Just Seen: Newman's History of Oil

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

History of Oil – Rob Newman

“Your good war, your just war has always been presented as a one off, a discreet event no more connected to other wars than consecutive productions of the same musical because all the ‘just war’, ‘humanitarian’ arguments begin to unravel if ever a war is seen to be part of a continuous foreign policy that has remained absolutely consistent for decades.”
Stuck away on More4 where anything even remotely controversial seems to get put these days was an absolutely fantastic stand up show by Rob Newman.
“There is in our own time an absolute taboo among the corporate news media and the political class against mentioning anything whatsoever to do with the strategic and economic reasons for war.”
In a previous review I mentioned that some of the best analysis of this war (in terms of motives at least) has come from the comedians. Even someone like Stephen Colbert, in his Whitehouse press dinner speech, stood up to the Bushies and the media in a way that hasn’t been seen in years in America’s corporate news media.
In his introduction Newman talks about the reporting of ‘an American plan to bring democracy to the middle-east™’ and suggests that the level of naiveté necessary to believe in such a thing is almost unheard of outside of 70s porn films. He suggests that this has been the rebranding of a 1973 document written by the House-sub committee on foreign relations with the less friendly title “Oil Fields as Military Objectives – A feasibility study.”
The whole piece is in three distinct sections (well the TV version is – I didn’t see the live show).
Firstly, he traces the history of nearly a century of Iraq policy. He tells the astonishing statistic that in the 95 years since oil was discovered in Iraq and a telegram was sent to the Glasgow office of Burma Oil saying “see psalm 104 verse 15 line 3” (“that He may bring forth out of the earth, oil, to make a cheerful countenance”) the United Kingdom has been at war with or occupying that particular country for 45 of them.
His contention that World War 1 should be taught in our schools as an invasion of Iraq seems outlandish at first but he is extremely convincing.
“I am sure many of you, like me, have never been entirely satisfied with the standard explanation we were given at secondary school for the causes and origins of WW1… the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand…I mean, NO ONE is that popular…The war breaks out, and remember it’s a war to defend plucky Belgian neutrality while the Belgians are pluckily defending Congolese rubber and ivory. The FIRST British regiment to be deployed in the First World War, the Dorset regiment, goes to….Basra, 1914, where it is joined by 51 other British divisions.
“Therefore I think we can conclude that had Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon fought by the Tigris or the Euphrates instead of the Somme we would never have heard of them.
‘They could have sent truckloads to the front, full of nothing but poets, if they had fought in Iraq during the first world war we would not know of a single man jack of them. There could even have been a First special poets battalion but had it fought in Iraq we would never have known of its existence, although…one can’t help feeling that the first special poets battalion would have been wiped out quite early on in the hostilities.”
One of the possible reasons for this was that just before WW1 the Germans were constructing the Berlin-Baghdad railway (part of which is now known as the Orient Express). This was at a time that the British and German Navies were switching from coal to oil. The British Navy at that time was probably the most powerful military force in the world so access (and denying access) to the newly discovered oil fields was vital. Also, the British government knew that people would simply not accept the Sarajevo to Basra replacement bus service.
The second part is what he calls his “Euro-Dollar theory.” This is an idea I have seen before and although it is a comedian delivering it here I have never seen it so comprehensively and convincingly put forward.
Roughly put, in 1971 OPEC had a meeting where it was decided that any transaction for a barrel of oil was to be conducted in US dollars. This essentially gives the Federal Reserve a blank cheque. The money goes around the global system in US dollars and the cheques never come back to the bank.
However, on the 30th October 2000 the Iraqis changed their Oil for Food program money from a dollar denominated account to a Euro denominated account. The Euro then gains 25% against the dollar thanks to strong sales of Moon Safari by Air which forces Iran to change to the Euro also. Next, North Korea changes not just its oil transactions but ALL its business to Euros. There was then a meeting speculating on the possibility of changing all oil transactions to Euros –the worst nightmare of the Federal Reserve.
It was around this time that the ‘axis of evil’ speech was made.
The third part is a superb section about the looming energy crisis. He correctly says that societies have collapsed because their strategies for energy capture became subject to the law of diminishing returns (not because they all suddenly got bored of being Mayans or Romans), which is certainly what is happening to industrial society.
As he points out, the ultimate irony is that if they did discover huge new Siberian oil fields “the climate chaos unleashed by burning it all would make the oil wars seem like a sideshow bagatelle.”
He provides some possible solutions to this problem, one of which is distinctly skanky but I will leave that one for you when you see it. We might very well have to get used to skanky solutions.
This is superb. You may have noticed I say that about most of the things I review but the truth is I usually only review things I like. I have better things to do than review things I don’t.
You can download it for free at this link - The Dossier . At time of writing it is the 12th one down on the list but it is updated so you might have to look.