It’s
The Crude, Dude - War, Big Oil, And The Fight For The Planet
By Jime Miles
26 June, 2007
Countercurrents.org
It’s the Crude, Dude - War, Big Oil, and the Fight For the
Planet. Linda McQuaig. Anchor Canada (Random House). 2006.
Originally
published in 2004, this revised and updated story of oil, war, politics,
the media, and big business is still very relevant today. Linda McQuaig’s
writing style is highly engaging as she uses a witty intelligence to
juxtapose various ideas and criticize and confront different speakers
for the cause of oil, power, and money. The account is readily accessible
and understandable to any reader wanting to know more about the story
of how oil has shaped everything from global warming, commercial interactions
with Japan, the growth of the SUV industry, and, above all, the war
in Iraq and the need to control oil.
Two main themes accompany
her wanderings from the world of business, through government to the
military. First is that of media compliance, complacency, and denial
through ignoring information within the overall western perspective,
leading to a general public ignorance and manipulation concerning the
global agenda of the oil business and the U.S. government. McQuaig is
continually surprised at what the media did not pick up on, choosing
those items that supported their corporate owners and ignoring much
of what contradicted it.
The war in Iraq was covered
in “a curiously upbeat manner,” with TV stations all having
their own “in house military experts with coloured pens tracing
troop movements like weathermen …or sportscasters.” The
media “barely mentioned the fact that Iraq was bountifully endowed
with oil,” and while the war was supposedly about WMDs and tyrannical
dictators, “setting oil fields on fire would be punished as a
war crime.” A different kind of bias was directed at Hugo Chavez,
described as a “strongman” (a mild term at that compared
to some McQuaig could have quoted), presented to millions of CNN watchers
as “simply a dictator, a mini-Saddam.” This of course denies
his true democratic successes in two elections and a nation wide referendum
(Bush should be so lucky on a referendum on Iraq, and the first election
is not without its manipulations).
The media criticism extends
to commentators who “trust the motives of those in the White House”.
While modern economic theory, as supported by the politicians in the
White House, is “primarily motivated by material self-interest”,
their rhetoric looks “for higher ideals like world peace, democracy
and liberating people from oppression.” Yet before Iraq, oil and
its control were openly stated geopolitical strategies, no conspiracy
necessary. The media were “complicit in the reckless rush to war,
having failed to raise questions to challenge the administration’s
case [along with the Democrats].” As for the Niger uranium deal,
“there was virtually no media questioning of the forgery”
of the documents, and along with other prewar intelligence twists, by
2005 the issue “had been officially put to rest, with barely a
protest in the mainstream media.”
While the media “kept
their focus trained on Saddam and his weaponry,” the focus in
the Pentagon was on “putting out oil fires during the invasion
and getting Iraq’s oil flowing after the fighting stopped.”
Once the idea of WMDs and al-Queda connections had been discredited,
“the media helped smooth the transition by shifting its focus
onto…democracy…whether Islam was inherently undemocratic…The
word ‘oil’ remained unmentioned and unmentionable.”
I could continue on with McQuaig’s comments concerning the media,
but that in a way would rewrite the book. Suffice to say that western
media, once considered the Fourth Estate and a power of advocacy unto
itself, has now given up its voice to its corporate and political owners
and has become one of the manipulative aspects of our current political
and economic life.
The second theme –
perhaps other readers might not see this as an actual theme –
is Dick Cheney. George Bush receives his due mention, but Dick Cheney
is shown to be the real leader of American operations, having worked
to coordinate big business with political office, to the point that
while “still CEO of Halliburton” he headed the search for
Bush’s running mate, deciding, “he was the best man for
the job.” Certainly conflict of interest did not bother him in
the least – from his perspective, there would be no conflict,
simply grand opportunity. While the likes of Wolfowitz, Bolton, and
Rumsfield are now out of the official picture, Cheney remains the most
influential and powerful person in the American government today.
Iraq had been in the forefront
of the neoconservative agenda well before 9/11 offered the opportunity
to put that agenda into action. In 1992, then defense secretary Dick
Cheney along with undersecretary for policy Paul Wolfowitz and other
neocons organized the Project for a New American Century which focussed
on “our vital interests in the Gulf” including “a
significant portion of the world’s supply of oil.” McQuaig
points out another aspect of the neocon crowd, their religious affiliation
and support for Israel. Another neocon Richard Perle, called for a policy
of Israel “permanently annexing the entire West Bank [sic] and
Gaza Strip.” In reality, Saddam posed no true threat to the existence
of Israel but “it did represent a political obstacle to the dreams
of Israeli expansion articulated by Perle.”
Stating the obvious quite
cautiously, McQuaig says that Cheney’s focus “on the invasion
of Iraq and…on energy policy is certainly suggestive of a possible
connection between the invasion and a desire for oil.” From the
history that she presents clearly and strongly, this statement could
readily go beyond the suggestion of a possibility to a statement of
reality.
Beyond those two themes,
there are other interesting sojourns the reader takes. The manipulation
of the global environment argument and its relationship to the energy
sector is explored. The topic of how SUVs became the predominant reality
but also a symbol of Americas oil-guzzling ways leads into the politics
of tariffs combined with the politics of environmental emissions. The
discovery and exploration of oil in the U.S., initially in Pennsylvania,
is one of cut-throat competition, cartels, illegal manipulations, corporate
banking complicity in limiting trade, with the then captain of industry
Roosevelt revealed as a manipulative, uncaring, non-democratic corporate
bully. The story of Venezuelan oil is also presented, it its many incarnations
under various democratic attempts suppressed by U.S. supported dictatorships,
and the role Venezuela played in strengthening the OPEC cartel.
The conclusions reached through
these variously interacting stories present the idea of control of oil,
rather than just access to it. Trying to protect itself by controlling
the world’s existing oil capacity, even as it reaches peak production,
and in denial and obstruction of new environmentally friendly options,
the U.S. under Bush, and probably under whomever makes the next government
in 2008, “seem to see such…endless, bitter conflict with
the world’s Muslims…as inevitable and unavoidable”
especially if the U.S. refuses to “deal substantively with one
of the most potent sources of Muslim anger against the West: the deferred
establishment of a Palestinian state,” unless that conflict is
useful to reinforce the “an us-against-them mentality” in
order to prolong the ‘war on terror’ and its control of
oil assets in the Middle East.
Finally, the media is rejoined:
the lack of discussion of what caused 9/11; the “wilful blindness”
behind recognizing the “sense of humiliation derived from decades
of foreign domination”; the lack of recognition of the hypocritical
machinations of the Saudi-U.S. oil pact where “Washington’s
support for the Saudi dictatorship [blocks] moderate reform efforts…driving
the opposition into the confines of religious institutions that happen
to be staunchly anti-Western.” Further, the “lack of democracy…so
often lamented by commentators, is not the product of some mysterious,
inexplicable Islamic sensibility, but rather, to at least some extent
[along with the British, French, and Turks among others], the result
of American actions in the region.”
It all comes down to her
final phrase, in which the strongest military power in the world - willing
to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively - has an insatiable appetite for
a declining resource and is determined, one way or another, to control
that resource. With Iraq under American domination, if not full control;
with the Palestinians sundered with who knows what future possibilities,
now appearing fully at the mercy of and limited by the Israeli-American
powers; with an American corporate foreign policy backed by both Republicans
and Democrats; and with a supposedly nascent nuclear power in Iran and
a another case of the media presenting the Washington line, in spite
of the overwhelming similarities with the manipulations before the Iraqi
invasion: the U.S. attitude to the rest of the world is written in oily
crudity, might is right, winner take all, out of my way….
Linda McQuaig presents a
well thought out compilation of what might appear to be a variety of
unrelated activities to those following the mainstream media. But the
media itself is part and parcel of the oil-war-business-politics-money-global
warming scheme of things that is shaping our current global destiny.
And as media itself, “It’s the Crude, Dude” alleviates
much of that ignorance in an entertaining reader friendly fashion.
Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist
of opinion pieces and book reviews to Palestine Chronicles. His interest
in this topic stems originally from an environmental perspective, which
encompasses the militarization and economic subjugation of the global
community and its commodification by corporate governance and by the
American government.
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