Blood for Oil

 Back during the Bush years, it was a stock criticism on the Left of George W. Bush's Iraq War to say that the whole thing was being fought for oil. The administration might talk a big game about democracy and freedom—we said—but really they just wanted to get their hands on a lucrative asset. 

Who knows now if this was true or not—or if it was even an important question in assessing the overall morality of the 2003 invasion—which, whatever its motive—ended up being absolutely catastrophic in its consequences. 

What is not debatable, either way, is that the current U.S. military provocations in Venezuela are motivated by oil. How do we know? Trump told us so. 

Earlier this week, Trump declared explicitly that his pressure campaign on the Maduro government is motivated by a desire to seize Venezuelan oil assets, which he claims were wrongfully expropriated from U.S. firms. "They took all of our oil not that long ago. And we want it back," he reportedly—and repetitively—said. "They took it — they illegally took it." 

Leave it to Trump to simplify things from a moral perspective. Back during the Bush years, we had to wade through a lot of hypocritical rhetoric about promoting democracy and human rights in order to assess whether the U.S. government really had a self-interested motive behind its actions. 

With Trump, we don't have to engage in these kinds of excavations. He just comes out and says: yeah, I want to take Venezuela's stuff. They took our oil, and we're taking it back. (In reality, Venezuela did pay out some compensation for nationalized assets; though an international arbitration panel deemed it insufficient.)

So Trump doesn't frame this conflict as an effort to combat the authoritarianism and human rights violations of Maduro's reign (which are valid and serious objections to his regime), the way an ideological neoconservative might do. Instead, he just says: yeah, I'm doing this because I want to grab stuff that belongs to them and make it ours. 

As James Russell Lowell once wrote of the Mexican-American war, in the Biglow Papers—the administration's purpose appears avowedly to be nothing more than robbery and piracy: "ascrougin' 'em out o' thir own dominions"—which he defined as "to take a feller up jest by the slack o' 's trowsis / An' walk him Spanish clean right out o' all his homes an' houses[.]"

Trump, then, really is trading blood for oil. He has blown up more than a hundred civilians in boat strikes at sea—without charge or trial—for the sake of no more noble an aim than the theft and appropriation of the fossil fuel wealth of another sovereign nation. 

We are back, it would seem, in the bad old days of U.S. policy in Latin America—the classic petroleum-industry imperialism that Pablo Neruda described in his poem, "Standard Oil": 

A President assassinated for a drop of petroleum,

a million-acre mortgage,

a swift execution on a morning mortal with light, petrified,

a new prison camp for subversives,

in Patagonia, a betrayal, scattered shots

beneath a petroliferous moon,

a subtle change of ministers

in the capital, a whisper

like an oil tide,

and zap, you’ll see

how Standard Oil’s letters shine above the clouds,

above the seas, in your home,

illuminating their dominions.

(Schmitt trans.)