[Peace-discuss] Pipelineistan

[Brussel Morton K.]

A detailed gas-oil scenario to help explain events in east and SE Asia,
relating also to western policies with respect to Iran:


Liquid War: Postcard From Pipelineistan

Tuesday 24 March 2009

by: Pepe Escobar  |  Visit article original @ TomDispatch.com


     What happens on the immense battlefield for the control of  
Eurasia will provide the ultimate plot line in the tumultuous rush  
towards a new, polycentric world order, also known as the New Great  
Game.

     Our good ol' friend the nonsensical "Global War on Terror," which  
the Pentagon has slyly rebranded "the Long War," sports a far more  
important, if half-hidden, twin -- a global energy war. I like to  
think of it as the Liquid War, because its bloodstream is the  
pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the  
planet. Put another way, if its crucial embattled frontier these days  
is the Caspian Basin, the whole of Eurasia is its chessboard. Think of  
it, geographically, as Pipelineistan.

     All geopolitical junkies need a fix. Since the second half of the  
1990s, I've been hooked on pipelines. I've crossed the Caspian in an  
Azeri cargo ship just to follow the $4 billion Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan  
pipeline, better known in this chess game by its acronym, BTC, through  
the Caucasus. (Oh, by the way, the map of Pipelineistan is chicken- 
scratched with acronyms, so get used to them!)

     I've also trekked various of the overlapping modern Silk Roads,  
or perhaps Silk Pipelines, of possible future energy flows from  
Shanghai to Istanbul, annotating my own DIY routes for LNG (liquefied  
natural gas). I used to avidly follow the adventures of that once-but- 
not-future Sun-King of Central Asia, the now deceased Turkmenbashi or  
"leader of the Turkmen," Saparmurat Niyazov, head of the immensely gas- 
rich Republic of Turkmenistan, as if he were a Conradian hero.

     In Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan (before it was moved  
to Astana, in the middle of the middle of nowhere) the locals were  
puzzled when I expressed an overwhelming urge to drive to that  
country's oil boomtown Aktau. ("Why? There's nothing there.") Entering  
the Space Odyssey-style map room at the Russian energy giant Gazprom's  
headquarters in Moscow -- which digitally details every single  
pipeline in Eurasia -- or the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC)'s  
corporate HQ in Tehran, with its neat rows of female experts in full  
chador, was my equivalent of entering Aladdin's cave. And never  
reading the words "Afghanistan" and "oil" in the same sentence is  
still a source of endless amusement for me.

     Last year, oil cost a king's ransom. This year, it's relatively  
cheap. But don't be fooled. Price isn't the point here. Like it or  
not, energy is still what everyone who's anyone wants to get their  
hands on. So consider this dispatch just the first installment in a  
long, long tale of some of the moves that have been, or will be, made  
in the maddeningly complex New Great Game, which goes on unceasingly,  
no matter what else muscles into the headlines this week.

     Forget the mainstream media's obsession with al-Qaeda, Osama  
"dead or alive" bin Laden, the Taliban -- neo, light or classic -- or  
that "war on terror," whatever name it goes by. These are diversions  
compared to the high-stakes, hardcore geopolitical game that follows  
what flows along the pipelines of the planet.

     Who said Pipelineistan couldn't be fun?

     Calling Dr. Zbig

     In his 1997 magnum opus The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski  
-- realpolitik practitioner extraordinaire and former national  
security advisor to Jimmy Carter, the president who launched the U.S.  
on its modern energy wars -- laid out in some detail just how to hang  
on to American "global primacy." Later, his master plan would be duly  
copied by that lethal bunch of Dr. No's congregated at Bill Kristol's  
Project for a New American Century (PNAC, in case you'd forgotten the  
acronym since its website and its followers went down).

     For Dr. Zbig, who, like me, gets his fix from Eurasia -- from,  
that is, thinking big -- it all boils down to fostering the emergence  
of just the right set of "strategically compatible partners" for  
Washington in places where energy flows are strongest. This, as he so  
politely put it back then, should be done to shape "a more cooperative  
trans-Eurasian security system."

     By now, Dr. Zbig -- among whose fans is evidently President  
Barack Obama -- must have noticed that the Eurasian train which was to  
deliver the energy goods has been slightly derailed. The Asian part of  
Eurasia, it seems, begs to differ.

     Global financial crisis or not, oil and natural gas are the long- 
term keys to an inexorable transfer of economic power from the West to  
Asia. Those who control Pipelineistan -- and despite all the dreaming  
and planning that's gone on there, it's unlikely to be Washington --  
will have the upper hand in whatever's to come, and there's not a  
terrorist in the world, or even a long war, that can change that.

     Energy expert Michael Klare has been instrumental in identifying  
the key vectors in the wild, ongoing global scramble for power over  
Pipelineistan. These range from the increasing scarcity (and  
difficulty of reaching) primary energy supplies to "the painfully slow  
development of energy alternatives." Though you may not have noticed,  
the first skirmishes in Pipelineistan's Liquid War are already on, and  
even in the worst of economic times, the risk mounts constantly, given  
the relentless competition between the West and Asia, be it in the  
Middle East, in the Caspian theater, or in African oil-rich states  
like Angola, Nigeria and Sudan.

     In these early skirmishes of the twenty-first century, China  
reacted swiftly indeed. Even before the attacks of 9/11, its leaders  
were formulating a response to what they saw as the reptilian  
encroachment of the West on the oil and gas lands of Central Asia,  
especially in the Caspian Sea region. To be specific, in June 2001,  
its leaders joined with Russia's to form the Shanghai Cooperation  
Organization. It's known as the SCO and that's an acronym you should  
memorize. It's going to be around for a while.

     Back then, the SCO's junior members were, tellingly enough, the  
Stans, the energy-rich former SSRs of the Soviet Union -- Kyrgyzstan,  
Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan -- which the Clinton  
administration and then the new Bush administration, run by those  
former energy men, had been eyeing covetously. The organization was to  
be a multi-layered economic and military regional cooperation society  
that, as both the Chinese and the Russians saw it, would function as a  
kind of security blanket around the upper rim of Afghanistan.

     Iran is, of course, a crucial energy node of West Asia and that  
country's leaders, too, would prove no slouches when it came to the  
New Great Game. It needs at least $200 billion in foreign investment  
to truly modernize its fabulous oil and gas reserves -- and thus sell  
much more to the West than U.S.-imposed sanctions now allow. No wonder  
Iran soon became a target in Washington. No wonder an air assault on  
that country remains the ultimate wet dream of assorted Likudniks as  
well as Dick ("Angler") Cheney and his neocon chamberlains and  
comrades-in-arms. As seen by the elite from Tehran and Delhi to  
Beijing and Moscow, such a U.S. attack, now likely off the radar  
screen until at least 2012, would be a war not only against Russia and  
China, but against the whole project of Asian integration that the SCO  
is coming to represent.

     Global BRIC-a-brac

     Meanwhile, as the Obama administration tries to sort out its  
Iranian, Afghan, and Central Asian policies, Beijing continues to  
dream of a secure, fast-flowing, energy version of the old Silk Road,  
extending from the Caspian Basin (the energy-rich Stans plus Iran and  
Russia) to Xinjiang Province, its Far West.

     The SCO has expanded its aims and scope since 2001. Today, Iran,  
India, and Pakistan enjoy "observer status" in an organization that  
increasingly aims to control and protect not just regional energy  
supplies, but Pipelineistan in every direction. This is, of course,  
the role the Washington ruling elite would like NATO to play across  
Eurasia. Given that Russia and China expect the SCO to play a similar  
role across Asia, clashes of various sorts are inevitable.

     Ask any relevant expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences  
in Beijing and he will tell you that the SCO should be understood as a  
historically unique alliance of five non-Western civilizations --  
Russian, Chinese, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist -- and, because of that,  
capable of evolving into the basis for a collective security system in  
Eurasia. That's a thought sure to discomfort classic inside-the- 
Beltway global strategists like Dr. Zbig and President George H. W.  
Bush's national security advisor Brent Scowcroft.

     According to the view from Beijing, the rising world order of the  
twenty-first century will be significantly determined by a quadrangle  
of BRIC countries -- for those of you by now collecting Great Game  
acronyms, that stands for Brazil, Russia, India, and China -- plus the  
future Islamic triangle of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Add in a  
unified South America, no longer in thrall to Washington, and you have  
a global SCO-plus. On the drawing boards, at least, it's a high octane  
dream.

     The key to any of this is a continuing Sino-Russian entente  
cordiale.

     Already in 1999, watching NATO and the United States aggressively  
expand into the distant Balkans, Beijing identified this new game for  
what it was: a developing energy war. And at stake were the oil and  
natural gas reserves of what Americans would soon be calling the "arc  
of instability," a vast span of lands extending from North Africa to  
the Chinese border. No less important would be the routes pipelines  
would take in bringing the energy buried in those lands to the West.  
Where they would be built, the countries they would cross, would  
determine much in the world to come. And this was where the empire of  
U.S. military bases (think, for instance, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo)  
met Pipelineistan (represented, way back in 1999, by the AMBO pipeline).

     AMBO, short for Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corporation, an  
entity registered in the U.S., is building a $1.1 billion pipeline,  
aka "the Trans-Balkan," slated to be finished by 2011. It will bring  
Caspian oil to the West without taking it through either Russia or  
Iran. As a pipeline, AMBO fit well into a geopolitical strategy of  
creating a U.S.-controlled energy-security grid that was first  
developed by President Bill Clinton's Energy Secretary Bill Richardson  
and later by Vice President Dick Cheney.

     Behind the idea of that "grid" lay a go-for-broke militarization  
of an energy corridor that would stretch from the Caspian Sea in  
Central Asia through a series of now independent former SSRs of the  
Soviet Union to Turkey, and from there into the Balkans (thence on to  
Europe). It was meant to sabotage the larger energy plans of both  
Russia and Iran. AMBO itself would bring oil from the Caspian basin to  
a terminal in the former SSR of Georgia in the Caucasus, and then  
transport it by tanker through the Black Sea to the Bulgarian port of  
Burgas, where another pipeline would connect to Macedonia and then to  
the Albanian port of Vlora.

     As for Camp Bondsteel, it was the "enduring" military base that  
Washington gained from the wars for the remains of Yugoslavia. It  
would be the largest overseas base the U.S. had built since the  
Vietnam War. Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR)  
would, with the Army Corps of Engineers, put it up on 400 hectares of  
farmland near the Macedonian border in southern Kosovo. Think of it as  
a user-friendly, five-star version of Guantanamo with perks for those  
stationed there that included Thai massage and loads of junk food.  
Bondsteel is the Balkan equivalent of a giant immobile aircraft  
carrier, capable of exercising surveillance not only over the Balkans  
but also over Turkey and the Black Sea region (considered in the  
neocon-speak of the Bush years "the new interface" between the "Euro- 
Atlantic community" and the "Greater Middle East").

     How could Russia, China, and Iran not interpret the war in  
Kosovo, then the invasion of Afghanistan (where Washington had  
previously tried to pair with the Taliban and encourage the building  
of another of those avoid-Iran, avoid-Russia pipelines), followed by  
the invasion of Iraq (that country of vast oil reserves), and finally  
the recent clash in Georgia (that crucial energy transportation  
junction) as straightforward wars for Pipelineistan? Though seldom  
imagined this way in our mainstream media, the Russian and Chinese  
leaderships saw a stark "continuity" of policy stretching from Bill  
Clinton's humanitarian imperialism to Bush's Global War on Terror.  
Blowback, as then Russian President Vladimir Putin himself warned  
publicly, was inevitable -- but that's another magic-carpet story,  
another cave to enter another time.

     Rainy Night in Georgia

     If you want to understand Washington's version of Pipelineistan,  
you have to start with Mafia-ridden Georgia. Though its army was  
crushed in its recent war with Russia, Georgia remains crucial to  
Washington's energy policy in what, by now, has become a genuine arc  
of instability -- in part because of a continuing obsession with  
cutting Iran out of the energy flow.

     It was around the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, as I pointed  
out in my book Globalistan in 2007, that American policy congealed.  
Zbig Brzezinski himself flew into Baku in 1995 as an "energy  
consultant," less than four years after Azerbaijan became independent,  
and sold the idea to the Azerbaijani elite. The BTC was to run from  
the Sangachal Terminal, half-an-hour south of Baku, across neighboring  
Georgia to the Marine Terminal in the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the  
Mediterranean. Now operational, that 1,767-kilometer-long, 44-meter- 
wide steel serpent straddles no less than six war zones, ongoing or  
potential: Nagorno-Karabakh (an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan),  
Chechnya and Dagestan (both embattled regions of Russia), South  
Ossetia and Abkhazia (on which the 2008 Russia-Georgia war pivoted),  
and Turkish Kurdistan.

     From a purely economic point of view, the BTC made no sense. A  
"BTK" pipeline, running from Baku through Tehran to Iran's Kharg  
Island, could have been built for, relatively speaking, next to  
nothing -- and it would have had the added advantage of bypassing both  
mafia-corroded Georgia and wobbly Kurdish-populated Eastern Anatolia.  
That would have been the really cheap way to bring Caspian oil and gas  
to Europe.

     The New Great Game ensured that that was not to be, and much  
followed from that decision. Even though Moscow never planned to  
occupy Georgia long-term in its 2008 war, or take over the BTC  
pipeline that now runs through its territory, Alfa Bank oil and gas  
analyst Konstantin Batunin pointed out the obvious: by briefly cutting  
off the BTC oil flow, Russian troops made it all too clear to global  
investors that Georgia wasn't a reliable energy transit country. In  
other words, the Russians made a mockery of Zbig's world.

     For its part, Azerbaijan was, until recently, the real success  
story in the U.S. version of Pipelineistan. Advised by Zbig, Bill  
Clinton literally "stole" Baku from Russia's "near abroad" by  
promoting the BTC and the wealth that would flow from it. Now,  
however, with the message of the Russia-Georgia War sinking in, Baku  
is again allowing itself to be seduced by Russia. To top it off,  
Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev can't stand Georgia's brash  
President Mikhail Saakashvili. That's hardly surprising. After all,  
Saakashvili's rash military moves caused Azerbaijan to lose at least  
$500 million when the BTC was shut down during the war.

     Russia's energy seduction blitzkrieg is focused like a laser on  
Central Asia as well. (We'll talk about it more in the next  
Pipelineistan installment.) It revolves around offering to buy Kazakh,  
Uzbek, and Turkmen gas at European prices instead of previous, much  
lower Russian prices. The Russians, in fact, have offered the same  
deal to the Azeris: so now, Baku is negotiating a deal involving more  
capacity for the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline, which makes its way to  
the Russian borders of the Black Sea, while considering pumping less  
oil for the BTC.

     President Obama needs to understand the dire implications of  
this. Less Azeri oil on the BTC -- its full capacity is 1 million  
barrels a day, mostly shipped to Europe -- means the pipeline may go  
broke, which is exactly what Russia wants.

     In Central Asia, some of the biggest stakes revolve around the  
monster Kashagan oil field in "snow leopard" Kazakhstan, the absolute  
jewel in the Caspian crown with reserves of as many as 9 billion  
barrels. As usual in Pipelineistan, it all comes down to which routes  
will deliver Kashagan's oil to the world after production starts in  
2013. This spells, of course, Liquid War. Wily Kazakh President  
Nursultan Nazarbayev would like to use the Russian-controlled Caspian  
Pipeline Consortium (CPC) to pump Kashagan crude to the Black Sea.

     In this case, the Kazakhs hold all the cards. How oil will flow  
from Kashagan will decide whether the BTC -- once hyped by Washington  
as the ultimate Western escape route from dependence on Persian Gulf  
oil -- lives or dies.

     Welcome, then, to Pipelineistan! Whether we like it or not, in  
good times and bad, it's a reasonable bet that we're all going to be  
Pipeline tourists. So, go with the flow. Learn the crucial acronyms,  
keep an eye out for what happens to all those U.S. bases across the  
oil heartlands of the planet, watch where the pipelines are being  
built, and do your best to keep tabs on the next set of monster  
Chinese energy deals and fabulous coups by Russia's Gazprom.

     And, while you're at it, consider this just the first postcard  
sent off from our tour of Pipelineistan. We'll be back (to slightly  
adapt a quote from the Terminator). Think of this as a door opening  
onto a future in which what flows where and to whom may turn out to be  
the most important question on the planet.

     ---------

     Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and an  
analyst for the Real News. This article draws from his new book, Obama  
does Globalistan. He may be reached at pepeasia at yahoo.com.
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