[Peace-discuss] It's all about oil?

[C. G. Estabrook]

Yes, he does, and that's a pretty big piece to leave out. (Of course Russia's 
being surrounded as stated is at least partly a result of the US insistence on 
controlling ME energy resources.)

Klare's helpful in reminding people of why the USG is willing to kill large 
numbers of people in the ME, but he's remarkably credulous in regard to the 
American line.  (In the second week in August, he solemnly announced on 
Democracy Now! that Russia had attacked the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline in 
Georgia -- which fit with a vulgar reading of the it's-all-about-oil theory -- 
but lacked the essential characteristic of being true...)

It's surely a mistake to see the "geopolitical struggle between Moscow and 
Washington over the energy riches of the Caspian Sea basin" as the *immediate* 
cause of the Russian military action, altho' it was surely a mediate cause 
(i.e., that's why the US was arming and encouraging the Georgians).

The immediate cause was the mad Saakashvili's attack on civilians in his 
invasion of Tshkinvali (including the use of cluster bombs -- an Israeli 
contribution?). And the Russian military seems largely to have confined itself 
to military targets in response.

It's worthwhile for Klare to remind us of Clinton's machinations in Georgia in 
regard to oil (but he seems to approve), but he should perhaps include the 
context -- the US attempt (almost successful) in the 1990s to reduce Russia to 
the status of Third World country.  The reason that US policy makers (including 
Klare) are so hysterical about Putin is that he prevented it.

As Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer put it, "[Putin's] resurgent 
Russia [has] made most Russians better off than they were during the 1990s, when 
they were run by Clinton, Harvard, and the IMF via Yeltsin -- [now] it offers a 
counterweight to U.S. imperial power. The U.S. had it easy in the 1990s. Now 
with Russia -- not to mention China -- it can't have its way anymore. Which is, 
on balance, a good thing."

But apparently Klare doesn't think so. And he sees the US policy as "a 
calculated effort to enhance Western energy security" -- ignoring (a) how little 
  energy the US receives from the region; and (b) the real US motive, to secure 
by means of the control of ME oil what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls "indirect but 
politically critical leverage on the European and Asian economies that are also 
dependent on energy exports from the region."

And that policy very much continues.  Klare notes that "From 1998 to 2000 alone, 
Georgia was awarded $302 million in U.S. military and economic aid -- more than 
any other Caspian country..." But Cheney has just arrived in Tblisi with *$1 
billion* more -- putting little Georgia in the top rank of recipients of US 
"foreign aid" (after Israel and Egypt, of course) for the year.

So it's a bit hard to share Klare's sympathies for a "Bush team" so unfortunate 
as to "walk into a trap cleverly set by Putin."  That's surely to invert the 
matter.  The US has been assiduously building an "oil trap" in the former USSR, 
in spite of its promise not to extend NATO.  And Clinton (characteristically) 
was more perjurer than chessplayer.

And what an inversion to say that "the Russian prime minister goaded the rash 
Saakashvili into invading South Ossetia," even if the Bush administration (or 
McCain's lobbyist) didn't directly urge the reduction of Tshkinvali (and they 
might've)! He was at least April Glaspied in.

Finally, I'm not quite sure what's implied by the alternative, "if American 
leaders assume a more realistic approach to Russia's resurgent power or, 
alternatively, choose to collaborate with Moscow in the exploitation of Caspian 
energy" -- but it's vague enough to sound good.  It's the rest of the article 
that's worrying. --CGE


Brussel wrote:
> An "gas/oil energy analysis" of the events in Georgia by Michael Klare. 
> 
> He leaves out other factors, such as the threat that Russia sees to 
> being surrounded by antipathetic nations and American bases. 
> 
>  
> *Putin's Ruthless Gambit*
> 
> The Bush Administration Falters in a Geopolitical Chess Match
> 
> September, 04 2008
> 
> By Michael T. Klare
> Source: TomDispatch
> 
> 
> Many Western analysts have chosen to interpret the recent fighting in 
> the Caucasus as the onset of a new Cold War, with a small pro-Western 
> democracy bravely resisting a brutal reincarnation of Stalin's 
> jack-booted Soviet Union. Others have viewed it a throwback to the 
> age-old ethnic politics of southeastern Europe, with assorted minorities 
> using contemporary border disputes to settle ancient scores.
> 
> Neither of these explanations is accurate. To fully grasp the recent 
> upheavals in the Caucasus, it is necessary to view the conflict as but a 
> minor skirmish in a far more significant geopolitical struggle between 
> Moscow and Washington over the energy riches of the Caspian Sea basin -- 
> with former Russian President (now Prime Minister) Vladimir Putin 
> emerging as the reigning Grand Master of geostrategic chess and the Bush 
> team turning out to be middling amateurs, at best.
> 
> The ultimate prize in this contest is control over the flow of oil and 
> natural gas from the energy-rich Caspian basin to eager markets in 
> Europe and Asia. According to the most recent tally by oil giant BP, the 
> Caspian's leading energy producers, all former "socialist republics" of 
> the Soviet Union -- notably Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and 
> Uzbekistan -- together possess approximately 48 billion barrels in 
> proven oil reserves (roughly equivalent to those left in the U.S. and 
> Canada) and 268 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (essentially 
> equivalent to what Saudi Arabia possesses).
> 
> During the Soviet era, the oil and gas output of these nations was, of 
> course, controlled by officials in Moscow and largely allocated to 
> Russia and other Soviet republics. After the breakup of the USSR in 
> 1991, however, Western oil companies began to participate in the 
> hydrocarbon equivalent of a gold rush to exploit Caspian energy 
> reservoirs, while plans were being made to channel the region's oil and 
> gas to markets across the world.
> 
> Rush to the Caspian
> 
> In the 1990s, the Caspian Sea basin was viewed as the world's most 
> promising new source of oil and gas, and so the major Western energy 
> firms -- Chevron, BP, Shell, and Exxon Mobil, among others -- rushed 
> into the region to take advantage of what seemed a golden opportunity. 
> For these firms, persuading the governments of the newly independent 
> Caspian states to sign deals proved to be no great hassle. They were 
> eager to attract Western investment -- and the bribes that often came 
> with it -- and to free themselves from Moscow's economic domination.
> 
> But there turned out to be a major catch: It was neither obvious nor 
> easy to figure out how to move all the new oil and gas to markets in the 
> West. After all, the Caspian is landlocked, so tankers cannot get near 
> it, while all existing pipelines passed through Russia and were hooked 
> into Soviet-era supply systems. While many in Washington were eager to 
> assist U.S. firms in their drive to gain access to Caspian energy, they 
> did not want to see the resulting oil and gas flow through Russia -- 
> until recently, the country's leading adversary -- before reaching 
> Western markets.
> 
> What, then, to do? Looking at the Caspian chessboard in the mid-1990s, 
> President Bill Clinton conceived the striking notion of converting the 
> newly independent, energy-poor Republic of Georgia into an "energy 
> corridor" for the export of Caspian basin oil and gas to the West, 
> thereby bypassing Russia altogether. An initial, "early-oil" pipeline 
> was built to carry petroleum from newly-developed fields in Azerbaijan's 
> sector of the Caspian Sea to Supsa on Georgia's Black Sea coast, where 
> it was loaded onto tankers for delivery to international markets. This 
> would be followed by a far more audacious scheme: the construction of 
> the 1,000-mile BTC pipeline from Baku in Azerbaijan to Tbilisi in 
> Georgia and then on to Ceyhan on Turkey's Mediterranean coast. Again, 
> the idea was to exclude Russia -- which had, in the intervening years, 
> been transformed into a struggling, increasingly impoverished former 
> superpower -- from the Caspian Sea energy rush.
> 
> Clinton presided over every stage of the BTC line's initial development, 
> from its early conception to the formal arrangements imposed by 
> Washington on the three nations involved in its corporate structuring. 
> (Final work on the pipeline was not completed until 2006, two years into 
> George W. Bush's second term.) For Clinton and his advisors, this was 
> geopolitics, pure and simple -- a calculated effort to enhance Western 
> energy security while diminishing Moscow's control over the global flow 
> of oil and gas. The administration's efforts to promote the construction 
> of new pipelines through Azerbaijan and Georgia were intended "to break 
> Russia's monopoly of control over the transportation of oil from the 
> region," Sheila Heslin of the National Security Council bluntly told a 
> Senate investigating committee in 1997.
> 
> Clinton understood that this strategy entailed significant risks, 
> particularly because Washington's favored "energy corridor" passed 
> through or near several major conflict zones -- including the 
> Russian-backed breakaway enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. With 
> this in mind, Clinton made a secondary decision -- to convert the new 
> Georgian army into a military proxy of the United States, equipped and 
> trained by the Department of Defense. From 1998 to 2000 alone, Georgia 
> was awarded $302 million in U.S. military and economic aid -- more than 
> any other Caspian country -- and top U.S. military officials started 
> making regular trips to its capital, Tbilisi, to demonstrate support for 
> then-president Eduard Shevardnadze.
> 
> In those years, Clinton was the top chess player in the Caspian region, 
> while his Russian presidential counterpart, Boris Yeltsin, was far too 
> preoccupied with domestic troubles and a bitter, costly, ongoing 
> guerrilla war in Chechnya to match his moves. It was clear, however, 
> that senior Russian officials were deeply concerned by the growing U.S. 
> presence in their southern backyard -- what they called their "near 
> abroad" -- and had already had begun planning for an eventual comeback. 
> "It hasn't been left unnoticed in Russia that certain outside interests 
> are trying to weaken our position in the Caspian basin," Andrei Y. Urnov 
> of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared in May 2000. "No one 
> should be perplexed that Russia is determined to resist the attempts to 
> encroach on her interests."
> 
> Russia Resurgent
> 
> At this critical moment, a far more capable player took over on Russia's 
> side of the geopolitical chessboard. On December 31, 1999, Vladimir V. 
> Putin was appointed president by Yeltsin and then, on March 26, 2000, 
> elected to a full four-year term in office. Politics in the Caucasus and 
> the Caspian region have never been the same.
> 
> Even before assuming the presidency, Putin indicated that he believed 
> state control over energy resources should be the basis for Russia's 
> return to great-power status. In his doctoral dissertation, a summary of 
> which was published in 1999, he had written that "[t]he state has the 
> right to regulate the process of the acquisition and the use of natural 
> resources, and particularly mineral resources [including oil and natural 
> gas], independent of on whose property they are located." On this basis, 
> Putin presided over the re-nationalization of many of the energy 
> companies that had been privatized by Yeltsin and the virtual 
> confiscation of Yukos -- once Russia's richest private energy firm -- by 
> Russian state authorities. He also brought Gazprom, the world's largest 
> natural gas supplier, back under state control and placed a protégé, 
> Dmitri Medvedev -- now president of Russia -- at its helm.
> 
> Once he had restored state control over the lion's share of Russia's oil 
> and gas resources, Putin turned his attention to the next obvious place 
> -- the Caspian Sea basin. Here, his intent was not so much to gain 
> ownership of its energy resources -- although Russian firms have in 
> recent years acquired an equity share in some Caspian oil and gas fields 
> -- but rather to dominate the export conduits used to transport its 
> energy to Europe and Asia.
> 
> Russia already enjoyed a considerable advantage since much of 
> Kazakhstan's oil already flowed to the West via the Caspian Pipeline 
> Consortium (CPC), which passes through Russia before terminating on the 
> Black Sea; moreover, much of Central Asia's natural gas continued to 
> flow to Russia through pipelines built during the Soviet era. But 
> Putin's gambit in the Caspian region evidently was meant to capture a 
> far more ambitious prize. He wanted to ensure that most oil and gas from 
> newly developed fields in the Caspian basin would travel west via Russia.
> 
> The first part of this drive entailed frenzied diplomacy by Putin and 
> Medvedev (still in his role as board chairman of Gazprom) to persuade 
> the presidents of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan to ship their 
> future output of gas through Russia. Success was achieved when, in 
> December 2007, Putin signed an agreement with the leaders of these 
> countries to supply 20 billion cubic meters of gas per year through a 
> new conduit along the Caspian's eastern shore to southern Russia -- for 
> ultimate delivery to Europe via Gazprom's existing pipeline network.
> 
> Meanwhile, Putin moved to undermine international confidence in Georgia 
> as a reliable future corridor for energy delivery. This became a 
> strategic priority for Moscow because the European Union announced plans 
> to build a $10 billion natural-gas pipeline from the Caspian, dubbed 
> "Nabucco" after the opera by Verdi. It would run from Turkey to Austria, 
> while linking up to an expanded South Caucasus gas pipeline that now 
> extends from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Erzurum in Turkey. The 
> Nabucco pipeline was intended as a dramatic move to reduce Europe's 
> reliance on Russian natural gas -- and so has enjoyed strong support 
> from the Bush administration.
> 
> It is against this backdrop that the recent events in Georgia unfolded.
> 
> Checkmate in Georgia
> 
> Obviously, the more oil and gas passing through Georgia on its way to 
> the West, the greater that country's geostrategic significance in the 
> U.S.-Russian struggle over the distribution of Caspian energy. 
> Certainly, the Bush administration recognized this and responded by 
> providing hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the 
> Georgian military and helping to train specialized forces for protection 
> of the new pipelines. But the administration's partner in Tbilisi, 
> President Mikheil Saakashvili, was not content to play the relatively 
> modest role of pipeline protector. Instead, he sought to pursue a 
> megalomaniacal fantasy of recapturing the breakaway regions of Abhkazia 
> and South Ossetia with American help. As it happened, the Bush team -- 
> blindsided by their own neoconservative fantasies -- saw in Saakashvili 
> a useful pawn in their pursuit of a long smoldering anti-Russian agenda. 
> Together, they walked into a trap cleverly set by Putin.
> 
> It is hard not to conclude that Russian prime minister goaded the rash 
> Saakashvili into invading South Ossetia by encouraging Abkhazian and 
> South Ossetian irregulars to attack Georgian outposts and villages on 
> the peripheries of the two enclaves. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice 
> reportedly told Saakashvili not to respond to such provocations when she 
> met with him in July. Apparently her advice fell on deaf ears. Far more 
> enticing, it seems, was her promise of strong U.S. backing for Georgia's 
> rapid entry into NATO. Other American leaders, including Senator John 
> McCain, assured Saakashvili of unwavering U.S. support. Whatever was 
> said in these private conversations, the Georgian president seems to 
> have interpreted them as a green light for his adventuristic impulses. 
> On August 7th, by all accounts, his forces invaded South Ossetia and 
> attacked its capital city of Tskhinvali, giving Putin what he long 
> craved -- a seemingly legitimate excuse to invade Georgia and 
> demonstrate the complete vulnerability of Clinton's (and now Bush's) 
> vaunted energy corridor.
> 
> Today, the Georgian army is in shambles, the BTC and South Caucasus gas 
> pipelines are within range of Russian firepower, and Abkhazia and South 
> Ossetia have declared their independence, quickly receiving Russian 
> recognition. In response to these developments, the Bush administration 
> has, along with some friendly leaders in Europe, mounted a media and 
> diplomatic counterattack, accusing Moscow of barbaric behavior and 
> assorted violations of international law. Threats have also been made to 
> exclude Russia from various international forums and institutions, such 
> as the G-8 club of governments and the World Trade Organization. It is 
> possible, then, that Moscow will suffer some isolation and inconvenience 
> as a result of its incursion into Georgia.
> 
> None of this, so far as can be determined, will alter the picture in the 
> Caucasus: Putin has moved his most powerful pieces onto this corner of 
> the chessboard, America's pawn has been decisively defeated, and there's 
> not much of a practical nature that Washington (or London or Paris or 
> Berlin) can do to alter the outcome.
> 
> There will, of course, be more rounds to come, and it is impossible to 
> predict how they will play out. Putin prevailed this time around because 
> he focused on geopolitical objectives, while his opponents were blindly 
> driven by fantasy and ideology; so long as this pattern persists, he or 
> his successors are likely to come out on top. Only if American leaders 
> assume a more realistic approach to Russia's resurgent power or, 
> alternatively, choose to collaborate with Moscow in the exploitation of 
> Caspian energy, will the risk of further strategic setbacks in the 
> region disappear.
> 
> 
> Michael T. Klare is professor of peace and world security studies at 
> Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, 
> Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Metropolitan Books).
> 
> [This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation 
> Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and 
> opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder 
> of the American Empire Project, author of The End of Victory Culture, 
> updated in a newly issued edition covering Iraq, and editor and 
> contributor to The World According to Tomdispatch: America in the New 
> Age of Empire.]
> 
>  
> 
>  
> From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
> URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/18680
> 
> Print 
> 
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