A Century of War Quotes

“Thirty years after the first oil shock, the largest new fields had already passed their peak. Washington and the major British and American oil giants no longer had the luxury of counting on regimes with state-owned oil companies to do their bidding. Direct U.S. and British control of world oil and gas assets was the agenda. They preferred to call it promoting democracy in the Middle East.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“At the start of the millennium, the United Stated held a near monopoly on military technology and might. It commanded the world’s reserve currency and with it, was able to control the assets of much of the industrial world. Following the occupation of the oil fields of Iraq, one power, the United States, now commanded a near monopoly on future energy resources. The Pentagon had a term for it– ‘full spectrum dominance.’ It meant that the U.S. should control military, economic and political developments, everywhere. They appeared to be well along in the project.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“They called it ‘sustainable’ growth. It sustained the rich nations of the industrial world, and the dollar system for more than three decades, by enforcing ‘limits to growth’ on the rest of the world. The industrial world was able to live some three decades more under the illusion of abundant, cheap oil to support a living standard unprecedented in history. That illusion, however, had been bought at the cost of the well-being of the populations of the once-developing world, from Africa to Latin America to Asia. Only through preventing the natural aspirations of most of the rest of the world for economic stability and growth, could a small handful of nations, led by the United States, enjoy that illusion of prosperity, a bit longer.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“For the group around Cheney, the single most important consideration is guaranteed and unrestricted access to cheap oil, controlled as far as possible at its source.’ ‘Full spectrum dominance’ The stakes in securing military control over Iraqi oil and the entire Arabian Gulf were so high, and the resulting ability to determine the entire economic future of Eurasia and other countries so vital to America’s new imperial strategy, that the costs were clearly considered worth risking.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“By the end of his first term in office, George W. Bush, the neophyte in foreign affairs, had presided over the most dramatic extension of American military power in its history. U.S. military bases allowed it to control the strategic energy routes of all Eurasia as never before. It could control future energy relations from Japan, China, East Asia, India, Russia, as well as the European Union. Belgian author, Michel Collon, put it bluntly, ‘If you want to rule the world, you need to control oil. All the oil. Anywhere.’ That was clearly just what Washington was doing.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“In the aftermath of the Iraq war, U.S. bases had been extended to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan in the former Soviet domain, and to Afghanistan. From its military position in Afghanistan, U.S. forces could control most of South Asia. Pakistan was dependent on U.S. military pressure. The entire Gulf was now a U.S. military protectorate. With the military control secure in the wake of the Iraq war, one by one the energy dominoes around the world began to fall, with a hefty push from Washington.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“Referring to the Cheney Energy Report of 2001 in that light, Klare remarked, ‘The overall emphasis is on removing obstacles–whether political, economic, legal and logistical–to the increased procurement of foreign oil by the United States.’ He added, ‘…the Cheney energy plan will also have significant implications for U.S. security policy and for the actual deployment and utilization of American military forces.’ Step by step over the course of the Bush Administration, the United States had managed to extend its military power and presence into areas of the globe never before possible. The collapse of the Soviet economic structure had prepared the possibilities and permitted the extension of a Washington-controlled NATO presence into what Brzezinski called the Heartland, right up to Russia’s front door.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“energy because of
politics or civil strife in other countries – because tyrants control
the spigots.—G.W. Bush, February 27, 200617”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“Halford Mackinder’s worst nightmare–a cooperative convergence of mutual interests of the major states of Eurasia, born of necessity and need for oil to fuel economic growth–was emerging. Ironically, it was the blatant US grab for the vast oil riches of Iraq and, potentially, of Iran, that catalyzed closer cooperation between traditional Eurasian foes, China and Russia, and a growing realization in western Europe that their options too were narrowing.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir’yev, the USSRs senior petroleum geologist, told a Moscow conference on petroleum geology, “The overwhelming preponderance of geological evidence compels the conclusion that crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the Earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“Why would the United States risk its entire standing as a force for peace and stability, its so-called ‘soft power’? Why would the U.S. risk creating instability in the entire oil-producing world, perhaps even the risk of a new oil price shock and a global economic depression, in order to strike Iraq? The official Washington answer was that Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and that he had ties to Al Qaida terrorists. Was that sufficient to explain the clear obsession of George W. Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others in Washington for a new Iraq war? Many were not convinced. Their skepticism was confirmed, but only after 130,000 American troops had been firmly entrenched in Iraq.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“The Taliban fell out of favor in Washington in July 2001, when U.S. negotiators proposed conditions for their pipeline, reportedly telling the Taliban leaders, ‘either you accept our offer on a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.’ The Taliban was demanding U.S. aid to rebuild Afghan infrastructure. They wanted the pipeline not only be a transit line to India and beyond, but also to serve Afghan needs for energy. Washington rejected the demands. September 11, 2001 gave Washington the excuse to deliver its carpet of bombs on Kabul.6 Unocal had broken”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“The Project for the New American Century praised a 1992 strategic white paper that Wolfowitz had written for Cheney, back when Cheney had been Defense Secretary during the first Iraq war, stating, ‘The Defense Policy Guidance drafted in the early months of 1992 provided a blueprint for maintaining U.S. pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.’ That 1992 policy paper was ordered buried by Bush. It became far too hot, after a copy was leaked to the New York Times in early 1992. It had called for precisely the form of preemptive wars, to ‘preclude’ a great power rival, that George W. Bush made official as U.S. National Security Strategy, the Bush Doctrine, in September 2002. Cheney and company now restated that 1992 imperial agenda for America in the post-Cold War era. They declared that the U.S. ‘must discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership, or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.’ The PNAC group were not content only to dominate the earth, where they proposed Washington create a ‘worldwide command and control system.’ They also called for creation of ‘U.S. space forces’ to dominate space, and effect total control of cyberspace, as well as to develop biological weapons, ‘that can target specific genotypes and may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.’ Biological warfare as a politically useful tool? Even George Orwell would have been shocked.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“Soon it became more clear that Bush’s appeal for a “kinder and gentler America” was little more than rhetorical appeal to an aging voting population. The Bush who occupied the White House moved quickly to establish his “tough guy” policies, by creating a major media pretext for a military invasion of a tiny Central American republic, Panama, during the Christmas days of his first year as President, December 1989. By eyewitness accounts, upwards of 6,000 Panamanians, most poor civilians, were killed as U.S. Special Forces and U.S. bombers invaded the small country on the pretext of arresting General Manuel Noreiga on charges of being a drug cartel kingpin.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“The wild and woolly climate of deregulation created an ambience in which normal, well-run savings banks were surpassed by fast-track banks which catered to dubious monies with no questions asked. Banks laundered funds for covert operations of the CIA, as well as covert operations of the Bonano or other organized crime families. The son of the Vice President, Neil Bush, was a director of the Silverado Savings and Loan in Colorado, later indicted by the government for illegal practices. Son Neil had the good taste to “resign” the week his father received the Republican nomination for president in 1988.9”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“Into this situation, came the Reagan Administration’s bizarre collection of “free market” economic conundrums, called by their advocates, “Supply-Side” economics. The idea was thin cover for unleashing some of the highest rates of short-term personal profiteering in history, at the expense of the greater good of the country’s long-term economic health. While policies imposed after October 1982 to collect billions from Third World countries, brought a huge windfall of financial liquidity to the American banking system, the ideology of Wall Street, and Treasury Secretary Donald Regan‘s zeal for lifting the government “shackles” off financial markets, resulted in the greatest extravaganza in world financial history. When the dust settled by the end of that decade, some began to realize that Reagan’s “free market” had destroyed an entire national economy. It happened to be the world’s largest economy, and the base of world monetary stability as well. On the simple-minded and quite mistaken argument that a mere removing of the tax burden on the individual or company would allow them to release “stifled creative energies” and other entrepreneurial talents, President Ronald Reagan signed the largest tax reduction bill in postwar history in August 1981. The bill contained provisions which also gave generous tax relief for certain speculative forms of real estate investment, especially commercial real estate. Government restrictions on corporate takeovers were also removed, and Washington gave the clear signal that “anything goes,” so long as it stimulated the Dow Jones Industrials stock index.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“The real issue of Thatcher’s military confrontation with Argentina was to enforce the principle of collection of Third World debts by a new form of 19th century “gunboat diplomacy.” Two-thirds of Britain’s Naval fleet was dispatched to the South Atlantic during April 1982, for a shooting war with Argentina which Britain nearly lost to Argentine deployment of French Exocet missiles. The British”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“With regulatory changes in nuclear power plant construction in the United States after the Three Mile Island anti-nuclear hysteria, producing years of added new delay in completion of existing power plants, nuclear energy as an investment for America’s electric utility companies became prohibitive under the Volcker interest rate regime. After that year, 1979, not one new nuclear reactor was ordered in the United States, and scores of half-built or planned nuclear projects were cancelled midstream because of prohibitive financing costs. One of the most advanced sector of the productive economy was allowed to die.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“As Thatcher imposed the policies which earned her the name “The Iron Lady,” unemployment in Britain doubled, rising from 1.5 million when she came into office, to a level of 3 million by the end of her first eighteen months in office. Labor unions were targetted under Thatcher as obstacles to the success of the monetarist “revolution,” a prime cause of the “enemy,” inflation. All the time, with British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell exploiting the astronomical prices of $36 or more per barrel for their North Sea oil, never a word was uttered against big oil or the City of London banks which were amassing huge sums of capital in the situation. Thatcher also moved to accommodate the big City banks by removing exchange controls, so that instead of capital being invested in rebuilding Britain’s rotted industrial base, funds flowed out to speculate in real estate in Hong Kong or lucrative loans to Latin America.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“The general population must have the illusion, Lippmann argued, that it is actually exerting “democratic” power. This illusion must be shaped by the elite body of “responsible men” in what was termed the “manufacture of consent.” This was described by Lippmann several decades before Paul Volcker ever set foot in Washington, as the “political philosophy for liberal democracy.” In its concept of an elite specialized few, ruling”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“As the most influential American publicist of 19th century British Liberalism, the aristocratic Walter Lippmann defined this class society in a modern framework for an American audience. Society should, Lippmann argued, be divided into the great vulgar masses of a largely ignorant “public,” that is then steered by an elite or a “special class,” which Lippmann termed the “responsible men,” who would decide the terms of what would be called “the national interest.” This elite would become the dedicated bureaucracy, to serve the interests of private power and private wealth, but the truth of their relationship to the power of private wealth should never be revealed to the broader ignorant public. “They wouldn’t understand.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“Kissinger explicitly stated in the memorandum, ‘how much more efficient expenditures for population control might be than (would be funds for) raising production through direct investments in additional irrigation and power projects and factories.’ British 19th century Imperialism could have expressed it no better. By the middle 1970’s the government of the United States, with this secret policy declaration, had committed itself to an agenda which would contribute to its own economic demise as well as untold famine, misery and unnecessary death throughout the developing sector. The 13 target countries named by Kissinger’s study were Brazil, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, Ethiopia and Colombia.13”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“The most severe impact of the oil crisis hit the United States’ largest city, New York. In December 1974, nine of the world’s most powerful bankers, led by David Rockefeller‘s Chase Manhattan, Citibank, and the London-New York investment bank, Lazard Freres, told the Mayor of New York, an old-line machine politician named Abraham Beame, that unless he turned over control of the city’s huge pension funds to a committee of the banks, called the Municipal Assistance Corporation, the banks and their influential friends in the media would ensure financial ruin to the city. Not surprisingly, the overpowered Mayor capitulated, New York City was forced to slash spending for roadways, bridges, hospitals and schools in order to service their bank debt, and to lay off tens of thousands of city workers. The nation’s greatest city was turned into a scrap heap beginning then. Felix Rohatyn, of Lazard Freres, became head of the new bankers’ collection agency, dubbed by the press as ‘Big MAC.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“Named for the place of their first gathering, the Hotel de Bilderberg near Arnheim, the annual Bilderberg meetings gathered top elites of Europe and America for secret deliberations and policy discussion. Consensus was then ‘shaped’ in subsequent press comments and media coverage, but never with reference to the secret Bilderberg talks themselves. This Bilderberg process has been one of the most effective vehicles of postwar Anglo-American policy-shaping. What the powerful men grouped around Bilderberg had evidently decided that May, was to launch a colossal assault against industrial growth in the world, in order to tilt the balance of power back to the advantage of Anglo-American financial interests, and the dollar. In order to do this, they determined to use their most prized weapon–control of the world’s oil flows. Bilderberg policy was to trigger a global oil embargo, in order to force a dramatic increase in world oil prices. Since 1945, world oil trade had by international custom been priced in dollars as American oil companies dominated the postwar market. A sharp sudden increase in the world price of oil, therefore, meant an equally dramatic increase in world demand for U.S. dollars to pay for that necessary oil.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“By declaring to world dollar holders their paper would no longer be redeemed for gold, Nixon ‘pulled the plug’ on the world economy, setting into motion a series of events which was to rock the world as never before. Within weeks, confidence in the Smithsonian agreement had begun to collapse.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

“On August 15, 1971 Nixon took the advice of a close circle of key advisers which included his chief Budget adviser, George Shultz, and a policy group then at the Treasury Department including Paul Volcker, and Jack F. Bennett, who later went on to become a director of Exxon. That sunny quiet August day, in a move which rocked the world, the President of the United States announced formal suspension of dollar convertibility into gold, effectively putting the world fully onto a dollar standard with no gold backing, and by this, unilaterally ripping apart the central provision of the 1944 Bretton Woods system. No longer could foreign holders of U.S. dollars redeem their paper for U.S. gold reserves.”
― F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order