Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Energy, war
and US policy
The American mix
Oil has been the lifeblood of war - armies, navies and air forces
run on it - ever since the major powers' navies converted to oil just
before World War I. Oil fields have therefore been a prime target in
war. During World War II, getting hold of the oilfields of Romania
and southern Russia was a vital goal for the Germans, and loss of
them after 1944 helped seal Germany's fate. When US and UK troops
invaded Iraq in 2003, one of their priorities was to seize Iraq's oil
fields.
When US troops took Baghdad, it was noticeable that they secured the
oil ministry, while leaving the other ministries to be looted by Iraqis.
(Leading Donald Rumsfeld, the US defense secretary, to make his famous-
ly insouciant remark about the looting: “stuff happens”.)
But just because oil fields are a prime target in war does not mean that
they are necessarily a prime
cause
of war. Oil certainly can, and has been,
the trigger for war. It was the reason why Bolivia and Paraguay went to
war in the 1930s over the Chaco region, which was, wrongly, thought
to hold oil. Many historians consider oil to have been a motive behind
Japan's attack on the US in 1941. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
appeared to be in response to the decision of America, then the world's
major source of oil, to ban the sale of oil to Japan, in order to penalize
Japan for its incursions into China. The Japanese had calculated that the
only option left to them by the US decision was to invade the Dutch-
controlled Indonesia to get oil, that this would make war with the US
inevitable, and that therefore they might as well land the first blow, at
Pearl Harbor.
