Oil imperialism

Pipeline Plots are an alternative historical explanation for conflicts in Central Asia, Iran and Iraq. The Persian Gulf has the largest known easily-accessible oil deposits. The Caspian Sea and Afghanistan have large untapped oil deposits which require pipelines to reach European Union, Indian and Chinese markets, which have insufficient oil resources of their own to maintain primary industry and secondary industry.

According to the larger theory of oil imperialism, the old Standard Oil monopoly, recently resurrected as BP-AMOCO[?] including most of the companies that were once Standard Oil plus many new players, seeks control of Persian Gulf, Caspian Sea and Afghanistan oil reserves, to politically isolate Russia, reduce its influence over India and China as an oil supplier, and limit access to oil when nations do not do US bidding. A barrier to these plots is Iran which is in general friendly to the UK and opposes US corporate expansion and globalization. Another barrier is the remaining Communist states who refuse to offer long-term leases on oil, and regimes like that of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela which nationalize the oil interests. Some versions of this theory hold that World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Gulf War were likewise motivated by oil power - some trace the motivations even for World War I back to Standard Oil's desire to reconstruct its monopoly.

Credibility of the oil empire and pipeline plot theories is much disputed. It is certainly true that major players in all of the above conflicts have had contact through oil industry[?] circles and (between wars which in this theory are corporate control battles) investment groups, e.g. the Carlyle Group. It is also true that some individuals have been involved in apparently unlinked events such as the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the current Venezuelan oil strike[?]. These connections encourage the proliferation of conspiracy theories, e.g. the assertion that the Bush family[?] is at the center of a global generations-long effort to control the world's oil - see George Bush family conspiracy theory.

One piece of evidence that geopolitics motivates these wars and not any ideal of justice or human rights is that interventions tend to be very selective - invasions, coups and other risky activities for intelligence agency operatives tend only to happen where such great interests are at stake.

They do not by contrast happen in nations like Croatia, Bosnia, Cambodia or Rwanda even when horrific atrocity or genocide events are underway. For instance, the very different treatment of Kosovo which was strongly supported by NATO even without UN Security Council support. See legality of NATO bombing of Yugoslavia[?] for details of this. Kosovo Albanians, being Muslim and near ex-Communist state Albania and poorly-armed NATO member Greece, constituted a strategically useful counter-balance to Serbs (who like Russians are Slavs) and thus to Russia, and provide an excuse to block Russian access to the Aegean as Montenegro would inevitably split from Serbia (as it did in 2003). This access would be quite important if control of Russia's oil exports is the ultimate purpose of such interventions by NATO.

Another piece of evidence is that the United States, where most of the reputed conspirators live and work, does not rely to any great extent on these Asian oil supplies[?] itself. Its own reserves especially in Louisiana, West Texas, Oklahoma and Alaska are significant, and nearby friendly reserves in Mexico and the Canadian province of Alberta and the Northwest Territories are more than enough to fuel the USA for the forseeable future. Although extraction of these reserves, e.g. the Alberta Oil Sands[?], can be daunting and add some premium to the price (to pay also for Canadian commitment to the Kyoto Protocol of greenhouse gas control[?]), it seems small compared to the proven risk and huge cost of the military control of Mideast and Asian oil. Thus it seems likely that depriving strategic competitors of this oil supply is a more rational motive than any of the variously (some say conveniently or opportunistically) alternative motives: the War on Terrorism, the human rights abuses, genocide, or search for weapons of mass destruction.

Nations that make overt threats to 'destroy the Earth' if invaded, and who are implicated in generations of human rights abuses, such as North Korea, are according to this theory not invaded or much harrassed simply because:

• they have no oil, and can usually have oil supplies cut off without difficulty
• their destabilizing effect is felt mostly by bordering Russia and China
• their threats provide a credible excuse to maintain US bases in Japan[?] and a US Navy patrol of the Sea of Japan, which also protects Taiwan from any forcible (or democratic) effort at Chinese reunification.
• their missile capacity[?] provides excuses to engage in expensive pork barrel projects such as Anti-Ballistic Missile systems, which have never under any circumstances proven to be effective, but which move large amounts of money into US military contractor coffers which are in turn generally controlled by interests friendly to the global oil companies.

External links:

• Oil Imperialism (http://www.hermes-press.com/impintro1.htm) - by Livergood[?] - note: this article has a clearly advertised POV - the list of more mainstream journal articles offered as references at the end are this article's primary and most credible sources.