Reviewed by Maree Boyce

Michael T Klare’s Blood and Oil documentary is assembled like the policy of war machinery it critiques.  Extensive and impressive archival footage is paraded, Professor Klare’s insightful analysis that is reminiscent of a field general.  The seams are clearly visible, revealing American foreign policy merging with American intent (since 1945) to protect access to oil. The film’s message is simple, but still heavily reinforced to ensure no viewer could miss the point and should be compulsive entertainment for American citizens and those of American Allies: the cost in blood will rise if the lessons of Blood and Oil are lost in the chaos of continual warfare.

There is a convincing argument for the American Dream turning bloody through its dependency on oil.  Idyllic music plays as this dependency is unpacked, from uses in transportation to the less obvious percentages in packaging, paints and lubricants.  This spans the self-sufficient 1940s, to depletion through the Second World War effort, and misrepresented estimates of current reliance on foreign oil. There are undocumented pictures of the fabulous meeting between divergent cultures on February 14, 1945 with Roosevelt and the feudal King of Saudi Arabia mooting the idea of ‘any means necessary,’ through to the formation of Centcom in 1983 where it takes hold. 

The power of Blood and Oil is evident in that viewers have a front row seat in press conferences over time from 1941 through to January 2008. Like time-lapse photography, we see the big names in American history play their part in this fatal bonding.  Bush Sr is there blustering and grabbing onto any rhetoric to convince the American Congress to target dollars to fund the Gulf war; you can almost touch the moment where he turns it from the unpopular real issues to try and appeal with ramblings defenseless issues about children and incubators. The American belief that military action should only be used for higher humanitarian purposes has both led and compounded the current deception, but could also be the saving force if popular support gets behind this production. Klare offers a chilling look at the bloody and fruitless consequences of proceeding, just as Africa enters to complicate the situation, and extremist anger grows at the picture of the West plundering the Arab states.

Blood and Oil
(2008)

Presented by the Media Education Foundation