Foreign Policy for Mark

Mark (if I remember correctly) is an ex-pat Canadian who loathes his former countrymen. He works in IT somewhere in Florida and is firmly in the centre of the USA's political spectrum. He finds US-Americans to be significantly more open-minded, tolerant, less dogmatically ideological, less irritatingly smug, than us Canucks. For some reason or other, Mark finds my blog mildly interesting and has frequently commented and critiqued me from a centrist US-American perspective.

We are in the last throes of an interesting discussion as to whether the USA's foreign policy with regards to the Middle East is primarily motivated by oil or not. I'm finding it interesting only because Mark refuses to side with klee-shayed left-wing non-US Americans such as myself, Naomi Klein, Linda McQuaig, and Alan Greenspan, who say that the US is in Iraq (for instance) because of its oil. I'm also finding it interesting because while Mark is a thoughtful, articulate person, he has made absolutely no attempt to respond to my request for an alternative explanation for the US invasion of Iraq, sabre-rattling against Iran, multi-billion dollar subsidizing of Israel and Egypt, and counter-productive (for the USA's own self-interest) enabling of Israel's offences against the Palestinian Arabs.

And it seems to me that if your country kills TWO MILLION PEOPLE (UN estimates of the preventable deaths which resulted from USA-UK-enforced UN sanctions against Saddam Hussein's government and the one-million excess deaths estimate from the credible John Hopkins study in The Lancet a few years back) that that is significant and bears looking into. Even in this day and age, killing TWO MILLION people is approaching Hitlerian (or Stalin and Mao) levels of mass murder. It doesn't "just happen" and if it does, that would mean that your country has been in the hands of a series of psychopaths from Bush Sr., to Clinton, to bush II.

In this post, Mark responded with a challenge as to why the USA did not seem to bother as much with slapping around non-Middle Eastern oil producers (including Russia and Canada) which I partially answered. Mark said that I didn't answer the more important second-half of his question:

If it's cheaper to smack around third world countries on the taxpayers dime, and then let the oil companies move in, why aren't more countries like Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Turkmenistan, and Gabon at the top of the list?

Again, if "big oil" was all about the $$$, why not abandon the US entirely (it's #3 on the list of oil producers) and invest all it's money in Mexico, where presumably, labor costs are cheaper, but the costs of transporting extraction equipment etc is presumably cheaper than transporting it half way across the world to a Middle Eastern nation, with the added bonus of not having to worry about Mexico suddenly nationalizing ones assets in a hissy fit?
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Why aren't there more third world hell-holes that can be easily pushed around in the top five? The top ten? The top fifteen? I'm sure with a combination of the right equipment and bribes some of these basket cases that produce 200,000 barrels a day could be ramp up production to 1-2 million barrels a day. There wouldn't even be the need to send in the USMC. Panama and Grenada are both nowhere near the top twenty by the way, so I think we can safely rule out oil as the reason for their invasion.

For that matter, about a third of US daily consumption can be met by domestic consumption, and between Canada and Mexico, most of US demand could be met solely through the NAFTA trading bloc.

So, in the hopes that Mark will either be convinced that maybe, just maybe, the USA is motivated by oil politics in the Middle East, or that at least he'll provide me with some non-laughable alternative explanation, I shall attempt to provide an answer to the USA's fixation on the Middle East and its oil.

The USA's involvement in the Middle East began to get big following World War II in the early days of the Cold War. The USA produced most of its own oil and got very little of the rest from the Middle East. It was Western Europe and Japan that got most of their oil from the Middle East. These two regions were the crucial US allies in sustaining the international capitalist system against the threat of Soviet communism and both of these regions were too weak to prevent the expansion of Soviet influence in the region. The British had been the ones who had previously dominated the oil-rich Gulf states and it was with them that the USA began to expand its involvement, in Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, especially. The future "Trilateral" partners of Western Europe and Japan were and are very vulnerable to supply disruptions and the USA did not want them subjected to extortion either from the Soviets or from domestic nationalists.

The thing about the Middle East's oil is that it's the cleanest, and easiest to access of all the huge deposits in all the world. The OPEC countries have not seriously industrialized and therefore don't use much of their fuel domestically. They set the price for the whole world oil industry. They have expensive infrastructure built up by decades of US and European investment. Have a look at the words of the USA's own Cold War planners had to say about the region's importance for them.

Why not Mexico or Nigeria? I don't know off-hand. Mexico nationalized its oil in the 1930s and was boycotted for two years until World War II forced the USA, Britain, and France to end the embargo. After the nationalist Cardenas presidency, Mexico and PeMex became regular, dependable suppliers to the USA under more traditionally pro-capitalist administrations. Nigeria? Why doesn't the USA slap Nigeria around and ignore the Middle East? Who is to say that Nigeria hasn't gotten as much investment from the West (including the USA) as it possibly could have? And when has Nigeria given the West any real trouble? And IF the USA were to build-up rivals to the Middle East they still couldn't ignore that area because somebody else would move in on that prize.

An excerpt from that Nigeria link might answer your question about why the US still gets oil from the relatively high labour costs US oil fields:

The importance of Nigerian oil to the world economy cannot be doubted. Indeed, Khan sees two main factors which contributed to Nigeria's early success as an oil-producing nation. "High production growth and profitability during the 1960s and 1970s were the result of two main factors: the high quality of Nigerian crudes, making them popular with Western European and North American refiners, as well as the proximity advantage that they had to these markets relative to Middle Eastern oil."

But that comparative advantage declined in the face of new competition from Europe itself. "The 1980s saw the emergence and growth of North Sea crudes of similar high quality, and thanks to technological advances and investments, increasingly sophisticated refining in the West. The latter made sulphur-heavy crudes more competitive than hitherto with Nigerian sweet and light crudes." In a word, the proximity of North Sea oil was greater than Nigerian oil and technological advances wiped out the qualitative differences in the two crudes. Khan is quite clear in tracing the exact effect of the emergence of North Sea oil on Nigeria's production. "A comparison of the Nigerian production decline in the years 1980-83 and the production increase in the North Sea is striking. Nigerian production fell by about 830,000 b/d, while North Sea production rose by about 840,000

Evidently there are big advantages of proximity to markets, skilled workers, technology, that can't be overcome simply by exploiting poor countries' oil. Anyway, for whatever reason, the USA now gets 17 percent of its oil from the Middle East, which is nothing to sneeze at.

This Foreign Policy article asks some of the questions you're asking Mark. Questions which I've already tried to answer. Discounting for a minute that your political elites ARE insane, the fact remains that while the costs of policing the Middle East for Western interests are born mainly by US taxpayers, the profits (to US oil companies and US military contractors) are enjoyed by the private sector. Let me repeat that: The US taxpayer pays for the costs of US government meddling in the Middle East, and this is done, as all things in the USA (from Wall Street bail-outs to individual mandates for over-priced health insurance) are done for, ... to benefit a tiny elite of wealthy oligarchic capitalists.

So there you have it Mark. You're free to mindlessly dismiss it. But for god's sake man! I've answered your question to the best of my ability. Now why has your government killed two million Iraqis and brought suffering and ruin to millions more? You're absolutely right, in practical terms, as a US citizen, your opinion counts more than mine with the US government. So tell us what your opinion is? WHY did your country kill two-million people with your's (and other citizens') tax dollars?

If it wasn't oil, then what was it? Are you going to say it was to fight terror or spread democracy (and therefore leave me open to make fun of YOU)? Or are you going to say that maybe your government is completely insane? Or is there some other rational explanation besides the lies of bush II and the oil thesis?

By the way Mark; if you haven't bought into the laughable excuses that bush II farted out and have a critical analysis, I'd keep quiet about it vis-a-vis your government actually, because they don't take kindly to criticism to tell you the truth. They're actually an elitist cabal of inhuman, undemocratic, oligarchic-capitalist scum.

But right here, right now, tell me why your government has killed TWO MILLION PEOPLE.

Thanks. Ta-ta!