By
Andrew McKillop
From Twin Piillars To Twin Towers
US oil geopolitics in the 1948 to 2009 period can be said to have been dominated, until 2001, by the 'Twin Pillars' doctrine of regional partners in the Middle East guarding and protecting US oil interests. This doctrine had important ideological and non economic components, as well as apparent and basic economic objectives. After 2001 we switch to the 'Twin Towers' doctrine, the era of post 911 chaos. The Twin Towers oil doctrine, to be sure, is completely hidden from public view and just as surely we can fear that it is completely makeshift, a Pavolovian response to the USA's entirely desperate situation regarding its proven and real remaining oil reserves. If we forget the flummery of imagined 'oil on paper' reserves, and hypothetical 'massive condensate reserves' at fantastic depths (from about 4000 or 5000 metres below the surface), the US today has about 28 Billion barrels of remaining conventional crude. This is based on US Geological Survey estimates. For some years now, spokespersons of the USGS itself make occasional presentations, displaying large posters with a banner headline: The Big Rollover. In other words the peak of world production is no longer a theory but a predictable reality. Almost certainly it is with us now, using the widest possible 'all liquids' definition of oil, at earliest in 2007, at latest in 2010. Concerning the 'rollover' of US domestic oil production there is no possible discussion: US domestic production peaked out and rolled over in 1970-71, more than 36 years ago.
US proven conventional oil reserves, at about 28 Bn barrels, are less than 4 years national consumption at present rates. The Twin Towers doctrine, if it can be called a doctrine, is surely underlain by the nightmare of running out and doing without – noting here that highly successful economies such as those of Switzerland, Singapore and Belgium operate in national territories with 'zero barrel' proven reserves of oil. This logic does not apply to US politicans and geostrategists. Their reasoning is Aristotelean in simplicity. Using very basic syllogistic reasoning, the Middle East has the reserves, can provide, and will provide.
The Twin Towers doctrine is much more than a secret, never avowed reaction to American oil fear. Within the mishmash of ultraconservative ramblings that we can translate and analyse as motivated by oil fear, there is also massive, scarcely hidden nostalgia for a glorious and heroic Chicago School past that the USA never really had. This past economic glory is tarnished, but can be restored, claim the shrinking band of ultraconservatives. What they mean by 'glory', always old, surely includes a manageable and docile Middle East, able when needed to supply cheap and sweet light crude, in preference to US domestic crude. Unfortunately this fantasy view of US post 1945 history is as virtual as its current, declining Petroimperium status. For many years, we should note, US control over Mid East oil reserves and production was of no direct strategic utility, and of no economic utility to America.
US control or surveillance of the region's oil was in pursuance of a stated doctrine: what is good for the USA is good for the world, at least to the World Outside Communist Areas as the Evil Empire was known at the time, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The huge discoveries made in the Mid East region during the 1950s and 1960s, often by US oil corporations, were taken to be so large that the world outside communist areas almost had an obligation to use it as fast as possible. Under no circumstance was future scarcity imagined. Climate change was an unknown subject. The very first versions of growth economics were at that time coming out of the economics departments of US universities, Chicago being the hearth of this movement. Cheap energy was as basic to this growth economics as turkey is to Thanksgiving, or the KGB was to the USSR. Attempts at reversing this social and economic paradigm have proved to be almost impossible, and may in fact be impossible. Attempts by Jimmy Carter to do so, and find a demand side solution to America's gargantuan oil consumption, were a suicide pill for his re-election chances and for the US Democrat party, ushering in the oil-fired and policy brimstone Reagan years of 1980-88.
The US republican and conservative solution, or imagined solution to oil pinch and Peak Oil is a supply side response, a pure expression of supply side economics . This means the Middle East must supply, and accessorily, perhaps, the former USSR and Muslim southern republics of Central Asia must also supply. Geology has decided, with George W Bush and Dick Cheney translating this to the number of US Army divisions needed on the ground.
As we already noted, it is also easy to argue the 'Twin Towers' doctrine places oil far behind other objectives. These now include defence of America against terrorism, and against the loss of the USA's imagined hyperpower or more-than-superpower geostrategic role, for example the challenge posed by Putin's Russia with vast numbers of thrmonuclear weapons - and plenty of oil. The US ultraconservative wish list is joined by a confused mass of other world fears. The makeshift nature of this unacknowledged new doctrine, if we can call it a doctrine, is shown by its claimed expression of 'loyalty to friends and allies', especially the oil dependent democracies of the OECD club. Inside the Middle East and Central Asia, unfortunately, such have been the tortuous, often rapid doctrinal shifts and ideological U-turns of US foreign policy over the decades since 1945, that yesterday's enemy is surely today's ally, and the reverse. Multiple in-betweens also exist, subjected to intense scrutiny by the G W Bush regime for signs of which side of the fence they belong to for later cajoling, or threats of regime change.
Very surely, as the most cursory check of any book by Robert Baer will show, US ideological sifting for the choice of strategic allies inside the region have for decades played both the sunnite card, and the shi'ite card in a constant and far from glorious confusion. In Afghanistan and globally within this country, that is with multiple exceptions, the US has tended to play 'the shi'a card'. Since 2001, this is particularly clear, with the sunni Taliban regime being specially targeted through supposedly selective aid to mostly shi'a opponents of the Taliban. This 'strategy' of preferring to spend US taxpayers' dollars on almost always covert military aid to shi'a forces, rather than sunni forces is less than sure in the rest of central Asia. Nevertheless, to maintain incoherence at the highest possible level, in the Middle East we find that only sunni powers and regimes are supported, even the most extreme fundamentalist. Numerous G W Bush administration-friendly think tanks claim that where the Middle East stricto sensu is concerned, there is no such thing as 'moderate shi'a', these creatures did not exist in the Bush regime's bestiary,and perhaps not also in the Obama administration's national security appareil, with apparatchiks inherited from the previous administration. Conversely, the wahabite-dominated Saudi regime is, and will probably remain categorised as 'moderate'. To this incoherence, the Twin Towers doctrine adds further layers and shells of irrationality, scooping out new and exciting urgent needs from whatever happens to be prominent at the moment on Yahoo or Google blog lists of "key issues in the Middle East".
Oil is a fundamental supporting rationale for the Twin Towers doctrine. The highly simplist equation oil = wealth is taken as fundamental, that is unquestionable. Never would any employable or respected US geostrategist or petrostrategist, nor administration-friendly economist remark that wealthy countries such as Switzerland, Belgium or Singapore, without a trace of domestic oil nor oil production, feel no conditioned reflex to invade and occupy oil producer countries, or to back various armed movements opposing their governments or ruling powers. The world's N°1 and N°2 oil producer countries, Saudi Arabia and Russia, are very surely among the most sombre, corrrupt and repressive countries in the world. They are also far from the wealthiest, Saudi Arabia having a GDP-per-capita score near that of Portugal, when the oil price is high, and below Romania's when it is low. Does the USA feel it has no option but to imitate them ?
The problem is historical and economic. The USA's economy is so closely linked with oil, its recent modern history so easy to call a petroimperium that we can be certain that no American leader can imagine US power, or the country itself staying intact without 'command and control' of perhaps 25% or more of the world's oil reserves, production and supply system. Facing the integrism of extreme sunnites and chi'ites, we have the USA's petro-integrism, the doctrinal inability to do without oil, and inability to admit it.
The shifting incertitude and fear underlying the Twin Towers geopolitical doctrine are very clear, very palpable. The net result, spurred on by the implacable decline of US oil reserves and US oil production, was a great leap forward in the Bush regime's aggressiveness, and especially in the wider Middle East and central Asian (MECA) region. Another reading of why the USA's oil geostrategy in this region became so aggressive, desperate, and unsuccessful, is that the 1948-2001 period only saw the recurring collapse of "regional pillars", that is US allies in the region. The new doctrine, being fear-based and fantasist, can be counted on to change before our very eyes, and call any "sacrosanct" aspect of US foreign policy into question - even including the possible ultimate sacrifice - abandonment of Israel. This threat is understood in Israel, which very surely is not so much led by, but leads and manipulates the USA, through its own 'regional military initiatives'.
It is impossible to appreciate, or analyse US oil geopolitics, and American action in the MECA region, conceived as supporting or tending to assure US oil interests, without reviewing what has come before. As we have seen elsewhere in this book, the two European partners of the USA in the Versailles Treaty series (1917-1923), France and Britain, acted to protect what they saw, at the time, as their oil interests in the region. The very creation of British Iraq, then Kuwait, the intense oil exploration-linked rivalry between the British and French concerning the size and area of French Syria and Lebanon during the time of the Society of Nations Mandate, attests to this. At certain stages, in the 1920s, British and French armed forces engaged in hostilities, with loss of life on each side, merely for disputed oil prospecting territory in Syrian Kurdistan, and elsewhere. Yet the USA was supremely absent from these feverish actions on the ground, though most certainly not in that which concerns overall, regional control of the territories formerly controlled by the Turkish Ottomans, including all of the Arabian peninsula. The Sykes-Picot "oil map" of the region resulted from an American initiative to set spheres of influence for all 3 allied victors of World War 1 - with all of the future Saudi Arabia reserved for the USA, or rather its oil corporations.
However, on the ground, in the 1920s and 1930s, US military or 'peacekeeping' initiatives were few and the reason is again oil: at the time the USA was by far the biggest producer, and exporter of oil in the world. US oil majors had no interest at all in seeing world production increase, if anything the reverse, and made this known to their political representatives and friends.What the USA required was orderly and controlled production of what were taken, at the time, to be "limitless reserves" of oil in the southern territories of the former Ottoman Empire, and in Iran.
It was not until after 1945 that times changed for the USA. The geostrategic importance of oil had been underlined by World War 2, and was now recognised. Even by the late 1940s and early 1950s a 'heretical' American oil geologist called M. King Hubbert had made predictions - treated with the same guffaws that Peak Oil was subjected to until about 2005 or 2006 - that the USA would in 1948, and again in about 1992, produce the same amount of oil. In other words, as his Hubbert Peak diagram showed very starkly, production of oil in the USA would attain a peak between these two dates, about 1970 or 1971. This was exactly correct. The negationist camp explain this as only due to pure chance.
When we ask how American historians describe the Twin Pillars doctrine we find they have a degree of doctrinal flexibility that would have been admired in the Russia of the 1930s. They can point to, define and discuss the existence of several Twin Pillars doctrines. All are, or were, loosely or strongly, focused on oil and all concerned, or concern the wider Middle East region, but not central Asia. After defining any one Twin Pillars doctrine, come the revisions and the revisionism. This extends to not only the doctrine, but also its history and key dates, its unfolding on the ground, and its actors !
Thus it can be, and is said that a Twin Pillars doctrine based on the Iran of the second Chah (Reza Pehlavi), and Israel, existed from about 1948-51 to 1979. Iran and Israel formed an eastern and a western pillar guarding the oil production areas, and transport routes out of the region. This version or mouture of the doctrine is presented as the brainchild of John F. Dulles and Kermit Roosevelt, or their colleagues and advisers, and was primarily developed and used from about 1951-53. Application of this doctrine is claimed as the motivation for removal from office of Iran's PM Mossadegh, the 'oil nationalising minister' of the second Chah, in 1956.
More recent American historians, needing to rework history to the pleasure of today's rulers, claim the Twin Pillars doctrine emerged under Richard Nixon, about 1960, and not under Eisenhower.
This 'second authorized version' of the doctrine is presented as a regional strategic doctrine seeking to counter and contain the USSR, and to build up Saudi Arabia's defensive capability, rather than to primarily safeguard oil supplies for the west. We should note that well into the 1960s the US remained a sizeable net exporter of oil: this latter day revision of the doctrine by American historians designates the western European, Asian and other oil importer OECD countries, not the USA, as prime beneficiairies of American petro largesse . For this 'revised version' of the doctrine, the key period is about 1956-63, starting with Mossadegh's ouster and the Suez crisis, followed by the US marines invasion of Beirut in 1958 to restore a friendly local regime to power. In all three cases the USA displayed either military or diplomatic power, and most surely put the European allies - Britain in France - in their place for their Suez adventure. A distant outrider to the 1970s oil shocks, the 1956 Suez crisis led to dire warnings, in Europe, of intense oil shortage due to short-term closure of the Suez canal. The next trigger for change came in 1968. With the 1968 announcement, and 1971 application of the British decision to abandon all of its colonial treasures, and military obligations in the entire eastern hemisphere the 'revised version' of the US Twin Pillars doctrine went into high gear.
The basic rationale put forward by American strategists, historians and military men of today is as follows.
Before 1971, responsibility for tregional security fell to the British, with the US only providing a supporting role. From 1971, Britain abandoned the region, basically because contant regional military presence was too expensive, but presented in the media and political stances as linked with decolonisation, decreased regional tension, local economic growth enabling local powers to defend themselves, and so on. The US felt it was obligatory for American oil and economic interests on the ground, or 'in theatre', to receive physical protection. This protection, however, was operated in British fashion, that is mostly or exclusively through indirect power and control, by unconditional support to whatever political party, regime or system had local power. In effect, this was translated on the ground by massive US military aid to designated friendly regimes. It was not in fact until the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 that the doctrine's really high gears were engaged, with the "Carter doctrine". This new doctrine was the brainchild of Zbigniew Brzezinski, playing oil strategist to Carter, as Kissinger had to Nixon.
This effortlessly rewrote all previous history, again. The Carter-Brzezinski doctrine featured the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, a quickly available and very large American aeronaval force 'just over the horizon', ready to strike any troublemaker menacing US oil interests - which had become ever more vital by the early 1970s. Also in the 1970s, thanks to the Khomeiny revolution and overthrow of the Chah, the first mention of Islamic fundamentalism creeps into the reworked and revamped Twin Pillars doctrine we can find with a few mouse clicks on the Web.
Oil is now all-imporant, but from 1979 this concerned Saudi, not Iranian oil. The Soviet threat then seen to be hanging over the scene was later seen as a tragic misreading of the USSR's unwinnable military occupation of Afghanistan, which had little or nothing to do with an imputed Soviet desire 'to gain access to the warm waters' of the Gulf and Indian Ocean. American and British geostrategists, steeped in their own Boy Scout lores and legends believed the Soviet invasion was taken from a Halford Mackinder pamphlet of the 1920s, and was nothing more or less than a thrust by the Soviet Union towards the warm waters, of course taking all regional oil reserves under its control.
What in fact changed from the before-1971 period, to after 1980? The Oil Shock of 1973-1974 was a fundamental defining experience, entirely triggered by Israel and not at all by petroleum geology. However, also in that period Peak Oil truly arrived in the USA. Through the 1970s, US oil production regularly fell from its 1971 peak, as M King Hubbert had predicted, and US dependence on oil imports skyrocketed with rising national consumption, little affected by also skyrocketing prices. The long period of comfortable theorizing by American historians displaying their armchair erudition was now over. Declassified papers from the Nixon White House of the 1973-74 oil blockade period show that Nixon and Kissinger very surely discussed military invasion of Saudi Arabia at the time, to ensure oil supplies. By 1983, with Reagan taking the relay baton of Republican far-right realpolitik, it was Iran that was permanently under threat of invasion - for the same motive, of course.
A yet more radical 'revision' of the Twin Pillars doctrine, as taught to American Marines in the USMC college, in their history courses of today, claims the Twin Pillars doctrine was initiated by Nixon, then modified by Carter, and had from the start only concerned Iran and Saudi Arabia, not Israel. This was therefore a Persian Gulf (or Arab Gulf, depending on the audience) doctrine. The west of the region no longer had any significance in oil terms, Israel was dropped off the map. This essentially technological and industrial reality - the west of of the Middle East and the Mediterranean coast no longer being strategic in strict oil supply terms - was recognised by as early as 1955, by none other than Richard Nixon. With his customary and fast-acting impetuosity, almost overnight, he reoriented and reworked the doctrine.
Today's militarty historians in the US add that by oversight or design Nixon did not inform the State Department and other heavyweight players. These players continued with an Eisenhower-vintage, Dulles-Kermit Roosevelt Twin Pillars doctrine for so long that Carter's presidency, in 1979, was effectively sacrificed or destroyed by their lingering Iranophile doctrine. If the Persophiles had been silenced and Nixon's correct reading had been allowed to dominate, the doctrinal revision by today's US historians goes on, there would have been no humiliating defeat for the USA in Iran, in 1979. Early American military and oil industrial effort to infiltrate and strategically dominate Saudi Arabia would have been capitalized by quick and focused attack and seizure of key oil production and export facilities, either in Iran or Saudi Arabia, easing critical pressure on US oil import supplies. This would have prevented any chance for a remake of the 1973-74 oil supply boycott. The 'insignificant detail' that the 1979-81 crisis was due to Iran, not Saudi Arabia, would have been of little concern to happy US gasoline consumers, bathing in the euphoria that cheap gas delivers at their friendly local filling station. This is an entire reversal of the Dulles-Roosevelt doctrine !
The 'traditional version', in the Eisenhower mold of the doctrine, holds that Iran and Israel were always natural allies of the USA, unlike Saudi Arabia. Latter day defenders of the doctrine go on to add that the loss of Iran is only temporary. Its 'natural ally' status will be restored by the Iranian middle class and the consumer society, given time and inch'allah or God willing . The role of Saudi Arabia in the 'traditional' doctrine, we should note, was small, almost negligeable. Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf peromonarchies were essentially considered as desert kingdoms of herders and pastoralists, somewhat like Somalia or Sudan and almost equally unreliable. Saudi fundamentalist wahabism was however considered advantageous for American and western interests because this 'stone age thinking' tended to make the populace more amenable to any peacekeeping intervention by the USA, to install a new feudal ruler when or if needed. Its limitless oil reserves would be extracted in orderly fashion by western companies, led by the US oil majors. Conversely, Iran and Israel were seen as inheritors of important and traditional civilizations - the Jewish and Persian civilizations - and therefore reliable partners for the USA, itself seen, at least by its own historians and its own elites, as a major civilization.
The collapse of the second and probably last Chah's regime in 1979, a laughably ruritanian but repressive mix of western bureaucracy and eastern corruption, always on the defensive against shi'a criticism, dealt a mortal blow to Persophile notions in the American power elite. However, the agonizing sloth and hesitation with which American policy moves forward resulted in a fatal delay - for Jimmy Carter's regime. Leaving behind his RDJTF (Fast Deployment Force), to Ronald Reagan, this force did rather little to show massive power in Lebanon, where hundreds of US marines were slaughtered by a single bomb in 1983. Reagan immediately ordered a total pull-back of all US forces in the region, and a de facto handover of fighting to Israel's Tsahal in its bloody Lebanon and Palestine campaigns. This underlined, if necessary, the 'cut and run' nature of American geopolitical decisions whenever their armed forces take serious casualties. As for the reworked, and mostly unworkable doctrines thrown up by myopic rats de bibliotheque burrowing in the archives of Washington Think Tank bunkers, these have even less credibility today, than at any previous time.
We can say that the Twin Pillars doctrine has experience life after death at least three times. After collapsing due to real world events, it was resuscitated, revamped and recycled with new "founding myths", and different objectives or goals, as and when required. The first collapse, we can note, was technical not geopolitical. Israel was no longer needed as a western pillar safeguarding the west's oil supplies from the Middle East, by as early as 1960. The few and small oil transport infrastructures running east-west, from the Gulf region and northern Iraq to the Mediterranean coast, and the refinery and docking installations of the Mediterranean ports, were entirely superceded and replaced by supertanker shipping direct from Gulf ports. This accounts for Saudi Arabia replacing Israel as western pillar, with Iran remaining the eastern pillar. Another and more massive shock to the doctrine was the Arab-Israel war of 1973-1974, and the dramatic use of the oil weapon, that is supply embargo, against the USA, Holland and other western countries decided by Arab countries as too-supportive of Israel. To a certain extent, this brought into question the "western pillar role" of Saudi Arabia, but the ever-increasing dependence of OECD oil importers on Saudi Arabia, and its large official oil reserves resulted in this fatal flaw of the doctrine being papered over - after a long period of torment for US strategists.
By 1974 the US was more than 3 years post peak for its own national domestic oil production capacities and import dependence was rising fast, though in volume terms no faster than today. These combined shocks - oil supply embargo, and structural import dependence - triggered the most recent versions of the Twin Pillars doctrine, before its transformation into its surely last, and incoherent Twin Towers mutant. As early as 1974, long before New Economics, and as part of the emerging Nixon-Kissinger doctrine which featured readiness to invade Saudia Arabia if it ever again cut off oil supplies to the USA, the International Energy Agency (IEA) was founded. This part of the Nixon-Kissinger doctrine sought to coordinate OECD country oil-saving and strategic oil storage, as a response to future shortages, if they should occur. More important perhaps, the IEA was also given the interesting role of exploiting market mechanisms to reduce oil prices, through divide-and-rule trading arrangements with separate OPEC suppliers. It also became, and stayed a centre for concocting optimistic and upbeat oil supply data, and always moderate or 'reasonable' oil consumption numbers, with the sole aim of bringing down oil prices. Moving with the times, the IEA has reflected ideological changes in the oil user camp since 2001 and from 2005 gives copious coverage in its publications and Web sites to 'low carbon energy' and OECD action to promote a 'clean, clever and competitive energy future'.
The largest and most brutal shock to the early versions of the Twin Pillars doctrine, even more so than the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo, was the collapse of Chah Reza Pehlavi's regime in 1979, causing total loss of the eastern pillar. As we noted above, this speeded acceptance and adoption of the Carter doctrine: large, fast-deployed military forces held ready to invade any country in the Middle East, when or if oil supply was threatened. To a certain extent, therefore, the bases of the Twin Towers doctrine were surely set by 1979-1980, but were already latent or prefigured in the panic caused by the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo. Permanent war readiness, to defend oil suppliers and punish any group, regime or power which would reduce or threaten oil supplies to the US or its designated allies was now official and openly stated. By extension, the stationing of large permanent military forces in the region , for example in Qatar, with their logistics, and the declared intention of waging "pre-emptive oil security war", flow logically from this purely aggressive doctrine. As we can see, after diplomacy and indirect rule or political influence in the region, through strategic local allies, military power and direct rule are subsequently used. In this, the USA is in no way different from any historic imperium menaced by economic shortage or political opposition in its far-flung possessions – the important difference is that both China and India, as well as Europe need the same Middle Eastern oil.
Since 2001 and joining previous forms of US petrostrategy , we therefore have the Twin Towers doctrine. This is surely more aggressive. Military action rigorously replaces simple military threat. But more important for its coherence and staying power, this final doctrinal mold contains a messianic and hysterical undertow. Essentially non-economic objectives confusedly replace the former economic growth message that 'what is good for the USA is good for the world'. We move into a polarized world of fantasy. This is half terrorist, and half angelic consumer of gasoline and fastfood, similar to Zoroastrian notions of the spenta angra and spenta minya or pure good and evil, as permanently equal and opposing powers. For the Twin Towers doctrine, securing oil and gas supplies can only be a messianic quest. The incoherence of the Twin Towers petrostrategy is clear. More important, this doctrine or fuite en avant can collapse at any moment, or with equal ease lead to The Next Oil War .
SAMPLE CHAPTER from "THE NEXT OIL WAR"
