In March 2001, eight months before September 11 and two years before the invasion, Vice President Cheney’s Energy Task Force was reviewing detailed maps of Iraqi oil fields alongside a two-page document titled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.” The list named the French, Russian, Chinese, Italian, Japanese, and Canadian companies that had signed production-sharing agreements with Saddam Hussein, worth up to $1.1 trillion according to the International Energy Agency. The United States and United Kingdom were conspicuously absent. Judicial Watch pried seven pages loose through a Freedom of Information Act request in July 2002. The Bush administration fought further disclosure to the US Supreme Court and won. William R. Clark’s Petrodollar Warfare, published by New Society Publishers in 2005, uses those seven pages and the surrounding documentary record to trace what the war was actually about.
Clark holds an MBA and a Master of Science in Information and Telecommunication Systems from Johns Hopkins University and worked as an Information Security Analyst at Argosy Omnimedia. He was not an academic, a journalist, or a think tank fellow. His 2003 online essay building the euro-oil hypothesis received a Project Censored award and appeared in Censored 2004: The Top 25 Censored Stories. His follow-up research on Iran’s coming Oil Bourse received a second Project Censored award in 2005. Both awards signal something specific: recognition within alternative journalism precisely because the findings had been buried in mainstream American coverage. In December 2002, three months before the invasion, Clark published a hypothesis specifying two motives for the coming war: preventing further OPEC drift toward euro pricing, and gaining physical control over Iraq’s reserves ahead of global Peak Oil. Both hypotheses were confirmed within months of Baghdad’s fall, when the Bush administration reconverted Iraqi oil sales to dollars and voided the pre-war contracts.
By mid-2005, when Petrodollar Warfare appeared, the Iraq occupation was in its second year. No weapons of mass destruction had been found. The Abu Ghraib photographs had circulated the previous year. A Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study published in The Lancet estimated 100,000 excess Iraqi deaths from the invasion. The stated rationale for the war had migrated from WMD to Al Qaeda ties to “spreading democracy,” each successive justification collapsing under evidence. In the same period the euro appreciated 25 percent against the dollar, Russia opened public discussions of accepting euros for oil exports, Iran announced its Tehran Oil Bourse with a euro-denominated crude marker scheduled for 2006, and China signed a $70 billion oil and gas deal with Iran. Cheney’s Energy Task Force documents remained largely sealed. American media consolidation, which had reduced independent news sources from 50 in 1980 to five corporate conglomerates, meant essentially none of this was covered as connected to the war. Petrodollar Warfare grew out of that vacuum.
The book sits within a small literature that treats US foreign policy as economic warfare over hydrocarbons rather than democratic mission, alongside F. William Engdahl’s A Century of War, Chalmers Johnson’s Sorrows of Empire, and Michael Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon. The full summary unpacks the seven-page Judicial Watch FOIA release from Cheney’s Energy Task Force, the Straussian philosophy underpinning the Office of Special Plans and its manufactured intelligence apparatus, Iraq’s €26 billion euro windfall between September 2000 and March 2003, Iran’s Tehran Oil Bourse and its euro-denominated crude marker, and the 1977 CIA memo that predicted Soviet peak oil arriving on schedule in 1987. The Bush administration reconverted Iraqi oil sales from euros back to dollars within weeks of Baghdad’s fall. That was the first significant economic act of the occupation.
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