Anthony DiPaola and
> Maher Chmaytelli Bloomberg News Tuesday, June 30, 2009...



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