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How Did Our Oil Get Under Their Sands?
by Dave Chaddock
Why is the price of gasoline rising? In
one sense it is simply an inevitable result of supply and demand. There is
a finite amount of oil on this planet, and it is becoming more difficult and
expensive to extract it. At the same time there is an ever growing demand
for this increasingly elusive liquid.
But there is something else going on, a bullying tendency on the part of
the United States, which makes it act as if the control of the world's oil was
its own exclusive prerogative. This tendency came to full expression in
1953 when, right after Iran nationalized its oil industry, the US simply set
about to overthrow the Iranian government.
The
Bushes, father and son, have intensified this unfortunate tendency. Back in
August of 1990, when Treasury Secretary Brady was trying to explain to Daddy
Bush that Saddam's takeover of Kuwait would force the US to adapt to higher oil
prices, Bush angrily interrupted him. "Let's be clear about one
thing", he declared: "We are not going to plan how to live with this
!" Raising the price of OUR oil was just not permitted! And in a major
speech in 2002 Dick Cheney pronounced that Saddam could not be allowed even to
control the oil within his own borders. This was "a great portion of the
world's energy supplies", Cheney noted. Indeed, Iraq had proven
reserves of 112 billion barrels in
15 developed fields, and 58 additional oil fields on tap. To be an oil
company in Iraq, as one European oil executive put it, was like "being a
kid in F.A.O Schwartz."
But the problem is, bullying produces blowback. A direct line can
be traced from the US overthrow of the legitimate government of Iran through the
resulting Shah Pahlevi government up to today's hostility of Iran to the US.
And the invasion of Iraq has not brought any oil security to the US,
since it has so angered the populace that sabotage of oil facilities has become
an everyday occurrence. At present, Iraq is producing 900,000 less barrels
of oil a day than it did before the war. Nor did Bush help his own cause when,
on April 3, 2003, a US Navy plane dropped a bomb on a bridge which, up until
that point, had carried Iraq's main pipeline carrying crude oil across the
Tigris to its refineries and export terminals. After that there was a $220
million fiasco during which US engineers tried and failed to run pipelines
underneath the river, ignoring the fact that this was an old earthquake fault
zone full of jagged boulders that resisted drilling (See NYT 4-25). Still another "noble
effort" was Bush's attempt to overthrow the government of Venezuela, thus
alienating practically all of Latin America, and further jeopardizing US oil
supplies, as Chavez seems more interested in helping his own people than in
rapidly
exhausting his oil reserves for the benefit of the US.
And now sophisticated oil traders have gone in for the kill. Huge
hedge funds are betting their money on the assumption that the price of oil will
only continue to rise. And thus the price rises even higher, feeding on
itself.
Instead of
making the problem worse by trying to bludgeon others into submission, would it
not make more sense to try getting along with people in the rest of the world,
who, like us, want a share in the good things of life? We all live on the
same planet, and we all face the same problem of finding a long-term solution
for our energy needs.
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