[Austin-ghetto-list] Fw: [AlasBabylon] It's the Oil Stupid

[JIM BALDAUF]

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From: <y6qvsk@yahoo.com>
To: <AlasBabylon@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 7:05 PM
Subject: [AlasBabylon] It's the Oil Stupid


http://www.laweekly.com/ink/01/44/cover-angel.shtml

It's the Oil 
Never mind the pundits, the root cause remains the same 

by Johnny Angel 
>In the orgy of examination of who and what is to blame for the 
events of September 11, we must have heard every conceivable 
explanation. The American right, as exemplified by President 
Bush, Fox News and the opinion page of the The Wall Street 
Journal, blames envy of American values and success. The 
extreme right blames secular humanism, gay rights and the 
other bogeymen they love to flog. The center faults lax airport 
security and a general lack of preparedness, while the left, all but 
ignored by the corporate media, blames American imperialism 
and in some cases our unconditional support for Israel.

Yet for all the noise generated by partisans and centrists alike, 
no one is willing to accept the blatantly obvious, the real 
underlying factor behind America's involvement in the byzantine 
labyrinth of Middle East politics. What could possibly motivate the 
propping up of repressive non-democracies like the Saudi and 
Kuwaiti royal families, or murderous regimes like that of Reza 
Pahlavi, Shah of Iran? Or pouring billions into the coffers of 
Saddam Hussein in the '80s, or even creating the monster that 
is possibly the mastermind of these attacks, Osama bin Laden, 
beneficiary of CIA lucre and training?

It's the oil, stupid.

Once again, America's twin addictions, that of its people to 
cheap gasoline and its corporations to billions of petro-dollars, 
has led us right into the proverbial pit. Having learned very little
or 
forgotten a lot in the wake of the oil embargoes of the 1970s, 
America is as strung out on the fossil-fuel jones as any Bonnie 
Brae Street junkie is on Mexican tar heroin. Even though 
American dependency on oil from the Middle East has fallen to 
about 17 percent of national consumption, Saudi Arabia remains 
the cornerstone, producing 50 percent of the whole world's 
supply. So in order to keep this economic balm flowing, to keep 
the status quo static and the balance sheets of the major oil 
companies brimming, we've installed our military as a kind of 
mega police force in the region. Our official reason for being 
there is to ensure "stability," one of the great buzzwords in
the 
history of business, but this is nothing more than spin - the 
military is in the Middle East to guarantee that whatever comes 
out of the ground is exploitable and controlled by American 
multinationals.

And it is the simple fact of the presence of American soldiers on 
the holy soil of Islam that has so enraged our new nemesis, bin 
Laden.

Speaking to British journalist Robert Fisk in 1996 Afghanistan, 
bin Laden made clear his agenda. "When the American troops 
entered Saudia Arabia [after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait], the land 
of the two holy places [Mecca and Medina], there was strong 
protest from the ulema [religious authorities] and from students 
of the Shariah law all over the country against the interference of 
American troops," bin Laden told Fisk, who published the 
comments in The Nation in 1998. The Saudi leaders made a 
"big mistake," bin Laden said, when they responded by 
suppressing the protests and cementing ties to the U.S. "After it 
had insulted and jailed the ulema . . . the Saudi regime lost its 
legitimacy," bin Laden said. And so began his deadly fatwa 
against the United States.

Oil has been the prime mover behind any and every political 
decision in that region since the First World War, when trucks, 
tanks and planes replaced horses and camels. Once the 
internal-combustion engine became the technological 
centerpiece of the century, keeping it going by any means 
necessary became a most profitable business venture. And 
despite the myth that has been rammed down America's psyche 
for eons, American business loathes competition and aims for 
monopoly. Sure, they'll partner with the Saudi royal family 
(because the government that they dominate owns all of its oil), 
but in exchange, anyone in the region who actually believes in 
the rights of the people of that country to share in the wealth of 
their homeland is shut out. And forcefully, with the aid of the 
American military and CIA, as we saw in Iran and during the Gulf 
War.

This dusty, empty part of the world was basically nothing more 
than a bedouin crossroads for 1,300 years, between the end of 
the Crusades and the early 1900s. During the period when 
America endured revolution and a civil war, and Europe tore itself 
apart, the Middle East was downright peaceful. Tell me why the 
United States and Great Britain reflexively back the state of Israel 
in its battles with its neighbors. Were it not sitting strategically 
close to vast pools of viscous crude, no one would give a rat's 
ass about either side.

It's the meddling in the internal affairs of the indigenous
people 
of the region to ensure that said oil stays in the hands of the 
privileged few that has led to an enraged underground 
movement of terrorists in these lands. And oil is all we're there 
for - what else of value comes from that part of the world, what 
strategic value does it have otherwise?

That may seem as obvious as the nose on our collective face, 
but it's something no one wants to acknowledge. Especially 
given the ties between the media and the oil companies: ABC is 
tied to Texaco, NBC to British Petroleum, Time Warner to Mobil 
Oil, as revealed in the marvelous media-watchdog flier 
Censored Alert in the summer of 2000. And now the oil industry 
is entrenched as America's No. 1 player with Bush and Cheney, 
two oil men (one failed, one successful) in command.

Eliminate the oil, and the American presence ends in the area; 
the resentment aimed at our land and our people also ends. Out 
of sight, out of mind, remember? Never mind the bollocks about 
how the Arabs envy our wealth: I don't see them terrorizing 
Monaco or flying jets into the side of the Big Ben. The simple fact 
is, our armies piss them off as colonial enforcers. Much in the 
same way that our forefathers loathed Hessians in the American 
Revolution.

If anything, the leaders of the Middle East are terrified of our 
abandonment. Like savvy survivors, they play both sides at the 
same time. Just as an American corporation will donate money 
to Republicans and Democrats both, so these strongmen pay lip 
service to America while nodding, winking and (in the case of 
Yemen and allegedly some Saudi businessmen) donating 
money to terrorist cells on the side, just to be safe.

It's our own greed and need for control that has led us into this 
petroleum quagmire. Ross Perot, hardly the voice of progressive 
politics, made the canny observation in the first presidential 
debate of 1992 that the Gulf War was fought solely for control of 
oil and nothing more. He made the further point that American 
blood wasn't worth shedding over a product that Saddam would 
have been glad to sell us himself.

Too late for that sort of pragmatism. The war we're about to 
wage will surely be protracted and costly, with profound 
repercussions, and all because we decided that dealing with our 
enslavement to gasoline via conservation, alternative energy 
sources and the like was just too incon-fucking-venient. Feel that 
way now?<





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