[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 54 (Thursday, April 3, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H2812-H2815]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




          ESTABLISHING A PERMANENT PRESENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I want to bring to your attention a 
fascinating article in this month's issue of Mother Jones magazine, 
written by Robert Dreyfuss, and it deals with the question of 
establishing a permanent presence in the Middle East. I wanted to point 
out that this issue of oil, which fuels military power, national 
treasuries and international politics, is no longer a commodity to be 
bought and sold within the confines of traditional energy supply and 
demand balances. Rather, it has been transformed into a determinant of 
well-being of national security and of international

[[Page H2813]]

power. I recommend it to the attention of all of my colleagues.
  Mr. Speaker, I submit the above-mentioned article for the Record.

          Establishing a Permanent Presence in the Middle East

       If your were to spin the globe and look for real estate 
     critical to building an American empire, your first stop 
     would have to be the Persian Gulf. The desert sands of this 
     region hold two of every three barrels oil in the world-
     Iraq's reserves alone are equal, by some estimates, to those 
     of Russia, the United States, China, and Mexico combined. For 
     the past 30 years, the Gulf has been in the crosshairs of an 
     influential group of Washington foreign-policy strategists, 
     who believe that in order to ensure its global dominance, the 
     United States must seize control of the region and its oil. 
     Born during the energy crisis of the 1970s and refined since 
     then by a generation of policymakers, this approach is 
     finding its boldest expression yet in the Bush 
     administration--which, with its plan to invade Iraq and 
     install a regime beholden to Washington, has moved closer 
     than any of its predecessors to transforming the Gulf into an 
     American protectorate.
       In the geopolitical vision driving current U.S. policy 
     toward Iraq, the key to national security is global 
     hegemony--dominance over any and all potential rivals. To 
     that end, the United States must not only be able to project 
     its military forces anywhere, at any time. It must also 
     control key resources, chief among them oil--and especially 
     Gulf oil. To the hawks who now set the tone at the White 
     House and the Pentagon, the region is crucial not simply for 
     its share of the U.S. oil supply (other sources have become 
     more important over the years), but because it would allow 
     the United States to maintain a lock on the world's energy 
     life-line and potentially deny access to its global 
     competitors. The administration ``believes you have to 
     control resources in order to have access to them,'' says 
     Chas Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia 
     under the first President Bush. ``They are taken with the 
     idea that the end of the Cold War left the United States able 
     to impose its will globally--and that those who have the 
     ability to shape events with power have the duty to do so. 
     It's ideology.''
       Iraq, in this view, is a strategic prize of unparalleled 
     importance. Unlike the oil beneath Alaska's frozen tundra, 
     locked away in the steppes of central Asia, or buried under 
     stormy seas, Iraq's crude is readily accessible and, at less 
     than $1.50 a barrel, some of the cheapest in the world to 
     produce. Already, over the past several months, Western 
     companies have been meeting with Iraqi exiles to try to stake 
     a claim to that bonanza.
       But while the companies hope to cash in on an American-
     controlled Iraq, the push to remove Saddam Hussein hasn't 
     been driven by oil executives, many of whom are worried about 
     the consequences of war. Nor are Vice President Cheney and 
     President Bush, both former oilmen, looking at the Gulf 
     simply for the profits that can be earned there. The 
     administration is thinking bigger, much bigger, than that.
       ``Controlling Iraq is about oil as power, rather than oil 
     as fuel,'' says Michael Klare, professor of peace and world 
     security studies at Hampshire College and author of Resource 
     Wars. ``Control over the Persian Gulf translates into control 
     over Europe, Japan, and China. It's having our hand on the 
     spigot.''
       Ever since the oil shocks of the 1970s, the United States 
     has steadily been accumulating military muscle in the Gulf by 
     building bases, selling weaponry, and forging military 
     partnerships. Now, it is poised to consolidate its might in a 
     place that will be a fulcrum of the world's balance of power 
     for decades to come. At a stroke, by taking control of Iraq, 
     the Bush administration can solidify a long-running strategic 
     design. ``It's the Kissinger plan,'' says James Akins, a 
     former U.S. diplomat. ``I thought it had been killed, but 
     it's back.''
       Akins learned a hard lesson about the politics of oil when 
     he served as a U.S. envoy in Kuwait and Iraq, and ultimately 
     as ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the oil crisis of 1973 
     and '74. At his home in Washington, D.C., shelves filled with 
     Middle Eastern pottery and other memorabilia cover the walls, 
     souvenirs of his years in the Foreign Service. Nearly three 
     decades later, he still gets worked up while recalling his 
     first encounter with the idea that the United States should 
     be prepared to occupy Arab oil-producing countries.
       In 1975, while Akins was ambassador in Saudi Arabia, an 
     article headlined ``Seizing Arab Oil'' appeared in Harper's. 
     The author, who used the pseudonym Miles Ignotus, was 
     identified as ``a Washington-based professor and defense 
     consultant with intimate links to high-level U.S. policy-
     makers.'' The article outlined, as Akins puts it, ``how we 
     could solve all our economic and political problems by taking 
     over the Arab oil fields [and] bringing in Texans and 
     Oklahomans to operate them.'' Simultaneously, a rash of 
     similar stories appeared in other magazines and newspapers. 
     ``I knew that it had to have been the result of a deep 
     background briefing,'' Akins says. ``You don't have eight 
     people coming up with the same screwy idea at the same 
     time, independently.
       ``Then I made a fatal mistake,'' Akins continues. ``I said 
     on television that anyone who would propose that is either a 
     madman, a criminal, or an agent of the Soviet Union.'' Soon 
     afterward, he says, he learned that the background briefing 
     had been conducted by his boss, then-Secretary of State Henry 
     Kissinger. Akins was fired later that year.
       Kissinger has never acknowledged having planted the seeds 
     for the article. But in an interview with Business Week that 
     same year, he delivered a thinly veiled threat to the Saudis, 
     musing about bringing oil prices down through ``massive 
     political warfare against countries like Saudi Arabia and 
     Iran to make them risk their political stability and maybe 
     their security if they did not cooperate.''
       In the 1970s, America's military presence in the Gulf was 
     virtually nil, so the idea of seizing control of its oil was 
     a pipe dream. Still, starting with the Miles Ignotus article, 
     and a parallel one by conservative strategist and Johns 
     Hopkins University professor Robert W. Tucker in Commentary, 
     the idea began to gain favor among a feisty group of 
     hardline, pro-Israeli thinkers, especially the hawkish circle 
     aligned with Democratic senators Henry Jackson of Washington 
     and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. Eventually, this 
     amalgam of strategists came to be known as 
     ``neoconservatives,'' and they played important roles in 
     President Reagan's Defense Department and at think tanks and 
     academic policy centers in the 1980s. Led by Richard Perle, 
     chairman of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board, 
     and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, they now 
     occupy several dozen key posts in the White House, the 
     Pentagon, and the State Department. At the top, they are 
     closest to Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald 
     Rumsfeld, who have been closely aligned since both men served 
     in the White House under President Ford in the mid-1970s. 
     They also clustered around Cheney when he served as secretary 
     of defense during the Gulf War in 1991.
       Throughout those years, and especially after the Gulf War, 
     U.S. forces have steadily encroached on the Gulf and the 
     surrounding region, from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia. 
     In preparing for an invasion and occupation of Iraq, the 
     administration has been building on the steps taken by 
     military and policy planners over the past quarter century.
       STEP ONE: The Rapid Deployment Force. In 1973 and '74, and 
     again in 1979, political upheavals in the Middle East led to 
     huge spikes in oil prices, which rose fifteenfold over the 
     decade and focused new attention on the Persian Gulf. In 
     January 1980, President Carter effectively declared the Gulf 
     a zone of U.S. influence, especially against encroachment 
     from the Soviet Union. ``Let our position be absolutely 
     clear,'' he said, announcing what came to be known as the 
     Carter Doctrine. ``An attempt by any outside force to gain 
     control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an 
     assault on the vital interests of the United States of 
     America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means 
     necessary, including military force.'' To back up this 
     doctrine, Carter created the Rapid Deployment Force, an 
     ``over-the-horizon'' military unit capable of rushing several 
     thousand U.S. troops to the Gulf in a crisis.
       STEP TWO: The Central Command. In the 1980s, under 
     President Reagan, the United States began pressing countries 
     in the Gulf for access to bases and support facilities. The 
     Rapid Deployment Force was transformed into the Central 
     Command, a new U.S. military command authority with 
     responsibility for the Gulf and the surrounding region from 
     eastern Africa to Afghanistan. Reagan tried to organize a 
     ``strategic consensus'' of anti-Soviet allies, including 
     Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. The United States sold 
     billions of dollars' worth of arms to the Saudis in the early 
     '80s, from AWACS surveillance aircraft to F-15 fighters. And 
     in 1987, at the height of the war between Iraq and Iran, the 
     U.S. Navy created the Joint Task Force-Middle East to protect 
     oil tankers plying the waters of the Gulf, thus expanding a 
     U.S. naval presence of just three or four warships into a 
     flotilla of 40-plus aircraft carriers, battleships, and 
     cruisers.
       STEP THREE: The Gulf War. Until 1991, the United States was 
     unable to persuade the Arab Gulf states to allow a permanent 
     American presence on their soil. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, 
     while maintaining its close relationship with the United 
     States, began to diversify its commercial and military ties; 
     by the time U.S. Ambassador Chas Freeman arrived there in the 
     late '80s, the United States had fallen to fourth place among 
     arms suppliers to the kingdom. ``The United States was being 
     supplanted even in commercial terms by the British, the 
     French, even the Chinese,'' Freeman notes.
       All that changed with the Gulf War. Saudi Arabia and 
     other Gulf states no longer opposed a direct U.S. military 
     presence, and American troops, construction squads, arms 
     salesmen, and military assistance teams rushed in. The 
     Gulf War put Saudi Arabia back on the map and revived a 
     relationship that had been severely attrited,'' says 
     Freeman.
       In the decade after the war, the United States sold more 
     than $43 billion worth of weapons, equipment, and military 
     construction projects to Saudi Arabia, and 416 billion more 
     to Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, 
     according to data compiled by the Federation of American 
     Scientists. Before Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military 
     enjoyed the right to stockpile, or ``pre-position,'' military 
     supplies only in the comparatively remote Gulf state of Oman 
     on the Indian Ocean. After the war, nearly every country in 
     the region began conducting joint military exercises, hosting 
     U.S. naval units and Air Force squadrons,

[[Page H2814]]

     and granting the United States pre-positioning rights. ``Our 
     military presence in the Middle East has increased 
     dramatically,'' then-Defense Secretary William Cohen boasted 
     in 1995.
       Another boost to the U.S. presence was the unilateral 
     imposition, in 1991, of no-fly zones in northern and southern 
     Iraq, enforced mostly by U.S. aircraft from bases in Turkey 
     and Saudi Arabia. ``There was a massive buildup, especially 
     around Incirlik in Turkey, to police the northern no-fly 
     zone, and around [the Saudi capitol of] Riyadh, to police the 
     southern no-fly zone,'' says Colin Robinson of the Center for 
     Defense Information, a Washington think tank. A billion-
     dollar, high-tech command center was built by Saudi Arabia 
     near Riyadh, and over the past two years the United States 
     has secretly been completing another one in Qatar. The Saudi 
     facilities ``were built with capacities far beyond the 
     ability of Saudi Arabia to use them,'' Robinson says. ``And 
     that's exactly what Qatar is doing now.''
       Step four: Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan--and the 
     open-ended war on terrorism, which has led to U.S. strikes in 
     Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere--further boosted America's 
     strength in the region. The administration has won large 
     increases in the defense budget--which now stands at about 
     $400 billion, up from just over $300 billion in 2000--and a 
     huge chunk of that budget, perhaps as much as $60 billion, is 
     slated to support U.S. forces in and around the Persian Gulf. 
     Military facilities on the perimeter of the Gulf, from 
     Djibouti in the Horn of Africa to the island of Diego Garcia 
     in the Indian Ocean, have been expanded, and a web of bases 
     and training missions has extended the U.S. presence deep 
     into central Asia. From Afghanistan to the landlocked former 
     Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, U.S. forces 
     have established themselves in an area that had long been in 
     Russia's sphere of influence. Oil-rich in its own right, and 
     strategically vital, central Asia is now the eastern link in 
     a nearly continuous chain of U.S. bases, facilities, and 
     allies stretching from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea far 
     into the Asian hinterland.
       Step five: Iraq. Removing Saddam Hussein could be the final 
     piece of he puzzle, cementing an American imperial presence. 
     It is ``highly possible'' that the United States will 
     maintain military bases in Iraq, Robert Kagan, a leading 
     neoconservative strategist, recently told the Atlanta Journal 
     Constitution. ``We will probably need a major concentration 
     of forces in the Middle East over a long period of time,'' he 
     said. ``When we have economic problems, it's been caused by 
     disruptions in our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, 
     there will be no disruption in oil supplies.''
       Kagan, along with William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, 
     is a founder of the think tank Project for the New American 
     Century, an assembly of foreign-policy hawks whose supports 
     include the Pentagon's Perle, New Republic publisher Martin 
     Peretz, and former Central Intelligence agency director James 
     Woolsey. Among the group's affiliates in the Bush 
     administration are Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz; I. Lewis 
     Libby, the vice president's chief of staff; Elliott Abrams, 
     the Middle East director at the National Security Council; 
     and Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House liaison to the Iraqi 
     opposition groups. Kagan's group, tied to a web of similar 
     neoconservative, pro-Israeli organizations, represents the 
     constellation of thinkers whose ideological affinity was 
     forged in the Nixon and Ford administrations.
       To Akins, who has just returned from Saudi Arabia, it's a 
     team that looks all too familiar, seeking to implement the 
     plan first outlined back in 1975. ``It'll be easier once we 
     have Iraq,'' he says. ``Kuwait, we already have. Qatar and 
     Bahrain, too. So it's only Saudi Arabia we're talking about, 
     and the United Arab Emirates falls into place.''
       Last summer, Perle provided a brief glimpse into his 
     circle's thinking when he invited Rand Corporation strategist 
     Laurent Murawiec to make a presentation to his Defense Policy 
     Board, a committee of former senior officials and generals 
     that advises the Pentagon on big-picture policy ideas. 
     Murawiec's closed-door briefing provoked a storm of criticism 
     when it was leaked to the media; he described Saudi Arabia as 
     the ``kernel of evil,'' suggested that the Saudi royal family 
     should be replaced or otherthrown, and raised the idea of a 
     U.S. occupation of Saudi oil fields. He ultimately lost his 
     job when Rand decided he was too controversial.
       Murawiec is part of a Washington school of thought that 
     views virtually all of the nations in the Gulf as unstable 
     ``failed states'' and maintains that only the United States 
     has the power to forcibly reorganize and rebuild them. In 
     this view, the arms systems and bases that were put in place 
     to defend the region also provided a ready-made 
     infrastructure for taking over countries and their oil 
     fields in the event of a crisis.
       The Defense Department likely has contingency plans to 
     occupy Saudi Arabia, says Robert E. Ebel, director of the 
     energy program at the Center for Strategic and International 
     Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank whose advisers 
     include Kissinger; former Defense Secretary and CIA director 
     James Schlesinger; and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national 
     security adviser. ``If something happens in Saudi Arabia,'' 
     Ebel says, ``if the ruling family is ousted, if they decide 
     to shut off the oil supply, we have to go in.''
       Two years ago, Ebel, a former mid-level CIA official, 
     oversaw a CSIS task force that included several members of 
     Congress as well as representatives from industry including 
     ExxonMobil, Arco, BP, Shell, Texaco, and the American 
     Petroleum Institute. Its report, ``The Geopolitics of Energy 
     Into the 21st Century,'' concluded that the world will find 
     itself dependent for many years on unstable oil-producing 
     nations, around which conflicts and wars are bound to swirl. 
     ``Oil is high-profile stuff,'' Ebel says. ``Oil fuels 
     military power, national treasuries, and international 
     politics. It is not longer a commodity to be bought and sold 
     within the confines of traditional energy supply and demand 
     balances. Rather, it has been transformed into a determinant 
     of well-being, of national security, and of international 
     power.''
       As vital as the Persian Gulf is now, its strategic 
     importance is likely to grow exponentially in the next 20 
     years. Nearly one out of every three barrels of oil reserves 
     in the world lie under just two countries: Saudi Arabia (with 
     259 billion barrels of proven reserves) and Iraq (112 
     billion). Those figures may understate Iraq's largely 
     unexplored reserves, which according to U.S. government 
     estimates may hold as many as 432 billion barrels.
       With supplies in many other regions, especially the United 
     States and the North Sea, nearly exhausted, oil from Saudi 
     Arabia and Iraq is becoming ever more critical--a fact duly 
     noted in the administration's National Energy Policy, 
     released in 2001 by a White House task force. By 2020, the 
     Gulf will supply between 54 percent and 67 percent of the 
     world's crude, the document said, making the region ``vital 
     to U.S. interests.'' According to G. Daniel Butler, an oil-
     markets analyst at the U.S. Energy Information Administration 
     (EIA), Saudi Arabia's production capacity will rise from its 
     current 9.4 million barrels a day to 22.1 million over the 
     next 17 years. Iraq, which in 2002 produced a mere 2 million 
     barrels a day, ``could easily be a double-digit producer by 
     2020,'' says Butler.
       U.S. strategists aren't worried primarily about America's 
     own oil supplies; for decades, the United States has worked 
     to diversify its sources of oil with Venezuela, Nigeria, 
     Mexico, and other countries growing in importance. But for 
     Western Europe and Japan, as well as the developing 
     industrial powers of eastern Asia, the Gulf is all-important. 
     Whoever controls it will maintain crucial global leverage for 
     decades to come.
       Today, notes the EIA's Butler, two-thirds of Gulf oil goes 
     to Western industrial nations. By 2015, according to a study 
     by the CIA's National Intelligence Council, three-quarters of 
     the Gulf's oil will go to Asia, chiefly to China. China's 
     growing dependence on the Gulf could cause it to develop 
     closer military and political ties with countries such as 
     Iran and Iraq, according to the report produced by Ebel's 
     CSIS task force. ``They have different political interests in 
     the gulf than we do,'' Ebel says. ``Is it to our advantage 
     to have another competitor for oil in the Persian Gulf?''
       David Long, who served as a U.S. diplomat in Saudi Arabia 
     and as chief of the Near East division in the State 
     Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research during the 
     Reagan administration, likens the Bush administration's 
     approach to the philosophy of Admiral Mahan, the 19th-century 
     military strategist who advocated the use of naval power to 
     create a global American empire. ``They want to be the 
     world's enforcer,'' he says. ``It's a worldview, a 
     geopolitical position. They say, ``We need hegemony in the 
     region.''
       Until the 1970s, the face of American power in the Gulf was 
     the U.S. oil industry, led by Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Texaco, 
     and Gulf, all of whom competed fiercely with Britain's BP and 
     Anglo-Dutch Shell. But in the early '70s, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, 
     and the other Gulf states nationalized their oil industries, 
     setting up state-run companies to run wells, pipelines, and 
     production facilities. Not only did that enhance the power of 
     OPEC, enabling that organization to force a series of sharp 
     price increases, but it alarmed U.S. policymakers.
       Today, a growing number of Washington strategists are 
     advocating a direct U.S. challenge to state-owned petroleum 
     industries in oil-producing countries, especially the Persian 
     Gulf. Think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, 
     the Heritage Foundation, and CSIS are conducting discussions 
     about privatizing Iraq's oil industry. Some of them have put 
     forward detailed plans outlining how Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and 
     other nations could be forced to open up their oil and gas 
     industries to foreign investment. The Bush administration 
     itself has been careful not to say much about what might 
     happen to Iraq's oil. But State Department officials have had 
     preliminary talks about the oil industry with Iraqi exiles, 
     and there have been reports that the U.S. military wants to 
     use at least part of the country's oil revenue to pay for the 
     cost of military occupation.
       ``One of the major problems with the Persian Gulf is that 
     the means of production are in the hands of the state,'' Rob 
     Sobhani, an oil-industry consultant, told an American 
     Enterprise Institute conference last fall in Washington. 
     Already, he noted, several U.S. oil companies are studying 
     the possibility of privatization in the Gulf. Dismantling 
     government-owned oil companies, Sobhani argues, could also 
     force political changes in the region. ``The beginning of 
     liberal democracy can be achieved if you take the means of 
     production out of the hands of the state,'' he said, 
     acknowledging that Arabs would resist that idea. ``It's going 
     to take a lot of selling, a lot of marketing,'' he concluded.

[[Page H2815]]

       Just which companies would get to claim Iraq's oil has been 
     a subject of much debate. After a war, the contracts that 
     Iraq's state-owned oil company has signed with European, 
     Russian, and Chinese oil firms might well be abrogated, 
     leaving the field to U.S. oil companies. ``What they have in 
     mind is denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out 
     of American Oil companies,'' says Akins. ``The American oil 
     companies are going to be the main beneficiaries of this 
     war.''
       The would-be rulers of a post-Saddam Iraq have been 
     thinking along the same lines. ``American oil companies will 
     have a big shot at Iraqi oil,'' says Ahmad Chalabi, leader of 
     the Iraqi National Congress, a group of aristocrats and 
     wealthy Iraqis who fled the country when its repressive 
     monarchy was overthrown in 1958. During a visit to Washington 
     last fall, Chalabi held meetings with at least three major 
     U.S. oil companies, trying to enlist their support. Similar 
     meetings between Iraqi exiles and U.S. companies have also 
     been taking place in Europe.
       ``Iraqi exiles have approached us, saying, `You can have 
     our oil if we can get back in there,' '' says R. Gerald 
     Bailey, who headed Exxon's Middle East operations until 1997. 
     ``All the major American companies have met with them in 
     Paris, London, Brussels, all over. They're all jockeying for 
     position. You can't ignore it, but you've got to do it on the 
     QT. And you can't wait till it gets too far along.''
       But the companies are also anxious about the consequences 
     of war, according to many experts, oil-company executives, 
     and former State Department officials. ``The oil companies 
     are caught in the middle,'' says Bailey. Executives fear that 
     war could create havoc in the region, turning Arab states 
     against the United States and Western oil companies. On the 
     other hand, should a U.S. invasion of Iraq be successful, 
     they want to be there when the oil is divvied up. Says David 
     Long, the former U.S. diplomat, ``It's greed versus fear.''
       Ibrahim Oweiss, a Middle East specialist at Georgetown 
     University who coined the term ``petrodollar'' and has also 
     been a consultant to Occidental and BP, has been closely 
     watching the cautious maneuvering by the companies. ``I know 
     that the oil companies are scared about the outcome of 
     this,'' he says. ``They are not at all sure this is in the 
     best interests of the oil industry.''
       Anne Joyce, an editor at the Washington-based Middle East 
     Policy Council who has spoken privately to top Exxon 
     officials, says it's clear that most oil-industry executives 
     ``are afraid'' of what a war in the Persian Gulf could mean 
     in the long term--especially if tensions in the region spiral 
     out of control. ``They see it as much too risky, and they are 
     risk averse,'' she says. ``They think it has `fiasco' written 
     all over it.''

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