-- November 23, 1999
During last spring's brutal U.S./NATO airborne assault on Yugoslavia conducted in the name of democracy and human rights, some critics on the Left pointed to the likelihood that oil and other exploitable resources in Kosovo, or closeby, may have had much more to do with the war's actual motivation. The argument went roughly as follows: Yugoslavia - or the Serbian-Montenegrin rump that was left of it after years of Western-sponsored destabilization and dismantlement - however enfeebled still remains as a somewhat independent outpost in the region, following in the Third World tradition which Yugoslavia under Marshall Tito had helped to initiate. To the eastward of the Balkans lie the vast reservoirs of petroleum around the Caspian Sea, increasingly subject, since the break-up of the Soviet Union, to the exploitation of Western oil companies. These companies want security for their capital investments, specifically, for the pipeline routes westward they are planning to build to pump out the oil. Yugoslavia was a possible roadblock to those plans that had to be eliminated. Hence, the vilification of the Serbs and the Milosevic regime. (Nothing ever said, needless to say, about the blatant human rights violations or the near-total lack of democracy in Western-compliant oil states such as Indonesia, Saudi Arabia or Kuwait.) Hence, bombs had to start falling from the skies despite the fact that thousands of ordinary people might be maimed and killed -- and they were.
A rather simple, straightforward argument. Marxists are sometimes accused of being “economic reductionists”. There are always complicating factors, of course. But often this type of explanation turns out to work, precisely because capitalists and capitalist-run states themselves are economic reductionists, i.e., their behavior is determined largely by the dictates of profit-seeking to which all other values and interests are subordinated.
This past week, in the context of the conclave of the Western leaders held in Istanbul, several articles have come out in the more-or-less official U.S. media which speak with rare candor about the imperialist economic game being played by the U.S. in this region. Both the “Boston Globe” and the “New York Times” had major articles on the proposed development of an oil pipeline from Baku, now in the independent state of Azerbaijan but formerly in the Soviet Union, to Turkey and the West. The current pipeline runs through Chechnya and into Russia proper (which may help to explain in part the current military campaign being waged by the Russians to suppress the Chechen separatists). The plan, openly trumpeted, is to keep the oil away from Russia, and the Iranians to the south.
There was no sense expressed in either of these articles that there might be anything wrong or disadvantageous with playing this “game”, that possibly the U.S. and other Western countries, if they had systems that were more rational and less profit-driven, might want to reexamine their commitment to petroleum economies and to the lock-step defense of the interests of the oil companies. This is a relationship that has already led these countries to go to war (again using other excuses), to bomb and to kill, earlier this decade in the Gulf region. That particular conflict for oil and corporate profits is, of course, not really over. Practically every day, the U.S. and Great Britain carry out new bombing raids, and large numbers of Iraqi men, women, and children continue to suffer from the dire effects of economic sanctions imposed on them because their government, like the Yugoslav government, threatened to disrupt the rules of the “game” for the big players.
How many more bloody wars for oil will there be? The situation can only get worse. The availability of cheap oil and the recirculation into U.S. coffers of large quantities of “petrodollars” from comprador oil regimes like the Islamic fundamentalist Saudi Arabia are among the factors underlying the current U.S. economic “boom”. The oil shortages of the 1970s, when gasoline prices shot upward or gas became unavailable and people rioted at the pumps, may largely be forgotten by most consumers in the U.S., where every other “car” seems now to be a gas-guzzling sports utility vehicle. But this situation of cheap oil will not last forever. A recent article in “Scientific American” predicts a new oil crisis soon in the early years of the next decade as oil becomes more expensive to extract from existing sources such as the Middle East, the North Sea, and Alaska's North Slope. The OPEC countries and other major Third World oil producers such as Mexico are also getting better organized again and demanding higher prices. This may help explain the frenzied current interest among Western capitalists in sources such as those on the Caspian Sea.
On another geographical front, an imperialist oil war - in this case packaged and sold as a “drug war” - is under way right now in Colombia, the third largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid (after Israel and Egypt). Some have called this the “next Vietnam”, at a stage now equivalent to the early 1960s. U.S. military advisors are already abetting the corrupt, repressive government there to fight the Marxist guerillas who control large liberated zones in the countryside, who sometimes blow up oil pipelines as a military tactic, and who seem poised at some point soon to take power in the country as a whole. Meanwhile, next door in Venezuela -- which, unlike the Middle East or the Caspian Sea area, is a major direct exporter of oil to the U.S. itself -- a charismatic populist Hugo Chavez has come to power promising a more equitable distribution of the country's oil revenues. For those who know the history of how imperialism works, the signs are plainly visible that a U.S. media campaign is under way to vilify this new government as moving in a “dictatorial” direction and to pave the way for possible further destabilization and intervention. Watch out!
Anti-imperialist forces clearly have our work cut out for us in the days and years ahead. As with the war against Yugoslavia, we need constantly to be finding ways to make the point that these are not foreign policy “miscalculations” that can possibly be changed with a new administration at the next election - one of the basic illusions of life in Western “democracies” -- but are rooted in the system of capitalism itself. Our interests as human beings, wherever we are, are not their interests as corporate greedmongers. Until their system has been fundamentally transformed by our militant actions all over the world, the greasy and useful substance called "oil" will continue to be tainted with blood's smell.
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