Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future. Amanda Little

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СКАЧАТЬ many passages of pleasant conversation I shall choose the King’s statement to the President that the two of them really were twins: (1) they were both of the same age…; (2) they were both heads of states with grave responsibilities to defend, protect and feed their people; (3) they were both at heart farmers…(4) they both bore in their bodies grave physical infirmities.” In the aftermath of the giftgiving, the king said, “This [wheel]chair is my most precious possession. It is the gift of my great and good friend, President Roosevelt, on whom Allah has had mercy.”

      It was during the Quincy rendezvous, amid exotic meals, astrology readings, and high-tech gifts, that the leaders of the West and East established the foundations of a potent and high-stakes relationship: America would provide military support to keep the royal dynasty in power. King Ibn Saud would, in turn, continue to offer Americans privileged access to his kingdom’s oil.

      The issue of oil was allegedly not the centerpiece of the discussion between Saud and Roosevelt. In the absence of a transcript, aides have recalled that Roosevelt primarily stressed the urgent matter—following on the Holocaust—of resettling European Jews in Palestine. He asked for the king’s support in this effort, but Saud retorted that Arabs should not have to redress the sins of Adolf Hitler, and made a remark that has since proven ominously prescient: “Arabs would choose to die rather than yield their land to Jews.”

      Even though the two leaders could not find agreement on the question of Zionism, Ibn Saud made a formal request for FDR’s friendship and support. This was the kind of simple and direct question often used to seal alliances between tribal leaders. Saud said that he especially prized America’s friendship because the United States was the only global power that had never made any attempt to colonize or enslave another country—it was, instead, a champion of freedom. The king said he valued nothing more than Saudi Arabia’s independence. He had cited a similar reasoning when, just before the war, the negotiations that granted Socal exclusive oil rights had concluded. Though Socal paid a stiff price, Saud claimed he could have gotten far more from British and Japanese prospectors yearning for the bid. “Gentlemen, the Japanese offered me twice as much for one-third of what you now obtain!” he’d told the American entrepreneurs, adding that no amount of money was more important to him than the assurance that his American partners would not interfere in his domestic affairs.

      FDR accepted Ibn Saud’s request for friendship, and vowed that under his leadership, the United States “would never do anything which might prove hostile to the Arabs.” This was one of Roosevelt’s final acts as president—he died of a brain hemorrhage six weeks after the encounter.

      Roosevelt’s promise would be reaffirmed again and again to the Saudi royal family by subsequent American presidents. In 1950, President Harry Truman wrote to Ibn Saud: “I wish to renew to Your Majesty the assurances which have been made to you several times in the past, that the United States is interested in the preservation of the independence and territorial integrity of Saudi Arabia. No threat to your Kingdom could occur which would not be a matter of immediate concern to the United States.”

      No other scene in modern history intrigues me more than the meeting between Roosevelt and Ibn Saud. All the presidential administrations that have followed Roosevelt’s—including the Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, and Reagan administrations—sought to build on this precedent and further cement U.S. relations with the Saudis. They worked to ensure that the oil so crucial to our domestic prosperity and military victories would flow freely from the region’s wells.

      The George H. W. Bush administration cited the Roosevelt–Ibn Saud meeting as part of its rationale for launching Operation Desert Storm. “We do, of course, have historic ties to the governments in the region,” said Dick Cheney, then defense secretary—ties that “hark back with respect to Saudi Arabia to 1945, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with King Abdul Aziz on the USS Quincy…and affirmed at that time that the United States had a lasting and a continuing interest in the security of the Kingdom.” The security of the kingdom, after all, had become tantamount to the security of the increasingly oil-dependent United States.

      Twelve years later, Cheney would again voice his intention to protect Saudi security as he made his argument for invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein from power. At a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in August 2002, Cheney said that with access to weapons of mass destruction, Saddam “could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world’s energy supplies, [and] directly threaten America’s friends throughout the region.”

      LIFELINE

      The urgent memo sent by Major General Richard Zilmer from the fields of Fallujah in 2006 was not, in fact, the first document addressing concerns inside the Pentagon about the military’s dependence on fossil fuels. I was surprised when a quick online search led me to a 130-page report prepared by the Defense Science Board (DSB), the military’s most prestigious technical advisory committee. This 2001 document, titled More Capable Warfighting Through Reduced Fuel Burden, made detailed recommendations for ramping up the fuel efficiency of military equipment, facilities, and overall strategy. The report exposed Department of Defense (DoD) negligence on this issue: “Although significant warfighting, logistics and cost benefits occur when weapons systems are made more fuel-efficient, these benefits are not valued or emphasized in the DoD requirements and acquisition processes.” The Pentagon, it stated, had also failed to evaluate the full cost of the fuel it was purchasing for its military operations: “The DoD currently prices fuel based on the wholesale refinery price and does not include the cost of delivery…” That cost of delivery, it later added, could be more than 100 times greater than the cost of the fuel itself.

      One little-known agency called the Defense Energy Support Center (DESC) coordinates all of the DoD’s energy purchases, ensuring that the fuel sustaining the U.S. military is available at all times, wherever needed—including in fields of combat. I traveled to the DESC with two goals in mind: to better understand the equation of fuel with military power (an equation that had both motivated and been sealed by that first meeting aboard the Quincy) and to better grasp the hidden costs of our continued operations in the Middle East.

      Tucked inside the bucolic Fort Belvoir army base in Fairfax County, Virginia, the DESC headquarters is located in the new Andrew T. Mc-Namara Headquarters Complex. The sprawling six-story complex looked like an upscale suburban strip mall, with a freshly paved parking lot the size of an eighteen-hole golf course, immaculate landscaping, a brickand-steel façade, and expansive tinted windows. The center also houses the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Defense Logistics Agency, and several other divisions whose exact functions were hard to discern, but all, I could see, meant business.

      I reflexively stiffened my back as I entered the building, with its walls of brushed steel and blond wood, black lacquered granite floors, and a rigorous security detail. The man who was screened before me, in his mid-forties, wearing a crisp black suit and mirrored aviators, surrendered a thick black leather suitcase that looked borrowed from the set of Mission: Impossible along with two firearms, one from an ankle holster.

      I was led silently down a long corridor to the office of Colonel Shawn Walsh, the DESC official who oversees bulk fuel contracts for the war on terror. A direct and serious man in his mid-forties, Walsh was sporting camouflage fatigues and a crew cut. He came to the DESC after serving in 2003 in Iraq, where he led the 1,200 soldiers of the 240th Quartermaster Battalion in missions that included securing fuel convoys. His office was spartan and unadorned, with the exception of a framed collage given to him as a parting gift from his battalion. Featured there were snapshots of armored fuel convoys snaking like anacondas along dusty roads under cover of night, wide sunrise vistas of Iraqi deserts, and grinning compatriots at a Hawaiian-themed party on the eve of Walsh’s departure from Iraq.

      Walsh began our conversation with a basic primer on the Pentagon’s СКАЧАТЬ