[Peace-discuss] Liberal organization promotes AfPak killing

[C. G. Estabrook]

Oil is certainly fungible, and the USG intends to control as much of it as it 
can, all recent administrations agree.  Most of it is in the Mideast -- a region 
understood since World War II to be the “most strategically important area of 
the world,” “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest 
material prizes in world history” -- in the words of US State Department planners.

Apart from what one historian of the industry calls “profits beyond the dreams 
of avarice,” which must flow in the right direction, control over two-thirds of 
the world’s estimated hydrocarbon reserves – uniquely cheap and easy to exploit 
– provides what Zbigniew Brzezinski recently called “critical leverage” over 
European and Asian rivals, what George Kennan many years earlier had called 
“veto power” over them.

These have been crucial policy concerns throughout the post-World War II period, 
even more so in today’s evolving tripolar world, with its threat that Europe and 
Asia might move towards greater independence, and worse, might be united: China 
and the EU became each other’s major trading partners in 2004, joined by the 
world’s second largest economy (Japan), and those tendencies are likely to 
increase.  A firm hand on the spigot reduces these dangers.

Note that the critical issue is control, not access.  US policies towards the 
Middle East were the same when it was a net exporter of oil, and remain the same 
today when US intelligence projects that the US itself will rely on more stable 
Atlantic Basin resources.  Policies would be likely to be about the same if the 
US were to switch to renewable energy.  The need to control the “stupendous 
source of strategic power” and to gain “profits beyond the dreams of avarice” 
would remain.  Jockeying over Central Asia and pipeline routes reflects similar 
concerns -- hence Afghanistan.

--CGE (mostly from Chomsky)


Stuart Levy wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 09:28:14PM -0500, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>> [Hayden ignores the long-standing US policy that dictates control of AfPak
>>  and instead speaks of a "quagmire," which since Vietnam has meant a 
>> situation that the US gets into accidentally and then can't get out of. 
>> That wasn't Vietnam, nor is it AfPak. The geopolitical goal of the USG -- 
>> control of Mideast energy resources -- is clear; they just don't want to 
>> talk about it, because they know that, if they do, the US populace will 
>> oppose it -- especially when they learn that we get very little oil from 
>> the Mideast. --CGE]
> 
> It could seem like a nit, but we should remember that -- if somehow we could
> no longer get so much Western Hemisphere (Canada/Mexico/Venezuela) oil -- we
> would switch over to importing Middle Eastern oil.  (I gather this'd be
> disruptive for a while for the refineries, but wouldn't be a major national 
> sort of roadblock.)  In other words, we should consider oil as fungible, and
> I'd expect that US planners must be doing so too.   The prospect of "peak
> oil", for example, is best seen as worldwide not regional.
> 
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