Speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee on September 11, 1990, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said: ” ‘Once […Iraqi President Saddam Hussein] acquired Kuwait and deployed an army as large as the one he possesses, he was clearly in a position to be able to dictate the future of worldwide energy policy, and that gave him a stranglehold on our economy and on that of most of the other nations of the world as well…’ ”
– Michael Klare, “US: Procuring the World’s Oil,” Asia Times, April 27, 2004