Fight Climate Change? Or Oil the Wheels of War?

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

24 September 14

oes anyone really believe that Bill Clinton repeatedly bombed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to defend democracy? Or that George W. Bush waged war in Afghanistan to protect the rights of that country’s terribly oppressed women? Or that Barack Obama reopened the American war in Iraq to stop the militants of Islamic State from raping Yazidi women?

Cynical, skeptical, or merely realistic, most sensible people have learned to doubt the humanitarian justifications that accompany cross-border military intervention, whether by Washington, its European allies, or its Russian and Chinese adversaries. The New Yorker’s Steve Cole, dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, gave substance to these doubts back in August with his candid explanation of why Obama was dropping bombs to defend Erbil.

“The capital of the oil-endowed Kurdish Regional Government,” Coll wrote, “Erbil is an oil-rush town.” Thousands of Americans live in Erbil, working for ExxonMobil and Chevron, the oilfield service companies, accountants, construction firms, trucking firms, and “at the bottom of the economic chain, diverse entrepreneurs digging for a score.” This explains why the American consulate has so many people, including an untold number of intelligence operatives.

In others words, the bombing was and is largely about oil, like so much else in America’s wars in Iraq, from George Herbert Walker Bush’s defense of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia’s oilfields against Saddam Hussein to what, in a later article, Coll calls Obama’s “Whack-a-Mole against jihadists.”

“Obama’s defense of Erbil,” he concluded, “is effectively the defense of an undeclared Kurdish oil state whose sources of geopolitical appeal – as a long-term, non-Russian supplier of oil and gas to Europe, for example – are best not spoken of in polite or naïve company.” To back up his argument, Coll cited Rachel Maddow’s documentary on MSNBC, “Why We Did It,” in which he played a prominent role. Since we now know that Saddam had no Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), the documentary seeks to find out why Bush, Cheney, and Blair took us to war in Iraq.

Oil, says Maddow. But not simply to grab it, privatize it, or line the pockets of friends and supporters in the oil industry, or of Cheney himself. That kind of analysis is far too shallow and simplistic, much like what those on the Left used to call “vulgar Marxism.” Nor does Maddow tell us what motivated Bush personally, which could have been to avenge Saddam’s contract on the elder Bush or “a mission from God,” as he told Palestinian peace negotiator Nabil Shaath and French president Jacques Chirac.

But, based on internal documents and interviews with decision-makers, Maddow shows convincingly that the National Security Council, Cheney’s industry-dominated Energy Task Force, and the Pentagon wanted to increase the supply of oil, bring down its price, and ensure Western control of access to it.

No surprise. Control of global reserves – and the ability to reward or punish rivals who need the oil and natural gas – has been a central theme of American policy for over a century. As Maddow shows, President Jimmy Carter even made it a fighting matter in his State of the Union Address in January 1980.

“Let our position be absolutely clear,” he told the world. “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.”

Carter was threatening the Soviet Union, who had sent troops into Afghanistan at least in part as a response to his arming the mujahideen. He was warning them not to move south toward the Persian Gulf. George W. Bush invaded Iraq to take control of its oil. And Barack Obama bombed Erbil primarily to maintain control of Kurdish oil.

As the bombing extends into Syria, we will see other motives, humanitarian instincts, desires to protect Israel and local Christians, or counter-productive ideas about how to fight terrorists. But little that America and its European allies do in that part of the world will ever be far removed from controlling the region’s energy resources.

All of which makes Obama’s new war a major foe of global efforts to address climate change. Now is the time to move away from fossil fuels, not to put them at the top of the national agenda, locking us into an ever deeper, more militarized involvement with Big Oil and its threat to Planet Earth.

We can’t go both ways, so which will it be? Do we fight to cut back carbon emissions? Or, do we oil the wheels of war throughout the Middle East?

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."