Complex Consequences

When President Richard Nixon realized that he would not be able to keep U.S. forces engaged actively in America’s long war in Southeast Asia, he prodded international oil companies (IOCs) to explore for oil in South Vietnam. His goal was to secure for South Vietnam an income stream large enough to enable the government to continue the war on its own if Congress were to cut it off financially (Wesseling 2000). The notion that oil production is a great way to pay for a war persists today. It underpinned assumptions of strategists planning for the 2003 U.S.-U.K. invasion of Iraq. Conventional neocon wisdom assumed that Iraqi oil would pay at least part of the costs of war and that it would also support U.S.-based contractors engaged in recon-struction.1 U.S. aims to expand Iraqi oil production in a tight global market constitute another impetus to the invasion ofIraq that inaugurated this Third Gulf War (Freeman and Kagarlitsky 2004; Tétreault 2004). Indeed, U.S. desires to guarantee access on favorable terms to Persian Gulf oil have shaped U.S. foreign policy for almost 30 years, the lifetime of the so-called Carter Doctrine (Smith 1992; Nitzan and Bichler 2002; Hollis 2004; Mann 2004).