Several sections of this long interview with Noam Chomsky mention the control of Iraqi oil. The interview took place Jan. 4, 2005. -BA
[snip]
Now Iraq is nothing like that. There’s no point in destroying Iraq. Iraq is worth owning, unlike Vietnam. I mean Eisenhower did contrive stories about the rubber and the tin and so forth but that was mostly for propaganda purposes. Vietnamese resources were not of that much significance. Iraq is totally different. It is the last corner of the world in which there are massive petroleum resources pretty much unexplored, maybe the largest in the world or close to it. Now they are very easy to gain access to. The profits from that must flow primarily to the right pockets, that is, US and secondarily UK energy corporations. And controlling that resource puts the US in a very powerful position, even more powerful than today, to exert influence over the world.
I mean, serious planners are well aware of this. [Former National Security Advisor under President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew] Brzezinski recently pointed out that victory and control in Iraq would give the US what he called critical leverage over Asian and European economies, so the US will have its hand on the spigot. I mean it already does to a substantial extent but this will be much greater. In fact, back in the 1940s the Middle East was described as a stupendous source of strategic power, the most strategically important area in the world, and the US remained an oil exporter into the 1970s but still pursued the same policies. You have got to control that massive resource, it is a source of world control. If the US or UK were to shift to renewable energy it would still stick to the same policies. It doesn’t really need…I mean it does use the oil but it has other sources and the oil goes on the market anyway so it doesn’t matter. But control over it does matter. And the profit from it also matters, and having bases there that allow you to organize the region in your own interests, of course that matters. So this is nothing like Vietnam. It is totally different. In Vietnam the US basically won its major goals.
[snip]
On the other hand it is very hard to imagine that the US would allow an independent, sovereign Iraq. I mean, just ask what its policies would be like. It will have a Shiite majority. Probably as a first step it will try to reconstitute relations with Iran. It’s not that they are pro- [Ayatullah Ruhollah] Khomeini, they’ll want to be independent. But it’s a natural relationship and in fact even under Saddam they were beginning to restore relations with Iran. It is entirely possible that an independent Iraq under Shiite leadership would be a virus in the sense of US planners. It might instigate some pressures for autonomy in the largely Shiite regions of Saudi Arabia which happens to be where most of the oil is, right on the border. You can project not too far in the future a possible Shiite-dominated region including Iran, Iraq, oil-producing regions of Saudi Arabia which really would monopolize the main sources of the world’s oil. Is the US going to permit that? I mean it is out of the question.
