Oil-Control
Formula
By Robert Dreyfuss
20 July, 2005
Tompaine.com
George
W. Bushs war in Iraq may not be going as planned. But for those
whove stopped believing the myth that prewar Iraq represented
any sort of threat to the United States, there is plenty of circumstantial
evidence mounting that the real reason for the American invasion of
Iraq was the most obvious one: Oil. In this case, oil doesnt
mean that we went to war for the commercial benefit of U.S. oil companiesand
in fact, as I reported in Mother Jones magazine in early 2003, before
the war, most U.S. oil firms and their executives were against the war.
But in Iraq, oil means the strategic commodity that is the
single most important world resource. Even a novice geostrategist knows
that who controls oil controls the world. And in this case, Americas
rival for control of oil is, first and foremost, China.
Last week, China,
Russia and four Central Asian Stans, including Uzbekistan,
rather impolitely asked the United States to withdraw from Central Asia.
That part of the world is a significant oil and gas region, and neither
Moscow nor Beijing want the United States to put down roots there. But
Central Asias oil and gas resources pale next to the Middle East,
and that is where Americas imperial presence has set off alarms
in Beijing.
Consider oil the
Occams Razor explanation of the war in Iraq.
A June 24 New York
Times article subtly attacked China and its CNOOC oil firm over its
bid to buy Unocal, a U.S. oil company with long experience in Asia,
calling the intended purchase (in its page-one headline) a costly
quest for energy control. But if any nation controls
energy, it is the United States. Buried in the article was this fairly
explosive paragraph:
Privately, Chinese
officials and analysts say oil is treated as a strategic crisis. They
have sounded the alarm about Western and particularly American domination
of oil supplies and influence over major oil-exporting nations, including
Saudi Arabia and now Iraq, which has made China dependent on what many
here refer to as American economic and military hegemony.
Together, Saudi
Arabia and Iraq control roughly half of the worlds oil deposits,
a share that is likely to rise as oil countries deplete their reserves.
Saudi Arabia has long been in Americas back pocket, and now Iraq
though not going well for the United Statesis occupied by the
American army and its quisling government is comprised of American puppets.
It isnt shocking for the Chinese to have a legitimate beef here.
Consider the following from the July 13 Washington Post . The headline
read: Big Shift in Chinas Oil Policy and the subhead,
more revealing, was With Iraq Deal Dissolved by War, Beijiing
Looks Elsewhere. It began:
Until recently,
China's view of the global energy map focused narrowly on the Middle
East, which holds roughly two-thirds of the world's oil. Special attention
was directed toward one well-supplied country: Iraq.
Through cultivation
of Saddam Hussein's government, China sought to develop some of Iraq's
more promising reserves. Beijing advocated lifting the United Nations
sanctions that prevented investment in Iraq's oil patch and limited
sales of its production.
Then the United
States went to war in Iraq in 2003, wiping out China's stakes. The war
and its aftermath have reshaped China's basic conception of the geopolitics
of oil and added urgency to its mission to lessen dependence on Middle
East supplies. It has reinforced China's fears that it is locked in
a zero-sum contest for energy with the world's lone superpower, prompting
Beijing to intensify its search for new sources, international relations
and energy experts say.
So. We went to war
in Iraq, wiping out Chinas stakes in Iraq. And so,
Chinese officials and analysts call the current situation
an oil crisis, says the Times.
Meanwhile, neoconservatives,
Bush administration officials, some members of Congress and (unfortunately)
a few labor-connected liberals are making a big deal of CNOOCs
Unocal bid. For perspective, lets recall that Unocal is the company
that did more to support the Taliban than any other U.S. entity, courting
those Islamic radicals in search of a pipeline, oil and gas deal in
central Asiaand hiring various malleable U.S. strategists to support
the Taliban on its behalf, including incoming U.S. ambassador to Iraq,
Zalmay Khalilzad. Its hard to imagine anything that China could
do with Unocal that would do more damage to U.S. interests than Unocal
has already done. Still, the outcry goes on, most recently during a
congressional hearing at which Jim Woolsey, the former CIA director,
and Frank Gaffney, the neocon-linked military strategist, railed against
China. (CNOOC, by the way, is partly owned by Shell Oil, which bought
a big chunk of the mostly state-owned firm when it conducted a public
stock offering in 2002.)
According to the
U.S. Energy Information Administration, road transportation in China
will be the driving force for that countrys enormous oil appetite
in the next two decades, noting that the Chinese passenger car
market grew tenfold between 1990 and 2000. By 2025, says EIA,
Chinas oil demand will reach nearly 13 million barrels of oil
per day. (Saudi Arabias entire output is only about 8 million
barrels a day.) To meet such demand, China is searching everywhere,
from Sudan to Venezuela to Central Asia. Iran and China are making oil
deals, too. But by invading and occupying Iraq, the United States has
pretty much locked up the most easily expanded source of oil in the
world; Iraq, which manages to eke out about 2 million barrels a day,
can produce six to eight times that much oil if it made sufficient investments
in production facilities. Quite a prize, Iraqif Washington can
hold onto it. No wonder various neoconservative world hegemonists consider
talk of an Iraq exit strategy to be treasonous.
Robert Dreyfuss
is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics
and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation,
a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The
American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone. His
book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist
Islam, will be published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books in the fall.