I have personally doubted the worst case scenario – that our dominant motives for the War in Iraq were not National Defense, they were greed – the greed of the Military Industrial Complex and the Energy Industry. In Neoconservatives or Neo Con-Men? The Project: and Neoconservatives or Neo Con-Men? The Decision:, I’ve been discussing why I’ve changed my mind. Then there’s the speech…
In 1999, Dick Cheney was C.E.O. of a large conglomerate, Halliburton, involved in "the oil business" and Defense Contracting. In that capacity, he gave a speech to the Institute of Petroleum in London. Here’s some of what he said:
…But I am delighted to be here and I want to try to avoid, I understand last year when Sheikh Yamani spoke that he was rather pessimistic about the outlook for oil prices and the ability of OPEC to arrive at a price level and maintain it over time and I’m not sure that it’s fair to come back a year later and second-guess and I hope a year from now people won’t do that to me in terms of the forecasts I’m going to make, but I do want to talk about the outlook, certainly from the perspective of Halliburton, how we look at what may occur here in the future and let me say at the outset that I am unreasonably optimistic about our industry.…For the world as a whole, oil companies are expected to keep finding and developing enough oil to offset our seventy one million plus barrel a day of oil depletion, but also to meet new demand. By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from?Governments and the national oil companies are obviously controlling about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow. It is true that technology, privatisation and the opening up of a number of countries have created many new opportunities in areas around the world for various oil companies, but looking back to the early 1990’s, expectations were that significant amounts of the world’s new resources would come from such areas as the former Soviet Union and from China. Of course that didn’t turn out quite as expected. Instead it turned out to be deep water successes that yielded the bonanza of the 1990’s.…
In 2000, a year later, George W. Bush appointed his dad’s Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, to lead a search for a Vice Presidential candidate. The search found Dick Cheney. So, oil, then, became our government’s business too.
to be continued in Neoconservatives or Neo Con-Men? The Answer:
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