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

[C. G. Estabrook]

You don't think there's any undue sympathy for the USG position in re the
Georgian attack in an article entitled "Putin's Ruthless Gambit"?!

In this matter, Medvedev/Putin have certainly behaved better than
Clinton/Bush/Cheney/Saakashvili. Surely you agree.

Yes, let the reader decide.  --CGE


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> Your statements about the presumed sympathies of Klare for U.S. government
> policy are not apparent from this article.  Rather, I find them a distortion
> of the tenor of the article. Outlined below in red italics are paragraphs
> which seem to confirm this. Let the reader decide.
> 
> I even find some admiration for Putin here.--mkb
> 
> 
> On Sep 4, 2008, at 3:34 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> As Klare says…
>> 
>> 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."
> 
> It's obvious (to me) that Klare understands all this quite well. I wonder why
> you bring it up?
>> 
>> 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.
> 
> This is the only assertion that I would question in the article.  Klare seems
> to posit it more as a possibility than as a fact.
>> 
>> 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 
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------