May 18, 2006
Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.He can be reached through his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com
Nothing the Bush administration ever does is about
oil. It didn’t invade Iraq because that country might have more oil
than Saudi Arabia. It isn’t threatening Iran because Iran has a tenth
of the world’s oil and one-sixth of its natural gas. And the United
States isn’t cozying up to autocrats in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan
because the Caspian Sea is a mini-Persian Gulf in the middle of Central
Asia, either.
So it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that Washington isn’t making a
fuss over Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez because that country is a major
supplier of oil to the United States? And that it isn’t making nice to
Libya’s erratic Colonel Gadhafi because of oil, either?
"This decision is not undertaken because Libya has oil," said David
Welch, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, in
announcing that the United States is restoring diplomatic ties with
Libya and removing that country from the hard-to-get-off-of list of
nations linked to terrorism. Nevertheless, expect U.S. oil companies to
flock into Libya.
Let me hasten to add that it’s better to normalize relations with
Libya than to paint another regime change bull’s-eye on the map. And
certainly the fact that the United States was willing to engage in
direct talks with Libya—and successfully—underlines the absurdity of
the American refusal to engage Iran, North Korea, Syria, Hamas and, for
that matter, the Taliban. In addition, it needs to be pointed out that
the United States and Libya have been involved in a behind-the-scenes
minuet for years, one led in part by the CIA’s Steve Kappes—the covert
operative who was forced out of the agency by Porter Goss and who will
now be brought back into the fold by Michael Hayden, the
director-designate. Neoconservatives who claim that Libya’s agreed to
end its weapons of mass destruction programs because it was terrified
of being the next Iraq are flat wrong since the deal was in the works
long before the spring of 2003.
Still, it’s hard not to get a queasy feeling about the
rehabilitation of the Libyan colonel. He is indisputably a loose cannon
with agents and operatives all over sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa
and the Middle East, including Chad, Sudan and elsewhere. And, perhaps
ominously if you are the king of Saudi Arabia or the president of
Egypt, the head of Libya’s Revolutionary Committees announced that
Tripoli is ready to help President Bush "to spread democracy around the
world together." Just a couple of years ago, Libya cheerfully tried to
spread democracy to Saudi Arabia by plotting the assassination of Saudi
Arabia’s King Abdullah, who was then crown prince.
Whatever the merits of the U.S.-Libyan rapprochement, it boggles the
mind that the United States is moving in the opposite direction in
regard to Venezuela. (Piling irony on irony, Chavez arrived in Libya on
Wednesday to meet Gadhafi.) Even as it subtracted Libya, the United
States took a major step toward adding Venezuela to the list of
terrorism-supporting countries. The State Department announced that it
is imposing a ban on the sale of weapons, including spare parts for
F-16 Falcons, to Venezuela. In doing so, the spokesman for the State
Department—noting that he "can’t get into all the details of
it"—essentially accused Venezuela’s intelligence service of working
with Iran and Cuba to support terrorism and drug gangs in neighboring
Colombia.
The charges are absurd on their face and, unsurprisingly, the
government of Venezuela angrily rejected the accusations. In fact,
Venezuela has more reason to add the United States on its list of terrorism-supporting countries. The United States is harboring a former Venezuelan intelligence official,
Luis Posada Cariles, who blew up a Cuban airplane in 1976. At the time
Cariles was operating out of Caracas in coordination with anti-Castro
extremists. In 1985 he escaped from a Venezuelan prison and today
Venezuela is seeking his extradition from the United States. In
addition, in a move that was not exactly a manifestation of the Good
Neighbor policy, the Bush administration endorsed a coup d’etat two years ago in which the Venezuelan right briefly toppled Chavez.
Although the Bush administration claims to be engaged in a global
war on terrorism and a campaign to extend U.S.-style democracy, it is
more than apparent that Washington is in fact pursuing a worldwide
strategy driven by the geopolitics of oil—and not just in regard to
Libya and Venezuela. Iran and Iraq, of course, come to mind. More
broadly, in recent weeks President Bush played obsequious host to
President Ilham Aliev of oil-rich Azerbaijan. Bush warmly embraced
Aliev, a less-than-democratic leader whose energy resources and
strategic position make him an important player both in pipeline
politics and in regard to U.S. plans for regime change in Iran.
One-fourth of Iran’s population is comprised of Azeris. Then Vice
President Cheney trundled into oil-rich and autocratic Kazakhstan last
week, on a jaunt during which he warned Russia against using "oil and
gas [as] tools of intimidation and blackmail."
Of course. Using oil and gas for intimidation and blackmail? That’s America’s job.
