Power To The Oilmen

A new article at the invaluable Information Clearing House makes for interesting reading, analyzing a 1977 CIA memorandum that has just been de-classified:

"American oil won both World Wars for the Allies and made the US the world's richest and most powerful nation. Meanwhile, throughout most of this same period the USSR remained the world's second foremost oil-producing nation...

"The Reagan Administration abandoned the established policy of pursuing détente with the Soviet Union and instead instituted a massive arms buildup... in the mid-1980s, Washington persuaded Saudi Arabia to flood the world market with cheap oil. Throughout the last decade of its existence, the USSR pumped and sold its oil at the maximum possible rate in order to earn foreign exchange income with which to keep up in the arms race and prosecute its war in Afghanistan... Two years after their oil production peaked, the economy of the USSR crumbled and its government collapsed."

The article then speculates on the coming global peak in oil production - expected around the year 2010 - and the "slow-motion global economic and industrial collapse" which will inevitably follow. It ponders potential differences in CIA and Bush administration policy on this matter.

"If policy makers and their intelligence analysts understand the phenomenon of peak oil, and perhaps even used it strategically during the 1980s to undermine the Soviet Union, and are aware of the upcoming global peak, they must be interested to direct geopolitical events accordingly. What thoughts may be occurring to them in this regard?...

"One cannot help but wonder if the long-coddled Saudi government is even now being set up for a fall."