Could BP Oil Fuel the Afghan Antiwar Movement?

Hard as it may be to believe, the BP oil disaster may actually have an upside, by bringing new life to the antiwar movement in Afghanistan.

Despite the constant daily stream of news stories covering the BP oil spill, the mainstream media has until now failed to draw the important connections between the environmental crisis in the Gulf and America's wars abroad.

But, there's a growing movement, led by Public Citizen, a government watchdog group, that calls on the U.S. government to hold BP fully accountable for its actions in the Gulf of Mexico by canceling the company's multi-billion dollar business contracts with the Department of Defense to fuel U.S. fighter jets and military vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a letter recently sent to the White House and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the group gathered 150,000 backers in a drive to remove BP from the federal payroll, by calling on the White House to suspend and revoke the DoD's six federal fuel contracts — worth a total of $2.1 billion dollars — to the company and its subsidiaries.  According to the group's director Tyson Slocum, "You have to send a clear message to shareholders that committing felonies is not tolerated in the United States. And the way you do that is through some form of permanent sanctions."

It's no secret that the U.S. military's foreign wars have left the country heavily dependent on petroleum companies. But, as Nick Turse highlights in his recent article at TomDispatch.com, BP receives the lion's share of DoD contracts, already awarded more than $837 million dollars in this fiscal year alone. In 2009, the company was the largest government-funded oil moneymaker, receiving almost 12 percent of all of the petroleum contract dollars awarded by the Pentagon for the year.

The fact that the same company that is responsible for what the Obama administration's top environmental adviser Carol Browner has deemed "the worst environmental disaster we've ever faced in this country," is being subsidized by the Pentagon and Americans' tax dollars is surely evidence for greater linkage between the environmental and antiwar movements.

As tens of thousands of barrels of oil continue to spill into the Gulf, U.S. fighter planes are burning 47,000 gallons per mission over the skies of Afghanistan. If this movement to cancel BP's defense contracts with the government continues to gather steam, environmental and antiwar activists may be able to channel and utilize the public's outrage with BP not only to give much-needed spark to the green movement, but also as a new weapon in the effort to withdraw U.S. troops from the AfPak region.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons