This did not mean that American presidents would necessarily embrace a military approach to American foreign oil dependency in the Middle East. Suggested reading The battle to control America's mind Under the Carter Doctrine, the United States became publicly committed to using military force in response to “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf”. In this maelstrom, Jimmy Carter made a major strategic change in American foreign policy that has never yet been reversed. But the Iranian revolution in February 1979, followed by first the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and then the Iran-Iraq War, overwhelmed this strategy while sending oil prices soaring until new output from Alaska and the North Sea appeared.

Wanting to guard against Soviet influence in the Persian Gulf, but not wanting militarily to replace Britain, the Nixon administration made Saudi Arabia and Iran the guarantors of American energy security in the region. During the Seventies, Iraq was also an ally of Moscow. The Ba’athist government - on this issue directed by Saddam Hussein - had nationalised all the foreign oil companies.

Iraq was always tangled up in Washington’s ensuing geopolitical problems. Unfortunately from its perspective, it acquired a direct interest in supply from the Middle East just as British imperial power crumbled in the region and post-colonial energy nationalism took hold. Then, the United States became the world’s largest oil importer after decades of near self-sufficiency. Indeed, since the origins of the oil problem that the Iraq War was conceived to address lie in the Seventies, he was necessarily Carter’s energy heir. In that moment, Bush might have been mistaken for Jimmy Carter. After post-invasion Iraq descended into civil war, Bush came close to spelling out those motivations when, in his 2006 State of the Union address, he said: “we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world”. Yet the Halliburton allegations were a distraction from the actual reasons why Iraq was an oil war - not that Bush and Blair dared present it as such. It’s not the oil that is the issue - it is the weapons, which is why the UN resolutions have gone over 12 years in relation to the weapons and why we’ve actually allowed Iraq to export oil.” The fact is that, if the oil that Iraq has were our concern, I mean we could probably cut a deal with Saddam tomorrow in relation to the oil.

“Let me just deal with the oil thing because… the oil conspiracy theory is honestly one of the most absurd when you analyse it. Knowing that the oil charge coming from across the Atlantic made it harder for him to win the battle of public opinion in Britain, Tony Blair directly tried to defuse it in a Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman:

Ironically, one of Brown & Root’s critics was a young Donald Rumsfeld, then a Republican Congressman, but in 2003 Bush’s defence secretary and a vocal cheerleader for the war. Four decades earlier, a Halliburton subsidiary, Brown & Root, made large donations to President Lyndon Johnson before securing contracts on a naval construction programme in South Vietnam. At the centre of these accusations stood Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, the former CEO and Chair of the Board of Halliburton, the large American oil services company that received a contract to repair Iraq’s oil infrastructure in the same month the war began.Ĭheney’s involvement appeared to repeat a familiar story about the American military-industrial complex. Bush and his advisers’ decision to invade was part of the bitter political contest preceding the “shock and awe” attack on 23 March 2003. Even before the conspicuous absence of weapons of mass destruction shattered the pretext for the Iraq War, it was haunted by black gold.

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