Oil Wars, Moral cancers and 'sanctions of mass destruction'

Living on Lies

Oil Wars: a Moral Cancer

by WILLIAM MANSON

“Something is rotten in the state…”

- Marcellus, in “Hamlet”

In our times, in a media-saturated culture in which well-packaged and comforting lies are explicitly preferred to unsettling truths, those who reveal sordid realities are often dismissed if not reviled.  Whistleblowers and voices of integrity—such as Julian Assange and Bradley Manning—engage in the often-thankless vocation of disturbing complacency; and those awakened from their lying dreams angrily threaten to “kill the messenger” (figuratively—or perhaps literally).

I am reminded of Henrik Ibsen’s bitterly satirical play An Enemy of the People.  The protagonist, a maverick scientist named Dr. Stockmann, has dreamed up a project to turn his backwater town into a cosmopolitan health spa.  However, he later discovers that the project, upon which the town has invested its capital and its future, is hopelessly ruined by contaminating waste coming from upriver.  At a meeting of the townspeople, he tries mightily to inform, explain, warn—but his fellow citizens refuse to listen and shout him down, finally even labeling him “an enemy of the people.”  At that moment, he announces the discovery of an even greater source of corruption–“that all the sources of our moral life are poisoned and that the whole fabric of our civic community is founded on the pestiferous soil of falsehood.”

In the last half of the 20^th century, the American economy promised the realization of a “dream” of universal home ownership and a veritable cornucopia of consumer goods. The coveted, high-consumption ideal of unparalleled material comforts, based as it was on easy credit, offered the two-car garage and four-bedroom house.  But by the 1990s, with almost one motor vehicle per adult and domestic oil fields largely depleted, the U.S. economy had become addicted to an endless ocean of foreign oil.  Per capita consumption of oil remained at a rate roughly twice that of western Europe.

As U.S.-based oil companies further extended their tentacles globally, a bloated U.S. War Machine-in-overdrive laid waste to entire countries, creating incalculable human suffering in its quest to secure access to the oil which fed an insatiable Moloch called the “American Way of Life.”   Dis-information and fabricated pretexts manufactured the consent of a largely passive populace that resigned itself to, or often cheered on, the next waging of aggressive war–“the supreme international crime,” according to the Nuremberg Charter.   By 1996, U.S. diplomat Madeleine Albright matter-of-factly stated on national television that the deliberate killing some 500,000 Iraqi children had been “worth it”—and her remark provoked little concern, let alone outrage, among the American citizenry.  (The draconian U.S.-UN sanctions in the early 1990s, had deprived the Iraqi people—whose water treatment plants and medical facilities had been deliberately destroyed in the Gulf War—of urgent necessities like vaccines, medicines, food.)

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The statistics are horrifying, unspeakable—although we must (relentlessly) speak of them.  If one ponders, for even a few minutes, what such statistics mean, one suffers serious emotional disturbance and disorientation.  “Roughly” 500,000 children in the early 1990s?  “About” a million people killed by the invasion and its aftermath?  “A few million” more lives maimed, displaced, wrecked (as much by grief and despair as by physical mutilation)?  Such statistics are terribly abstract, obscenely abstract: an adding-machine tabulates an endless list of corpses into an abstract figure to be entered in the chronicle of  “collateral damage,” “civilian casualties,”—or a “body count.”

Yet such icy abstraction can suddenly become terribly concrete—when we scrutinize up-close the faces and bodies of children “unlucky” enough to have inhabited a city called Falluja.  In the short RAI documentary “Falluja: The Hidden Massacre,” we see a city completely in ruins, bricks strewn everywhere, with the occasional motionless, crushed child to be discerned beneath the rubble.  We see, with a fierce lucidity, the squashed faces and scorched skulls of little children—viciously burnt to death by the napalm (MK77) the killers chose to inflict on these innocent victims.  We see many other things, unspeakable things, unspeakable crimes of which we must find a way to speak—and to speak with searing moral clarity.

Within neo-colonial systems (empires), those living in the “core” nation are led to believe that they can and should enjoy an affluent standard of material comforts—even if it is based on military conquest, resource-extraction, and the exploitation of cheap labor (in “peripheral” places like the Middle East).  Those Americans who continue to believe in an unrealistic standard of material affluence—based as it is on an addiction to an energy-guzzling, hyper-consumption “way of life”—will continue to tolerate U.S.-initiated oil wars and minimize the threats posed by global warming.  (Indeed, Cheney’s secretive Energy Task Force—comprised mostly of top-level U. S. oil executives—had mapped out some of the coveted Mideastern oil fields; upon U.S. occupation, the contracts and profit-sharing agreements were anticipated to be highly favorable.)

If trying to sustain the “ideal” of American-style prosperity nowadays is based on war (i.e., imperial Terrorism)—as well as its counterparts of trade embargoes and “regime change”–why even care if the U.S. economy continues to falter or even collapse?  True, those who suffer the most are always poor people and innocent children.  Nonetheless, even with better jobs and financial reform, the coveted “American Dream” of material affluence can only be sustained by Middle Eastern (and possibly Venezuelan?) oil—favorable access to which has been gained through military aggression, draconian sanctions, and neoliberal privatizations.

The “American Dream”–with its equation of “consuming” with living, with its “middle-class” ideal of big cars and big homes, with its addiction to frivolous (and vulgar) amusements—is in itself morally bankrupt.  The culture is an insatiable Moloch which feeds on oil—and has already demanded the mass sacrifices of innocent children ten thousands miles away to get it.

A shrinking “middle-class”?  Insufficient “stimulus” to jump-start “consumer demand”?  Sixty-year congressional gridlock regarding universal “health care”?  Surrounded by a soulless banality propped up by vicious wars, those who hold fast to truth and universal human values are confronted with Dr. Stockmann’s haunting question: “What does the destruction of a [society] matter, if it lives on lies?”

William Manson, a psychoanalytic anthropologist,  formerly taught social science at Rutgers and Columbia universities. He is the author of The Psychodynamics of Culture (Greenwood Press).

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/31/oil-wars-a-moral-cancer/

William Blum

Official website of the author, historian, and U.S. foreign policy critic.

The Anti-Empire Report #117

By William Blum – Published June 4th, 2013

Pipelineistan

I have written on more than one occasion about the value of preaching and repeating to the choir on a regular basis. One of my readers agreed with this, saying: “How else has Christianity survived 2,000 years except by weekly reinforcement?”

Well, dear choir, beloved parishioners, for this week’s sermon we once again turn to Afghanistan. As US officials often make statements giving the impression that the American military presence in that sad land is definitely winding down – soon to be all gone except for the standard few thousand American servicemen which almost every country in the world needs stationed on their territory – one regularly sees articles in the mainstream media and government releases trying to explain what it was all about. For what good reason did thousands of young Americans breathe their last breath in that backward country and why were tens of thousands of Afghans dispatched by the United States to go meet Allah (amidst widespread American torture and other violations of human rights)?

The Washington Post recently cited a Defense Department report that states: The United States “has wound up with a reasonable ‘Plan B’ for achieving its core objective of preventing Afghanistan from once again becoming a safe haven for al-Qaeda and its affiliates.”

“Preventing a safe haven for terrorists” – that was the original reason given back in 2001 for the invasion of Afghanistan, a consistency in sharp contrast to the ever-changing explanations for Iraq. However, it appears that the best and the brightest in our government and media do not remember, if they ever knew, that Afghanistan was not really about 9-11 or fighting terrorists (except the many the US has created by its invasion and occupation), but was about pipelines.

President Obama declared in August 2009: “But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.” 2

Never mind that out of the tens of thousands of people the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001.

Never mind – even accepting the official version of 9/11 – that the “plotting to attack America” in 2001 was devised in Germany and Spain and the United States more than in Afghanistan. Why didn’t the United States bomb those countries?

Indeed, what actually was needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with a table and some chairs? What does “an even larger safe haven” mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere. At the present time there are anti-American terrorist types meeting in Libya, Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, London, Paris, and many other places. And the Taliban of Afghanistan would not be particularly anti-American if the United States had not invaded and occupied their country. The Taliban are a diverse grouping of Afghan insurgents whom the US military has come to label with a single name; they are not primarily international jihadists like al-Qaeda and in fact have had an up-and-down relationship with the latter.

The only “necessity” that drew the United States to Afghanistan was the desire to establish a military presence in this land that is next door to the Caspian Sea region of Central Asia – reportedly containing the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world – and build oil and gas pipelines from that region running through Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is well situated for such pipelines to serve much of South Asia and even parts of Europe, pipelines that – crucially – can bypass Washington’s bêtes noire, Iran and Russia. If only the Taliban would not attack the lines. Here’s Richard Boucher, US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, in 2007: “One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south.” 3

Since the 1980s all kinds of pipelines have been planned for the area, only to be delayed or canceled by one military, financial or political problem or another. For example, the so-called TAPI pipeline (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) had strong support from Washington, which was eager to block a competing pipeline that would bring gas to Pakistan and India from Iran. TAPI goes back to the late 1990s, when the Taliban government held talks with the California-based oil company Unocal Corporation. These talks were conducted with the full knowledge of the Clinton administration, and were undeterred by the extreme repression of Taliban society. Taliban officials even made trips to the United States for discussions. 4

Testifying before the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific on February 12, 1998, Unocal representative John Maresca discussed the importance of the pipeline project and the increasing difficulties in dealing with the Taliban:

The region’s total oil reserves may well reach more than 60 billion barrels of oil. Some estimates are as high as 200 billion barrels … From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of the pipeline we have proposed across Afghanistan could not begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, leaders, and our company.

When those talks with the Taliban stalled in 2001, the Bush administration reportedly threatened the Taliban with military reprisals if the Afghan government did not go along with American demands. On August 2 in Islamabad, US State Department negotiator Christine Rocca reiterated to the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef: “Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold [oil], or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.” 5 The talks finally broke down for good a month before 9-11.

The United States has been serious indeed about the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf oil and gas areas. Through one war or another beginning with the Gulf War of 1990-1, the US has managed to establish military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan.

The war against the Taliban can’t be “won” short of killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States may well try again to negotiate some form of pipeline security with the Taliban, then get out, and declare “victory”. Barack Obama can surely deliver an eloquent victory speech from his teleprompter. It might even include the words “freedom” and “democracy”, but certainly not “pipeline”.

“We are literally backing the same people in Syria that we are fighting in Afghanistan and that have just killed our ambassador in Libya! We must finally abandon the interventionist impulse before it is too late.” – Congressman Ron Paul, September 16, 2012 6

How it all began: “To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom. Their courage teaches us a great lesson – that there are things in this world worth defending. To the Afghan people, I say on behalf of all Americans that we admire your heroism, your devotion to freedom, and your relentless struggle against your oppressors.” – President Ronald Reagan, March 21, 1983

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Washington’s sanctions against Iran are a wonder to behold, seriously hampering Tehran’s ability to conduct international commerce, make payments, receive money, import, export, invest, travel … you name the hardship and the United States is trying to impose it on the government and the people of Iran. In early May a bipartisan bill was introduced in Congress aimed at stopping Iran from gaining access to its billions of dollars in euros kept in overseas banks – money that represents up to a third of Tehran’s total hard-currency holdings. In addition, Congress is looking to crack down on a weakness in current sanctions law that allows Iran to replenish its hard-currency accounts by acquiring gold through overseas markets.

Washington has as well closed down Iran’s media operations in the United States, is putting great pressure on Pakistan to cancel their project to build a pipeline to import natural gas from Iran, and punished countless international companies for doing business with Iran.

After a plane crash in Iran in 2011, the Washington Post reported: “Plane crashes are common in Iran, which for decades has been prevented from buying spare parts for its aging fleet by sanctions imposed by the United States.” 7

There are many more examples of the sanctions of mass destruction.

All this to force Iran to abandon any program that might conceivably lead someday to a nuclear weapon, thus depriving Israel of being the only nuclear power in the Middle East. The United States doesn’t actually say this. It instead says, explicitly or implicitly, that a nuclear Iran would be a danger to attack the US or Israel, without giving any reason why Iran would act so suicidal; at the same time Washington ignores repeated statements from various Israeli and American officials that they have no such fear.

Now, a group of US lawmakers is proposing a more drastic remedy: cutting off Iran entirely from world oil markets. Oil sales provide Iran with the bulk of its foreign-currency earnings. The plan would require all countries to stop buying oil from Iran or risk losing access to the US banking system. 

http://williamblum.org/aer/read/117