|
CounterPunch
March 14,
2003
Oil War:
The Smoking
Guns
by RITT GOLDSTEIN
While chants of "No War for Oil" mark
an increasingly dissenting and skeptical public, the Bush administration
has continued bulldozing its way towards a crushing Iraq rendezvous.
As you read this war may already have begun. But startling in
its candor, a US Department of Defense document has just been
discovered, a top-level document specifically discussing war
for oil. This is the first official document found explicitly
confirming as policy the US Defense Department's readiness to
wage oil war.
According to the report--Strategic Assessment
1999--prepared for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary
of Defense (and only recently unearthed by this journalist),
"energy and resource issues will continue to shape international
security". Explicitly envisioned were potential oil "conflicts
over production facilities and transportation routes", particularly
in the Persian Gulf and Caspian regions.
Paradoxically, Strategic Assessment 1999
forecast it was "most likely" that America would not
need to "employ military forces" to obtain energy.
But the Assessment nevertheless ranks as extraordinary, doing
so because it positively documents an official willingness to
wage oil war, a willingness at the very highest levels of the
US defense community.
While the document was prepared under
Clinton, it suggests he was willing to wage war only to protect
what he perceived as the existing interests of America's economy.
In contrast, war critics have repeatedly charged that Bush is
seeking to conquer new interests, not defend old one's. Clinton
may have opened the door, but Bush marched through it.
In what many will see as a disturbing
parallel to present events, the Report also drew attention to
pre-WWII Britain's pursuit of an approach where "control
over territory was seen as essential to ensuring resource supplies".
However, the defense policymakers authoring Strategic Assessment
also appear cognizant of the potential consequences of such policies.
The authors warned that if the great powers should return to
"the 19th century approach" of securing resources,
of conquering resource suppliers, "the world economy would
suffer and world politics would become more tense".
Although at the time of its writing,
Strategic Assessment 1999 predicted adequate US energy supplies,
it also found that supply shortages "could exacerbate underlying
political differences and serve as a catalyst for regional conflicts",
illustrating oil war's potential trigger. And the Bush administration
has repeatedly stated that America is facing what has been termed
an "energy crisis".
Highlighting the Assessment's importance,
it was prepared by the Institute for National Strategic Studies,
part of the US Department of Defense's National Defense University.
The Institute is located at Fort McNair in Washington, DC, and
lists its primary mission as policy "research and analysis"
for the Joint Chiefs, the Defense Secretary, and other key US
Governmental security and defense bodies. But this DOD "smoking
gun" is linked to another.
In 2001 US VP Dick Cheney headed the
Bush administration's National Energy Policy Development Group,
an energy task force working to devise a National Energy Policy
to address America's looming shortages. In line with the defense
policy outlined in Strategic Assessment, it had been urged that
Cheney's task force include DOD participation. And so it will
surprise few that the Bush administration has been going to extraordinary
lengths to conceal both who attended the Cheney energy task force's
meetings and what those meetings were about.
Commenting upon the nature of this concealment,
Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA), the ranking member of the Committee
on Government Reform, said "The White House should simply
try telling the truth on the Task Force's activities and stop
hiding information that Congress and the public have a right
to see." The Administration's stonewalling also spawned
a lawsuit by the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative
arm of Congress.
The Cheney Task force confrontation resulted
in the GAO pursuing the first lawsuit in its 81 year history,
though, that suit was dismissed this December by Judge John Bates,
a recent Bush appointee. Bates' decision found that the GAO had
"no standing" to sue Cheney or any other executive
branch official for information.
In a sharp reflection upon that decision,
John Dean (the former Republican Presidential Counsel) wrote,
"the present situation is absurd". Dean charged that
Bates' ruling means an ordinary US citizen has more power to
compel the release of government information than the investigative
arm of America's Congress.
Cutting to what many perceive as the
ruling's true basis, Congressman John Dingle (D-MI), ranking
member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, charged "Vice
President Cheney's cover-up will apparently continue for the
foreseeable future". And summarizing the key question, the
former US Vice-Presidential candidate, Sen. Joseph Lieberman,
asked, "What are they hiding?".
While most speculation regarding the
Cheney task force has centered around its relationship to the
energy industry, the military implications of task force deliberations--military
action to secure oil and gas supplies--has yet to be addressed.
And notably, according to a February headline in The Hill--the
largest of Capitol Hill's political newsletters and among the
most respected--"GOP threats halted Cheney suit", with
The Hill reporting that Republicans had threatened to cut the
GAO's budget should an appeal of Judge Bates' ruling be pursued.
Ritt Goldstein
can be reached at: ritt1997@hotmail.com.
Today's
Features
Robert Creeley
Help!
William Cook
Rage Against the Regime!
Issam Nahashibi and Abdelatif Rayan
Bush's Iraq Deja Vu: the Reincarnation
of Failed 1930s British Policies
Anthony Gancarski
Ledeen's Big Score
Wendy Brinker
Guns, Oil and Drugs
Robert Jensen
Petróleo, Petróleo, Petróleo
Karyn Strickler
The Big Lie About Partial Birth Abortions
Mickey Z.
Of Patience, Forebearance and War
Linda S. Heard
America, Don't Let Us Down
Col. Dan Smith
Crunch Time for the Security Council
Paul de Rooij
A Glossary to Warmongering
Website of the Day
Give
War a Chance: the Anti-Peace Anthem
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- Turkish Delights: a Pre-War Diary by Tariq Ali;
- The Plot to Frame the
Zapatistas: Talkers
and Cowards;
- Drugging Kids: The Plague of Neuroleptics;
- The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal:
a New Investigation.
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
Take a Bite Out of Phil Knight's Bottom Line: Buy No Sweat Apparel!
March 8 /
9, 2003
Edward Said
Who's
In Charge?
Bruce Jackson
Elegy
for Two Giraffes and a Zebra
Perry Anderson
The Casuistries of Peace and
War
Joanne Mariner
Patriot
Act II's Attack on Punishment
William Lind
A Warning from Clausewitz on 4th Generation Warfare
Sam Husseini
Why
So Long for Iraq to Comply? Follow the Policy
Forrest Hylton
Business as Usual in Bolivia?
David Lindorff
Race and the Death Penalty in Pennsylvania
Ben Tripp
Is There
a Eurologist in the House?
Anthony Gancarski
W's Personal Jesus
Jon Elmer
An Interview with William Blum
Douglas Valentine
The Clash of the Icons
Norman Madarasz
Radical Politics and the Writer:
Maurice Blanchot
Gordon Solberg
There's
Got to be a Better Way
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Engel, Bernard
Weekend Website
The
White House
February 28,
2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Meet
the New Yorker's Chief Hack: Jeffrey Goldberg
Saul Landau
Now
It's Personal
Michael Neumann
A Plea for Hysteria
Karima Bennoume
The UN: Tool for Peace or War?
The Black
Commentator
The Rev. Sharpton and the Soul of the Democrats
Jennifer Loewenstein
Don't Turn Off the War
Richard Levins
Cuba's Biological Weapons: Why the World Needs More of Them
M. Shahid Alam
Is This a Clash of Civilizations?
Clay Conrad
Juries
and Judges: What's Relevant?
Ben Tripp
Speaking in Tongues: a Guide to Gibberish in the Age of Bush
Eliot Katz
To Declare Preemptive War is to Declare a Bankrupt Imagination
Kurt Nimmo
Paying Through the Nose to Kill Iraqi Kids
Matt Vidal
George W. Bonaparte
Mark Zepezauer
Why the Right Hates America
Mickey Z.
The Anti----War Talk I Never Gave
Jerry Kroth
Jung and the Space Shuttle Revisited
Shyam Oberoi
Chronicle of a War Foretold
Ron Jacobs
What If the Firebombing of Baghdad Were a Nightclub Fire?
Poets' Basement
Eliot Katz and Jim Cohn
Website of
the Weekend
Defense
Tech
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|