US PRESIDENT Barack Obama said yesterday that the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico will have the same impact on the US psyche as 9/11.
The impact that 9/11 had on the psyche of George Bush and co. was to decide that the time was ripe to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein to grab Iraq’s oil, after dealing with the Taleban regime that had sheltered Osama bin Laden.
Very quickly the search for Osama was given up and the war in Afghanistan wound down, so that the concentration could be on Iraq where the oil is almost on the surface, and could be got at without a massive investment. You definitely do not have to go one mile beneath the sea surface as in the Gulf of Mexico, before drilling can begin at colossal expense.
The US imperialists are now very close to the point, nine years after 9/11, where they are going to be driven out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and are no closer to the ownership of Iraqi and central Asian oil than they were in 2001.
The difference is that BP has blown up the US plan, whose father was the one-time Vice-President Dick Cheney, of ‘Big Oil’ infamy, to start drilling for oil all along the eastern and western seaboards of the USA.
The US public will clearly not tolerate it.
This is why the major source of Obama’s fury is BP.
In an interview with US website Politico, Obama said the disaster would ‘shape how we think about the environment . . . for years to come’.
Today, he will address the US on the subject from the White House.
A presidential aide said he would outline the next steps his administration would be taking over the spill.
Among these steps are to ensure that BP pays not a cent of dividends until BP has coughed up tens of billions of dollars to cover the damages of the oil disaster, otherwise Uncle Sam will have been seen to have been taken for a ride by the Limeys, and this perception of the state of affairs will not be tolerated in the US.
The truth is that BP and the British government will pay the price. The former will be ruined and the latter will be left without a special relationship with the US to hang onto, buggering up all of its defence and other plans.
Obama said yesterday: ‘In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11, I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come.’
He vowed to ‘move forward in a bold way in a direction that finally gives us the kind of future-oriented . . . visionary energy policy that we so vitally need and has been absent for so long’.
Obama added that he could not predict whether the nation would make a complete transition from an oil-based economy within his lifetime, but added that ‘now is the time for us to start making that transition and investing in a new way of doing business when it comes to energy’.
This visionary stuff is well to the future and in fact belongs to the socialist future. Meanwhile, what US imperialism must have is a secure oil supply if it is to remain the dominant world power.
It must immediately act to secure its oil supply.
BP has meanwhile been told that it ‘must identify in the next 48 hours additional leak containment capacity that could be operationalised and expedited.’
BP is to be broken, or broken up, and with it a good chunk of British capitalism.
For the rest, the US is not going to turn to wind or wave power, not in Obama’s lifetime anyway.
It is going to turn to military action in countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia in the Americas, which have vast oil and gas resources, and step up its drive to grab the oil fields of the Middle East and Central Asia despite all its recent setbacks.
The response of the working people of the world to this situation, in these enormously revolutionary times, must be to advance together to smash capitalism and imperialism and replace them with world socialism. This fight will be led by the Fourth International, the world party of the socialist revolution, which must be built in every part of the world.
