The strangest aspect of media coverage of
the US invasion and occupation of Iraq involved
that country's oil. Everyone, including the Bush
administration, was well aware that Iraq sat on a
sea of it. It was obvious that Middle Eastern oil
was a global lifeline and an ever-more valuable
commodity; and yet, unless you were a faithful
reader of the business pages, for days, weeks,
even months on end, it was impossible to find
serious discussion of Iraqi oil in the mainstream
media.
Forget the fact that a number of
the major players in the Bush administration came
out of the energy business; that Condoleezza Rice,
the national security advisor, had had an oil
tanker named after her (when she was still on
Chevron's board of directors); that the
neo-conservatives and their supporters evinced a
special interest in the oil heartlands of our
planet (aka "the arc
of
instability"); or that the Pentagon was staking
those heartlands out, base by base.
Nonetheless, when it came to the
punditocracy just about the only discussion of
Iraqi oil was restricted to the dismissal of
claims by the antiwar movement that oil was either
the (or a) significant factor in the invasion, a
position supposedly too simpleminded to be taken
seriously. If Iraq's main export had been video
games, the press would have been flooded with
pieces of every sort about our children's
entertainment future; and yet, until the Iraqi
resistance began blowing up pipelines, reports on
Iraqi oil were as few and far between as oases in
a desert.
Even today, with pump prices
through the ceiling and global energy supplies
tight, Iraqi oil - or the lack of it - is not
exactly headline material. As Jonathan Schell said
recently, speaking of media attitudes, "If the
Bush administration is not supposed to be
interested in oil in Iraq, why are they so
interested in it in Alaska?"
In the prewar
period, President George W Bush simply swore that
the US was religiously ready to respect and
preserve what he referred to as Iraq's "patrimony"
- and, when it came to serious coverage, that was
about that.
On the other hand, you had an
antiwar movement, one part of which was focused
almost solely on the issue of Iraqi oil. The
iconic oil sign of the prewar protest period (sure
to be found again at the big demonstration in
Washington this Saturday) was: "No blood for oil."
But, with two years-plus of Iraqi experience under
our belts, it should now be clear that this slogan
was misconceived in at least one crucial way. It
should have read: "Blood for no oil."
This
is perhaps the strangest, most instructive and
least written about aspect of the Iraqi invasion,
occupation and present chaos. We can be assured
that, in the next few years, we're going to be
hearing far more about "resource wars", tight
energy supplies and the need to nail down raw
materials militarily.
It may not be long
before administration officials start telling us
that we can't withdraw from Iraq exactly because
of the world energy situation. Already, two days
after Katrina hit, there was the president
standing in front of the USS Ronald Reagan - this
administration's advance men have never seen an
aircraft carrier they didn't want to turn into a
photo op - offering a new explanation for the war
in Iraq: "If [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi and [Osama]
bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create
a new training ground for future terrorist
attacks; they'd seize oil fields to fund their
ambitions ..."
We're guaranteed to see
more Pentagon planning and war-gaming based on the
control of world energy supplies, not to speak of
more and ever better military bases planted in
far-flung, oil-rich areas of the world. So it's
important to take stock of what actually happened
to Iraqi oil and the dreams of global dominance
that went with it.
Energy is a strange
thing to control militarily. As Iraq showed and
Katrina reminded us recently, its flow is
remarkably vulnerable, whether to insurgents,
terrorists or hurricanes. It's next to impossible
to guard hundreds, not to say thousands, of miles
of oil or natural gas pipelines.
It's all
very well to occupy a country, set up your
"enduring camps" and imagine yourself controlling
the key energy spigots of the globe, but doing so
is another matter. (As the saying went in a
previous military age, you can't mine coal with
bayonets.)
In the case of Iraq, one could
simply say that the military conquest and
occupation of the country essentially drove Iraq's
oil deeper underground and beyond anyone's grasp.
Hence, the signs should indeed say: "Blood for no
oil." It's the perfect sorry slogan for a sad,
brainless war; and even the Pentagon's
resource-war planners might consider it a lesson
worthy of further study as they think about our
energy future.
Tom Engelhardt is
editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture.
(Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch. Used by
permission.)
