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SPEAKING
FREELY
The oil factor in Bush's 'war on
tyranny'
By F William Engdahl
Speaking Freely is an Asia
Times Online feature that allows guest writers to
have their say. Please click here
if you are interested in
contributing.
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. Please click here
if you are interested in
contributing. |
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