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Timetables, schedules and deadlines are all ingenious devices that
help make life efficient, manageable and predictable to a certain
extent. But the recent debate in Washington over whether to set goals
and dates for withdrawing American forces from Iraq has about it the
artificial air of a theatrical skirmish that takes place stage front,
while the real scene is set behind closed curtains.
For it
denies the most strategic factor of all: Iraqi oil, and our vital
national interest in protecting our access to it, in lieu of a real
timetable to make America more energy independent through efficiency
measures, demand management and renewables.
Critics of the Bush
administration’s war policy argue that an open-ended commitment to keep
American military forces in Iraq is rapidly losing the support of an
American public dubious of the war’s origins and skeptical that
continuing the sacrifice of American troops contributes to our security
against terrorism. The president and his circle have responded that to
set dates for troop withdrawals, before Iraqi security forces are fully
prepared to defend themselves against the insurgency, would alert the
insurgents to lie low until the Americans are gone. The president’s
current pitch is to keep our military forces in Iraq “as long as we are
needed and not a day longer.”
Neither side even mentions the geopolitics of energy.
While
crude oil prices have soared to record levels, threatening the global
economy, all signs point to our continued and growing dependence on
Middle East oil. The United States consumes over 25 percent of the oil
produced worldwide, slightly more than half of which it imports. Even
the 2001 National Energy Policy Development Group chaired by Vice
President Cheney acknowledged that by 2020 Gulf oil producers are
projected to supply between 54 and 67 percent of the world’s oil and
“the global economy will almost certainly continue to depend on the
supply of oil from Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
members, particularly in the Gulf. This region will remain vital to
U.S. interests.” Despite this, the Bush administration has persuaded
the American media that control of Iraqi oil had nothing to do with the
war. But Iraqis know different.
A senior petroleum geologist
from the Iraq Ministry of Oil I met in Baghdad just after the downfall
of the tyrant Hussein said he had spent 30 years doing seismic studies
of Iraqi geology. Wherever he tested there were signs of oil. He
estimated that Iraq sits atop a vast underground lake of
petroleum—perhaps the largest reserves in the world, even larger than
Saudi Arabia, whose reserve calculations have long been suspect. Thanks
to UN sanctions and Saddam Hussein’s incompetent management, Iraqi oil
production has never reached a fraction of its potential. That would
change, once a pro-American Iraqi government installs a liberalized
investment regime favorable to American oil producers—and if Iraq is
sufficiently secure for development to move forward. Vijay
Vaitheeswaran of “The Economist” argued in his book “Power to the
People” that if Iraq turned its back on OPEC and threw open its taps to
the world market, it could undermine Saudi Arabia and the oil cartel to
become “America’s filling station.”
The Bush administration is
counting on Iraqi oil to help get our unsustainable culture of oil
consumption past the bottleneck in energy supplies that is already
starting to bite Americans at the gas pumps. The bipartisan Energy Bill
that just passed the Senate, with its billions for subsidizing oil,
gas, coal and nuclear power, rejected a serious national effort to tame
energy demand, make cars more fuel efficient and rev up renewable
energy sources like biomass fuels, wind, solar, tidal and small-scale
hydro power.
Iraq’s potential to bring more oil to the world
market will be slowed by the Jihadists’ oft-stated intention to damage
the American economy. If and when Iraqi oil development does take
place, we will have to protect those investments, wells, pipelines,
ports and other assets. To tell the American people otherwise is not
the kind of straight talk we need from our leaders. Though Cheney
thinks the Iraqi insurgency is in its last throes, America’s thirst for
Iraqi oil will guarantee that our military sacrifices there go on and
on.
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