Mr. Speaker, I want to bring to your attention a fascinating article in this month's issue of Mother Jones magazine, written by Robert Dreyfuss, and it deals with the question of establishing a permanent presence in the Middle East. I…
Mr. Speaker, I want to bring to your attention a fascinating article in this month's issue of Mother Jones magazine, written by Robert Dreyfuss, and it deals with the question of establishing a permanent presence in the Middle East. I wanted to point out that this issue of oil, which fuels military power, national treasuries and international politics, is no longer a commodity to be bought and sold within the confines of traditional energy supply and demand balances. Rather, it has been transformed into a determinant of well-being of national security and of international
power. I recommend it to the attention of all of my colleagues.
Mr. Speaker, I submit the above-mentioned article for the Record.
Establishing a Permanent Presence in the Middle East
If your were to spin the globe and look for real estate
critical to building an American empire, your first stop
would have to be the Persian Gulf. The desert sands of this
region hold two of every three barrels oil in the world-
Iraq's reserves alone are equal, by some estimates, to those
of Russia, the United States, China, and Mexico combined. For
the past 30 years, the Gulf has been in the crosshairs of an
influential group of Washington foreign-policy strategists,
who believe that in order to ensure its global dominance, the
United States must seize control of the region and its oil.
Born during the energy crisis of the 1970s and refined since
then by a generation of policymakers, this approach is
finding its boldest expression yet in the Bush
administration--which, with its plan to invade Iraq and
install a regime beholden to Washington, has moved closer
than any of its predecessors to transforming the Gulf into an
American protectorate.
In the geopolitical vision driving current U.S. policy
toward Iraq, the key to national security is global
hegemony--dominance over any and all potential rivals. To
that end, the United States must not only be able to project
its military forces anywhere, at any time. It must also
control key resources, chief among them oil--and especially
Gulf oil. To the hawks who now set the tone at the White
House and the Pentagon, the region is crucial not simply for
its share of the U.S. oil supply (other sources have become
more important over the years), but because it would allow
the United States to maintain a lock on the world's energy
life-line and potentially deny access to its global
competitors. The administration ``believes you have to
control resources in order to have access to them,'' says
Chas Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia
under the first President Bush. ``They are taken with the
idea that the end of the Cold War left the United States able
to impose its will globally--and that those who have the
ability to shape events with power have the duty to do so.
It's ideology.''
Iraq, in this view, is a strategic prize of unparalleled
importance. Unlike the oil beneath Alaska's frozen tundra,
locked away in the steppes of central Asia, or buried under
stormy seas, Iraq's crude is readily accessible and, at less
than $1.50 a barrel, some of the cheapest in the world to
produce. Already, over the past several months, Western
companies have been meeting with Iraqi exiles to try to stake
a claim to that bonanza.
But while the companies hope to cash in on an American-
controlled Iraq, the push to remove Saddam Hussein hasn't
been driven by oil executives, many of whom are worried about
the consequences of war. Nor are Vice President Cheney and
President Bush, both former oilmen, looking at the Gulf
simply for the profits that can be earned there. The
administration is thinking bigger, much bigger, than that.
``Controlling Iraq is about oil as power, rather than oil
as fuel,'' says Michael Klare, professor of peace and world
security studies at Hampshire College and author of Resource
Wars. ``Control over the Persian Gulf translates into control
over Europe, Japan, and China. It's having our hand on the
spigot.''
Ever since the oil shocks of the 1970s, the United States
has steadily been accumulating military muscle in the Gulf by
building bases, selling weaponry, and forging military
partnerships. Now, it is poised to consolidate its might in a
place that will be a fulcrum of the world's balance of power
for decades to come. At a stroke, by taking control of Iraq,
the Bush administration can solidify a long-running strategic
design. ``It's the Kissinger plan,'' says James Akins, a
former U.S. diplomat. ``I thought it had been killed, but
it's back.''
Akins learned a hard lesson about the politics of oil when
he served as a U.S. envoy in Kuwait and Iraq, and ultimately
as ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the oil crisis of 1973
and '74. At his home in Washington, D.C., shelves filled with
Middle Eastern pottery and other memorabilia cover the walls,
souvenirs of his years in the Foreign Service. Nearly three
decades later, he still gets worked up while recalling his
first encounter with the idea that the United States should
be prepared to occupy Arab oil-producing countries.
In 1975, while Akins was ambassador in Saudi Arabia, an
article headlined ``Seizing Arab Oil'' appeared in Harper's.
The author, who used the pseudonym Miles Ignotus, was
identified as ``a Washington-based professor and defense
consultant with intimate links to high-level U.S. policy-
makers.'' The article outlined, as Akins puts it, ``how we
could solve all our economic and political problems by taking
over the Arab oil fields [and] bringing in Texans and
Oklahomans to operate them.'' Simultaneously, a rash of
similar stories appeared in other magazines and newspapers.
``I knew that it had to have been the result of a deep
background briefing,'' Akins says. ``You don't have eight
people coming up with the same screwy idea at the same
time, independently.
``Then I made a fatal mistake,'' Akins continues. ``I said
on television that anyone who would propose that is either a
madman, a criminal, or an agent of the Soviet Union.'' Soon
afterward, he says, he learned that the background briefing
had been conducted by his boss, then-Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger. Akins was fired later that year.
Kissinger has never acknowledged having planted the seeds
for the article. But in an interview with Business Week that
same year, he delivered a thinly veiled threat to the Saudis,
musing about bringing oil prices down through ``massive
political warfare against countries like Saudi Arabia and
Iran to make them risk their political stability and maybe
their security if they did not cooperate.''
In the 1970s, America's military presence in the Gulf was
virtually nil, so the idea of seizing control of its oil was
a pipe dream. Still, starting with the Miles Ignotus article,
and a parallel one by conservative strategist and Johns
Hopkins University professor Robert W. Tucker in Commentary,
the idea began to gain favor among a feisty group of
hardline, pro-Israeli thinkers, especially the hawkish circle
aligned with Democratic senators Henry Jackson of Washington
and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. Eventually, this
amalgam of strategists came to be known as
``neoconservatives,'' and they played important roles in
President Reagan's Defense Department and at think tanks and
academic policy centers in the 1980s. Led by Richard Perle,
chairman of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board,
and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, they now
occupy several dozen key posts in the White House, the
Pentagon, and the State Department. At the top, they are
closest to Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, who have been closely aligned since both men served
in the White House under President Ford in the mid-1970s.
They also clustered around Cheney when he served as secretary
of defense during the Gulf War in 1991.
Throughout those years, and especially after the Gulf War,
U.S. forces have steadily encroached on the Gulf and the
surrounding region, from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia.
In preparing for an invasion and occupation of Iraq, the
administration has been building on the steps taken by
military and policy planners over the past quarter century.
STEP ONE: The Rapid Deployment Force. In 1973 and '74, and
again in 1979, political upheavals in the Middle East led to
huge spikes in oil prices, which rose fifteenfold over the
decade and focused new attention on the Persian Gulf. In
January 1980, President Carter effectively declared the Gulf
a zone of U.S. influence, especially against encroachment
from the Soviet Union. ``Let our position be absolutely
clear,'' he said, announcing what came to be known as the
Carter Doctrine. ``An attempt by any outside force to gain
control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an
assault on the vital interests of the United States of
America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means
necessary, including military force.'' To back up this
doctrine, Carter created the Rapid Deployment Force, an
``over-the-horizon'' military unit capable of rushing several
thousand U.S. troops to the Gulf in a crisis.
STEP TWO: The Central Command. In the 1980s, under
President Reagan, the United States began pressing countries
in the Gulf for access to bases and support facilities. The
Rapid Deployment Force was transformed into the Central
Command, a new U.S. military command authority with
responsibility for the Gulf and the surrounding region from
eastern Africa to Afghanistan. Reagan tried to organize a
``strategic consensus'' of anti-Soviet allies, including
Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. The United States sold
billions of dollars' worth of arms to the Saudis in the early
'80s, from AWACS surveillance aircraft to F-15 fighters. And
in 1987, at the height of the war between Iraq and Iran, the
U.S. Navy created the Joint Task Force-Middle East to protect
oil tankers plying the waters of the Gulf, thus expanding a
U.S. naval presence of just three or four warships into a
flotilla of 40-plus aircraft carriers, battleships, and
cruisers.
STEP THREE: The Gulf War. Until 1991, the United States was
unable to persuade the Arab Gulf states to allow a permanent
American presence on their soil. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia,
while maintaining its close relationship with the United
States, began to diversify its commercial and military ties;
by the time U.S. Ambassador Chas Freeman arrived there in the
late '80s, the United States had fallen to fourth place among
arms suppliers to the kingdom. ``The United States was being
supplanted even in commercial terms by the British, the
French, even the Chinese,'' Freeman notes.
All that changed with the Gulf War. Saudi Arabia and
other Gulf states no longer opposed a direct U.S. military
presence, and American troops, construction squads, arms
salesmen, and military assistance teams rushed in. The
Gulf War put Saudi Arabia back on the map and revived a
relationship that had been severely attrited,'' says
Freeman.
In the decade after the war, the United States sold more
than $43 billion worth of weapons, equipment, and military
construction projects to Saudi Arabia, and 416 billion more
to Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates,
according to data compiled by the Federation of American
Scientists. Before Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military
enjoyed the right to stockpile, or ``pre-position,'' military
supplies only in the comparatively remote Gulf state of Oman
on the Indian Ocean. After the war, nearly every country in
the region began conducting joint military exercises, hosting
U.S. naval units and Air Force squadrons,
and granting the United States pre-positioning rights. ``Our
military presence in the Middle East has increased
dramatically,'' then-Defense Secretary William Cohen boasted
in 1995.
Another boost to the U.S. presence was the unilateral
imposition, in 1991, of no-fly zones in northern and southern
Iraq, enforced mostly by U.S. aircraft from bases in Turkey
and Saudi Arabia. ``There was a massive buildup, especially
around Incirlik in Turkey, to police the northern no-fly
zone, and around [the Saudi capitol of] Riyadh, to police the
southern no-fly zone,'' says Colin Robinson of the Center for
Defense Information, a Washington think tank. A billion-
dollar, high-tech command center was built by Saudi Arabia
near Riyadh, and over the past two years the United States
has secretly been completing another one in Qatar. The Saudi
facilities ``were built with capacities far beyond the
ability of Saudi Arabia to use them,'' Robinson says. ``And
that's exactly what Qatar is doing now.''
Step four: Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan--and the
open-ended war on terrorism, which has led to U.S. strikes in
Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere--further boosted America's
strength in the region. The administration has won large
increases in the defense budget--which now stands at about
$400 billion, up from just over $300 billion in 2000--and a
huge chunk of that budget, perhaps as much as $60 billion, is
slated to support U.S. forces in and around the Persian Gulf.
Military facilities on the perimeter of the Gulf, from
Djibouti in the Horn of Africa to the island of Diego Garcia
in the Indian Ocean, have been expanded, and a web of bases
and training missions has extended the U.S. presence deep
into central Asia. From Afghanistan to the landlocked former
Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, U.S. forces
have established themselves in an area that had long been in
Russia's sphere of influence. Oil-rich in its own right, and
strategically vital, central Asia is now the eastern link in
a nearly continuous chain of U.S. bases, facilities, and
allies stretching from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea far
into the Asian hinterland.
Step five: Iraq. Removing Saddam Hussein could be the final
piece of he puzzle, cementing an American imperial presence.
It is ``highly possible'' that the United States will
maintain military bases in Iraq, Robert Kagan, a leading
neoconservative strategist, recently told the Atlanta Journal
Constitution. ``We will probably need a major concentration
of forces in the Middle East over a long period of time,'' he
said. ``When we have economic problems, it's been caused by
disruptions in our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq,
there will be no disruption in oil supplies.''
Kagan, along with William Kristol of the Weekly Standard,
is a founder of the think tank Project for the New American
Century, an assembly of foreign-policy hawks whose supports
include the Pentagon's Perle, New Republic publisher Martin
Peretz, and former Central Intelligence agency director James
Woolsey. Among the group's affiliates in the Bush
administration are Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz; I. Lewis
Libby, the vice president's chief of staff; Elliott Abrams,
the Middle East director at the National Security Council;
and Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House liaison to the Iraqi
opposition groups. Kagan's group, tied to a web of similar
neoconservative, pro-Israeli organizations, represents the
constellation of thinkers whose ideological affinity was
forged in the Nixon and Ford administrations.
To Akins, who has just returned from Saudi Arabia, it's a
team that looks all too familiar, seeking to implement the
plan first outlined back in 1975. ``It'll be easier once we
have Iraq,'' he says. ``Kuwait, we already have. Qatar and
Bahrain, too. So it's only Saudi Arabia we're talking about,
and the United Arab Emirates falls into place.''
Last summer, Perle provided a brief glimpse into his
circle's thinking when he invited Rand Corporation strategist
Laurent Murawiec to make a presentation to his Defense Policy
Board, a committee of former senior officials and generals
that advises the Pentagon on big-picture policy ideas.
Murawiec's closed-door briefing provoked a storm of criticism
when it was leaked to the media; he described Saudi Arabia as
the ``kernel of evil,'' suggested that the Saudi royal family
should be replaced or otherthrown, and raised the idea of a
U.S. occupation of Saudi oil fields. He ultimately lost his
job when Rand decided he was too controversial.
Murawiec is part of a Washington school of thought that
views virtually all of the nations in the Gulf as unstable
``failed states'' and maintains that only the United States
has the power to forcibly reorganize and rebuild them. In
this view, the arms systems and bases that were put in place
to defend the region also provided a ready-made
infrastructure for taking over countries and their oil
fields in the event of a crisis.
The Defense Department likely has contingency plans to
occupy Saudi Arabia, says Robert E. Ebel, director of the
energy program at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank whose advisers
include Kissinger; former Defense Secretary and CIA director
James Schlesinger; and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national
security adviser. ``If something happens in Saudi Arabia,''
Ebel says, ``if the ruling family is ousted, if they decide
to shut off the oil supply, we have to go in.''
Two years ago, Ebel, a former mid-level CIA official,
oversaw a CSIS task force that included several members of
Congress as well as representatives from industry including
ExxonMobil, Arco, BP, Shell, Texaco, and the American
Petroleum Institute. Its report, ``The Geopolitics of Energy
Into the 21st Century,'' concluded that the world will find
itself dependent for many years on unstable oil-producing
nations, around which conflicts and wars are bound to swirl.
``Oil is high-profile stuff,'' Ebel says. ``Oil fuels
military power, national treasuries, and international
politics. It is not longer a commodity to be bought and sold
within the confines of traditional energy supply and demand
balances. Rather, it has been transformed into a determinant
of well-being, of national security, and of international
power.''
As vital as the Persian Gulf is now, its strategic
importance is likely to grow exponentially in the next 20
years. Nearly one out of every three barrels of oil reserves
in the world lie under just two countries: Saudi Arabia (with
259 billion barrels of proven reserves) and Iraq (112
billion). Those figures may understate Iraq's largely
unexplored reserves, which according to U.S. government
estimates may hold as many as 432 billion barrels.
With supplies in many other regions, especially the United
States and the North Sea, nearly exhausted, oil from Saudi
Arabia and Iraq is becoming ever more critical--a fact duly
noted in the administration's National Energy Policy,
released in 2001 by a White House task force. By 2020, the
Gulf will supply between 54 percent and 67 percent of the
world's crude, the document said, making the region ``vital
to U.S. interests.'' According to G. Daniel Butler, an oil-
markets analyst at the U.S. Energy Information Administration
(EIA), Saudi Arabia's production capacity will rise from its
current 9.4 million barrels a day to 22.1 million over the
next 17 years. Iraq, which in 2002 produced a mere 2 million
barrels a day, ``could easily be a double-digit producer by
2020,'' says Butler.
U.S. strategists aren't worried primarily about America's
own oil supplies; for decades, the United States has worked
to diversify its sources of oil with Venezuela, Nigeria,
Mexico, and other countries growing in importance. But for
Western Europe and Japan, as well as the developing
industrial powers of eastern Asia, the Gulf is all-important.
Whoever controls it will maintain crucial global leverage for
decades to come.
Today, notes the EIA's Butler, two-thirds of Gulf oil goes
to Western industrial nations. By 2015, according to a study
by the CIA's National Intelligence Council, three-quarters of
the Gulf's oil will go to Asia, chiefly to China. China's
growing dependence on the Gulf could cause it to develop
closer military and political ties with countries such as
Iran and Iraq, according to the report produced by Ebel's
CSIS task force. ``They have different political interests in
the gulf than we do,'' Ebel says. ``Is it to our advantage
to have another competitor for oil in the Persian Gulf?''
David Long, who served as a U.S. diplomat in Saudi Arabia
and as chief of the Near East division in the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research during the
Reagan administration, likens the Bush administration's
approach to the philosophy of Admiral Mahan, the 19th-century
military strategist who advocated the use of naval power to
create a global American empire. ``They want to be the
world's enforcer,'' he says. ``It's a worldview, a
geopolitical position. They say, ``We need hegemony in the
region.''
Until the 1970s, the face of American power in the Gulf was
the U.S. oil industry, led by Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Texaco,
and Gulf, all of whom competed fiercely with Britain's BP and
Anglo-Dutch Shell. But in the early '70s, Iraq, Saudi Arabia,
and the other Gulf states nationalized their oil industries,
setting up state-run companies to run wells, pipelines, and
production facilities. Not only did that enhance the power of
OPEC, enabling that organization to force a series of sharp
price increases, but it alarmed U.S. policymakers.
Today, a growing number of Washington strategists are
advocating a direct U.S. challenge to state-owned petroleum
industries in oil-producing countries, especially the Persian
Gulf. Think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute,
the Heritage Foundation, and CSIS are conducting discussions
about privatizing Iraq's oil industry. Some of them have put
forward detailed plans outlining how Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and
other nations could be forced to open up their oil and gas
industries to foreign investment. The Bush administration
itself has been careful not to say much about what might
happen to Iraq's oil. But State Department officials have had
preliminary talks about the oil industry with Iraqi exiles,
and there have been reports that the U.S. military wants to
use at least part of the country's oil revenue to pay for the
cost of military occupation.
``One of the major problems with the Persian Gulf is that
the means of production are in the hands of the state,'' Rob
Sobhani, an oil-industry consultant, told an American
Enterprise Institute conference last fall in Washington.
Already, he noted, several U.S. oil companies are studying
the possibility of privatization in the Gulf. Dismantling
government-owned oil companies, Sobhani argues, could also
force political changes in the region. ``The beginning of
liberal democracy can be achieved if you take the means of
production out of the hands of the state,'' he said,
acknowledging that Arabs would resist that idea. ``It's going
to take a lot of selling, a lot of marketing,'' he concluded.
Just which companies would get to claim Iraq's oil has been
a subject of much debate. After a war, the contracts that
Iraq's state-owned oil company has signed with European,
Russian, and Chinese oil firms might well be abrogated,
leaving the field to U.S. oil companies. ``What they have in
mind is denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out
of American Oil companies,'' says Akins. ``The American oil
companies are going to be the main beneficiaries of this
war.''
The would-be rulers of a post-Saddam Iraq have been
thinking along the same lines. ``American oil companies will
have a big shot at Iraqi oil,'' says Ahmad Chalabi, leader of
the Iraqi National Congress, a group of aristocrats and
wealthy Iraqis who fled the country when its repressive
monarchy was overthrown in 1958. During a visit to Washington
last fall, Chalabi held meetings with at least three major
U.S. oil companies, trying to enlist their support. Similar
meetings between Iraqi exiles and U.S. companies have also
been taking place in Europe.
``Iraqi exiles have approached us, saying, `You can have
our oil if we can get back in there,' '' says R. Gerald
Bailey, who headed Exxon's Middle East operations until 1997.
``All the major American companies have met with them in
Paris, London, Brussels, all over. They're all jockeying for
position. You can't ignore it, but you've got to do it on the
QT. And you can't wait till it gets too far along.''
But the companies are also anxious about the consequences
of war, according to many experts, oil-company executives,
and former State Department officials. ``The oil companies
are caught in the middle,'' says Bailey. Executives fear that
war could create havoc in the region, turning Arab states
against the United States and Western oil companies. On the
other hand, should a U.S. invasion of Iraq be successful,
they want to be there when the oil is divvied up. Says David
Long, the former U.S. diplomat, ``It's greed versus fear.''
Ibrahim Oweiss, a Middle East specialist at Georgetown
University who coined the term ``petrodollar'' and has also
been a consultant to Occidental and BP, has been closely
watching the cautious maneuvering by the companies. ``I know
that the oil companies are scared about the outcome of
this,'' he says. ``They are not at all sure this is in the
best interests of the oil industry.''
Anne Joyce, an editor at the Washington-based Middle East
Policy Council who has spoken privately to top Exxon
officials, says it's clear that most oil-industry executives
``are afraid'' of what a war in the Persian Gulf could mean
in the long term--especially if tensions in the region spiral
out of control. ``They see it as much too risky, and they are
risk averse,'' she says. ``They think it has `fiasco' written
all over it.''