Bart, a reader recently wrote to you:
> I remember your side hollering that Vietnam was over oil in the Gulf
of Tonkin.
> Maybe the Bushes were blamed for that, I don't remember. But,
almost 40 years after
> the "oil story" started getting bandied about, there is no oil being
pumped out of Vietnam.
> What happened? Are the Vietnamese just incompetent? Or
did your side just lie? That's the ticket!
Maybe the anti-war crowd said Vietnam was
about oil, I don't remember.
If they did, they were only agreeing with
what President Eisenhower said, to explain our
involvement even back then in southeast
Asia's affairs. Just one word. Oil.
The reason Vietnam itself hasn't exploited
the oil is that it is off shore, requires technology
monopolized by the West, and large capital
investments from big oil that isn't forthcoming
for some reason to one of the world's remaining
communist countries.
The history of the world's oil shows that
big oil has kept countries' production suppressed
when it couldn't control the cut. That
is, when Mexico, possessor of huge reserves, nationalized
all oil into their Pemex national company,
the major oil companies simply refused to build the
pipelines, the dock facilities, the storage
tanks, or to pick up the oil and take it to market.
That kept Mexican oil production at a trickle
for 30 years because they couldn't deliver it for sale
anywhere without big oil's help. Same thing
with Iraq. Iraq had leaders who demanded national
control instead of letting the oil companies
control the oil.
As a result, their production capacity was
kept low, and the capacities of more controlled
countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Brunei,
etc. were invested in, to punish Iraq and reward
the puppet countries. For the only way
to increase oil income is to pump more oil. If you
physically can't pump more, you can't make
more money. Iraq has never pumped a share of
the world market comparable to its share
of proven reserves.
When Mossadegh in Iran nationalized oil,
Kermit Roosevelt and Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf's
father, in the CIA, ran a coup and installed
Reza Pahlavi as Shah . When King Idris of Libya
wanted to nationalize control of its oil,
we installed Moammar Khaddafi. When we couldn't just
overthrow the governments, we punished
them and starved them of oil revenues. There has always
been enough idle capacity to glut the market
if it all was used, so any but the largest producers
could be taken off line without much disruption
of the world market. Big oil has left large known
reserves undeveloped, such as in the Caspian
Sea basin region, so as not to further aggravate
the glut of oil on the market.
Big oil and the CIA are so intertwined that
many consider it big oil's secret police. Howard Hughes'
fortune was founded on an inherited patented
drill bit technology for oil drilling, and Hughes Tools,
Hughes' cashcow, was a major CIA contractor.
George Herbert Walker Bush and William F.
Buckley, Jr. used their oil business interests
as cover for their CIA positions and travels overseas,
as well as the offshore rigs for smuggling
operations. The three surplus ships used to supply the
Bay of Pigs invasion had been rechristened
Houston, Barbara, and Zapata, GHWB's city, wife and
oil company name, respectively. And an
international oil man, George de Mohrenshield, a fascist
White Russian who was fiercely anti-Communist,
was the patron of Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas.
When he was scheduled to testify before
the House Select Committee on Assassinations the next day,
he was found dead from a shotgun, ruled
a suicide. His personal address book was found to contain
an entry for 'Poppy Bush,' with Bush's
Houston phone number next to it.
Click Here for more on Vietnam's oil and gas reserves. Thanks to Dave Tolley.