While
chants of "No War for Oil" mark an increasingly dissenting and
skeptical public, the Bush administration has continued bulldozing its
way towards a crushing Iraq rendezvous. As you read this war may already
have begun. But startling in its candor, a US Department of Defense
document has just been discovered, a top-level document specifically
discussing war for oil. This is the first official document found
explicitly confirming as policy the US Defense Department's readiness to
wage oil war.
According to the report--Strategic Assessment 1999--prepared for the US
Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense (and only recently
unearthed by this journalist), "energy and resource issues will
continue to shape international security". Explicitly envisioned
were potential oil "conflicts over production facilities and
transportation routes", particularly in the Persian Gulf and Caspian
regions.
Paradoxically, Strategic Assessment 1999 forecast it was "most
likely" that America would not need to "employ military
forces" to obtain energy. But the Assessment nevertheless ranks as
extraordinary, doing so because it positively documents an official
willingness to wage oil war, a willingness at the very highest levels of
the US defense community.
While the document was prepared under Clinton, it suggests he was willing
to wage war only to protect what he perceived as the existing interests
of America's economy. In contrast, war critics have repeatedly charged
that Bush is seeking to conquer new interests, not defend old one's.
Clinton may have opened the door, but Bush marched through it.
In what many will see as a disturbing parallel to present events, the
Report also drew attention to pre-WWII Britain's pursuit of an approach
where "control over territory was seen as essential to ensuring
resource supplies". However, the defense policymakers authoring
Strategic Assessment also appear cognizant of the potential consequences
of such policies. The authors warned that if the great powers should
return to "the 19th century approach" of securing resources, of
conquering resource suppliers, "the world economy would suffer and
world politics would become more tense".
Although at the time of its writing, Strategic Assessment 1999 predicted
adequate US energy supplies, it also found that supply shortages
"could exacerbate underlying political differences and serve as a
catalyst for regional conflicts", illustrating oil war's potential
trigger. And the Bush administration has repeatedly stated that America
is facing what has been termed an "energy crisis".
Highlighting the Assessment's importance, it was prepared by the
Institute for National Strategic Studies, part of the US Department of
Defense's National Defense University. The Institute is located at Fort
McNair in Washington, DC, and lists its primary mission as policy
"research and analysis" for the Joint Chiefs, the Defense
Secretary, and other key US Governmental security and defense bodies. But
this DOD "smoking gun" is linked to another.
In 2001 US VP Dick Cheney headed the Bush administration's National
Energy Policy Development Group, an energy task force working to devise a
National Energy Policy to address America's looming shortages. In line
with the defense policy outlined in Strategic Assessment, it had been
urged that Cheney's task force include DOD participation. And so it will
surprise few that the Bush administration has been going to extraordinary
lengths to conceal both who attended the Cheney energy task force's
meetings and what those meetings were about.
Commenting upon the nature of this concealment, Congressman Henry Waxman
(D-CA), the ranking member of the Committee on Government Reform, said
"The White House should simply try telling the truth on the Task
Force's activities and stop hiding information that Congress and the
public have a right to see." The Administration's stonewalling also
spawned a lawsuit by the General Accounting Office (GAO), the
investigative arm of Congress.
The Cheney Task force confrontation resulted in the GAO pursuing the
first lawsuit in its 81 year history, though, that suit was dismissed
this December by Judge John Bates, a recent Bush appointee. Bates'
decision found that the GAO had "no standing" to sue Cheney or
any other executive branch official for information.
In a sharp reflection upon that decision, John Dean (the former
Republican Presidential Counsel) wrote, "the present situation is
absurd". Dean charged that Bates' ruling means an ordinary US
citizen has more power to compel the release of government information
than the investigative arm of America's Congress.
Cutting to what many perceive as the ruling's true basis, Congressman
John Dingle (D-MI), ranking member of the Committee on Energy and
Commerce, charged "Vice President Cheney's cover-up will apparently
continue for the foreseeable future". And summarizing the key
question, the former US Vice-Presidential candidate, Sen. Joseph
Lieberman, asked, "What are they hiding?".
While most speculation regarding the Cheney task force has centered
around its relationship to the energy industry, the military implications
of task force deliberations--military action to secure oil and gas
supplies--has yet to be addressed. And notably, according to a February
headline in The Hill--the largest of Capitol Hill's political newsletters
and among the most respected--"GOP threats halted Cheney suit",
with The Hill reporting that Republicans had threatened to cut the GAO's
budget should an appeal of Judge Bates' ruling be pursued.
http://www.counterpunch.org/goldstein03142003.html
