Talk:United States oil politics

Cleanup since 2006?

No one has thought to clean this up yet? None of our power editors have done anything for it?

Come on guys and girls, lets do this article some good shall we? Right now, it just sounds like some screaming conspiracy-theoryist, whiny wacko liberal arguements thrown into hysteria mode. Lets try and cut out any POV and get this to a more fact-on-fact article.

Myself, I cut out the part about the 9/11 hijackers being 12/13ths Saudi: whilst the 9/11 attacks may of indeed been linked to oil, that doesn't need to be present in a statistical analysis of the US's relations with Saudi Arabia. That'd go under a section that would have to be entitled "Controversy," and with a detailed explanation leading up to the fact about the hijackers. Not just some randomly injected fact.Scryer_360 (talk) 02:03, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Cleaning up this article will be difficult. One possible place to start would be to express the various reliably-sourced points of view by writing (or expanding) book articles relating to U.S. petroleum politics, for example Energy Victory by Robert Zubrin, and Blood and Oil by Michael Klare. The plainly obvious connection between growing U.S. addiction to imported oil and the steadily-expanding U.S. military involvement in oil-exporting regions of the world is apparent to experts from a variety of political views. It is obvious to anyone who examines the facts. Zubrin, for example, is hardly a leftist, and his central thesis is that United States energy independence is the central front in the War on Terror. T. Boone Pickens frequently states "We are funding both sides" of the War on Terror by shipping so much U.S. wealth overseas to buy ever-increasing amounts of petroleum, and as John Kerry supporters may recall, Pickens hardly leans to the left either. Alan Greenspan (not exactly a friend of the left) had this to say:

• AMY GOODMAN: "Alan Greenspan, let’s talk about the war in Iraq. You said what for many in your circles is the unspeakable, that the war in Iraq was for oil. Can you explain?"
• ALAN GREENSPAN: "Yes. The point I was making was that if there were no oil under the sands of Iraq, Saddam Hussein would have never been able to accumulate the resources which enabled him to threaten his neighbors, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. And having watched him for thirty years, I was very fearful that he, if he ever achieved—and I thought he might very well be able to buy one—an atomic device, he would have essentially endeavored and perhaps succeeded in controlling the flow of oil through the Straits of Hormuz, which is the channel through which eighteen or nineteen million barrels a day of the world eighty-five million barrel crude oil production flows. Had he decided to shut down, say, seven million barrels a day, which he could have done if he controlled, he could have essentially also shut down a significant part of economic activity throughout the world. ... it’s clear to me that were there not the oil resources in Iraq, the whole picture of how that part of the Middle East developed would have been different."

Of course the exact nature of political events depends on too many factors to be fully comprehensible, let alone predictable in fine detail, but the general trend is crystal clear: as the U.S. (and its allies) have chosen to rely increasingly on oil imported from unstable parts of the world, U.S. military presence and activity in these areas have also increased. --Teratornis (talk) 19:35, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Intro

I rewrote the intro (the old intro is now the first section after the intro). Is it better? RJFJR (talk) 16:44, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Section on U.S. officials who have worked for the oil industry

Do we want to keep this section in the earticle? Is it all cited? Is it notable? (If put back shoul;d probably have more prose describing what the context of this list.) RJFJR (talk) 16:02, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

U.S. officials who have worked for the oil industry

• James Baker
• Joe Barton
• Michael Boskin
• George H.W. Bush
• George W. Bush
• Robert Card
• James Connaughton
• Richard Cheney
• Philip Cooney
• Donald Evans
• Alberto Gonzales
• Wendy Lee Gramm
• J. Steven Griles
• Robert Jordan (lawyer)
• Zalmay Khalilzad
• Henry Kissinger
• Robert B. Oakley
• James C. Oberwetter (ambassador to Saudi Arabia)
• Joseph Lieberman
• Condoleezza Rice
• Gale Norton
• James Schlesinger (first Secretary of Energy)

Info not merged

I didn't merge the specific countries we get oil from, because I couldn't figure out what source verified it, and it would be excessive detail in that other article anyway. I also didn't merge the quote about Saudi Arabia, as it's not very definitive and it's really about US-Saudi Arabia diplomatic relations, not about energy policy. Someone may want to move that quotation (or a summary of it) to some other article. Qwyrxian (talk) 00:32, 22 September 2011 (UTC)