By David L. Winkler, Arizona Republic
May 30, 2002

They call it the "Bay of Piglets." In Venezuela, the world's fourth-largest producer of oil, a coup ousted a democratically-elected leader and installed a businessman in his place, before popular outrage forced the return of President Hugo Chavez.

The White House denied responsibility, but senior members of the Bush administration met with the coup plotters before Chavez's ouster. According to School of the Americas Watch, leaders of the coup were trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga., known in Latin America as the "School of Coups."

The Bush administration has repeatedly criticized Chavez, who has defied U.S. business interests and supported tighter discipline on OPEC oil quotas.

The U.S. supplied Colombia with $100 million to train and equip an army brigade to protect an oil pipeline belonging to Occidental Petroleum. The U.S. is also increasing military aid to Nigeria, our leading source of African oil, and a country with a dismal human rights record.

In Central Asia, the U.S. is establishing military bases and training local defense forces. The Caspian Sea basin holds the world's largest reserves of oil after the Persian Gulf. Plans for pipelines to transport oil and gas across Afghanistan have a new lease on life with the defeat of the Taliban.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, is a former consultant to Unocal, the leader of the CentGas pipeline consortium. Khalilzad is said to have played a major role in negotiations to construct the proposed $2.5 billion pipeline.

The U.S. supports some of the most repressive, anti-democratic, oil-friendly regimes in the Arab world, including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. According to the May 10 New York Times, the Bush administration is debating what government it should impose on Iraq following the removal of Saddam Hussein in Gulf War II.

Michael Klare is the author of Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict. He analyzed the Bush administration's energy policy for AlterNet in a recent article titled "Bush's Master Oil Plan":

"With so many new international crises erupting every day, it is hard to detect any clear forward direction to U.S. foreign policy. . . . But beneath the surface of day-to-day crisis management, one can see signs of an overarching plan for U.S. policy: a strategy of global oil acquisition."

The use of the U.S. military to promote private oil interests is nearly as old as the oil business itself. Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler of the U.S. Marine Corps put it bluntly in 1935: "I helped make Mexico . . . safe for American oil interests in 1914. . . . In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."

A self-described "gangster for capitalism" who "helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street," Butler experienced a conversion in later life, and became an outspoken critic of U.S. military interventions. (See Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History, by Hans Schmidt.)

We could use a leader of Butler's integrity and candor these days, as the Bush administration, teeming with former oil company executives, spans the globe in search of "evildoers" who just happen to sit on petroleum reserves and pipeline routes.

David L. Winkler lives in Phoenix. He is a member of the Arizona Alliance for Peaceful Justice. Reach him at mediamaven@cox.net.

Reprinted from The Arizona Republic:
http://arizonarepublic.com/opinions/
articles/0530winkler30.html