Resource Protection

Blood and Oil... (based on Michael T Klare's writing - source >)

America's dependence on imported petroleum has been growing steadily since 1972, when domestic output reached its maximum (or "peak") output.  Yet America's total oil consumption remains on an upward course; meaning ever more of the nation's total petroleum supply will have to be imported.

An increasing share of that oil will come from hostile, war-torn countries in the developing world, not from friendly, stable countries such as Canada or Norway. This is the case because the older industrialized countries have already consumed a large share of their oil inheritance, while many producers in the developing world still possess vast reserves of untapped petroleum.

An historic shift in the center of gravity
We are seeing an historic shift in the center of gravity for world oil production—from the industrialized countries of the global North to the developing nations of the global South, which are often politically unstable, torn by ethnic and religious conflicts, home to extremist organizations, or some combination of all three.

Because oil is viewed as the primary motive for U.S. involvement in these areas, and because the giant U.S. oil corporations are seen as the very embodiment of U.S. power, anything to do with oil—pipelines, wells, refineries, loading platforms—is seen by insurgents as a legitimate and attractive target for attack.

The Middle East
In January 1980—in response to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the Islamic revolution in Iran—President Jimmy Carter announced that the secure flow of Persian Gulf oil was in "the vital interests of the United States of America", and that in protecting this interest, the United States would use "any means necessary, including military force".

Carter's principle of using force to protect the flow of oil was later cited by President George H W Bush to justify U.S. intervention in the Gulf War of 1990-91, and it has been the underlying strategic rationale for America's invasion and occupation of Iraq ever since. Capt. Kurt Tidd, commander of the Fifth Fleet task force recently told the New York Times, "In the grand scheme of things there may be no other place where our armed forces are deployed that has a greater strategic importance." During an October 2006 press conference, Bush declared that the U.S. could not “tolerate a new terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East with large oil reserves that could be used to fund its radical ambitions or used to inflict economic damage on the West.”

Despite the bluster and high-minded rhetoric about planting the seeds of democracy in the Middle East, the underlying motivation for the Iraq war and subsequent occupation has been first and foremost about securing the flow of oil.

In late October 2002, columnist Maureen Dowd of the New York Times would later reveal, Halliburton, the energy services company previously headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, had prepared a confidential 500-page document on how to handle Iraq's oil industry after an invasion and occupation of Iraq. This was, commented Dowd, "a plan [Halliburton] wrote several months before the invasion of Iraq, and before it got a no-bid contract to implement the plan (and overbill the U.S.)."

Guarding the pipelines
Originally, America’s “protection” policies were largely confined to the world's most important oil-producing region: the Persian Gulf. But given America's ever-growing requirement for imported petroleum, U.S. officials have begun to extend it to other major producing zones, including the Caspian Sea basin, Africa and Latin America. American sailors are now on oil-protection patrol in the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the South China Sea, and along other sea routes that deliver oil to the United States and its allies. In fact, the U.S. military is increasingly being converted into a global oil-protection service.

The energy potential of the Caspian basin has been a hotbed of speculation hope and the construction of a pipeline from Baku to Ceyhan spurned the U.S. to establish military ties with future suppliers, including Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, and the pivotal transit state of Georgia.

Typically, such moves are justified as being crucial to the "war on terror". A close reading of Pentagon and State Department documents shows, however, that anti-terrorism and the protection of oil supplies are closely related in administration thinking. When requesting funds in 2004 to establish a "rapid-reaction brigade" in Kazakhstan, for example, the State Department told Congress that such a force is needed to "enhance Kazakhstan's capability to respond to major terrorist threats to oil platforms" in the Caspian Sea.

Another example of our involvement in pipeline protection is in Latin America. In Colombia, our government is already spending hundreds of millions of dollars to enhance oil-infrastructure security, beginning with the Cano-Limon pipeline, the sole conduit connecting Occidental Petroleum's prolific fields in Arauca province with the Caribbean coast. As part of this effort, U.S. Army Special Forces personnel from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, are now helping to train, equip, and guide a new contingent of Colombian forces whose sole mission will be to guard the pipeline and fight the guerrillas along its 770km route.

View an interactive world map of the world's energy assets and the accompanying "protection" America provides.

Patrolling the seas
An increasing share of U.S. naval forces is also being committed to the protection of foreign oil shipments. The navy's 5th Fleet, based at the island state of Bahrain, now spends much of its time patrolling the vital tanker lanes of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz—the narrow waterway connecting the Gulf to the Arabian Sea and the larger oceans beyond.

The navy has also beefed up its ability to protect vital sea lanes in the South China Sea—the site of promising oilfields claimed by China, Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia—and in the Strait of Malacca, the critical sea-link between the Persian Gulf and America's allies in East Asia.

Even Africa has come in for increased attention, one officer told Greg Jaffe of the Wall Street Journal in June 2003 that "a key mission for U.S. forces [in Africa] would be to ensure that Nigeria's oilfields, which in the future could account for as much as 25% of all U.S. oil imports, are secure".

Our Future - More Blood for Oil...
The use of U.S. military personnel to help protect vulnerable oil installations in conflict-prone, chronically unstable countries is certain to expand given three critical factors:

• America's ever-increasing dependence on imported petroleum,
• a global shift in oil production from the developed to the developing world, and
• the growing militarization of U.S. foreign energy policy.

This, then, is the future of U.S. military involvement abroad. While anti-terrorism and traditional national-security rhetoric will be employed to explain risky deployments abroad, a growing number of American soldiers and sailors will be committed to the protection of overseas oilfields, pipelines, refineries and tanker routes. And because these facilities are likely to come under increasing attack from guerrillas and terrorists, the risk to American lives will grow accordingly. Inevitably, Americans will pay a higher price in blood for every additional liter of oil they obtain from abroad.