Why Trump’s War Is Dumb, Brazen—and Of Course, All About Oil |
A poet once wrote of small men who measured their lives in “coffee spoons.” But, all of us as Americans living in the modern era, can just as easily measure ours by the number of oil wars we have lived through.
As a young guy just starting out in the world of foreign policy, I was hosting a conference in Caracas, Venezuela, when a buzz went through the room. “They’ve started bombing!” people said to one another, and an evening event broke up so everyone could head to the rooms to watch the bombing of Baghdad on CNN. The images back in January 1991 were strikingly similar to those broadcast on Saturday as the U.S. conducted bombing raids, this time on Caracas of all places.
There were plenty of similarities. Two Republican administrations took action while answering to higher powers in the fossil fuels industry. Media outlets hyperventilated about the drama, not sure whether to cheer on the military or tell the truth about why they were fighting. Officials offered canned remarks about values and higher purpose while revealing once again that the only line that really mattered was neither in the sand nor was it red. It was, then and now, the bottom line.
Here we are once again “making the world safe” for obscene oil company profits.
There have been oil wars in the interim too. Every few years, in fact. My experience in Caracas was during the first Gulf War. There was, of course, a second such war. While the first one featured a president and a secretary of state from the oil patch, during the second, we had not only the son of the president from that first war, but a U.S. Vice President who was also an oil industry CEO.
(I can’t help but note that during the first Gulf War, the Secretary of Commerce........