In a NYT column titled "Will fight for Oil", Ted Koppel suggests "For now America's rapt attention to the security of the Persian Gulf is what it has always been. It's about the oil." He cites the following from an answer given in 1990 by the then defense secretary Dick Cheney. "We're there because the fact of the matter is that part of the world controls the world supply of oil, and whoever controls the supply of oil, especially if it were a man like Saddam Hussein, with a large army and sophisticated weapons, would have a stranglehold on the American economy and on — indeed on the world economy."