Reflections On The Oil Wars
By Peter Goodchild
14 October, 2006
Countercurrents.orgEverywhere there are children running around and laughing, inviting the soldiers to play with them. A "Hajji" suicide car-bomber hits a fuel truck, and the walls several kilometers away tremble as if made of rubber. At night there is the constant noise of mortars, RPGs, car bombs, and sleep is often impossible.
Modern warfare is mainly about oil, in spite of all the pious and hypocritical rhetoric about "the forces of good" and "the forces of evil." The real "forces" are those trying to control the oil wells and the fragile pipelines that carry that oil. A map of American military ventures is a map of petroleum. When the Oil Wars began is largely a matter of definition, and one could go back fifty years or more to find their origin, but perhaps 1973 would be a usable date, when the Yom Kippur War - or, more truthfully, the decline of U.S. domestic oil - led to the OPEC oil embargo. Oil Wars have devastated the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, the Balkans, and many other parts of the world, as the great powers try to control the oil-producing regions and the pipelines.
War is now incessant and ubiquitous, but its nature has changed. Conflicts are, not so much between nations, but rather between ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. Police are indistinguishable from armies, armies are indistinguishable from street gangs. Nuclear weapons are replaced by chemical and biological weapons.
One of the problems of any empire is that, in order to survive, it must have a permanent ring of fire at its perimeter, and that has certainly been the case with the United States. The U.S. began with the devastation of the native people. Then there was the War of Independence against the British. Then the Spanish people were pushed back, along what is now the southern border. And so on and so forth, on to two world wars, followed by fifty years of competition against Reagan's "Evil Empire," the Soviet Union.
American involvement in Central and South America has been endless and brutal, largely a case of installing dictators who would provide a comfortable environment for American business interests. The classic case is that of Guatemala: in 1954, President Jacobo Arbenz tried to redistribute some of the uncultivated lands of the United Fruit Company, so in retaliation the CIA staged a coup that led to decades of terror. There has also been prolonged, relentless warfare in Nicaragua, Honduras, Cuba, Haiti, and so on.
There are no "forces of good," no "forces of evil,"except in the sense that all such behavior is unworthy of the human species. In the twentieth century, the brutality of the "democratic" United States was easily matched by the horrors of the Soviet Union and communist China: Stalin killed thirteen million Ukrainians, but Mao Tse-tung killed twenty million Chinese in his Great Leap Forward. Any accusations of "rape, torture, and imprisonment" are bound to be hypocritical, and no soldier carries a gun to create "peace," no matter what mindless rhetoric one may read in the newspaper. But for any empire such long hard military struggles cannot be kept up forever.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: Chicago Review Press has published Peter Goodchild's Survival Skills of the North American Indians, Raven Tales, and The Spark in the Stone.He can be reached at [email protected]
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