Blood and Oil

In the preface Klare is transparent about his intellectual path. Peace was expected at the end of the Cold War but never came; Huntington's «clash of civilizations» explained some conflicts but not, for instance, America's 1991 alliance with Saudi Arabia against Iraq. After studying wars over diamonds in Angola and Sierra Leone, gold and copper in Congo and timber in Cambodia, the author concluded that most conflicts of our era are rooted not in identity but in resources.

The most interesting feature of the preface is that the author corrects his own earlier view. In «Resource Wars» (2001) he had treated all resources as roughly equal sources of danger; 9/11, the fact that most of the hijackers were Saudi, and the run-up to the Iraq war led him to conclude that oil holds a special place. This intellectual honesty lends the book credibility.

Klare's central argument is simple and strong: although oil extraction accounts for only about 5% of the US economy, cheap and plentiful oil underpins cars, highways, aviation, petrochemicals, agriculture and tourism — in other words, the American way of life. That is why presidents of both parties have treated oil not as an ordinary commodity like copper or cobalt but as a matter of «national security», and considered military force a normal means of securing it.

Chapter 1 opens with a telling detail: Tampa, Florida, is neither an oil capital nor a media hub, yet here — at MacDill Air Force Base — sits Central Command (Centcom), the brain of every American operation in the Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq. Klare documents how Centcom grew out of the 1980 Carter Doctrine, fought in four major wars from the Iran–Iraq war to the 2003 invasion, and has as its primary mission, in effect, protecting the global flow of oil.

The chapter's strength is the way it sets official rhetoric against the facts: Ari Fleischer's and Donald Rumsfeld's statements that the war «has nothing to do with oil» are placed beside US troops in Baghdad guarding the Oil Ministry first while other buildings were looted. With examples such as protecting pipelines in Colombia and the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan line in Georgia, Klare argues that the US military is being turned into a «global oil-protection service» — a detail of particular interest to readers in the Caspian region.

The book's weakness is that it is tied to the realities of 2004: the shale revolution has made the US a major producer again, and «peak oil» forecasts have not come true. The Turkish copy also contains many scanning errors. Even so, as an analysis of the structural link between oil and military power, the book has kept its value.

• Each chapter opens with a concrete place or event (Tampa, Centcom) before broadening into analysis
• Rich documentation from official statements, congressional testimony and statistics
• The argument is built in a clear logical sequence, each section setting up the next question