Oil and bases: removing the obstacles

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 oilfi eld 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 fi rst 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 defi nite 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

and transport route on earth. Such control would be unprecedented. One superpower, the United States, would be in a position to decide who gets how much energy and at what price. On the eve of an approaching supply crisis, whose impact would be potentially devastating to the world’s economy and social stability, such power held unimaginable potential. Washington appeared to be waging what one critic called resource wars.

In the face of unexpected and imminent global supply shortages, especially in fast-growing regions like China and India, the United States, as the world’s only military superpower, would be in a position to dictate the terms of world economic development. It would have unprecedented power to allow or deny the most economically essential raw material, oil. To be able to control the coming resource crisis, Washington would have to act well before the world realized what was at stake. Deception would be essential. There seemed to be no shortage of that in Bush’s Washington.

Another speaker at the same May 2003 Paris peak oil conference was Michael Klare, author of studies on resource. He cited a littlenoted remark by Bush Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to a March 2001 National Energy Summit. The Bush energy offi cial had warned, ‘America faces a major energy supply crisis over the next two decades. The failure to meet this challenge will threaten our nation’s economic prosperity, compromise our national security, and literally alter the way we lead our lives.’ Referring to the Cheney energy report of 2001, Klare remarked, ‘The overall emphasis is on removing obstacles— whether political, economic, legal and logistical—to the increased procurement of foreign oil by the United States.’ He added, ‘… the Cheney energy plan will also have signifi cant implications for U.S. security policy and for the actual deployment and utilization of American military forces.’

The prospect of a sudden, unexpected global peaking of present oil and gas supplies, perhaps before the end of the decade, some fi ve to seven years off, would indeed explain Washington’s mood of obsessive determination for war. It would also explain why respected establishment media like the New York Times, in a January 2003 feature piece by Michael Ignatieff, would argue the case for empire when describing American foreign policy—something that previously would have been inconceivable for that traditional liberal paper.

Over the course of the Bush administration, the United States had managed to extend its military power and presence, step by step, into areas of the globe where this had never before been possible.

The collapse of the Soviet economic structure had prepared the possibilities and permitted the extension of a Washington-controlled NATO presence into what Brzezinski called the ‘heartland,’ right up to Russia’s front door.

Commenting on whether there had been a conscious linkage between Bush’s energy policy and his military security strategy, Klare noted:

… what is undeniable is that President Bush has given top priority to the enhancement of America’s power projection capabilities, while at the same time endorsing an energy strategy that entails increased U.S. dependence on oil derived from areas of recurring crisis and confl ict … One arm of this strategy is aimed at securing more oil from the rest of the world; the other is aimed at enhancing America’s capacity to intervene in exactly such locales …

Klare concluded, ‘They have merged into a single, integrated design for American world dominance in the 21st Century.’

In the aftermath of the Iraq war, U.S. bases had been extended to Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in the former Soviet domain and to Afghanistan. From its military position in Afghanistan, U.S. forces could control most of south Asia. Pakistan was dependent on U.S. military pressure. The entire Gulf was now a U.S. military protectorate.

With the military control secure in the wake of the Iraq war, one by one the energy dominoes around the world began to fall, with a hefty push from Washington. Georgia, lying on a key pipeline route from the Caspian to Ceyhan in Turkey, was a de facto U.S. protectorate by the beginning of 2004, when Mikhail Saakashvili, a 36-year-old U.S-educated lawyer, took over the presidency in a ‘rose revolution.’ The latter was supported by Washington and the Soros Foundation, and aided by the personal intervention of James Baker, whose law fi rm also represented the Caspian Sea BP oil interests.

In early 2003, while all eyes were on Iraq, the Pentagon prepared a long-term military basing agreement with two tiny Pacifi c islands, São Tomé and Príncipe, which conveniently were within striking distance of the strategic west African oilfi elds stretching from Morocco to Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea and Angola. George Bush made a highly unusual tour of west Africa to coincide with the deal. Some analysts in Washington estimated that up to 25 per cent of U.S. oil needs would soon come from west Africa. They called the Gulf of Guinea

an area of ‘vital interest’ to the United States. The Cheney energy policy report had said that west Africa was ‘expected to be one of the fastest-growing sources of oil and gas for the American market.’ Behind the scenes, the United States had been pushing the French from their traditional role in various African oil regions.

Libya was also falling into the U.S. orbit. In January 2004, Colonel Qaddafi announced his rejection of terror and opening up of Libya to foreign oil investment, in return for a U.S. lifting of sanctions. Remarking on his new embrace of Washington, Qaddafi noted, ‘It is the era of globalization, and there are many new factors which are mapping out the world.’ Libya still held considerable oil, and Washington wanted to get its hands on it. Libya had begun signing major deals with Japanese, Italian, French and other foreign companies not bound by the U.S. sanctions. It had already signed with China to build oil and gas pipelines. Now that would all change. American oil companies were invited back. Qaddafi had become a survivalist.

In Sudan, the government in Khartoum signed an agreement in January 2004 to share the oil wealth of the rebel south, ending two decades of civil war. Washington was behind the deal. Sudan had been working with Chinese and European oil companies, and U.S. fi rms were excluded by Washington sanctions policy. Sudan had signifi cant oil reserves and Washington decided the time was ripe to get them too.

Colombian oil and that of neighboring Venezuela were also subject to growing U.S. military presence. The Bush administration announced plans to spend $98 million to provide military training and support in Colombia. This was not intended to stop the fl ood of cocaine into the United States. It was to resist the guerillas of the FARC and ELN, who threatened the large Occidental Petroleum pipeline there. Colombia had become the seventh-largest oil supplier to the United States. And when the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, tried to take more direct policy control of the Venezuelan state oil company, the Bush administration attempted a covert coup. (U.S. oil imports from Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador exceeded those from the entire Middle East.) The same applied to the oil and gas of Indonesia: the terror war opened the doors to a new, far stronger U.S. military presence. One American analyst, Zoltan Grossman, remarked, ‘[E]stablishment of new bases may in the long run be more critical to U.S. war planners than the wars themselves, as well as to the enemies of the U.S.’

By the end of his fi rst term in offi ce, George W. Bush, the neophyte in foreign affairs, had presided over the most dramatic extension of American military power in its history. U.S. military bases allowed it to control the strategic energy routes of all Eurasia as never before. It could control future energy relations with Japan, China, East Asia, India and Russia, as well as the European Union. Belgian author Michel Collon put it bluntly: ‘If you want to rule the world, you need to control oil. All the oil. Anywhere.’ That was clearly just what Washington was doing.

When an energy-dependent Japan had tried to sign a long-term deal to develop a major oilfi eld in Iran in August 2003, after the Iraq war, Washington stopped Japan from signing, citing Iran’s nuclear program as reason. Tokyo got the message. By October, they were frantically trying to outbid China for Russian oil from the Yukos company, at a time when the Russian company was talking with George H.W. Bush about selling a dominant share of Yukos to ChevronTexaco. The Washington oil radar was monitoring everyone, anywhere.

In the wake of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, it became clear that the United States was determined, one way or another, to lock up every major source of oil and natural gas it could. Small wonder that many outside the United States began to question the motives of the American president and his declared mission of spreading freedom and democracy. His proposal to advance democracy in the Middle East through doubled funding for the National Endowment for Democracy was hardly reassurance.

Anatol Lieven analyzed the U.S. push for war just before the march on Baghdad. Lieven, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, remarked:

The basic and generally agreed plan is unilateral world domination through absolute military superiority, and this has been consistently advocated and worked on by the group of intellectuals close to Dick Cheney and Richard Perle since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s.

Lieven tied the agenda of the Cheney circle directly to the strategic issue of oil: ‘For the group around Cheney, the single most important consideration is guaranteed and unrestricted access to cheap oil, controlled as far as possible at its source.’6