Black Gold: Oil

Many people in the blog has previously talked about oil in relation to the elevation of the land and such related topics, but i want to go in another direction; I want to talk about the post world war 2 history in the Middle East, and how that relates to our current oil struggles.  George Kennan, of the U.S. State Department Policy Planning in 1948 said, "We should recognize that our influence in the Far Eastern area in the coming period is going to be primarily military and economic. We should make a careful study to see what parts of the Pacific and Far Eastern world are absolutely vital to our security, and we should concentrate our policy on seeing to it that those areas remain in hands which we can control or rely on."  The Cold War happened next, providing the US with perfect opprotunities to do what they needed to in order to gain oil concessions, under the cover of protecting the US and other countries from Communism's stranglehold.  In Afghanistan, as documented in Charlie Wilson's War, we sent arms and money to those people who we know fight against (Osama Bin Laden), to help them gain independence from Soviet Russia.  When the US first invaded Iraq in the Gulf War, we were there arguably to protect our oil share in Kuwait.  Iraq was even accused of dumping oil into the Persian Gulf to keep our troops at bay.  We won the Gulf War, removing an Iraqi presence in Kuwait, and later went on to remove Saddam Hussein as ruler of Iraq.  All of this was done to protect our oil in the Middle East.

The world's oil is under the hand of public companies and state-owned organizations.  The public companies are known as supermajors, or the six largest non state-owned energy companies.  They own roughly 5% of the oil reserves and made approximately 45.6 billion dollars worth of profit last year. Not coincidentally, these companies are all either primarily US or English owned.  As for the state-owned companies, the three biggest ones, Saudi Aramco, National Iranian Oil Company, and Qatar Petroleum all trace their routes to US and British companies.  While it is interesting how oil, elevation, and population are all connected, I find it more interesting that the world's largest oil producers all are connected to the US and Britain, two of the greatest allies