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Today's
Stories
December 6 / 7, 2003
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
December 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Jeremy Scahill
Bremer
of the Tigris
Jeremy Brecher
Amistad
Revisited at Guantanamo?
Norman Solomon
Dean
and the Corp Media Machine
Norman Madarasz
France
Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money
Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
November 14 / 23, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime:
Was It Really a Golden Age?
Saul Landau
Words
of War
Noam Chomsky
Invasion
as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy
Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl
John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills
Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith
Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees
Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins
M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory
Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete
Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil
Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?
William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics
Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First
Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners
Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly
Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review
of Bush in Babylon
Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq
Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions
Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?
David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead
Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film
Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
November 13, 2003
Jack McCarthy
Veterans
for Peace Booted from Vet Day Parade
Adam Keller
Report
on the Ben Artzi Verdict
Richard Forno
"Threat Matrix:" Homeland Security Goes Prime-Time
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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December
6 / 7, 2003
Oil, Power and Empire
Iraq
and the US Global Agenda
By LARRY EVEREST
The U.S. government has mustered a dizzying and
often shifting assortment of "reasons" for invading
and occupying Iraq. At one time or another--sometimes in the
next breath--it cited weapons of mass destruction and imminent
threats to America, links to terrorism and al Qaeda, liberating
the Iraqi people, and transforming the entire Middle East. Yet,
as it was going on ad nauseam about such nonexistent threats,
phantom connections, and hollow promises, there was one real
issue that the Bush team adamantly refused to discuss at all:
oil. Before the war, Rumsfeld even told CBS News that
the U.S. conflict with Iraq "has nothing to do with oil,
literally nothing to do with oil."
Bush II officials studiously avoided
even mentioning the 'o-word.' At one White House briefing on
October 9, 2002, a reporter asked press spokesman Ari Fleischer,
"how much does oil have to do with the assessment of the
threat from Saddam Hussein? President Bush didn't mention it."
Fleischer first claimed not to "follow" the question,
then said it was "not a factor." He wouldn't even utter
the word "oil" in the back-and-forth. Two days later,
The New York Times reported that the Pentagon had plans
to occupy Iraq and take control of its oil fields.
Behind closed doors, Bush was giving
top U.S. corporate heads and financiers a different message:
according to Bob Woodward's recent book Bush At War, in
October 2001, on the eve of war with Afghanistan and as planning
was beginning for invading Iraq, he told a private New York meeting
of business leaders, "I truly believe that out of this will
come more order in the world-real progress to peace in the Middle
East, stability  with oil-producing regions."
In his paean to his former boss, Bush speech writer David Frum
laid it out more directly: America's new global "war on
terror," he wrote, was designed to "bring new freedom
and new stability to the most vicious and violent quadrant of
the earth-and new prosperity to us all, by securing the world's
largest pool of oil."
Overthrowing Saddam Hussein, creating
a client state in Iraq, and opening up Iraq's economy are key
components of a much larger, multi-faceted global agenda in which
energy resources play a crucial role. The point is not that the
Bush inner circle waged war simply to secure Iraq's oil for American
profit or consumption. Yet petroleum was a central and
major objective--if understood in the larger context of global
empire. Most broadly, the 2003 invasion and occupation were designed
to solidify American political/military domination of the energy
heart of world -- the Middle East/Central Asian region, and are
part of broader efforts to secure control of global energy sources
and use that control to ensure the smooth functioning of U.S.
capitalism, strengthen its competitive position in world markets,
and increase U.S. leverage against potential rivals. In short,
oil is a powerful instrument of hegemony, which is what the new
Bush II National Security Strategy is all about.
Controlling Persian Gulf oil and dominating
world energy markets has been a prime U.S. strategic objective
for over 60 years, as examined in previous chapters. However,
the global energy picture does not remain constant: the tension
between supply and demand evolves, and new dynamics and problems
arise. Two trends stand out today: the precarious nature of the
global economy and the possibility that growing energy demand
will outstrip the global capacity to meet it.
A look at these concerns and how the
capitalist political elite is approaching them opens a window
on some of the deep compulsions and potential opportunities that
drove the 2003 war on Iraq and continue to drive the Bush II
global agenda.
U.S. Strategists Declare:
"It's the Oil, Stupid"
A key element of the new Bush doctrine
is leveraging current U.S. military supremacy into economic supremacy
and dealing with various difficulties confronting the global
economy. Oil and natural gas play an important part in this grand
design.
The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union
was a geopolitical earthquake, but it did not lead to U.S. economic
dominance. In his 1995 brief for global supremacy, current Bush
II official Zalmay Khalilzad worried that rivals were gaining
ground: "economic growth under way in Asia...will produce
important changes in relative economic power-with important potential
geopolitical and military implications" and "intensified
international economic competition."
Nor did the fall of the Soviet empire
usher in an era of sustained economic growth; instead, the global
economy has remained fragile. "The world economy is in trouble,"
wrote Jeffrey Garten, a former government official and now dean
of the Yale School of Management, in early 2003. "Corporate
investment and trade are slowing, factories are producing more
than they can sell, and deflation is threatening many regions.
The two potential economic engines besides the United States
- Germany and Japan - are stagnating. Big emerging markets, from
Indonesia to Brazil, are in deep trouble."
The new National Security Strategy promises
to ignite "a new era of global economic growth through free
markets and free trade," and to use American preeminence
to promote an "efficient allocation of resources, and regional
integration." In other words, the U.S. seeks to use its
military power to secure favored access to markets, raw materials,
and human labor across the planet.
Joseph Nye, dean of the Kennedy School
at Harvard, compares the Bush II strategy to a three-dimensional
chessboard: "The top board is the military and we can do
pretty much what we want. The middle board is economics, and
is not a world America controls." Cheney and Rumsfeld are
focusing on the "top board," he argues, in order to
parlay U.S. military power into greater economic and political
power. Nye's "bottom level" consists of factors beyond
Washington's control -- anti-U.S. movements, weapons proliferation,
the spread of infectious disease, etc. He warns, "The Cheney-Rumsfeld
focus on the top board may win in the short run, but will cause
lots of problems in the long run."
This is where oil ties in: global capitalism
remains dependent on a steady flow of low-priced petroleum, making
oil both vital to the health of the world economy and key to
the competitive position of rival nations. "The single best
cyclical indicator for the world economy is the price of oil,"
one economist told The New York Times, "Nothing moves
in the world economy without oil in there somewhere."
Despite a shift from manufacturing to
services and increases in energy efficiency, the U.S. still relies
on petroleum products for 40 percent of its energy needs and
remains the world's biggest energy glutton, devouring 19 million
barrels of oil a day. With a mere three percent of the world's
population, it consumes over 25 percent of the global output
of crude. "The price shocks from a serious disruption in
oil supplies would course through every quarter of the United
States economy," The New York Times notes. "The
drain on people's incomes and companies' revenue would further
sap a weakened economy." One Goldman-Sachs analyst told
Forbes Magazine, "Any [oil] price increase has devastating
effects on the U.S. economy."
On the other hand, in 1991 economics
lecturer Alan Freeman estimated that each $1 fall in the price
of a barrel of oil transferred roughly $5 billion a year from
Third World producing countries to North America, and the difference
between oil at $20 and oil at $25 a barrel meant the transfer
of $70 to $100 billion from the impoverished south to the industrialized
north. These figures are no doubt even more staggering today
given the rise in world oil consumption.
Former Clinton official Kenneth Pollack,
echoing Kissinger's words from two decades earlier, is blunt
about the oil connection:
It's the Oil, Stupid--The reason the
United States has a legitimate and critical interest in seeing
that Persian Gulf oil continues to flow copiously and relatively
cheaply is simply that the global economy built over the last
50 years rests on a foundation of inexpensive, plentiful oil,
and if that foundation were removed, the global economy would
collapse.
***
Oil, Power and Empire is now available at bookstores
(distributed by Consortium and Ingram) or through Common Courage
Press: 800.497.3207
To purchase online or contact author Larry Everest: www.larryeverest.com
ISBN: 1-56751-246-1 paper $19.95
390 pages, appendix, chronology, index
* Larry Everest will be discussing
the oil connection on KPFA's Flashpoints (94.1 FM, 5-6 pm) this
Monday, Dec. 8
* Book Launch: Author Signing, Conversation, Refreshments
Thursday, December 11, 2003--7:00 PM
Revolution Books
2425 Channing Way, Berkeley
510.848.1196
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
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