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A Century of War
‘FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE’ The stakes in securing military control over Iraqi oil and the entire Arabian Gulf were so high, and the resulting ability to determine the entire economic future of Eurasia and other countries so vital to America’s new imperial strategy, that the costs were clearly considered worth risking. The Bush administration’s economic policy was simple: Win reelection in 2004 regardless of what it takes. Washington was running staggering budget deficits of the order of $500 billion a year. Its deficit in trade was just as high. China and Japan and east Asian exporters invested hundreds of billions of their surplus trade dollars in U.S. Treasury and other assets, out of fear of losing exports, becoming more dependent on the United States in the process. They seemed to be caught up in a process from which they could find no exit. Alarming as the economic data out of Washington was, no one in either the Federal Reserve or the administration appeared concerned. They now controlled the most essential commodity for world economic growth, its oil. And they controlled it not indirectly, through the support of various regimes in oil regions, but directly, militarily. With their firm grip on world oil flows, they now held a true weapon of mass destruction, potential blackmail over the rest of the world. Who would dare challenge the dollar? The contrast between the first oil shock in the 1970s and the events after the Iraq invasion was dramatic. The 1973 Bilderberg policy, set out in Saltsjöbaden, Sweden, had been to raise oil prices high enough to make the new discoveries in the North Sea, Alaska and other nonOPEC regions profitable. That first oil shock managed to buy some time for the dollar system. In the 1970s, powerful groups such as the Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission had been able to postpone the impact of that first oil shock on Europe, Japan, and above all the United States. They did this by imposing the IMF system on the aspirations of most of the emerging world, crushing any nationalist movement for economic development and self-sufficiency. They called this ‘sustainable’ growth. It sustained the rich nations of the industrial world and the dollar system for more than three decades, by enforcing ‘limits to growth’ on the rest of the world. The industrial world was able to live some three decades more under the illusion of abundant, cheap oil supporting a living standard unprecedented in history. That illusion, however, had been bought at
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