Admiral Dennis Blair: "We Sent Troops to Middle East…Because of Oil-Based Importance of Region"

onMar 26, 2014 @ 11:54 PDT

At the just-completed U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing titled, “The Geopolitical Potential of the U.S. Energy Boom,” Admiral Dennis Blair — former Director of National Intelligence, President and CEO of Institute for Defense Analyses and Commander in Chief of U.S. Pacific Command — admitted what’s still considered conspiratorial to some.

Put tersely: the U.S. and allied forces launched the ongoing occupation in Iraq and occupy large swaths of the Middle East to secure the flow of oil to the U.S. and its global allies, explained Blair.

Blair began his analysis lasting just over a minute after a line of questioning (beginning at 1:02:56 in the video below) coming from U.S. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) about TransCanada’s Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, “energy as an instrument of geopolitical power” and geopolitical tensions in Venezuela.

By Steve Horn

Steve Horn is the owner of the consultancy Horn Communications & Research Services, which provides public relations, content writing, and investigative research work products to a wide range of nonprofit and for-profit clients across the world. He is an investigative reporter on the climate beat for over a decade and former Research Fellow for DeSmog.

Mark Carney Took Speech Ideas From Billionaire-Founded ‘Build Canada’

ByTaylor Noakes

onDec 8, 2025 @ 04:00 PST

The pro-AI and fossil fuel group tells DeSmog that it’s great to see its ideas “get taken up by government.”

Series: Mark Carney’s Climate Betrayal

Series: Carney's Climate Betrayal

Exxon’s Next Supreme Court Play

ByEmily Sanders

onDec 7, 2025 @ 10:04 PST

Oil companies are once again asking the high court to intervene in climate deception lawsuits across the U.S. — part of an all-hands-on-deck effort by Big Oil and the Trump administration to shut the cases down.