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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
The future won't be defined by East vs. West or Christian vs. Muslim. As Michael Klare's new book, "Blood and Oil," shows, it's all about who has, and who wants, the black gold.
Oct 4, 2004 | Of all the misinformation, spin and outright falsehoods that the Bush administration has perpetrated with regard to the war in Iraq, there is no more hair-pullingly outrageous, flat-out preposterous assertion than that the invasion had nothing to do with oil.
This is wrong on so many levels that one hardly knows where to start -- even if, for argument's sake, one dismisses as conspiracy theory the claim that the U.S. invasion was directly aimed at getting control of Iraqi oil fields, and accepts the dubious assertion that by removing Hussein, the Bush administration struck a blow against terrorism.
What inspired al-Qaida's attack on the United States in the first place? Was it not Osama bin Laden's outrage at the stationing of American soldiers in Saudi Arabia? And weren't those soldiers there to protect Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti oil fields from Iraqi aggression? So even by the disingenuous logic of the Bush administration, which continues to claim, against all evidence, that Saddam Hussein had strong links with al-Qaida, the struggle for control over oil fields in the Middle East is the root cause of today's conflict.
Such has been the case since at least as far back as the Roosevelt administration, as Michael T. Klare calmly and inexorably explains in "Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum," and such will be the case for the foreseeable future, unless U.S. leaders make vast changes in current energy policy. Every American president since then has made the issue of U.S. access to Persian Gulf oil a priority -- a priority that has put the nation in bed with corrupt, anti-democratic rulers, infuriated rank-and-file Arabs, and entailed military commitments that result in the deaths of American fighting men and women.
And it's only going to get worse, writes Klare. Worldwide demand for oil will continue to rise as supply tightens. As a consequence, bloody and deadly conflicts, not just in the Persian Gulf but everywhere there are significant reserves of oil, will continue to rage.
What are we going to do about it? After outlining the danger the United States is currently in -- foreign oil imports now account for more than 50 percent of total U.S. consumption, and that percentage is only going to rise -- Klare calls for a comprehensive reworking of national energy policy. Getting out of the oil dependency trap will require conservation, investment in renewable energy, and fundamental reworking of land use, zoning and public transportation priorities.
It's a big job, and one quails at the prospect of any such national initiative making headway in a land as addicted to cheap energy as the United States. But one way or another, change is going to come -- the only real question is whether political leaders and individual Americans have the gumption and foresight to get ahead of the problem, or whether the global economic meltdown that will result from worldwide war over energy resources makes our choices for us.
Does that sound too apocalyptic? Too scare-mongering? Too sky-is-falling? So be it. If history teaches us anything, it is that the struggle over resources is one of the most enduringly bloody occupations of humans on this planet. Oil is the most precious such resource today. And so we will continue to bleed.
