Article supposing what the influential social critic William Appleman Williams would say about current U.S. policy. The author sums it up in several points. Two of them are below. The whole article can be found here: http://hnn.us/articles/42971.html
"Fourth, Williams would have stressed the centrality of oil in current foreign policy. He would not do so in a single-cause way; contrary to his critics, Williams was never a narrow economic determinist. But he still would have seen the oil issue as crucial—partly because of the economic value of the oil itself, but more largely because of the geopolitical clout over others made possible by control of oil. The struggle for oil is, of course, one that is a century old. But that struggle has, for several reasons, reached a new and critical phase.
"Few new major fields have been discovered since the early 1970s, and predictions are that oil production will peak in the next five to ten years and decline sharply thereafter. More to the point, oil companies believe those dire predictions and have commenced a renewed search for new reserves. But Big Oil, however, has not been a prime mover pressuring the American State to aggressively act in its behalf. The giant multinationals, by and large, are fairly content with their relationship to the Saudis and to OPEC and anxious that war not upset the stability of their arrangements. The push really comes from the independent oil companies like Occidental, Unocal, Murphy and Kerr-McGee and from the Texas-based oil service companies tied to them, like Halliburton, Baker Hughes and Bechtel. As their U.S. holdings decline, they have looked elsewhere and sought to influence U.S. foreign policy in ways not seen since the Eisenhower days and the oil depletion allowance. And they have found ready ears in this administration and its aggressive policies in Iraq, Iran and Central Asia.
I ALSO FOUND POINT NO. 2 VERY INTERESTING:"Second, Williams would contend that in the conflict between those two versions of exceptionalism, the pro-active, aggressive variant has almost always won out. Over time, as he famously put it in the title of one of his books, empire became a “way of life” for American society. For starters, it provided the economic surplus necessary to maintain a high standard of living, even if that surplus was more unevenly distributed than in any other industrial society. Moreover, it provided a kind of psychic substitute for the lack of real community in a society whose only common identity was consumption. Empire offered the public the double thrill of physically dominating others while purporting to uplift and civilize them. And war, that frequent companion of empire, gave American society a chance to express and vent its own internal angst and anger against external, distant enemies. Bread and circuses!
Found on Marxmail list.
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