The Specter of Big Oil

A specter is haunting the planet. — the specter of big oil. All the powers of the industrialized world have entered into an unholy alliance to osmose this specter: President and dictator, Pope and monarch, Democrat and Republican, French Radicals and English socialist. Oppose big oil and you oppose the power of the State.

Big oil has been behind much of the mayhem inflicting the planet for the last 65 years. President Franklin Roosevelt and Saudi King Abdul Aziz met aboard the USS Quincy on February 14, 1945. According to Colonel William A. Eddy, Roosevelt's interpreter and an OSS intelligence agent, "In his talks with Roosevelt, Eddy wrote, the king did not even hint at any desire for financial assistance. He traveled to the meeting seeking friends and not funds, and that is what he got, despite the arguments about Palestine and Jewish immigration. The king's view was that if the suffering of the Jews had been caused by the Germans, Germans should pay the price for it; let the Jews build their homeland on the best lands in Germany, not on the territory of Arabs who had nothing to do with what happened to them. The most he could get from Roosevelt was a promise that the president would "do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs and would make no move hostile to the Arab people. The king taking this as a commitment from the United States and not just from Roosevelt personally, was furious to discover three years later that Harry Truman did not consider himself bound by it.”

It was BP (then known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) with the help of British Intelligence and the CIA's man on the ground, Dr. Donald N. Wilber, that overthrew the Iranian democracy in 1953 and replaced it with the brutal dictatorship of the Shah. According to a new volume published by George Washington University Press titled, " Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran," "The '28 Mordad' coup, as it is known by its Persian date, was a watershed for Iran, for the Middle East and for the standing of the United States in the region. The joint U.S.-British operation ended Iran's drive to assert sovereign control over its own resources and helped put an end to a vibrant chapter in the history of the country's nationalist and democratic movements. These consequences resonated with dramatic effect in later years. When the Shah finally fell in 1979, memories of the U.S. intervention in 1953, which made possible the monarch's subsequent, and increasingly unpopular, 25-reign intensified the anti-American character of the revolution in the minds of many Iranians." Look where we are today because of the greed of BP.

It was big oil (Exxon, known then as Standard Oil, and Royal Dutch Shell) that became worried over the possibility of losing control of Indonesia's immense wealth. Indonesia is estimated to be the fifth richest country in the world in terms of natural resources. Besides being the fifth largest oil producer, it has enormous reserves of tin, bauxite, coal, gold, silver, diamonds, manganese, phosphates, nickel, copper, rubber, coffee, palm oil, tobacco, sugar, coconuts, spices, timber and cinchona (for quinine). President Eisenhower told a state governors' conference that it was imperative for the US to finance the French colonial war in Vietnam as the ‘cheapest way' to keep control of Indonesia. Eisenhower detailed: "Now let us assume that we lose Indochina. If Indochina goes, several things happen right away. The Malay peninsula, the last little bit of land hanging on down there, would be scarcely defensible. The tin and tungsten we so greatly value from that area would cease coming, and all India would be outflanked. Burma would be in no position for defense. All of that position around there is very ominous to the United States, because finally if we lost all that, how would the free world hold the rich empire of Indonesia? So you see, somewhere along the line, this must be blocked and it must be blocked now, and that is what we are trying to do. So when the US votes $400 million to help the war (in Indochina), we are not voting a giveaway program. We are voting for the cheapest way that we can prevent the occurrence of something that would be of a most terrible significance to the United States of America, our security, our power and ability to get certain things we need from the riches of the Indonesian territory and from South East Asia." In 1965 a bloody coup was launched by Indonesian generals which resulted in over a million Indonesian deaths and became the opening act in implementation of the counter Domino Theory. In turn, the counter Domino Theory gave us the Vietnam War.

It was big oil that got us into the first and second Gulf War. Mark Zepezauer writes, “The whole dispute started because Kuwait was slant-drilling. Using equipment bought from National Security Council chief Brent Scowcroft's old company, Kuwait was pumping out some $14-billion worth of oil from underneath Iraqi territory. Even the territory they were drilling from had originally been Iraq's. Slant-drilling is enough to get you shot in Texas, and it's certainly enough to start a war in the Mideast. Even so, this dispute could have been negotiated. But it's hard to avoid a war when what you're actually doing is trying to provoke a war. The most famous example of that is the meeting between Saddam and the US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, five days before Iraq invaded Kuwait. As CIA satellite photos showed an Iraqi invasion force massing on the Kuwaiti border, Glaspie told Hussein that "the US takes no position" on Iraq's dispute with Kuwait. A few days later, during last-minute negotiations, Kuwait's foreign minister said: "We are not going to respond to [Iraq]....If they don't like it, let them occupy our territory....We are going to bring in the Americans." The US reportedly encouraged Kuwait's attitude.

In early February 2001, two weeks after Bush-Cheney took control of the US presidency, the National Energy Policy Development Group, a task force created and chaired by Dick Cheney was formed. The mission of the task force was to “develop a supply-side national energy policy designed to help the private sector, and, as necessary and appropriate, State and local governments, promote dependable, affordable, and environmentally sound production and distribution of energy for the future." The group met in secret and never publicly disclosed it’s activities. The Washington Post obtained some documents detailing how executives from major oil corporations, including Exxon-Mobil Corp., Conoco, Royal Dutch Shell Oil Corp., and the American subsidiary of British Petroleum met with Energy Task Force participants while they were developing national energy policy. Vice President Cheney was reported to have met personally with the Chief Executive Officer of BP (formerly British Petroleum) during the time of the Energy Task Force's activities. The task force produced detailed maps of the oil fields in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. (http://www.judicialwatch.org/IraqOilMap.pdf),
(http://www.judicialwatch.org/SAOilMap.pdf), (http://www.judicialwatch.org/UAEOilMap.pdf).

After the destruction of the World Trade Towers by Saudi Arabian terrorist in September 2001, the Bush-Cheney administration, began a propaganda campaign to blame Iraq for the attacks on the Twin Towers. Bush and Cheney manufactured evidence and planted disinformation with reporters in highly visible news outlets, like the New York Times and Fox News, who were willing to parrot the propaganda. The propaganda campaign pushed two lines of “evidence.” First, Bush-Cheney claimed that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) and second the Saudi terrorists were trained in Iraq. Both lines of evidence were proven to be nonsense. So what was the actual reason for invading Iraq? The UK Guardian reported on June 4, 2003, “Oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq, a leading White House hawk has claimed, confirming the worst fears of those opposed to the US-led war. The US deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz - who has already undermined Tony Blair's position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a "bureaucratic" excuse for war - has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is "swimming" in oil. The latest comments were made by Mr. Wolfowitz in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore at the weekend, and reported today by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt. Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defense minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

In addition to invading Iraq in order to use American soldiers to grab it’s rich oil reserves for big oil, Bush-Cheney gave us the USA Patriot Act, the largest single roll-back of civil rights legislation in American history. The two events are inextricably connected. Launching wars of aggression with the intent to use state power to grab and control the world's oil resources for private gain and the suppression of dissent at home go hand-in-hand.

Then there is Israel. It was the British and the French that clamored for the creation of Israel after the Second World War. It was the British and French and Israel that invaded the Suez Canal after Egypt nationalized the canal in 1956. Afterward US President Eisenhower threatened to call in the British and French debt thereby forcing the invading forces to withdraw from the Suez. In June 1967 the Israeli military routed Arab forces during the Six Day War using British Chieftain tanks and French Mirage jets. Only after the Six Day War did the United States fully recognize the strategic importance of a pro western Israeli State located within the oil rich middle east. When Israel nearly lost the October 1973 War to Egypt and Syria, US President Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger concluded the loss of Israel for American interest in the Middle East was not acceptable. Thus, it is big oil that provided the rationalization for introducing nuclear weapons into the Middle East via Israel. Otherwise how can the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons and the fact the United State officially does not recognize the existence of Israel's WMDs be explained without the existence of Middle Eastern oil fields?

Big oil's pursuit of profits have killed millions of Vietnamese, Iraqis, Indonesians, and tens of thousands of others from Burma to Bolivia, from Nigeria to Algeria. Big oil has polluted our planet’s land, streams, rivers, gulfs, bays, and oceans. Big oil gave us suburbs with it’s neighbor dividing fences, automobiles and freeways where most people drive alone and the only human contact is with an array of blathering fools on the radio, and strip malls where we run in and run out never knowing or caring who served us. Big oil gave us SUVs and 35,000 traffic deaths every year, and wall to wall concrete roadways and massive air pollution. And it was in defense of big oil that our government took away many of our civil rights. But most of all big oil gave us social alienation. Big oil changed our culture, our psychology, and our republican politics all for the worse. We don’t know or care about each other anymore.

Of course this borders on single factor analysis. But when a trillion dollar industry like big oil, with strong international political ties to all the major industrial/military economies always seems to be the specter in the background when modern wars are unleash and hatred and suspicion fills the air, then how else can the history of the last 65 years be explain?