As troops and equipment pour into the Gulf for a looming war with Iraq, United States military thinkers admit that defence" means protecting ... cheap oil. As far back as 1975, Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, said America was prepared to wage war over oil. Separate plans advocating US conquest of Saudi oilfields were published in the '70s. So it should come as little surprise that ... four months before the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York - a battle plan for Afghanistan was already being reviewed by the US Command that would carry it out after September 11. Military strategists were highlighting the energy wealth of the Caspian Sea and Central Asia and its importance to America's "security". The Indian media and Jane's Intelligence Review reported that the US was fighting covert battles against the Taliban, months before the "war on terrorism" was declared. Over several months beginning in April last year a series of military and governmental policy documents was released that sought to legitimise the use of US military force in the pursuit of oil and gas. A spring 2001 article by Jeffrey Record in the War College's journal, Parameters, argued the legitimacy of "shooting in the Persian Gulf on behalf of lower gas prices". Mr Record [is] a former staff member of the Senate armed services committee (and an apparent favourite of the Council on Foreign Relations). [He] advocated the acceptability of presidential subterfuge in the promotion of a conflict. Mr Record explicitly urged painting over the US's actual reasons for warfare with a nobly high-minded veneer, seeing such as a necessity for mobilising public support for a conflict.