Tariq Ali Quotes

American oil operations are, for all practical purposes, instruments of our foreign policy.

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil …. Whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction,' American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in an area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the world economy

The oil companies don’t own the resources…. We own the resources.

Land has lost its original strategic value; military forces are no longer employed primarily to conquer land, but to ensure stable economic, energy and information flows, which constitute the true resources, along with the natural resource

Teapot Dome involved the conservation of the oil resources of the United States, especially those situated upon the public lands.

In the United States you use more oil than water. Water takes a few days to recycle. Oil takes 4 million years.

Why did we leave Afghanistan? It’s because there is no oil in Afghanistan.

The United States is pursuing a series of goals (spreading democracy, asserting its hegemony, securing oil supplies) that are ultimately incompatible.

The real obstacle to progress in Nigeria is not a lack of resources; it is who controls them and how they are used.

If the principle product of the Middle East were broccoli, we would not worry about the Middle East.

Show this administration an oil well, and it will show you a foreign policy.

I'm only interested in Libya if we keep the oil. If we don't keep the oil, I'm not interested.

We're supposed to believe that oil had nothing to do with it, that if Iraq were exporting pickles or jelly and the center of world oil production were in the South Pacific that the United States would've liberated them anyway. It has nothing to do with the oil, what a crass idea. Anyone with their head screwed on knows that that can't be true.

As we head to war with Iraq, President Bush wants to make one thing clear: This war is not about oil. It's about gasoline.

Up here in Alaska we're sitting on billions of barrels of oil. We're sitting on hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas onshore and offshore. And it seems to be only the Republicans who understand that companies should be competing for the right to tap those resources, and get that energy source flowing into these hungry markets so that we will be less reliant on foreign sources of energy. In a volatile world, relying on foreign regimes that are not friendly to Americans, asking them to ramp up resource production for our benefit, that's nonsensical.

All that (Mr. Bush) wants is Iraqi oil.

I think that competition will exist even if we discover more oil. We're never going to know how much we have, or how long will it last. You are always going to want to have diversity of supply. I think the Middle East will remain a region of competition, of global competition, fighting for a long time.

In a world of increasing interdependence, energy security will depend much on how countries manage their relations with one another. That is why energy security will be one of the main challenges of foreign policy in the years ahead. Oil and gas have always been political commodities.

We need to see the connection between global warring and global warming, and it's oil. Sustainability is the path to peace.

They [root causes of terror] come out of a long dialectic of U.S. involvement in the affairs of the Islamic world, the oil-producing world, the Arab world, the Middle East - those areas that are considered to be essential to U.S. interests and security.

Nothing would please me more, but who else would pump the oil that we need? God damn America.

I believe that we do not share as many values with Russia yet as we do with the United States. On the other hand, we have a strong interest in Russia developing in a reasonable direction.

Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.

All my life I have been hearing that the oil was going to run out. It never happens. They keep discovering new oil fields. The world is apparently floating in oil fields.

Whenever we defend democracy we find oil.