Tom Engelhardt 72

October 9, 2014

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Washington Wields the Oil Weapon

You remember. It was the oiliest of administrations. The president was a (failed) West Texas oilman. The vice-president had been the CEO of the giant oil field services company, Halliburton, and before taking office, when speaking at the Petroleum Institute and elsewhere, was known to say things like, “The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.” The national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, long on the board of Chevron, had a double-hulled oil tanker named for her. They were a crew with the global flow of oil and how to control it on the brain. Just in case you forgot, and I know you haven’t, the new vice president had barely taken office and set up an “energy task force” to develop future policy that he himself would chair when a parade of top oil executives began arriving at the White House to meet secretly with it.

And then, after 9/11, came the assault on the oil heartlands of the planet. I’m sure you remember how, amid the chaos of a burning Baghdad, American troops were ordered to guard only the buildings of Iraq’s Oil and Interior Ministries, and… well, I don’t really have to review all of that for you, do I? Then, of course, Americans put into office the guy who swore he was going to end oil wars and attend to our global warming future instead -- a fellow named Barack Obama who, everyone knew, would step into office without an oil slick in his head.

That was then and this is now. The Barack Obama of 2014 is essentially running a drill-baby-drill White House in a country where oil consumption is actually rising. His administration has been opening up ever more coastal areas to exploration and drilling from the East to the Arctic waters of Alaska, while encouraging the creation of a “Saudi America” in the American frack lands. The result: a torrent of crude oil and natural gas and something else as well, as Michael Klare, TomDispatch’s indispensable energy expert, points out today. Buoyed by the country’s new energy wealth, our president has been putting oil to work abroad. He has been using energy as the spear of his already highly militarized foreign policy. The result has been a sophisticated weaponization of oil that puts the energy mavens of the Bush administration to shame. But let Klare tell you the whole grim tale. Tom

Obama’s New Oil Wars 

Washington Takes on ISIS, Iran, and Russia 

By Michael T. Klare

It was heinous. It was underhanded. It was beyond the bounds of international morality. It was an attack on the American way of life. It was what you might expect from unscrupulous Arabs. It was 'the oil weapon' -- and back in 1973, it was directed at the United States. Skip ahead four decades and it’s smart, it’s effective, and it’s the American way. The Obama administration has appropriated it as a major tool of foreign policy, a new way to go to war with nations it considers hostile without relying on planes, missiles, and troops. It is, of course, that very same oil weapon. 

Until recently, the use of the term 'the oil weapon' has largely been identified with the efforts of Arab producers to dissuade the United States from supporting Israel by cutting off the flow of petroleum. The most memorable example of its use was the embargo imposed by Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) on oil exports to the United States during the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, causing scarcity in the U.S., long lines at American filling stations, and a global economic recession. 

After suffering enormously from that embargo, Washington took a number of steps to disarm the oil weapon and prevent its reuse. These included an increased emphasis on domestic oil production and the establishment of a mutual aid arrangement overseen by the International Energy Agency (IEA) that obliged participating nations to share their oil with any member state subjected to an embargo.

So consider it a surprising reversal that, having tested out the oil weapon against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with devastating effect back in the 1990s, Washington is now the key country brandishing that same weapon, using trade sanctions and other means to curb the exports of energy-producing states it categorizes as hostile. The Obama administration has taken this aggressive path even at the risk of curtailing global energy supplies.

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