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Title: Just Business Just War
Author: R. Thomas Collins
ISBN: 1-928928-11-0
Description:
Just Business Just War is the behind-the-scenes account of the tumultuous upheavals in the oil industry between 1995-2002 as industry seeks to gain access to vital petroleum resources overseas. Since the Iran revolution in 1979, Thomas Collins had worked in the oil industry helping it expand its reach at home and abroad. Thriving in the rough and tumble of the corporate environment, Collins believed as an article of faith that the abundant production and distribution of oil in an emerging free market held the key to peace and prosperity. But the world oil markets changed after the end of the Cold War. The U.S. oil industry, once dominated by the American companies of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, struggled to re-vitalize itself in a world where 90 percent of the world’s petroleum was in the hands of a few state oil companies – more than half of whom were run by regimes hostile to the U.S. and its allies. Downsized out of his career at Mobil, Collins joined an Australian oil company seeking to ally itself with industry efforts in Washington, D.C. Collins chronicles the political efforts of the oil industry, which included future U.S. vice president Dick Cheney, to persuade U.S. lawmakers about the need for open markets in the global oil business. Everything changed after September 11, 2001 when Americans realized other forces needed to be resolved before a free market could flourish. Collins details how the oil industry in D.C. absorbed the meaning and motives of these attacks. This adversary was not part of any democratic process to fashion a peaceful future; this was an enemy pledged to destroy liberty, the foundation for global economic growth. Moreover, all would have to come to grips with the knowledge that this enemy had emerged because of free people’s demand for more -- of everything.
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Excerpt:
Introduction to Just Business Just War
This volume is the last in a five-part narrative that spans three decades. As I edit this now, I have turned age 55 and retired from oil industry chores. Having left behind one phase of life, it’s time to mine a half-century memory-scape and set a few things down. I’ve become used to sorting through things this way. Wordsmithing has been a trusted ally all these years; and I expect this to be a congenial chore. To borrow an equestrian metaphor, old horses don’t need to be told how to get to the barn at the end of the day. They smell their way home by instinct. So as a diarist these three decades, it is time now to organize my notes to take stock, reorient and, if I am fortunate, begin anew.
This and the other volumes in The NewsWalker Series were originally written to exercise emotional muscles, and for internal consumption – a mental house cleaning. If you’re reading this now, let’s hope I’ve edited them properly and eliminated all sniveling, excuse-mongering and posing; then again, maybe I’ll leave a tad in to keep the ginger up.
I began writing what evolved into The NewsWalker Series late in the 1960s. I wrote to sort through my thoughts, record my work and to bring order to life. When I began to understand a decade later that what I was writing could be more than just a diary, I was at the New York Daily News working as a reporter and editor on the city desk. The thrill of daily reporting had begun to fade. I hoped my personal journal could evolve into another more permanent form.
Now these years later, I see the territory covered in the NewsWalker volumes chronicled not only the journey of me and my family, but also the history of my time, oddly bookmarked by the public events of November 22, 1963, and September 11, 2001. Future generations will assess the full impact of those dates’ events. In striving to reflect on this period in this chronicle, I hope I have not posed that the boundaries of my own experience were due to any personal significance. That was not my intent. It just so happened that this eventful era in our nation’s public life was the age granted to me by Providence as the time of my adulthood.
The first volume in the series, NewsWalker, was about my years in journalism and with the Daily News. The second volume, Wordsmith, dealt with my years in Mobil’s downstream unit in the U.S. and about the reconciliation between a father and a son. The third volume, Blue Dragon, was about Mobil’s effort to return to Vietnam, and the fourth volume, White Monkey, about my years with Mobil’s upstream unit and the company’s quest to remain independent. Throughout, my diaries detailed my efforts to be a detective into the origins of my own beginnings and answer questions my children might have about how they and their family came to be. These books show that at the end of the day, despite my affection for the oil industry and my enthusiastic participation in its endeavors, I remained a reporter on a story.
This final volume, Just Business Just War, begins by detailing the effects the end of the Cold War had on American corporations, the mergers and retrenchments, and the growth of the global economy. For more than thirty years, I worked with the belief that trade and free markets were our best chance to win over our adversaries and create the conditions of peace. Despite the rough-and-tumble of the corporate environment, I held as an article of faith that our economy’s most fundamental commodity – oil – and its abundant production and distribution in an emerging free market held the key to peace and prosperity. Safe behind the Cold War’s nuclear deterrent, the historical era covered in this series was one in which many Americans, paradoxically, believed they could not trust the powers loose within our own society.
After September 11, however, this perception changed. After the attacks, Americans saw it was forces from without that needed to be contended with. In the aftermath of September 11, like millions of others I tried to absorb the meaning and motives of these attacks. Like others, I lay awake at night realizing that this enemy was not subject to any deterrent. It was not part of our democratic debate about our national destiny and the course of our country’s impact on history. Indeed, it was pledged to use nukes, chemicals, germs and our freedoms and technology to destroy my country and kill its people.
When I realized this, I changed. In a heartbeat, with utter certainty, I knew what needed to be done: We had to get them before they got us. I had a new appreciation for the history of my country and its founders – again, and not for a peaceful purpose of story-telling this time. This time, I understood the reason for the sometime lethal means to my country’s purposes. I knew why my ancestors in our nation’s beginnings had seemed so ruthless.
For example, before September 11, I had wondered what motivated our country’s earliest warriors – the English-speaking settlers on the border of North America who cast decades of co- existence and trade aside to wage vicious war on the Indians under the command of King Philip, the Wampanoag chief. Now I knew.
The war of 1676, like this new war on terrorism, would decide forever which society could make its dreams come true. This country’s founders, emboldened with a certainty bestowed by a righteous God, knew the purpose of war – before all else – was to destroy the enemy that sought to destroy you. That was just in our nation’s earliest days, long before better-known conflicts with France and Great Britain, and Mexico, Spain, Germany, and Japan. Sometimes more subtle or nuanced issues of state were at stake, but the great conflicts were for the survival of liberty. Despite at times clumsy campaigns, and the heartache and loss for those involved, the U.S. emerged victorious.
Along the way, my country’s early inhabitants had enslaved Africans, killed or forcibly relocated Indians, and exploited the labor of countless millions. These English-speaking immigrants and their followers established a nation that took over a continent and beyond – and along the way they liberated themselves and all who became part of their national enterprise, endeavored to right the wrongs of their origins and became the hope of the world. The civilization that had grown from the purposes of these settlers was now a paradise for my family and all I loved. It was now hated by an Islamic cult, which has emerged to threaten us, due in part to our own enabling.
The NewsWalker Series is being concluded as my country is still assessing the nature of this enemy, and as the world begins to question American means and resolve. I know the people of my country. My countrymen will not delegate their security to others. Some people’s leaders may decide to protect this enemy, nurture or hide its ranks; perhaps pay bribes hoping for safety. These leaders will be destroyed and the inhabitants of those lands freed to live in liberty. We shall call the war just, and we shall have faith that we are liberating others enslaved by evil. Some may question this faith. But it will not matter. The ideas that built the United States will prevail. Free people will always demand more -- and possess the liberty to get it.
