Oil Diplomacy

Robert Dreyfuss
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?