By the standard moral and legal definition, “telling the truth” means telling “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

Seen from the standpoint of that criterion, Ted Koppel came up more than a little short in yesterday’s New York Times.

As all faithful daily readers of the nation’s official “newspaper-of-record” know, the former ABC “Nightline” anchor-editor Koppel graced yesterday’s Times op-ed page with a column chiding the Bush administration for its refusal to admit that “oil” is the reason that for the United States (U.S.) occupation of Iraq.

More than simply denying that petroleum might have anything to with “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (hereafter “OIF”), indeed, the Bush administration says that it is “irresponsible,” “partisan,” “dishonest,” and damn-near treasonous to “claim we acted in Iraq because of oil.”

That’s childish nonsense, Koppel rightly says, usefully enough for those of us who’ve never bought the doctrinal White House story lines about Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” and (then) the administration’s passionate desire to export “democracy” to Iraq and the Middle East.

“There’s no reason,” Koppel boldly declares, “to be coy about why the U.S. is in Iraq.” “The reason for America’s rapt attention to the security of the Persian Gulf is what is has always been. It’s about the oil.”

And “the oil” is not just why the U.S. went into Iraq in the first place; it’s also why the administration says “the U.S. cannot now precipitously withdraw its forces from Iraq.”

There’s nothing to be embarrassed about in that, Koppel wants America and the White House to know. Glorious America is unfortunately “addicted” to overseas petroleum, he argues, and has long required “an uninterrupted flow of Persian Gulf oil.”

And the U.S. can’t stand to have evil non-American others – Iranian Communists and their Soviet allies in the 1950s, Iranian Ayotollahs in the 1970s, and Islamic terrorists today – in charge of such a vital substance.

Consistent with his historical argument, Koppel dedicates the bulk of his column to a review of successive moments when Uncle Sam has moved to guarantee secure regular “oil flows out of the Persian Gulf.”

Koppel’s narrative includes British and U.S. collaboration in the illegal but apparently noble (or at least understandable, as far as Koppel is concerned) overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected head of state Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and America’s sponsorship of the brutal dictatorship of Sha Mohammed Reza Pahlevi between 1967 and 1979.

Also meriting mention in Koppel’s account is the famous White House “Carter Doctrine,” which proclaimed that “an[y] attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

The provocative establishment of U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia and the launching of Operation Dessert Storm were legitimate expressions, Koppel feels, of America’s obvious and logical interest in protecting its own and the world’s economy by “defending the free flow of Middle East oil”

So what is the supposedly super-candid Koppel leaving out? A few things beginning above all with the selfish and imperial nature of America’s longstanding “rapt attention” to Middle Eastern oil.

The former “Nightline” host is right to say that OIF is “about the oil,” but he doesn’t give anything close to “the whole truth” on why Persian Gulf petroleum really matters so much to U.S. policymakers.

If Koppel likes history so much, he might want to look at how the U.S. State Department described that region’s unmatched oil reserves in 1945: “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in history.”

As such, that “prize” has long been understood by U.S. planners to be what leading U.S. policy critic Noam Chomsky calls “a lever of ‘unilateral world domination,’” adding that control of that that “prize” has “funnel[ed] enormous wealth to the U.S. in numerous ways.”

Consistent with that imperial perception and the related wealth windfall, Chomsky observes, “the U.S. invaded Iraq because it has enormous oil resources, mostly untapped, and it's right in the heart of the world's energy system.”

If the U.S. succeeds in controlling Iraq, Chomsky notes, “it extends enormously its strategic power, what [leading imperial strategist and Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor] Zbigniew Brzezinski calls its ‘critical leverage’ over Europe and Asia.

That's a major reason for controlling the oil resources -- it gives you strategic power”(Chomsky, “Confronting the Empire,” Address to World Social Forum, February 2, 2003).

To be sure, America’s insatiable demand for fossil fuels is making the U.S. increasingly reliant on foreign oil.

But even if the U.S. overcame its gasoline “addiction” and became fully energy- self-reliant (it currently receives just 20 percent of its oil from the Middle East), something else would still make U.S. officials positively obsessed with Middle Eastern petroleum.

The ongoing and ever-worsening loss of America’s one-time supremacy in basic global-capitalist realms of production, trade, international finance, and currency and the related emergence of the rapidly expanding giant China as a new strategic military (as well as economic) competitor.

As David Harvey argues, America’s basic decline, reflecting predictable (and predicted) shifts in the spatial patterns of capitalist investment and social infrastructure (David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Toward a Critical Geography [New York, NY: Routledge, 2001], pp. 237-393) gives special urgency for the U.S. empire to deepen its control of Middle Eastern oil and use it as what Chalmers Johnson calls “a bargaining chip with even more oil-dependent regions” like Western Europe and East Asia, homes to the leading challengers to U.S. economic power.

America’s long-fading capitalist hegemony is no small part of what drove its hard-right and nationalist administration to occupy Iraq.

By many analysts’ estimation, OIF is part of a White House effort to use America’s last truly unchallenged form of world dominance – it’s near monopoly over globally projected organized violence – “to establish U.S. control over the global oil spigot, and thus over the global economy, for another fifty years” (Giovanni Arrighi, “Hegemony Unraveling – I,” New Left Review, March-April 2005, p.62).

As David Harvey noted on the eve of the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq: "Europe and Japan, as well as East and Southeast Asia (now crucially including China) are heavily dependent on Gulf oil, and these are regional configurations of political-economic power that now pose a challenge to U.S. hegemony in the worlds of production and finance.

What better way to ward off that competition and secure its own hegemonic position than to control the price, condition, and distribution of the key economic resource on which the competitors rely?

And what better way to do that than to use the one line of force where the U.S. still remains all-powerful – military might?” (David Harvey, The New Imperialism [New York, NY: Oxford, 2004], p.25)

In a context where the U.S. has good reason to feel that its dominant position within world capitalism is seriously threatened, the Bush administration was “looking to flex military muscle as the only clear absolute power it has left” and to “hide the exaction of tribute from the rest of the world under a rhetoric of delivering peace and freedom for all” (Harvey, New Imperialism, p. 77).

Powerless to maintain economic hegemony through the “normal” mechanisms of corporate-neoliberal “free market” globalization, Uncle Sam has bared the “hidden fist” (Thomas Friedman) of coercive militarism to retain planetary economic dominance through military control of Middle Eastern petroleum reserves.

The other thing Koppel either doesn’t know or doesn’t wish to divulge is that the U.S. is not simply worried about “outside forces” controlling Persian Gulf oil.

It’s has an equal and related fear that groups internal to the region might attain significant control over the region’s critical raw materials.

Full truth be told, the U.S. strategic “stakes” and opposition to internal control in Iraq are so great that much current U.S. discussion of American withdrawal from Mesopotamia seems exceedingly na*ve.

Even on what passes for a left in the U.S., many commentators seem to think that the invasion is properly understood as a bungled effort to spread democracy – an incompetent occupation that genuinely sought to “liberate” and would have been undertaken even if Iraq’s only raw materials were chicory, lettuce, and bananas.

The “freedom”- loving Bush administration, many “left” American commentators seem to think, should just call off its overly “idealistic” misadventure and let the Iraqis work their problems out on their own.

“We” should accept “defeat,” which “we” allegedly suffered in Vietnam and muster the humanitarian courage to admit “our” (merely) tactical “mistake” and leave (see, for example, Nicholas Kristoff, “What We Need in Iraq: An Exit Date,” New York Times, 14 February, 2006, p. A23).

The White House has never had the slightest interest in creating a genuinely free, sovereign, democratic, and independent Iraq.

Under the useful cover story of “Iraqi Freedom,” it wants to deepen U.S. control of Iraqi and thus Middle Eastern oil, something such an Iraq would be certain resist.

That core objective would hardly be attained by leaving Iraq to its own independently and democratically determined fortunes.

And to make “the logic of withdrawal” yet less apparent to U.S. planners, the majority of Iraqis are Shiite Muslims and therefore likely to use real national independence as an opportunity to form a rough anti-systemic partnership with also oil-rich Iran.

Together with Iran, Iraqi Shiites might well inspire Shiite resistance to state power in the Persian Gulf’s ultimate oil-prize, feudal and arch-repressive Saudi Arabia, home (by the way) to the world’s largest known oil reserves, where “strategic” petro-imperial considerations have long mandated a deep U.S. partnership with tyranny and dictatorship.

As Chomsky recently explained in an important interview, reminding us that U.S. domination of majority-Shiite post-invasion Iraq is intimately related to U.S. domination of the entire Persian Gulf region (home to two-thirds of the world’s known oil reserves) and the rising world-systemic threat (to U.S. planners) of a dynamic new East Asian state capitalism:

"Let's talk about withdrawal. Take any day's newspapers or journals and so on. They start by saying the United States aims to bring about a sovereign democratic independent Iraq.

I mean, is that even a remote possibility? Just consider what the policies would be likely to be of an independent sovereign Iraq.

If it's more or less democratic, it'll have a Shiite majority. They will naturally want to improve their linkages with Iran, Shiite Iran. Most of the clerics come from Iran.

The Badr Brigade, which basically runs the South, is trained in Iran. They have close and sensible economic relationships which are going to increase.

So you get an Iraqi/Iran loose alliance. Furthermore, right across the border in Saudi Arabia, there's a Shiite population which has been bitterly oppressed by the U.S.-backed fundamentalist tyranny.

And any moves toward independence in Iraq are surely going to stimulate them, it's already happening.

That happens to be where most of Saudi Arabian oil is. Okay, so you can just imagine the ultimate nightmare in Washington: a loose Shiite alliance controlling most of the world's oil, independent of Washington and probably turning toward the East, where China and others are eager to make relationships with them, and are already doing it.

Is that even conceivable? The U.S. would go to nuclear war before allowing that, as things now stand"(Noam Chomsky, “There is no War on Terror,” ZNet Magazine, January 16, 2006).

To make easy or rapid U.S. withdrawal yet less likely, Iraq’s inanimate oil reserves and related social infrastructure cannot be “saved” for “critical [imperial] leverage” and global-economic windfall through wanton annihilation.

Iraq’s critical raw material cannot be removed from Iraq along with U.S. soldiers and B-52s in the same way that American crucifiers stole the promise of the Vietnamese Revolution through sheer destruction.

The utter demolition America inflicted on Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s is not a rational imperial option in regard to Iraq.

Iraq cannot be physically lost – territorially conceded – to the Iraqis without monumentally dire consequences to American Empire.

If abandoned, Iraq’s significant share of “the greatest material prize in history” can only be left to the control of others, an outcome that is unacceptable to American policymakers for (again) “very good [imperial] reason[s].”

The fully and ugly truth is that the self-proclaimed universal state and global super-power Uncle Sam has no intention of granting management of the world’s most “stupendous source of strategic power” and “critical” global political-economic “leverage” to the people who happen to live on its merely national, not-so sovereign topsoil.

At this precarious and potentially late point in the history of its global dominance, the U.S. can be expected to hold on to that control with an impressive imperial death grip.

It will likely exhibit a fierce determination to defend that grasp through even the most terrible conflicts and violence abroad and at home, where more and bigger 9/11’s seem all-too likely in coming years.

The risks of not holding on are simply too great, as far as those structurally super-empowered U.S. actors who crave planetary (and indeed inter-planetary) supremacy (the real objective of U.S. foreign policy) are concerned.

Withdrawal from Iraq is a most unlikely thing for Uncle Sam to seriously contemplate in light of his tendency to value hegemony over survival, consistent with deadly choices made by concentrated power through the long, reckless, and criminal record of empire.

Paul Street @ ZNet