It has always come down to one thing.
Let's put things in the crudest possible terms. Since long before the Gulf War, the United States has been bombing, destabilizing and, yes, terrorizing other countries for cheap, plentiful oil. Don't stand between a hyperpower and its blood supply.
American thirst for oil helps to explain all kinds of recent international events, including the war on terrorism. This February, everyone was too busy counting dead Al Qaeda to notice Hamid Karzai, the new US-backed Afghan president, strike an agreement with Pakistan for a trans-Afghanistan pipeline from the vast Caspian oil reserves. Rumored to be in the running for the multi-billion-dollar contract: American petroleum giant Unocal, who in the late 1990s tried and failed to negotiate a similar deal with the Taliban. Then there's April's short-lived coup against the elected government of oil-rich Venezuela, a revolt supported and possibly initiated by the Bush administration to guarantee supplies in the event of an Arab embargo.
Big Oil and the Bush administration go way back. Both the Bush family and US Vice President Dick Cheney got rich in the petroleum biz. Fossil-fuel companies contributed $1.8 million to George Bush's 2000 presidential campaign. Bush Sr. is an advisor to the Carlyle Group, which observers say secured lucrative Saudi Arabian investments as payback for Pappy Bush's stomping of Iraq in the Gulf War. Hamid Karzai used to consult for Unocal, as did Zalmay Khalilzad, US special envoy to Afghanistan. Months before September 11, American officials told the Pakistani foreign secretary that an attack on Afghanistan was planned for October.
In a global economy fuelled by the combustion engine, the US won't let OPEC hold it over a barrel much longer. American gas pumps must keep running over at rock-bottom prices ? with the profits flowing to American oil barons. Accomplishing that requires a war on many fronts, in many guises, and with many tragic consequences. Who better to make it happen than George W. Bush, a man whose private fortunes mesh so seamlessly with his public ambitions? It's nothing personal. It's just business.
Benefiting most unabashedly from these cozy arrangements is ExxonMobil, also known as Esso and Imperial Oil. The world's biggest oil and gas company, it's on its way to making petroleum the new tobacco.
While Shell, BP, and other smaller players are coming round to renewable energy, ExxonMobil will have none of it. Researching alternatives like wind and solar power might cut into the bottom line ($17.7 billion in 2000, the largest profit of any corporation in history). ExxonMobil has better ways to spend its money: stepping up exploration and production, helping get George Bush elected, lobbying the US government to abandon the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. As a result, ExxonMobil is now the worst polluter on the planet. It also rejects all evidence that fossil fuels cause global warming, predicted to endanger hundreds of millions of lives over the next century.
ExxonMobil can't do any of these things if people stop driving up to its pumps and buying gas.
? Nick Rockel