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.

MEPs Call for Urgent Review of €1.5 Billion EU Food Scheme Pushing 'Misleading' Claims

ByLaura Villadiego

onNov 25, 2025 @ 22:00 PST

The programme is “yet another bung to industrial production”, experts say.

Series: Shining a Light on Big Ag’s Climate Push

Series: Big Ag's Climate Push

Analysis

As Mark Carney Fast-tracks Canadian LNG Projects, First Nations Face Hidden Financial Traps

ByMitch Anderson

onNov 24, 2025 @ 09:00 PST

Critics say new LNG ventures in British Columbia saddle Indigenous communities with debt, opaque ownership structures, and financial risk that could leave them owing billions.