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Published on 3 Mar 2005 by Asia Times. Archived on 3 Mar 2005.
The oil factor in Bush's 'war on tyranny'
by F William Engdahl
In recent public speeches, President George W Bush and others in the
US administration, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,
have begun to make a significant shift in the rhetoric of war. A new
"war on tyranny" is being groomed to replace the outmoded "war on
terror". Far from being a semantic nuance, the shift is highly
revealing of the next phase of Washington's global agenda.
In his January 20 inaugural speech, Bush declared, "It is the policy
of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic
movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the
ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world" (author's emphasis).
Bush repeated the last formulation, "ending tyranny in our world", in
the State of the Union address. In 1917 it was a "war to make the
world safe for democracy", and in 1941 it was a "war to end all wars".
The use of tyranny as justification for US military intervention
marks a dramatic new step in Washington's quest for global
domination. "Washington", of course, today is shorthand for the
policy domination by a private group of military and energy
conglomerates, from Halliburton to McDonnell Douglas, from Bechtel to
ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, not unlike that foreseen in president
Dwight Eisenhower's 1961 speech warning of excessive control of
government by a military-industrial complex.
Congress declared World War II after an aggressive Japanese attack on
the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. While Washington stretched the
limits of deception and fakery in Vietnam and elsewhere to justify
its wars, up to now it has always at least justified the effort with
the claim that another power had initiated aggression or hostile
military acts against the United States of America. Tyranny has to do
with the internal affairs of a nation: it has to do with how a leader
and a people interact, not with its foreign policy. It has nothing to
do with aggression against the United States or others.
Historically Washington has had no problem befriending some of the
world's all-time tyrants, as long as they were "pro-Washington"
tyrants, such as the military dictatorship of President General
Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, a paragon of oppression. We might name
other befriended tyrants - Ilham Aliyev's Azerbaijan, or Islam
Karimov's Uzbekistan, or the al-Sabahs' Kuwait, or Oman. Maybe
Morocco, or Alvaro Uribe's Colombia. There is a long list of
pro-Washington tyrants.
For obvious reasons, Washington is unlikely to turn against its
"friends". The new anti-tyranny crusade would seem, then, to be
directed against "anti-American" tyrants. The question is, which
tyrants are on the radar screen for the Pentagon's awesome arsenal of
smart bombs and covert-operations commandos? Rice dropped a hint in
her Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony two days prior to
the Bush inauguration. The White House, of course, cleared her speech
first.
Target some tyrannies, nurture others
Rice hinted at Washington's target list of tyrants amid an otherwise
bland statement in her Senate testimony. She declared, "in our world
there remain outposts of tyranny ... in Cuba, and Burma and North
Korea, and Iran and Belarus, and Zimbabwe". Aside from the fact that
the designated secretary of state did not bother to refer to "Burma"
under its present name, Myanmar, the list is an indication of the
next phase in Washington's strategy of preemptive wars for its global
domination strategy.
As reckless as this seems given the Iraq quagmire, the fact that
little open debate on such a broadened war has yet taken place
indicates how extensive the consensus is within the Washington
establishment for the war policy. According to the January 24 New
Yorker report from Seymour Hersh, Washington already approved a war
plan for the coming four years of Bush II, which targets 10 countries
from the Middle East to East Asia. The Rice statement gives a clue to
six of the 10. She also suggested Venezuela is high on the non-public
target list.
Pentagon Special Forces units are reported already active inside
Iran, according to the Hersh report, preparing details of key
military and nuclear sites for presumable future bomb hits. At the
highest levels, France, Germany and the European Union are well aware
of the US agenda for Iran, on the nuclear issue, which explains the
frantic EU diplomatic forays with Iran.
The US president declared in his State of the Union speech that Iran
was "the world's primary state sponsor of terror". Congress is
falling in line as usual, beginning to sound war drums on Iran.
Testimony to the Israeli Knesset by the Mossad chief recently,
reported in the Jerusalem Post, estimated that by the end of 2005
Iran's nuclear-weapons program would be "unstoppable". This suggests
strong pressure from Israel on Washington to "stop" Iran this year.
According also to former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
official Vince Cannistraro, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's new
war agenda includes a list of 10 priority countries. In addition to
Iran, it includes Syria, Sudan, Algeria, Yemen and Malaysia.
According to a report in the January 23 Washington Post, General
Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), also has
a list of what the Pentagon calls "emerging targets" for preemptive
war, which includes Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, the Philippines and
Georgia, a list he has sent to Rumsfeld.
While Georgia may now be considered under de facto North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) or US control since the election of
President Mikheil Saakashvili, the other states are highly suggestive
of the overall US agenda for the new "war on tyranny". If we add
Syria, Sudan, Algeria and Malaysia, as well as Rice's list of Cuba,
Belarus, Myanmar and Zimbabwe, to the JCS list of Somalia, Yemen,
Indonesia and the Philippines, we have some 12 potential targets for
either Pentagon covert destabilization or direct military
intervention, surgical or broader. And, of course, North Korea, which
seems to serve as a useful permanent friction point to justify US
military presence in the strategic region between China and Japan.
Whether it is 10 or 12 targets, the direction is clear.
What is striking is just how directly this list of US "emerging
target" countries, "outposts of tyranny", maps on to the strategic
goal of total global energy control, which is clearly the central
strategic focus of the Bush-Cheney administration.
General Norman Schwarzkopf, who led the 1991 attack on Iraq, told the
US Congress in 1990: "Middle East oil is the West's lifeblood. It
fuels us today, and being 77% of the free world's proven oil
reserves, is going to fuel us when the rest of the world runs dry."
He was talking about what some geologists call peak oil, the end of
the era of cheap oil, without drawing undue attention to the fact.
That was in 1990. Today, with US troops preparing a semi-permanent
stay in Iraq and moves to control global oil and energy chokepoints,
the situation is far more advanced. China and India have rapidly
emerged as major oil-import economies at a time when existing sources
of the West's oil, from the North Sea to Alaska and beyond, are in
significant decline. Here we have a pre-programmed scenario for
future resource conflict on a global scale.
Oil geopolitics and the 'war on tyranny'
Cuba as a "tyranny target" is a surrogate for Hugo Chavez' Venezuela,
which is strongly supported by Russian President Vladimir Putin, via
Cuba, and now by China. Rice explicitly mentioned the close ties
between Cuban President Fidel Castro and Chavez. After a failed CIA
putsch attempt early in the Bush tenure, Washington is clearly trying
to keep a lower profile in Caracas. The goal remains regime change of
the recalcitrant Chavez, whose most recent affront to Washington was
his latest visit to China, where he signed a major bilateral energy
deal. Chavez also had the gall to announce plans to divert oil sales
away from the United States to China and sell its US refineries. Part
of the China deal would involve a new pipeline to a port on
Colombia's coast, which avoids US control of the Panama Canal. Rice
told the Senate that Cuba was an "outpost of tyranny" and in the same
breath labeled Venezuela a "regional troublemaker".
Indonesia, with huge natural-gas resources serving mainly China and
Japan, presents an interesting case, since the country has apparently
been cooperative with Washington's "war on terror" since September
2001. Indonesia's government raised an outcry in the wake of the
recent tsunami disaster when the Pentagon dispatched a US aircraft
carrier and special troops within 72 hours to land in Aceh province
to do "rescue work". The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, with
2,000 supposedly Iraq-bound Marines aboard, together with the USS
Bonhomme Richard from Guam, landed some 13,000 US troops in Aceh,
which alarmed many in the Indonesian military and government. The
Indonesian government acceded, but demanded that the US leave by the
end of March and not establish a base camp in Aceh. No less than
deputy defense secretary and Iraq war strategist Paul Wolfowitz,
former US ambassador to Indonesia, made an immediate "fact-finding"
tour of the region. ExxonMobil runs a huge LNG [liquefied natural
gas] production in Aceh that supplies energy to China and Japan.
If we add to the list of "emerging targets" Myanmar, a state that,
however disrespectful of human rights, is also a major ally and
recipient of military aid from Beijing, a strategic encirclement
potential against China emerges quite visibly. Malaysia, Myanmar and
Aceh in Indonesia represent strategic flanks on which the vital sea
lanes from the Strait of Malacca, through which oil tankers from the
Persian Gulf travel to China, can be controlled. Moreover, 80% of
Japan's oil passes here.
The US government's Energy Information Administration identifies the
Malacca Strait as one of the most strategic "world oil transit
chokepoints". How convenient if in the course of cleaning out a nest
of tyrant regimes Washington might militarily acquire control of this
strait. Until now the states in the area have vehemently rejected
repeated US attempts to militarize the strait.
Control or militarization of Malaysia, Indonesia and Myanmar would
give US forces chokepoint control over the world's busiest sea
channel for oil from the Persian Gulf to China and Japan. It would be
a huge blow to China's efforts to secure energy independence from the
US. Not only has China already lost huge oil concessions in Iraq with
the US occupation, but China's oil supply from Sudan is also under
increasing pressure from Washington.
Taking Iran from the mullahs would give Washington chokepoint control
over the world's most strategically important oil waterway, the
Strait of Hormuz, a three-kilometer-wide passage between the Persian
Gulf and the Arabian Sea. The major US military base in the entire
Middle East region is just across the strait from Iran in Doha,
Qatar. One of the world's largest gas fields also lies here.
Algeria is another obvious target for the "war on tyranny". Algeria
is the second-most-important supplier of natural gas to continental
Europe, and has significant reserves of the highest-quality
low-sulfur crude oil, just the kind US refineries need. Some 90% of
Algeria's oil goes to Europe, mainly Italy, France and Germany.
President Abdelaziz Bouteflika read the September 11, 2001, tea
leaves and promptly pledged his support for Washington's "war on
terror". Bouteflika has made motions to privatize various state
holdings, but not the vital state oil company, Sonatrach. That will
clearly not be enough to satisfy the appetite of Washington planners.
Sudan, as noted, has become a major oil supplier to China, whose
national oil company has invested more than US$3 billion since 1999
building oil pipelines from southern Sudan to the Red Sea port. The
coincidence of this fact with the escalating concern in Washington
about genocide and humanitarian disaster in oil-rich Darfur in
southern Sudan is not lost on Beijing. China threatened a United
Nations veto against any intervention against Sudan. The first act of
a re-elected Dick Cheney late last year was to fill his
vice-presidential jet with UN Security Council members to fly to
Nairobi to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, an eerie
reminder of defense secretary Cheney's "humanitarian" concern over
Somalia in 1991.
Washington's choice of Somalia and Yemen is a matched pair, as a look
at a Middle East/Horn of Africa map will confirm. Yemen sits at the
oil-transit chokepoint of Bab el-Mandap, the narrow point controlling
oil flow from the Red Sea with the Indian Ocean. Yemen also has oil,
although no one yet knows just how much. It could be huge. A US firm,
Hunt Oil Co, is pumping 200,000 barrels a day from there but that is
likely only the tip of the find.
Yemen fits nicely as an "emerging target" with the other target
nearby, Somalia.
"Yes, Virginia," the 1992 Somalia military action by George Herbert
Walker Bush, which gave the US a bloody nose, was in fact about oil
too. Little known was the fact that the humanitarian intervention by
20,000 US troops ordered by father Bush in Somalia had little to do
with the purported famine relief for starving Somalis. It had a lot
to do with the fact that four major US oil companies, led by Bush's
friends at Conoco of Houston, Texas, and including Amoco (now BP),
Condi Rice's Chevron, and Phillips, all held huge oil-exploration
concessions in Somalia. The deals had been made with the former
"pro-Washington" tyrannical and corrupt regime of Mohamed Siad Barre.
Siad Barre was inconveniently deposed just as Conoco reportedly hit
black gold with nine exploratory wells, confirmed by World Bank
geologists. US Somalia envoy Robert B Oakley, a veteran of the US
mujahideen project in Afghanistan in the 1980s, almost blew the US
game when, during the height of the civil war in Mogadishu in 1992,
he moved his quarters on to the Conoco compound for safety. A new US
cleansing of Somali "tyranny" would open the door for these US oil
companies to map and develop the possibly huge oil potential in
Somalia. Yemen and Somalia are two flanks of the same geological
configuration, which holds large potential petroleum deposits, as
well as being the flanks of the oil chokepoint from the Red Sea.
Belarus is also no champion of human rights, but from Washington's
standpoint, the fact that its government is tightly bound to Moscow
makes it the obvious candidate for a Ukraine-style "Orange
Revolution" regime-change effort. That would complete the US
encirclement of Russia on the west and of Russia's export pipelines
to Europe, were it to succeed. Some 81% of all Russian oil exports
today go to Western European markets. Such a Belarus regime change
now would limit the potential for a nuclear-armed Russia to form a
bond with France, Germany and the EU as potential counterweight
against the power of the United States sole superpower, a highest
priority for Washington Eurasia geopolitics.
The military infrastructure for dealing with such tyrant states seems
to be shaping up as well. In the January 24 New Yorker magazine,
veteran journalist Seymour Hersh cited Pentagon and CIA sources to
claim that the position of Rumsfeld and the warhawks is even stronger
today than before the Iraq war. Hersh reported that Bush signed an
Executive Order last year, without fanfare, placing major CIA covert
operations and strategic analysis into the hands of the Pentagon,
sidestepping any congressional oversight. He added that plans for the
widening of the "war on terror" under Rumsfeld were also agreed upon
in the administration well before the election.
The Washington Post confirmed Hersh's allegation, reporting that
Rumsfeld's Pentagon had created, by Presidential Order, and bypassing
Congress, a new Strategic Support Branch, which co-opts traditional
clandestine and other functions of the CIA. According to a report by
US Army Colonel (retired) Dan Smith, in Foreign Policy in Focus last
November, the new SSB unit includes the elite military special SEAL
Team 6, Delta Force army squadrons, and potentially a paramilitary
army of 50,000 available for "splendid little wars" outside
congressional purview.
The list of emerging targets in a new "war on tyranny" is clearly
fluid, provisional, and adaptable as developments change. It is clear
that a breathtaking array of future military and economic offensives
is in the works at the highest policy levels to transform the world.
A world oil price of US$150 a barrel or more in the next few years
would be joined by chokepoint control of the supply by one power if
Washington has its way.
F William Engdahl is the author of A Century of War: Anglo-American
Oil Politics and the New World Order, published by Pluto Press Ltd.
(Copyright 2005 F William Engdahl.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest
writers to have their say.
Original article available here.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GC03Dj02.html
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