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Addicted to Oil: America’s Relentless Drive for Energy Security.
Treating America's addiction
President George W Bush spoke recently in his State of the Union Address to Congress of the US’ addiction to oil and of the need for it to reduce its dependence on the Middle East. In this polemical book, Ian Rutledge describes this addiction and illustrates how it has affected US policy towards the Middle East and elsewhere. The author's thesis is that US foreign policy for the last 80 years has been dominated by "the geopolitics of oil".
This is nowhere more evident than in the case of Iraq. Rutledge describes how US oil companies were involved in high-level discussions with the Bush administration several months before the US-led invasion and alleges that Iraqi exiles were "virtually offering" US oil firms access to Iraq's oilfields "as an inducement to have themselves (the Iraqi exiles) hoisted into power in a post-Saddam Iraq."
He then goes on to detail US plans to allow US oil companies to participate in Iraq's post-war oil industry. The inability of the US to restore order in Iraq means that US and other foreign companies cannot invest there and cannot, as a result, revive and expand Iraq’s production. This is not the only policy failure, however, in Iraq. Rutledge points out that the débacle in Iraq means that the US is now increasingly reliant on Saudi Arabia: one of the things that the invasion of Iraq was designed to prevent. It has also led to a steep rise in world oil prices. Behind all this, according to Rutledge, lies America's massive dependence on the motor car, which shows no signs of beginning to wane. The era of oil wars may not yet be over.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2006
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