A New Millennium for Oil Geopolitics
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signed long-term oil development deals with Russia, France and China. Washington strategists around the Pentagon did not overlook the fact that those three were rivals for oil in any future crisis. Nor did Cheney. Among the documents which Cheney refused to make public at the time of his 2001 Energy Task Force were detailed oilfield maps and lists of just which foreign companies had business in Iraq. The documents were partially made public, but only well after the Iraq occupation had been secured. As the rubble in Iraq was cleared for oil development in early 2004, Washington declared that oil and reconstruction contracts would go only to those who had helped her take Iraq. The first oil companies to reap the gains were ChevronTexaco, Condi Rice’s old company, BP and Shell of the UK, and Cheney’s Halliburton. Even as war in Iraq was being prepared, Doha in Qatar had become the major American military base in the Gulf, allowing reduced reliance on Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar Air Base. By early 2004, Iraq faced a long U.S. military occupation, perhaps lasting decades. Robert Kagan, an author of the Cheney Project on the New American Century report, which had called for taking Iraq, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, months after the Iraq war, ‘We will probably need a major concentration of forces in the Middle East over a long period of time … If we have a force in Iraq, there will be no disruption in oil supplies.’ As the world viewed the results of Bush’s war in Iraq, the conclusion was inescapable that American military might had been used to secure direct control of the world’s largest oil resources. This also explained the lack of concern in Washington over weapons of mass destruction once Iraq had been conquered.5 OIL AND BASES: REMOVING THE OBSTACLES If the gloomy estimate of the imminent peaking of world oil explained why Washington had been prepared to take such extreme risks to control Iraq, it also offered an explanation for many puzzling new U.S. foreign policy initiatives, from the African west coast to Libya and Sudan, from Colombia and Venezuela to Russia and Georgia, as well as Baku and Afghanistan. As Bush prepared his bid to secure reelection, a definite pattern to U.S. military policy and to U.S. energy policy was clear. The conclusion was inescapable. U.S. foreign and military policy was now about controlling every major existing and potential oil source
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