Reply #29: But in the late 60's and early 70's there was fear about oil resources [View All]

[kcwayne]

running out. Hence, when the OPEC embargo hit us in 1973 there was a percieved truth to the idea that oil was in short supply, and people accepted the oil shortage as a truism, which it wasn't.

There was alot of discussion about the reason we continued to fight the war was to preserve the rights to the oil that supposedly was off shore. The government wasn't saying it was about oil (just like now), but we thought the government was lying, and that it was about large oil companies coercing foreign policy to maintain their business interests.

Vietnam and Oil

Herbert Hoover, later to become President of the United States did a study that showed that one of the world's largest oil fields ran along the coast of the South China Sea right off French Indo-China, now known as Vietnam.
- Denny, Ludwell, We Fight for Oil, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1928.


"US analyst Ludwell Denny in his book "We Fight for Oil" noted the domestic oil shortage and says international diplomacy had failed to secure any reliable foreign sources of oil for the United States. Fear of oil shortages would become the most important factor in international relations, Denny said.

"That empire in Southeast Asia is the last major resource area outside the control of any one of the major powers of the globe....I believe that the condition of the Vietnamese people, and the direction in which their future may be going, are at this stage secondary, not primary." (Senator McGee, D-Wyo., in the U.S. Senate, Feb. 17, 1965)

In a 1965 speech in Asia, Richard Nixon argued in favor of bombing North Vietnam to protect the "immense mineral potential" of Indonesia, which he later referred to as "by far the greatest prize in the southeast Asian area."

To protect its prizes, the US eventually killed over four million people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos between 1965 and 1975. In South Vietnam alone, the war resulted in a million widows and 879,000 orphans. It destroyed 9000 out of 15,000 hamlets, almost 40,000 square miles of farmland and 18,750 square miles of forest."