Behind the Iran War and All the Wars in the Middle East: Oil

One month into the war in Iran, journalists and politicians, Democrats and Republicans, leftist, rightists, and independents should no longer be asking what this war is all about.

Sasan Fayazmanesh, in his March 13th piece in Counterpunch, made a convincing (and brave) argument that It’s Israel, Stupid. He just didn’t go far enough.

He rightly begins by posing the questions that seemed to have no coherent answer:

Is it because negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program were not progressing? Is it because Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons? Is it because Iranian ballistic missiles were going to reach the US soon? Is it because Israel was going to attack Iran and the US took pre-emptive measures to ensure the safety of Americans? Is it because the Iranian government was violating human rights? Or is it something else?

He posits

The US attacked Iran for one reason and one reason only: Israel. Israel, created by the US and Europeans, has been urging the US for decades to wage a destructive war against Iran.”

Why? To achieve the Zionist goal of achieving a Greater Israel. But she omits Israel’s thirst for getting and controlling oil, harkening back to the presidency of George W. Bush and a revelation made to former NATO commander Wesley Clark immediately after 911. As I documented in my book, Follow the Pipelines: Uncovering the Mystery of a Lost Spy and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil, Clark in 2007 stated that a Pentagon official revealed to him in 2001 a plan to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years,” starting with Iraq and moving on to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan [all oil -related conflicts] and Iran. While on a book tour, Clark stated further that the Bush strategy was shaped around gaining control of Middle East oil resources, based on a plan by his neoconservative backers [some with dual US-Israeli citizenship] to “use US troops to secure access to these energy supplies abroad.”

Today Iran is the third largest owner of oil reserves in the world, behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. This simple fact has not been adequately addressed by the media, which has focused on the dangers of blockading the Strait of Hormuz and seizing Kharg Island, resulting in the increase in the price of oil, and chronicling how both sides have bombed the others’ oil installations –without explaining the hidden context of competing petro powers seeking to command and control oil to adequately supply their militaries — and most recently, to use natural gas to power AI data centers.

Now, at last, Trump has let the cat out of the bag. Last week, amidst a throng of journalists assembled at a press conference following Trump’s meeting with his cabinet, one reporter raised his hand high and asked the forbidden question: “Do you want to control Iran’s oil?”

“That’s an option,” Trump replied. “But I wouldn’t talk about it.” For the next couple of days, he adhered to the traditional playbook of hiding any oil connection to US war plans, then spilled it out over the weekend, telling the Financial Times he could “take the oil in Iran” and seize the energy export hub of Kharg Island.

The fact is, aside from Israel’s territorial ambitions, oil has always been the cause of all the wars in the Middle East since the state of Israel was created in 1948.

Location, Location

There is even an oil connection to the famous Balfour Declaration of 1917 with the British supporting the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. It was actually a simple letter by Lord Balfour, Britain’s foreign secretary, to Walter de Rothschild of Europe’s huge oil and banking dynasty. This small but significant detail is often absent from historical accounts on the founding of Israel, whose location, bordering the Eastern Mediterranean, made it a perfect terminal point for a pipeline carrying oil from Iraq. Provided, that is, European Jews could be relied on to protect the pipeline.

Why don’t people know this? Because the oil connection to war has been rigorously suppressed by all the nations that are, or aspire to be, great powers. They learned a big lesson from Germany’s defeat in World War I and World War II: its military ran out of gas.

Oil was, and still is, the fuel of the military, which makes it the most coveted resource on earth. Even if Country A has enough of it (as Trump is now arguing about US reserves) it has to worry about Enemy Country B (Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, the BRICS alliance) getting other rich, untapped reserves. I call it The Great Game for Oil, and it’s getting more vicious than ever now that huge quantities of natural gas are being sought after to power AI data centers.

President Trump, no student of history, likely knows this fact because he talks to his oil donors frequently, assuring them he will make good on the millions they donated to his campaigns by going to war. He may try to disguise his true ambitions: beyond his moniker Drill Baby Drill, he strives to make billions while serving as Commander in Chief, bent on conquering the oil lands of the world.

At least Senator Ed Marke of Massachusetts revealed on March 27 that the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz had made billions for oil companies, causing their stocks to skyrocket.On March 27, he sent a letter to the CEOs of at five of the largest oil and gas companies — ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell, and BP — demanding that “big oil and gas companies refrain from awarding executives profits generated from rising oil prices during Trump’s illegal war in Iran.”

But even he missed a central fact. What wife or mother would accept sending her loved ones into harm’s way if an underlying purpose was to enrich oil companies and their government allies? This, and the need to fuel the military, is where pretexts come into play.

And here’s how Time Magazine, under the ownership of arch-conservative Henry Luce, demonized Iranian President Mohammed Mosadegh in 1952 before the CIA coup that overthrew him in 1953. His “crime” was nationalizing Iran’s oil.

 

Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/04/03/behind-the-iran-war-and-all-the-wars-in-the-middle-east-oil/