What kind of madman would invade Kuwait?

A declassified British document reveals that Richard Nixon had a military plan to seize oil fields in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi during the Arab oil embargo 30 years ago.

Comments

[Richard Swan]

Joe,
What it tells me is there were some smart people in the Nixon White House. This is called contingency planning. There was a very remote possibility that war involving the US could have broken out. It would have been idiotic for the US not to have a war plan. Just as it would have been idiotic for the Clinton White House not to call for a war plan to be drawn up to attack North Korea's nuclear facilities. War, like many things, takes time to plan. If there is a possibility war may occur, however remote, the White House under any presidency, must plan for it. To fail to do so, could put US security at risk.

Richard Swan

[joe]

"...a war involving the US could have broken out." Quite possibly the best use of the passive voice I've yet seen.

If a war involving the US had broken out in the Persian Gulf in the 1970s, it would have been because we chose to send a half million men and several billion dollars to the other side of the planet in order to make sure that such a war broke out. There is no other way that it could have happened unless Nixon decided to make it happen.

Q: Why do you have duct tape, branding irons, and lots of plastic bags in your basement?

A: Just in case a serial killing involving me broke out.

[Lonewacko: Still Trying to Cap]

Lonewacko barely remembers the Gas Shock days, complete with even-odd rationing and very high gas prices. When this is put in its historic context, the complaints about this never-implemented plan just look like carping.

[Nick]

Lets see what this story really says. Some in the British intelligence THOUGHT that the United States MAY have been CONSIDERING a POSSIBLE invasion of Arab oil fields IF tensions in the area continued. Never mind that the said invasion never happened, never mind British intelligence has not always been perfect (just when they screw up about Iraq Uranium claims Bush somehow gets the blame...), never mind that even if this was considered it would have been considered a last resort, never mind that this whole thing is just speculation, this must be a big story because the media said so.
My favorite quote from the story:
"it was no longer obvious to him that the United States could not use force."

[Jean Bart]

asg,

This plan wasn't created during a long period of peace; unless you consider the war in Viet Nam peace.

Andrew,

The U.S. during the 1990s was one of Iraq's best customer. Indeed, in 2000, 7% of America's imports of oil were from Iraq. I don't think this pattern appreciably changed until sometime in 2002.

[R&D]

This is old news, isn't it?

From the Robert Baer interview "Addicted to Oil", Atlantic Unbound, May 29, 2003:

Shelburne: What is the Saudi royal family's attitude toward the threat to their oil?

Baer: Well, even the King, back in the early seventies, when there was the Kissinger plan of seizing the oil fields, the King said "Fine, seize our oil fields and we'll go to war with you and we'll go back to the desert and live off camel's milk and eat dates." There's this mentality in Saudi Arabia that oil has been a curse.

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2003-05-29.htm

[Gene Berkman]

Lonewacko remembers the oil shortage days, and does not think the oil war plans show Nixon is a wacko.

Hey wait a minute. The oil shortage was caused by the price controls on oil imposed by President Nixon. Without the price controls, there would have been no lines at the gas station. After President Reagan removed price controls, the supply went up and the price went down.

Of course that is how government often works. One bad policy leads to bad results, and people demand another bad policy to take care of the problem.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Happiness means having Dick Nixon to kick around forever.

From what I gleaned from the article, PM Heath didn't seem to have any particular objections to the plans, his beef was more that Nixon didn't ring him up often enough to give him the low down on what he (Nixon) was up to.

I wonder what sort of goofy military or foreign policy contingency plans we'll someday find out were floated around the halls of Clinton's White House.

[steve]

Crazy yes, but I find it difficult to get too upset about something that didn't happen. Likewise with Clinton.

[Stich]

We already knew all about this invasion scenario. Didn't you guys see that documentary "Three Days of the Condor"? That nice man Robert Redford then went on into acting.

[Ruthless]

Hey, just think how much less blood for oil there would have been if Nixon had hauled off and done it!?
He couldn't have done it anyway nohow. He was the Prez withdrawing us from Vietnam. It would have been just too inconsistent to be making a withdrawal one place just to make a deposit in another.
Another thing. Aren't these military contingency plans a dime a dozen... only useful for creating a little news when there really is none?
Finally, who told those nutcases over there that it was their oil in the first place? Didn't US oil companies find it? Shouldn't they have OWNED it? Decisions on oil should have always been business decisions, not political/tribal ones.

[Dan]

the fact that the White House told his early 70s equivalent to draw up an invasion plan for the Persian Gulf tells me a lot about Nixon

Um, ok. What does it tell you about him? Because I don't know if you noticed, but the United States didn't actually invade. We didn't even threaten to invade, so far as I'm aware.

Sure, obviously he entertained the idea of invading -- or at least entertained the idea that we might have to invade, to secure a supply of oil, should events require it (eg, a war elsewhere in the world, or a disruption of alternative supplies). But in what way is this a bad thing?

[Andrew]

How much the world has changed. A particular source for oil just isn't that critical, anymore. We sanctioned ourselves, and (mostly the rest of the world) off Iraqi oil for more than a decade.

Invading Saudi Arabia-- even any part of it-- isn't appealing: Mecca is there-- you can talk about moderate Moslems all you want, but...

Jordan might be persuaded to invade. Getting guardianship over the holy places could off-set losing Jerusalem.

[Andrew]

I wonder what that stuff about a ten-year occupation was all about?

[dj of raleigh]

Such stuff really shouldn't be in the news,
but in books from academia analyizing history.
The USA would have, and will, go to war
for strategic reasons. They are talking about it now because the war got slow, I guess.

South Africa was one such location,
and not for the diamonds,
but for the metals mined there,
and they were mined in the USSR.

The hard metals used to make the drills and machines that MAKE other products come from SA.
The USSR supplies them to us today as well.
Neither Nixon nor any other president
would allow our industry to come to a halt.
(We made more basic machined product back then.)

Before the SA mines would have been allowed in the hands of the USSR, the US would have gone to war if necessary.

The flow of oil, less important then, than now,
is another vital cog in world commerce. Why would anyone not think we are prepared to take action in the middle east?

What is yet another area?
Consider the international waterways:
Suez and Panama Canals,
the shipping lanes through the Banta Sea between Australia and Indonesia,
Gibraltar, that five mile square of mountain that controls the passage between the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea (Gibraltar just voted to remain with Britain (since the 1700s) rather than go back to Spain.
Consider air space....mineral wealth of remote places such as the poles, Greenland, and the Moon and stars above....

There are no real rules in this world.
We try to have them, but they aren't final.
We might think life is a Monopoly game,
or a ball game, and we have what we want,
and we think others are going to be satisfied
to have less, but we would be wrong.

Rome fell, and we will do. The face of the USA has changed drastically over my generation, and we haven't lost a war since Vietnam.

We can't just assume that the sense of democracy,
of right and wrong, of order we were given as children will be passed on to our kids automatically or accepted by others moving in. It has to be worked at, fought for, even to die for.

The US has everything given us this generation. Good roads, natural resources, fair scales, and a sense of fair dealings...but we could fall into third world corruption, bribery, nepotism, and ignorance. Some think it is happening due to the signs (persona of leadership - celebrities/heroes/politicians/preachers/teachers/family structure --
but I don't know. Do you?

[asg]

During peacetime, it's the job of the army to come up with contingency plans. During long periods of peace, they can come up with some pretty interesting scenarios. The video game "Harpoon", which was used as a jumping off point for a lot of Navy training sims, had a scenario where 3 billion barrels of oil are found under the Antarctic ice shelf and Chile and Argentina go to war over it. Also, more germane to U.S. involvement, one where Britain, after having joined the EU, decides to leave and the other member countries opt to use force to keep them in. Invasion of the Arab oil producing countries is positively down-to-earth compared to either of those.

[joe]

The numerous color-coded war plans the War Department wrote up before WW2 are also examples of the "war plans factory" that exists in Washington. It's important to have people who are practiced at drawing up warplans, and keeping their product on a bookshelf is a good idea, just in case something weird happens.

But that's not what the story was about. This was a plan drawn up at the direction of the White House, not the military heirarchy. The fact that there was a plan to invade South America drawn up by some lt col in 1928 doesn't tell me anything about Herbert Hoover, but the fact that the White House told his early 70s equivalent to draw up an invasion plan for the Persian Gulf tells me a lot about Nixon.

[Lonewacko: Prats don't get the]

According to this: It followed the decision in October 1973 by the Arab nations to slash oil production, and send prices rocketing, while imposing a complete embargo on the Americans over their support for Israel.

[Jean Bart]

Raleigh,

"The USSR supplies them to us today as well."

The USSR is kaput.

[Rick Barton]

Gene Berkman wrote:
"The oil shortage was caused by the price controls on oil imposed by President Nixon. Without the price controls, there would have been no lines at the gas station. After President Reagan removed price controls, the supply went up and the price went down.

Of course that is how government often works. One bad policy leads to bad results, and people demand another bad policy to take care of the problem."

Some posts are so strong that they bear repeating!

Gene; your post, especially the second paragraph shows that you are better qualified to be president than Bush and all the dwarfs put together. Weren't you with "libertarians for Dean"?
It's OK. All is forgiven. If you wanna run in the GOP primaries against Bush, you've got my vote.

[DFH]

What I find amusing is that any intelligent person could possibly imagine that any competent President of the United States would *not* have such a plan developed and performed a cost/benefit analysis of the possibility.

To not plan for this potential conflict would have been irresponsibility bordering on total incompetence.

Oil is a requirement for national security. one of the Presidents jobs is to ensure national security.

[Jean Bart]

BTW, given Nixon's willingness to "illegaly" bomb Cambodia (as well as Kissinger's support for such real politic measures), the invasion of the middle east is not beyond reality. Perhaps Watergate stopped it.

[Don]

"BTW, given Nixon's willingness to "illegaly" bomb Cambodia (as well as Kissinger's support for such real politic measures), the invasion of the middle east is not beyond reality. Perhaps Watergate stopped it."

Well, Watergate prevented Nixon from keeping the North Vietnamese from living up to their aggrements & not invading the South.

In '72, US air power tipped the balance for the ARVN forces, stopping the North's invasion. That could have been repeated in '75 as well, but the loss of Nixon's political capital due to Watergate prevented American intervention.