When lots of people said, "We invaded Iraq because of the oil", I was willing to consider it as one possible reason, but it also had the hollow ring of empty rhetoric for me, especially as we failed to produce a decent flow of crude.
(3.5M bbl/day pre-war, 1.5M bbl/day now)
It seems I was pretty wrong on that one. Almost crazy stupid wrong. For one thing, while invading Iraq was indeed about securing the supply, more importantly it was about controlling the flow (but that's just a little bonus info - read on).
A book review by
Matt Stoller via Naked Capitalism:
The use of coal and oil in the context of industrialization has always been about who has the power to profit from the surplus these energy forms produce, but until now, no one has pulled the various historical details together into a historical narrative laying bare the fascinating power dynamics behind the rise of Western political systems and their relationship with energy. Carbon Democracy is an examination of our civilization’s 400 hundred year use of carbon-based energy fueling sources, and the political systems that grew up intertwined with them. Rather than presenting energy and democracy as separate things, like a battery and a device, Mitchell discusses the political architecture of the Western world and the developing world as inherently tied to fueling sources. The thesis is that elites have always sought to maximize not the amount of energy they could extract and use, but the profit stream from those energy sources. They struggled to ensure they would be able to burn carbon and profit, without having to rely on the people who extract and burned it for them. Carbon-based fuels thus cannot be understood except in the context of labor, imperialism and democracy.
--and--
And oil companies operated not to maximize production, but to sabotage it. Mitchell wrote, “The companies had learned from Standard Oil that it was easier to control the means of transportation. Building railways and pipelines required negotiating rights from the government, which typically granted the further right to prevent the establishing of competing lines. After obtaining the rights, the aim was usually to delay construction, but without losing the right. Iraq became the key place to sabotage the production of oil. It would retain that role through much of the twentieth century, and reacquire it in a different way in the twenty-first century.”
So it turns out that all the Geopolitics and whatever nuevo-jargon maneuverings you care to mention over the last 50 years or so is just the same old imperial game of grab the cash and make a stash?
Same shit, new day. And Jesus wept.
