Resource Wars

Just about no one has missed the connection between the U.S. War on Terrorism and this country’s dependence on foreign oil. But competition for limited global supplies of water, timber and other fragile natural resources is also at the heart of many other geopolitcal conflicts, including the one raging in Israel/Palestine. This month’s focus on resource wars offers an introduction to the problem – and to the emerging landscape of alternatives.

The merging of the war against terrorism and the war for oil
An interview with Michael Klare

TW: What brought you to peace and world security studies?

MK: It comes from my history as an opponent of the war in Vietnam. I was a student at Columbia University in the 1960s and got drawn to the research side. Why were we in Vietnam? What was the truth behind what was being said by our leaders? I became associated with a progressive research association called NACLA – the North American Congress on Latin America – and started working there on counterinsurgency, military aid, arms transfers, intervention, North-South conflict, the whole range of issues that spread out from Vietnam like ripples. And I have been doing research and writing on issues of war and peace ever since.

When we came to the end of the Cold War, many of us believed that that would lead to a reduced level of world conflict – that a lot of the driving force of violence would disappear, the U.N. would be stronger, conflict resolution would be more widely practiced. Of course, it didn’t work out that way. The world was plunged into a series of bitter conflicts around the world. Many of them are described as ethnic and religious conflicts. I wouldn’t diminish the importance of ethnicity and religion in warfare, but I think we’ve learned over time that these are malleable concepts, malleable identities, and that scheming, opportunistic people manipulate people’s religion and ethnicity for purposes of garnering political power or economic wealth. It was in attempting to understand why we had this outburst of conflict in this new era that I was drawn to the issue of resource conflict.

I also spent a lot of time in the early 1990s studying the international trade in guns and how they were financed. That led me to the trade in drugs, in diamonds, in timber, because that’s how the global illicit arms trade is financed – through illicit commerce of one sort or another. This drew my attention to the role of resource competition and resource exploitation as a factor in contemporary warfare.

TW: You finished your book in late 2000. I imagine lots of people are now calling you prescient because of some of the things that you talked about there. You wrote about Venezuela and oil, and about Osama Bin Laden.

MK: I think anybody who followed the journey that I made and started paying attention to these resource issues would not be surprised by anything that’s happened in recent months. It’s more a matter, I think, that people weren’t looking in the right places.

TW: Many of the "right places" you looked in were sources from the U.S. government. You show how the government is already paying close attention to the importance of resources and making resources a "national security" issue. I’m wondering if your book has gotten attention from policymakers, whether they’re saying "Oh, dear, somebody has actually been reading our documents!"

MK: Actually, I was asked to lecture at the National Defense University in March. That’s the higher learning institute for military officers, to help them better understand the world they have to function in. Those officers who are serving in the Middle East, for example, are becoming very aware that resource issues – not just oil, but also water – are likely to become central to global conflict in the years ahead.

TW: Could you lay out how conflicts over oil and water are likely to happen?

MK: Resource conflict arises in the overlap of three worlds: the environmental world, the world of war and peace and security, and the world of globalization. If you can imagine three colored circles that overlap in the middle, that’s where the resource issues are.

On one hand, resources are becoming more precious because of their unsustainable exploitation. We are using water profligately. We’re using timber and we’re using oil as if these are unlimited materials. And they’re not! We are beginning to reach the limits of their availability. That’s something I learned from the environmental world.

Then from the globalization community I came to appreciate how the spread of industrialization to more areas of the world, the intensification of global commerce, is accelerating the exploitation of resources. And the third part is the part that I know best – that governments often securitize resource issues, by which I mean they view them through the lens of national security – we must have these things for our national security and therefore we’re willing to go to war to maintain them. It’s a combination of those three things that make the resources question so volatile.

TW: Can you say more about how we are using our resources up?

MK: Water is an example. One thinks of water as renewable, in the sense that each year the rains come, or we hope they come. But only about three percent of the planet’s water is fresh water, and two-thirds of that is tied up in the polar icecap. Actually only a very small percentage of the water that’s theoretically available runs on the surface where we can get at it – in rivers and lakes and wells. And that amount is being used up because of population growth, urbanization and industrialization, including industrialized agriculture. We’re now using about half of the available supply of renewable fresh water each year. At current rates of population growth, we’re going to be reaching the limits of what’s available within this century. And then most of the planet is going to start experiencing, depending on where you live, moderate to extreme water scarcity.

Some parts of the world are already at that point. The Middle East in particular, but there are parts of the American Southwest and the Southeast and the Plains – even parts of the Northeast are suffering from water scarcity. It’s a combination of weather-change patterns which come from global climate change and the fact that population growth and suburbanization and urbanization are creating a great increase in demand that can’t be supplied.

In the U.S. this leads to disputes over water between states or between counties, and usually these are settled without resorting to violence. What’s happening in the Middle East, though, and in South Asia, is that typically main sources of water, like a large river system, originate outside of the country that depends on them. The Jordan River originates in Syria and Lebanon, but Israel depends on the Jordan. The Nile River originates in Ethiopia and Uganda, but it’s Egypt that depends most heavily on the Nile. Israel has said very clearly it will go to war if any of the Arab states tries to cut off the Jordan River, and Egypt has said the same thing about the Nile.

TW: That’s a pretty precarious position for Israel to be in, a situation where all its water comes from outside the country.

MK: Correct. And that’s why Israel has been unwilling to give up the Golan Heights, which is part of Syria but which is also one of the main sources for the Jordan River. And it’s also unwilling to give up the West Bank, which has an underground stream of water known as the mountain aquifer. Together the Jordan and the mountain aquifer are Israel’s main sources of water, and they have chosen to maintain their control over those through military occupation.

Bear in mind that water is scarce to begin with. Picture desert-like conditions. Then picture the West Bank. Israel controls the wells there and allows Jewish settlers in the West Bank to have as much as five times as much water as the Palestinians, to have enough so that they can water their lawns and wash their cars and fill their swimming pools, while people across the road in Palestinian communities can’t feed their plants that they depend on, and don’t have enough water for proper sanitation. You can understand why resentments build up.

TW: Let’s talk about September 11. How did that change American military policy and oil policy?

MK: That’s not an easily compressed story. September 11 is a product, in part, of America’s pursuit of Persian Gulf oil. You can’t understand September 11 without knowing that history, which has to do with the special relationship the U.S. has with Saudi Arabia.

It goes back to 1945, when President Franklin Roosevelt met with King Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud. They met in Egypt in February 1945 and established a special relationship whereby the U.S. would gain privileged access to Saudi Arabian oil in return for a promise to protect the royal family against its domestic and foreign enemies. So this special relationship is not between the U.S. and a nation, the way our relationship with France or Britain is. Saudi Arabia doesn’t have a constitution; it doesn’t have a government. It’s a feudal monarchy, and our relationship is with the monarchy itself, with the male heirs of Abdul Azziz – women are not part of the line, of course, so this is like a medieval relationship. We don’t have any other relationship like this! And that has been the basis of U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf since 1945.

We’ve built up the Saudi military and the internal security forces of Saudi Arabia and continue to do so. We maintain bases there; we went to war in 1990 to protect Saudi Arabia against Iraq. This is a long-term relationship that predates the U.S. relationship with Israel and historically has been more important in terms of its impact on U.S. military policy. We’ve never stationed troops in Israel or gone to war to protect Israel, but we have stationed troops in Saudi Arabia and have gone to war to protect Saudi Arabia.

TW: And you say in your book that Saudi Arabia contains 25 percent of all the oil in the world.

MK: Right! Which is ...

TW: ... mind-boggling!

MK: They sit on top of more oil than is found in all of North America, all of South America, all of Europe, and all of Africa combined. And so over time the U.S. has developed this very close relationship with the royal family, which a) is undemocratic, b) doesn’t permit any dissent and c) is corrupt in the eyes of those who are devout Muslims. They’ve become so fattened by all this oil money that many of the princes lead very ostentatiously luxurious lives, which don’t accord with Muslim views of piety and modesty. And, of course, d) the royal family is linked closely to the U.S., which is closely related to Israel.

So for these four reasons – its undemocratic character, its repressive character, its corrupt character, and its link with the U.S. – the Saudi royal family has become a target for Islamic extremists within Saudi Arabia who wish to overthrow the royal family and replace it with a more radical Muslim government like the Taliban.

Most Saudis, probably, if they had a democratic option, would choose a more moderate government, but that option is closed off. The only way to express dissent in Saudi Arabia is through religious extremism and terrorism. And so the opponents of the regime turn to terrorist opposition, and it’s from this milieu that Osama Bin Laden and his followers came. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudis who were part of this anti-government underground.

TW: When he announced the "war on terrorism," George Bush talked about an "axis of evil." Your book talks about Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz, through which so much of the oil from the Middle East has to be shipped. And of course Iraq is right there near the strait, too. And it made me think, "Oh, that’s how Bush managed to put these two very disparate countries together into the ‘axis of evil’!"

MK: Right! I think anybody who’s studied the history of U.S. involvement in the Persian Gulf can’t help but see oil behind a lot of other things that happen. Yes, there are other issues: There is a genuine issue of how to address weapons of mass destruction in the region – Israel’s as well as Iran’s and Iraq’s. But I believe that the U.S. concern about Iran and Iraq is primarily about the threat they pose to Saudi Arabia.

And I would also note that Iraq and Iran are the number 2 and the number 3 possessors of oil in the world. I don’t think that U.S. policymakers have lost hope that at some point down the road, with a change of regime, U.S. companies will again be able to draw on those oil supplies.

What is important to understand is that three months before September 11, on May 17, 2001, the White House released the Cheney report on U.S. energy policy.

This is the report that Enron wrote, as we now know, and it reflects the outlook of big oil and big coal. The report calls for a very aggressive effort by the U.S. to gain access to oil supplies outside of the Persian Gulf. Because of fears that the Persian Gulf will be periodically embroiled in war, the strategy calls for increasing our supplies from other areas.

The report highlights three areas for a stepped-up effort: the Caspian Sea basin, the west coast of Africa, and Venezuela, Columbia, Mexico. The Caspian Sea is the first. So this was very much national policy beginning on May 17, 2001.

OK, now comes September 11. The U.S. makes war in Afghanistan because that’s where Osama bin Laden went when he was driven out of Saudi Arabia. The war in Afghanistan is primarily a war for Saudi Arabia – about Saudi Arabia. It was to reassure the Saudis that we would eliminate the Al Qaeda threat to Saudi Arabia. That’s its primary purpose.

However, it does have this nice side benefit. Already you have this policy in place for the U.S. to gain more access to Caspian oil, and the fact that we’re operating in Afghanistan and surrounding areas gives an opportunity, the momentum, to beef up the American presence there. And the administration has taken advantage of that fact to promote its oil agenda. I want to make clear: This was not the primary intent, but it is a very appealing side benefit, and perhaps a more lasting one, because we’ve acquired bases now in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan that could be very useful as the U.S. becomes more deeply involved in the Caspian region. And they could become permanent U.S. facilities.

So what’s happened, I would argue, is that the war against terrorism and the war for oil have merged. This is a product of circumstances, not of design. But once the circumstances arose, the two policies that were moving forward on separate tracks are now running on one track.

TW: Would you say something similar is happening in Colombia?

MK: In Colombia it applies because the U.S. has branded the guerrilla movements as terrorist organizations and has announced its intention to support the Colombian government in its efforts to fight the guerilla organizations. And one of the ways that the guerillas fight is by blowing up oil pipelines and oil facilities. So the U.S. has now said it is going to contribute to the security of the oil installations in Colombia.

Another example is in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. The U.S. now has special forces – military instructors – in Georgia, supposedly to fight terrorism. But this is also a place where the main pipeline is going to go, from the Caspian to Turkey and to the Mediterranean, and the U.S. is very worried about pipeline security in Georgia and the Caucasus.

TW: People on the left have always said that the reason the government and the corporations don’t turn to solar power is that nobody can put a meter on the sun, you can’t make money off of it. But it seems that if the scarcity problem is really becoming so serious over the next 50 years, that governments would be paying attention to alternative energy sources. They know as well as you do that the oil won’t last forever. Why don’t they pay attention?

MK: This is our energy psychosis at work, or the better term is addiction. Look at tobacco as a comparison. Just look how long it took to make even minimal progress in combating tobacco addiction. And there you only had two or three states, North Carolina and Virginia and South Carolina, where the economy was tobacco-driven and where the political leadership of those states worked hard to block any government action on tobacco.

TW: In spite of the fact that nationwide it was costing vast amounts of money in illness.

MK: Now, oil is a situation where all 50 states are addicted. There are no states that act as a political counterweight. And when I say addicted, it’s mainly for transportation. Because oil in this country is not used for power. So solar is not an issue here. It’s transportation that is the factor. And by transportation, we mean suburbs and malls and highways and trucking companies and airline companies, and we’re talking about a substantial chunk of the American economy and the political life. Who votes? Suburbs vote! It’s not inner-city people, who ride public transit and do not have much public clout. It’s middle-class people who live in suburbs, and the housing industry, which only builds in suburbs and nowhere else, and the highway industry and the automobile industry and the oil industry and the trucking industry that are so powerful. And in the end, we’re addicted to this.

What’s at stake here is the AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE. This is a shared addiction that we all have, to a greater extent or a lesser extent. And so it is extremely difficult for our politicians to get in front of the public and tell them the truth – that you can’t live in suburbs anymore, that we have to turn away from that and live our lives differently, the way they do in Europe, where people live in urban concentrations along rail lines and trolley lines.

The only exception that I know of is the city of Portland, Ore., where voters turned down a referendum that would have eliminated controls on suburban sprawl. Just about everywhere else suburban sprawl is the name of the economic game. And no politician has the courage to get in front of voters and say it can’t go on.

TW: So it’s not so simple as to say, "Why don’t we just use the sun?"

MK: Right. You could use solar power to heat our homes, but if our homes are a 30-minute drive from shopping and schools and work, it doesn’t matter. We’re still consuming vast amounts of petroleum. The only way that solar could work is if we build high-speed, electrified, rail connections between every city and every neighborhood, which is what they’re doing in Europe. And in other parts of the world that are run intelligently. Japan.

TW: So it would be possible, with a really concerted effort, to decrease drastically the dependence on oil.

MK: Correct. But what is Congress doing? It’s voting to build more interstates. Wherever you build an interstate, you’re building new sprawl.

I first drove across the U. S. in 1970. Some Witness readers will remember driving across country back then, and you would go huge distances between cities and see farms or wilderness. But now, in so many parts of the U.S., what you see is suburbs wherever you go. All of California, all of the East Coast, the Midwest – it’s all sprawl. And the census data confirm what our eyes tell us – that all of the growth in the American population in the last 20 years has been within 25 miles of the interstates.

TW: One of the things that come up over and over again in your book is the question of population growth. Should government be looking at ways to discourage such rapid population growth? And, if so, is there any way to do that in a non-nasty way?

MK: Two things. First, to make clear that population growth is part of the problem. Globalization is equally serious, and I want to lead with that because there is a tendency of some people in the U.S. to blame it all on population, and therefore absolve themselves of responsibility for their part, which is the consumption of more and more petroleum and other products. Poor people in Nigeria do not own automobiles and do not consume oil, so even if the population there increases a thousand-fold, it won’t make the slightest bit of difference compared to our failure to raise government standards for automobile mileage. Poor people without cars do not contribute to oil depletion. OK. I want to say that first.

However, population growth does matter in turns of water consumption and arable land consumption, and unfortunately some of the highest levels of population growth are occurring in arid countries in the Middle East and Asia that are already water-scarce. And therefore the pressure on water systems is growing as a result of population growth, and pressure on arable lands. This is a real problem not because of population growth, but because of where it’s located. Canada has plenty of water and land, so Canada could have a huge increase in population and it’s not going to affect anything. But in the Nile River valley, the Jordan River valley, the Indus River valley, where you have scarce water that’s shared between three or four countries and high rates of population growth – that’s a recipe for disaster.

TW: And why is population growth so strong right now?

MK: It’s high in many parts of the world, but it’s particularly high in those areas because of religious tradition.

Before, you asked what governments can do. All the studies show that the one best way to control population growth is to provide more education to girls and young women. And provide them with information on reproductive options. That is the best, in fact, the only way to reduce population growth.

TW: Doesn’t a reduction in the birth rate usually go along with a rising standard of living?

MK: Yes, but if it’s men who are educated, and not women, it doesn’t have the same effect. Because, women, when they are empowered, are the ones who tend to be more vigorous in controlling the size of their families. People in the oil countries have high standards of living – like Saudi Arabia – but they have an explosive population growth. And it’s because women have no power.

TW: In terms of resources, is there anything that we should be asking the government to do, or doing ourselves?

MK: Resources are increasingly central to world affairs, and managing global resource supplies is crucial to our ability as a species to survive on this planet. Unless we become more adept at managing and conserving the resources that we have, we can expect a very bloody and ugly future.

It is going to require a different kind of ethics than the ethics of consumption, so this is a moral issue as well as an economic issue. It’s how we choose to lead our lives. I think we should be looking to examples of people who struggle with these issues and might provide us with some guidance – like the Shakers and the Quakers, who regard a simple life as a superior life.

TW: And the Shakers had the population question down pat!

MK: Oh, yes. We won’t go there.

I live not far from one of the largest Shaker communities, the Hancock Village. And their life was austere, but not harsh, because everything they made was so beautiful, so elegant. We could learn to live with less, be happier with less.

One last thought is that this issue of resources cannot be managed on a country-by-country basis. Water and energy are global issues that have to be addressed on a global scale. And they have to be addressed through the principle of equity – that all people are entitled to basic minimums of the things that we need to survive. And if we don’t provide people with that, we’re going to invite violence and terrorism and war. So in the pursuit of peace, resource equity is crucial.

TW: What’s at stake is not just our lifestyle, but ...

MK: ... peace itself.