Complex Consequences

Mary Ann Tétreault

Chapter 4 in Rebuilding Devastated Economies in the Middle East, 2007, pp 77-94 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract 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).

Keywords: State Capacity; Hydrocarbon Production; Gulf Cooperation Council; Capital Intensity; Home Government (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-60929-7_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230609297

DOI: 10.1057/9780230609297_4

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().