Petroimperialism: US Oil Interests and the Iraq War

Practicing Radical Geopolitics: Logics of Power and the Iranian Nuclear “Crisis”

“…Only a few geographers have discussed the role of oil in U.S. intervention in the Middle East (Harvey 2003;Smith 2003Smith , 2005Jhaveri 2004; Le Billon and El Khatib 2004). This account clarifies and adds some important points.…”

Predicting the Psychological Response of the American People to Oil Depletion and Declining Energy Return on Investment (EROI)

“…government dealings with "troublesome" OPEC nations, during the decades that followed, have been persistently bellicose, determined to avert the loss of control experienced in the wake of the 1979 energy crisis [75,76]. Conversely, the American people were far quicker to forget the tumult of the late 1970s and early 1980s [69].…”

“…The fragile diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Middle Eastern countries, during the post WWII era are fundamentally linked to the maintenance of the world oil trade status quo and U.S. reliance upon a world economic system that requires very large U.S. imports of oil and other basic and also manufactured resources. The Arab Oil Embargo [37], Desert Storm [38], the "9/11" fall of the Twin Towers [36], the Iraq "war" [39] and the War on Terrorism [36] are all direct or indirect manifestations of the U.S. need for foreign oil and the complex responses of both the U.S. and those who supply it [40]. Thus as the U.S. has become increasingly dependent upon imported resources, resource-rich "developing nations" increasingly are able to impact the destiny of U.S. wealth, prosperity and, perhaps, national security.…”

The Imperial Present: Geography, Imperialism, and its Continued Effects

“…Engaging, narrating and learning from the geographies of past anti-imperial struggles matter a great deal for understanding resistance to contemporary imperial interventions (Butz, 2002;Smith, 2003;Jhaveri, 2004;Featherstone, 2005b;Kearns, 2009). Consider, for example, the repeated and myopic shortcomings of Western geopolitical and cultural explanations for the so-called 'insurgency' during the recent Iraq war (Gregory, 2008).…”

“…Contemporary imperialism has been critiqued by geographers in at least four principal ways: first, focus has been given to the persistence of hegemonic cultural registers of difference via imperial discourses of ethnicity, race, religion, gender and sexuality (Gregory, 2004;Blunt, 2005;Clayton, 2009b;Kearns, 2009); secondly, attention has directed to the political economy of continued Western global hegemony and accelerated capitalist accumulation (Harvey, 2003;Jhaveri, 2004;Smith, 2005;Nally 2011); thirdly, critical geopolitical accounts have underlined the abstracted discursive production of military interventionary spaces (and particularly so in the context of the socalled 'war on terror') (Ó Tuathail, 2003;Graham, 2005;Dalby, 2007;Hyndman, 2007); and, finally, geographers have sought to interrogate the multiple practices of interventionism in our contemporary world and their consequent contested forms of securitization and governmentality (Desbiens, 2007;Stanley, 2008;Fluri, 2009;Morrissey, 2011). There has, of course, been much overlap of perspective too, and arguably one of the most important overarching characteristics of contemporary geographical critiques of imperialism is a particular proficiency in contextualizing and theorizing discursive and material productions of space, especially in the complex contexts of postcolonialism, neoliberalism, environmental justice and political violence (Sullivan, 2006;Featherstone, 2008;Cowen, 2009;Watts, 2009).…”