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April 5, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon's
Wars: How the
News Gets Through
April 4, 2002
Ray Hanania
Sharon's Latest Lie About the Church
of the Nativity
Mike Leon
Rightwing
Assault on Madison Progressives Misfires
Tom Turnipseed
Stop the Killing Now!
Nancy
Stohlman
An
American Under Siege in a West Bank Refugee Camp
Christopher Reilly
Kissinger, Chile and Justice
at Long Last?
M. Shahid
Alam
The
Lies of Thomas Friedman
April 3, 2002
Don Henley
Dear Loathsome Trade Hacks
Bernard
Weiner
An
American Jew Talks
About His Shame
David Vest
Sting of Stings
Tzaporah
Ryter
Under
Fire: an American Student in Ramallah
Gabriel Ash
America's Bravest
John Chuckman
Of
War, Islam and Israel
Robert Fisk
The Siege of Bethlehem
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Sins of the Church
April 2, 2002
Uri Avnery
Murdering Arafat?
Jeff Chang
Is
Protest Music Dead?
Lev Grinberg
Israel's State Terrorism
Norman
Madarasz
Bullying
Brazil
Robert Fisk
Farce and Terror
in Ramallah
Steve
Perry
Let's
Roll! ®:
The Marketing of Lisa Beamer
April 1, 2002
Stanton / Madsen
America's War Inc.
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Peace
and Nuclear Disarmament: a Call to Action
Bahour / Dahan
Bloodshed in Palestine:
A Way Out
Molly
Secours
Tennessee's
Kangaroo Court
Phyllis Pollack
The Making of Exile
on Main Street
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
This Week's
Top 10 CDs
Francis Boyle
The Big Lie:
Palestine, Palestinians
and International Law
March 31, 2002
Jordan
Flaherty
Last
Night the Israeli
Military Tried to Kill Me
Kristen Schurr
Live from Bethlehem
Maha Sbitani
The
Israeli Army Took Over My House
Robert Fisk
Lies Leaders Tell When
They Want to Go to War
March 24/30, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
The Year
of the Yellow Notepad:
Plagiarism and History
Rep. Ron Paul
Slavery and the Draft
Fidel
Castro
A
Better World is Possible
Edward Said
What Price Oslo?
José
Saramago
Justice
and Democracy Denied
Azmi Bishara
Talking to Tanks
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Clearcutting
Montana
Alexander Cockburn
50 Years of James Bond
Wilhelm
Reich
Gethsemane
Claud Cockburn
The Horror of It All
Dave Marsh
What's
Playing at My Houe
David Vest
Remembering Tammy Wynette
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Waylon
Jennings:
an Honest Outlaw
March 23, 2002
Mokhiber/Weissman
A
Corporate Lawyer
Speaks Out
Saeed Vaseghi
The US and Iran's Quest
for Democracy
Brian
J. Foley
Does
Pedophilia Scandal Spell an Opportunity for Catholics?
Sheperd Bliss
American Soul and Empire
James
Packard Winkler
Occupation
and Terror:
Politics from a Gun Barrel
M. Shahid Alam
A New International Division
of Labor
T.W. Croft
Enron's
Attack on Our
Economic Security
March 22, 2002
Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy
Tommy
Ates
The
Future of Black Academia
Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?
March 21, 2002
McQuinn,
Munson, & Wheeler
Stars
and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?
John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
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The New Crusade:
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April 5, 2002
Former
Senior CIA Officer:
Oil and The Middle East:
Why
U.S. Foreign Policy Has To Change
By Bill Christison
Back in March CounterPunch published
Christison's devastating critique of the strategies and conduct
of the US war of terrorism. (See our archive by scrolling down
to "Search CounterPunch.)) These new remarks, which he has
made available to CounterPunch were delivered to various peace
groups in Santa Fe, New Mexico on early April.Bill Christison
joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the
Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National
Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central
Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast
Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was
Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis,
a 250-person unit His wife Kathy also worked in the CIA, retiring
in 1979.Since then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue
of Palestine.
I've been asked to talk today about the topic,
"U.S. Oil Policy as a Juggernaut in U.S. Foreign Policy."
That's a great title. When you hear the word "juggernaut,"
what you think of--at least what I think of--is a monster machine
of some sort, maybe the heaviest heavy tank you can imagine,
rumbling down a city street, unstoppable, crushing everything
in its way, and even destroying the paving of the street as it
goes. Well, that comes pretty close to describing what I believe
about the long-term effects of our oil, and other, foreign
policies in the Middle East. But if we look ahead, rather than
at the past or the present, my hope is that, by changing some
of our own foreign policies, U.S. oil policy will in the future
no longer be a destructive juggernaut.
It's worth spending a minute to talk
about why oil is so important to the United States. The world's
total use of energy from all sources--from petroleum, natural
gas, coal, wood, hydropower, nuclear, geothermal, solar, and
wind power--has increased in recent years roughly as the global
population has also increased. Petroleum contributes the greatest
single amount--about two-fifths of the world's total energy output,
and natural gas (which is in some ways related to oil) more than
another one-fifth. The United States alone uses about one-quarter
of the world's total energy output, but has less than five percent
of the world's population. The U.S. itself does not produce anywhere
near the amount of energy that it consumes. According to statistics
of the U.S. Department of Energy, the United States used in the
year 2000 almost 100 quadrillion Btu's--or British Thermal Units--of
energy. But of those 100 quadrillion Btu's, the U.S. had to import
close to 30 percent. The United States is, hands down, the most
profligate user of energy, by far, on this whole globe.
With respect to oil alone, the U.S. imported
in the year 2000 almost two-thirds of the oil that it used. The
importance of Saudi Arabia as a supplier of the U.S., needs to
be emphasized, but not just because the Saudis hold the largest
known but still untapped oil reserves in the world. What is even
more important to the U.S. at the moment is that Saudi Arabia
has the largest installed but unused rapid production capacity--that
is, oil wells, pumping equipment and so forth already there but
not used to meet current, or "normal," production needs.
In any emergency that cut off oil supplies from anywhere else
in the world, Saudi Arabia would one of very few, and maybe the
only, nation that could easily and quickly increase its oil production
without a waiting period measured in months rather than a few
days. This obviously adds to what any general or admiral would
call the strategic value of Saudi Arabia to the United States.
There is another characteristic of the
global oil industry that we should all understand. It is an industry
dominated by a half-dozen extremely large, global corporations--including
ExxonMobil (these two firms merged in 1999), British Petroleum,
Shell, Texaco, Gulf and Socal. Fifty to 75 years ago these companies
might have been swashbuckling, unregulated corporations seeking
to maximize profits and avoid the controls of any governments
by all means fair or foul. Today, however, these companies by
no means have the same personalities that they had years ago.
In the Middle East, at least, the governments of the area have
nationalized practically all oil production, and the companies
or their subsidiaries have gradually worked out mutually supportive
relationships with the local governments, under which the companies
continue to manage most of the oil production and global
oil trade, while the governments, and OPEC, make the basic decisions
on how much oil to produce. The companies continue to make large
profits, which keep them happy enough.
In their relations with the U.S. and
other advanced nations, the companies no longer shun government
regulation, because most of the regulations imposed on them are
supportive of, and increase the profits of, the companies themselves.
The regulations fall more into the area of corporate welfare
than into the area of inducing the corporations to become better
citizens. In the U.S., the ties of the oil companies with both
of the major political parties are close and mutually profitable.
Up to a few months ago, these same comments would have applied
to Enron, which was clearly one of the world's largest energy
companies, even though it was not one of the largest global
oil companies.
I started out by comparing the long-term
effects of U.S. oil policies to a juggernaut. To show you why,
I want to go back almost 60 years, to February 1945. In that
month, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, while returning from
the Yalta Conference, met with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia
on a U.S. warship in the middle of the Suez Canal. Two months
later, Roosevelt was dead, but this meeting was probably one
of his most important acts as a world leader The actual records
of the conversations between these two men have never been released
by either of their governments, but it is quite clear that an
agreement was reached under which the United States guaranteed
for the indefinite future the security and stability of the Saudi
monarchy. In return, the Saudi King guaranteed U.S. access to,
and joint development of, the massive Saudi oil reserves, also
for the indefinite future. These mutual guarantees were later,
implicitly at least, extended to apply to the other, and smaller,
Gulf state monarchies, from the Arab Emirates to Bahrain and
Kuwait. All of these guarantees were reinforced by the U.S. war
against Iraq in 1990-1991, and these guarantees still today form
the basis of U.S. oil policies in the Middle East.
So for close to 60 years now, the U.S.
has continued to prop up and support these authoritarian governments.
I'd like to give you an example of how this has worked in the
case of Saudi Arabia. This is from an article that appeared in
The Nation magazine last November, written by a British
expert on world security affairs. Here are a few lines from this
article. "To protect the Saudi regime against its external
enemies, the United States has steadily expanded its military
presence in the region. [T]o protect the royal family against
its internal enemies, US personnel have become deeply involved
in the regime's internal security apparatus. At the same time,
the vast and highly conspicuous accumulation of wealth by the
royal family has alienated it from the larger Saudi population
and led to charges of systemic corruption. In response, the regime
has outlawed all forms of political debate in the kingdom (there
is no parliament, no free speech, no political party, no right
of assembly) and used its US-trained security forces to quash
overt expressions of dissent. All these effects have generated
covert opposition to the regime and occasional acts of violence"
The United States pursued policies like
these not only in Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf States, but
elsewhere in the Middle East as well. When the U.S. overthrew
Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, and reinstalled the Shah in power,
Washington began carrying out precisely the same policies in
Iran as it employed in Saudi Arabia. The Shah's secret police,
known as SAVAK, and the Iranian military forces both grew markedly
stronger. For 26 years the Shah's repressive regime succeeded
in smothering internal dissent. In 1979, however, major internal
dissent did erupt, supported by radical Islamic clerics
who wanted all U.S. influence out of their land. The Shah was
quickly overthrown. U.S. experiences in Iran since that date
should have suggested to people in Washington that just perhaps
the strong U.S. support for repressive regimes in the Middle
East was not the ideal long-term policy for us to pursue. No
reexamination of U.S. foreign policy ever got started, however,
because the United States was immediately consumed by the horrible
insult Iranians imposed on us when they held over 50 Americans
from the U.S. Embassy hostage for more than a year.
Then, in the 1980s, the U.S. spent the
decade quietly cozying up to Saddam Hussein, the dictatorial
ruler of Iraq, which was and is another big oil producer of the
Middle East. Since Iran was now a U.S. enemy, the U.S. supported
Iraq in its war against Iran. The U.S. did not criticize Saddam
Hussein even when he employed chemical warfare to gas sizable
numbers of Kurdish people in his own country. The United States
only abandoned him in 1990, when he crossed the U.S. over Kuwait.
Even here, the diplomatic signals Saddam received from the U.S.
until shortly before he invaded Kuwait were very unclear. Once
again, when the break finally came, the U.S. administration gave
no thought to reappraising its own policies throughout the region.
A decision was made in favor of going to war to end this threat
to U.S. hegemony and U.S. access to oil, and that was that.
Now, in the year 2002, this almost-60-year-old
Middle East oil policy of the United States is showing signs
of even more fraying at the edges. Beyond any question in my
opinion, one of the root causes behind the terrorism of September
11 was this very U.S. policy of supporting for the past half-century
and more these authoritarian and often corrupt Arab and Muslim
governments. There exists a high degree of anger among
many Muslims with their own governments, which have for so long
been supported by the U.S.
Osama bin Laden is a good example of
this particular root cause behind the September 11 terrorism.
His wrath was directed as much against the Saudi government,
for example, as it was against the United States. His opposition
to what used to be his own government was probably the main reason
why he had the support of a majority of the young men under 25
in Saudi Arabia. He received similar support from many young
men in other Arab and Muslim states as well. Right now these
groups of angry young men obviously no longer have a viable leader
in Osama bin Laden, but other extremist leaders are almost sure
to arise. In addition, the next generation of leaders in at least
some of these states may well emerge from among these young men.
If any of them do come into power, their future governments will
likely be more anti-American than the present governments, which
Washington likes to call "moderate," but which are
really nothing of the sort. If we have not reduced our energy
dependence on oil in the meantime, we may face serious trouble.
The U.S. should therefore adopt quite
draconian measures immediately to reduce its overall energy usage,
including its dependence on Mideast oil. It is unlikely, for
the near future at least, that the U.S. will solve a future energy
crunch through alternative power sources or by "clean"
coal, nuclear power, or Alaskan oil usage. The U.S. also should
not count on oil supplies from Central Asia as a way to ignore
the need for conservation.
The U.S. should also, over time and gradually,
reduce its ties with the present governments in many Muslim states,
and try to develop improved relations with opposition elements
there, actively seeking out democratically inclined groups. Such
steps will be necessary if there is to be any hope of reducing
support for future Osama bin Ladens that arises from the anger
of Arabs and Muslims with their own governments.
I want to turn now to another
foreign policy problem that the U.S. faces in the Middle East,
one that has become more tightly intertwined with U.S. oil policies
since September 11. Ever since shortly after World War II, the
U.S. has had not one but two fundamental foreign policies
in the Middle East. The first policy, which I've already talked
about, has been to support authoritarian and undemocratic governments
in the oil nations in an effort to guarantee the long-term easy
access to Middle East oil at "reasonable" prices. The
other policy, equally important, has been to provide strong
support to Israel and to guarantee the security of Israel as
a Jewish state, also for the long term.
Over the last fifty-plus years, there
has been a fair amount of tension and conflict between these
two policies. The United States under President Harry Truman
was, as I'm sure you all know, instrumental in helping to establish
the state of Israel in 1948. But even then, one of the reasons
for the opposition to Truman's desires by many other U.S. officials,
including the Secretary of State, General George Marshall, was
that it might endanger the west's access to oil from the Arab
nations.
As it has turned out, for most of the
period since World War II, the U.S. has managed to keep its two
basic policies in the Middle East pretty much apart from each
other--in separate boxes so to speak--and to keep the tensions
between them in check. The very existence of the Cold War, which
provided the bogey-man of a common enemy, helped in this regard.
The one obvious time when the U.S. proved unable to keep the
tensions between its two policies under control was the OPEC
oil embargo against the west in late 1973 and early 1974. The
Arab-Israeli war of 1973, and specifically the U.S. response
of resupplying Israel with large amounts of new military equipment,
precipitated the embargo, and many of us here can remember the
gas lines that resulted in this country. But the gas lines only
lasted a few months, and then we all went back to normal. But
we should remember those months as a perfect example of the fact
that there are indeed real conflicting interests involved in
the two basic U.S. foreign policies in the Middle East.
Overall, though, because the United States
has been able to hold these conflicting interests in check for
most of the past half century, I think that Washington has allowed
the tensions to grow, more or less ignored by U.S. policymakers,
to a point where they are going to be exceedingly difficult to
deal with in the future. Since September 11, a number of things
have happened that make it more impossible than ever to separate
the effects of the Israel-Palestine problem from the effects
of the continuing U.S. support for most authoritarian governments
of the oil nations in the area.
In Saudi Arabia and most of the small
Gulf States, the position of the monarchies has become more precarious,
as these monarchies have been subjected to more criticism since
September 11 from public opinion in the United States than has
been the case for years. In normal circumstances, when these
monarchies are confident that the U.S. guarantee of their security
is strong and unbreakable, most of them will not worry too much
about other issues that might further weaken their domestic position.
The George W. Bush administration is undoubtedly reassuring them
that the U.S. security guarantee is still in effect, but
they cannot help but be worried about its permanence when they
see public opinion in this country changing. This puts pressure
on the monarchies to pay more attention to the opinion of their
own Arab "street." And the opinion of this Arab "street"
is today more intensely critical than ever of Israel's policies
on Palestine and the continued occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza.
The U.S. government, from September 11
right up to the present, has made it clearer than ever to the
world at large that it will unilaterally decide what actions
around the world constitute "terrorism," and what actions
do not. Specifically, in the minds of Arabs and Muslims everywhere,
the U.S. seems to have accepted all actions by Palestinians against
Israelis, including acts against Israeli soldiers as well as
those against innocent civilians, as being terrorism. At the
same time, however, the U.S. appears to believe that no acts
by Israelis against Palestinians constitute terrorism. Arabs
see this as a double standard. When, also at the same time, Arabs
see their own rulers expressing support for the "war on
terrorism" as it is defined by the U.S., their antagonism
toward their own rulers intensifies. And the rulers themselves,
recognizing this antagonism, feel greater concern for their own
positions.
I'd like to express a note of caution
here. I certainly do not know for sure whether any, or some,
or all of the governments in Arab oil nations--the dictatorial
governments whose stability and security the U.S. has guaranteed
for almost 60 years--will collapse in the near future. Of course
change can happen rapidly and without warning. The best minds
in the U.S. government had no inkling that the Shah of Iran was
going to be ousted a week before it happened in 1979. But even
governments that seem to be falling apart can sometimes last
for years, until some totally unforeseen shove comes along that
pushes them over the edge.
What I am more sure of is that
these Arab oil governments are now under greater pressure
to change than they have been for years, because of developments
since September 11. Therefore the U.S. should be actively encouraging--though
never using military force to do so--a gradual movement toward
greater political democracy in these nations. And in order to
reduce the importance of one major factor leading to greater
instability in the region, the U.S. should immediately begin
to play a far more active role than it has recently in pressing
for a solution to the Israel-Palestine problem based on two truly
sovereign nations, with strong treaty guarantees from the United
States of the future security of both of these nations.
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