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.

Analysis

Alberta Is Making It Even Harder to Develop Renewable Energy

ByMitch Anderson

onJun 20, 2025 @ 07:15 PDT

The province released new burdensome reclamation requirements for wind and solar projects — the latest performance in an elaborate political troll.

uk/Rachel Reeves Promised Oil Industry ‘Quid Pro Quo’ Over Windfall Tax in Private Meeting

BySam Bright

onJun 19, 2025 @ 04:01 PDT

The government has been accused of making a “secret exchange deal” with fossil fuel firms to compensate for the tax hike.

Analysis

Pioneers of Europe's Citizen-led Solar Revolution Sound Alarm Over 'Corporate Capture'

ByAna Muñoz and Jairo Marcos

onJun 19, 2025 @ 00:24 PDT

A third of energy communities receiving subsidies from the Spanish government are managed by subsidiaries of oil giant Repsol, DeSmog review of official data finds.