A great read, I must say!
The Oily Americans
Why the world doesn’t trust the U.S. about petroleum: A history of meddling
By DONALD L. BARLETT AND JAMES B. STEELE
Tuesday, May. 13, 2003
For more than a half-century, American foreign policy dealing with oil has typically been manipulative and misguided, often both at the same time. The pattern of intrigue has ranged from U.S. officials’ secretly writing tax laws in the 1950s (so the Saudi royal family could collect more money from the sale of its oil and American companies could write off the added payments on their tax returns) to overthrowing a government that showed too much independence in handling its oil sales. To illustrate the dark side of American oil policy, we offer two tales, stitched together from declassified government documents and oil-industry memos, involving a pair of Iraq’s neighbors, Iran and Afghanistan.
The first one begins with the rise of a member of Iran’s parliament, Mohammed Mossadegh, an impassioned speaker and popular politician who had long chafed at British domination over his country’s oil. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., partly owned by the British government and a predecessor of today’s British Petroleum, held the concession for all of Iran.
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