De ware aard van de oorlog tegen het terrorisme...

quote:

- "The last decade of the twentieth century has witnessed a tectonic shift in world affairs. For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world's paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power." (p. xiii)

- "But in the meantime, it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book." (p. xiv)

- "For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia" Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained." (p.30)

- "America's withdrawal from the world or because of the sudden emergence of a successful rival - would produce massive international instability. It would prompt global anarchy." (p. 30)

- "In that context, how America manages' Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources." (p.31)

- Referring to an area he calls the "Eurasian Balkans" and a 1997 map in which he has circled the exact location of the current conflict - describing it as the central region of pending conflict for world dominance - Brzezinski writes: "Moreover, they [the Central Asian Republics] are of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and more powerful neighbors, namely Russia, Turkey and Iran, with China also signaling an increasing political interest in the region. But the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold." (p.124) [Emphasis added]

- "The world's energy consumption is bound to vastly increase over the next two or three decades. Estimates by the U.S. Department of energy anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50 percent between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East. The momentum of Asia's economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea." (p.125)

- "It follows that America's primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it." (p148)

- "China's growing economic presence in the region and its political stake in the area's independence are also congruent with America's interests." (p.149)

- "America is now the only global superpower, and Eurasia is the globe's central arena. Hence, what happens to the distribution of power on the Eurasian continent will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy and to America's historical legacy." (p.194)

- "Without sustained and directed American involvement, before long the forces of global disorder could come to dominate the world scene. And the possibility of such a fragmentation is inherent in the geopolitical tensions not only of today's Eurasia but of the world more generally." (p.194)

- "With warning signs on the horizon across Europe and Asia, any successful American policy must focus on Eurasia as a whole and be guided by a Geostrategic design." (p.197)

- "That puts a premium on maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America's primacy." (p. 198)

- "The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role." (p. 198)

- "In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last." (p.209)

- "Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat." (p. 211) [Emphasis added]


Bron: A War in the Planning for Four Years

ps: ja ik het het boek ook zelf gelezen

quote:

One of the possible strategic reasons for the USA to attack Iraq in 2003 was securing future oil supplies. Iraq has the world's second largest oil reserves, and much of it is also relatively cheap to extract and refine.

This strategy was designed by the organisation "Project for the New American Century”, among their members are Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.

The attack upon Iraq is seen by some as part of a wider post 2001 redeployment of American forces, organised by Donald Rumsfeld to the Middle East and the oil rich Caspian basin.

However, the effectiveness of this military strategy has yet to be demonstrated, since the rate of rebuilding oil infrastructure has not greatly outpaced internal sabotage in Iraq.

Bron: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_the_United_States

quote:

The Energy Task Force is commonly known as the Cheney Energy Task Force after Vice President of the United States of America and former CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney.

In his second week in office George W. Bush created the task force, officially known as the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG) with Dick Cheney as chairman. This group was supposed to develop an energy policy for the Bush administration. With both Bush and Cheney coming from the energy industry, which had contributed heavily to their campaign, and with the group proceeding in extreme secrecy, critics charged that the energy industry was exercising undue influence over national policy.

Congressmen Henry Waxman and John Dingell prompted the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, to pursue Congress's oversight authority. Eventually the GAO filed a lawsuit known as Walker v. Cheney against the administration. This represented a power struggle between the legislative and executive branches. Judge John D. Bates, a recent Bush appointee, dismissed the case.

The activities of the Energy Task Force remain classified, even though Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests (since 19 April 2001) have sought to gain access to its materials. The organisations Judicial Watch and Sierra Club launched a law suit (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia: Judicial Watch Inc. v. Department of Energy, et al., Civil Action No. 01-0981) under the FOIA to gain access to the task force's materials. On 5 March 2002 the US Government was ordered to make a full disclosure; this has not happened, pending appeal. In the Summer of 2003 a partial disclosure of these materials was made by the Commerce Department.

What was obtained were maps and charts, dated March 2001, of Iraq's, Saudi Arabia's and United Arab Emirates' oil fields, pipelines, refineries, tanker terminals and development projects.

Bron: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_task_force

quote:

Op donderdag 9 november 2006 19:46 schreef problematiQue het volgende:
goed artikel over dit onderwerp

quote:

Op donderdag 9 november 2006 20:30 schreef meurdoos het volgende:
Die tegenlicht docu's hierover zijn echt de bom

http://www.vpro.nl/programma/tegenlicht/afleveringen/

quote:

Europa op de knieen voor Poetin - deel 1

De ex-Sovjet Staten, controle over de exportpijpleidingen naar Europa.

Na Wit Rusland, Armenië, Litouwen, Estland, Letland, Moldavië en Oekraïne is nu Georgië aan de beurt. De boodschap is helder, zodra er een leveringscontract voor aardgas afloopt dwingt Rusland haar “klanten” tot een keuze. Of je betaalt steeds meer, tot aan de Europese marktprijs van 250 dollar per duizend kubieke meter, of je geeft een stuk van je infrastructuur, vrijwel gratis, aan Rusland. Het doel is tweeledig, ten eerste wil Rusland zoveel mogelijk controle krijgen over haar exportpijpleidingen naar Europa die ze door de val van de Sovjetunie verloren is. Ten tweede heeft Rusland veel meer inkomsten nodig, om moeilijk winbare gasreserves af te tappen omdat de productie in haar grote oude gasvelden hard terugloopt. Poetin weet dat de ex-Sovjet staten de marktprijs niet kunnen betalen en dus wel door de knieën moeten gaan. Hieronder een overzicht van de ontwikkelingen in de afgelopen twee jaar.

Bron: Europa op de knieen voor Poetin - deel 1

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Yukos-concurrent achter onbekende bieder

zondag 19 december 2004

De winnaar van de veiling van de productiedivisie van de Russische oliegigant Yukos is naar alle waarschijnlijkheid verbonden aan een concurrent, olieproducent Surgutneftegaz. Heel verrassend kocht de onbekende Baikalfinansgroup zondag 19 december op een veiling Yuganskneftegaz, de belangrijkste dochteronderneming van Yukos. De Baikalfinansgroup heeft 7 miljard euro voor het bedrijf betaald.

Bron: http://www.elsevier.nl/ni(...)tnr/17418/index.html

quote:

Yukos toch in handen van Russische staat

donderdag 23 december 2004

De Russische president Vladimir Poetin is de grote winnaar in de strijd om oliegigant Yukos. Het staatsbedrijf Rosneft is eigenaar geworden van Yuganskneftegaz, de productiedivisie van Yukos.

Rosneft nam donderdag 23 december het onderdeel over van het onbekende investeringsbedrijf Baikalfinansgroup, dat Yuganskneftegaz zondag op een veiling voor 9,35 miljard dollar had gekocht. Hoeveel Rosneft voor het belangrijkste Yukos-onderdeel heeft neergeteld, is niet bekendgemaakt.

Bron: http://www.elsevier.nl/ni(...)tnr/18191/index.html

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Baikalfinansgrup

Baikalfinansgrup (Russian: Байкалфинансгруп) is a Russian limited liability company owned by Rosneft Oil Company. It is best known as the company that won the December 19, 2004 auction for a 76.79% share in Yuganskneftegaz, formerly the core production subsidiary of Yukos Oil Company. Baikalfinansgrup won the auction with a bid of 261 billion rubles (US $9.3 bn), which was somewhere between 37-49% of Yuganskneftegaz’ market value at the time, according to an appraisal made by Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and JPMorgan Chase & Co. [1].

Profile

Baikalfinansgrup was created on December 6, 2004, just two weeks before the Yuganskneftegaz auction, with a share capital of 10,000 rubles ($358 US). Its original registered address was in the north-western Russian city of Tver in a building that houses a vodka bar, a mobile phone shop, a tour operator agency and the offices of several small local companies, but no office of Baikalfinansgrup. Baykalfinansgrup later moved its legal address to the head office of Rosneft Oil Company, which is situated on Sofiyskaya Embankment directly opposite the Kremlin.

Despite its obscurity, Baikalfinansgrup was able to secure a credit of US $1.7 bn from the state-owned Sberbank savings bank as a down-payment for participating in the auction.

On December 21, 2004, Russian president Vladimir Putin admitted that he knew the owners of Baikalfinansgrup. Putin did not disclose their names but noted that they were individuals with ‘many years of experience in the energy business’.

Bron: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baikalfinansgroup

quote:

Arrested oil tycoon passed shares to banker

LONDON (Agence France-Presse) — Control of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's shares in the Russian oil giant Yukos have passed to renowned banker Jacob Rothschild, under a deal they concluded prior to Mr. Khodorkovsky's arrest, the Sunday Times reported.

Voting rights to the shares passed to Mr. Rothschild, 67, under a "previously unknown arrangement" designed to take effect in the event that Mr. Khodorkovsky could no longer "act as a beneficiary" of the shares, it said. Mr. Khodorkovsky, 40, whom Russian authorities arrested at gunpoint and jailed pending further investigation last week, was said by the Sunday Times to have made the arrangement with Mr. Rothschild when he realized he was facing arrest.

Mr. Rothschild now controls the voting rights on a stake in Yukos worth almost $13.5 billion, the newspaper said in a dispatch from Moscow. Mr. Khodorkovsky owns 4 percent of Yukos directly and 22 percent through a trust of which he is the sole beneficiary, according to Russian analysts. From the figures reported in the Sunday Times, it appeared Mr. Rothschild had received control of all Mr. Khodorkovsky's shares. The two have known each other for years "through their mutual love of the arts" and their positions as directors of the Open Russia Foundation, Yukos' philanthropic branch, it said.

Russian authorities Thursday froze billions of dollars of shares held by Mr. Khodorkovsky and his top lieutenants in Yukos — throwing control of the country's largest oil company into limbo and causing frenzied selling on financial markets. Russian prosecutors said owners of the shares are still entitled to dividends and retain voting rights, but can no longer sell their stakes. They said the freeze was necessary as collateral for the $1 billion that Mr. Khodorkovsky and his associates are accused of misappropriating during the 1990s. Mr. Rothschild is the British head of Europe's wealthy and influential Rothschild family, and runs his own investment empire.

Bron: http://washingtontimes.com/world/20031102-111400-3720r.htm

quote:

Op donderdag 9 november 2006 20:30 schreef meurdoos het volgende:
Die tegenlicht docu's hierover zijn echt de bom

http://www.vpro.nl/programma/tegenlicht/afleveringen/

quote:

Op donderdag 9 november 2006 20:27 schreef gorgg het volgende:
Artikel uit de Economist waarom Peak Oil zeer waarschijnlijk niet voor binnenkort is:
Daarbij komt nog eens dat er een erg grote kans bestaat dat er nog grote olievelden diep in de zee onondekt zijn. Zie bv. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=51837
Natuurlijk zijn deze allemaal veel duurder uit te baten, de tijd van 10$ per vat zal wel nooit meer terugkomen.

quote:

Artikel Economist

But is the world really starting to run out of oil? And would hitting a global peak of production necessarily spell economic ruin? Both questions are arguable. Despite today's obsession with the idea of “peak oil”, what really matters to the world economy is not when conventional oil production peaks, but whether we have enough affordable and convenient fuel from any source to power our current fleet of cars, buses and aeroplanes. With that in mind, the global oil industry is on the verge of a dramatic transformation from a risky exploration business into a technology-intensive manufacturing business. And the product that big oil companies will soon be manufacturing, argues Shell's Mr Van der Veer, is “greener fossil fuels”.

quote:

To see how that might happen, consider the first question: is the world really running out of oil? Colin Campbell, an Irish geologist, has been saying since the 1990s that the peak of global oil production is imminent. Kenneth Deffeyes, a respected geologist at Princeton, thought that the peak would arrive late last year.

It did not. In fact, oil production capacity might actually grow sharply over the next few years (see chart 1). Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), an energy consultancy, has scrutinised all of the oil projects now under way around the world. Though noting rising costs, the firm concludes that the world's oil-production capacity could increase by as much as 15m barrels per day (bpd) between 2005 and 2010—equivalent to almost 18% of today's output and the biggest surge in history. Since most of these projects are already budgeted and in development, there is no geological reason why this wave of supply will not become available (though politics or civil strife can always disrupt output).

quote:

Peak-oil advocates remain unconvinced. A sign of depletion, they argue, is that big Western oil firms are finding it increasingly difficult to replace the oil they produce, let alone build their reserves. Art Smith of Herold, a consultancy, points to rising “finding and development” costs at the big firms, and argues that the world is consuming two to three barrels of oil for every barrel of new oil found. Michael Rodgers of PFC Energy, another consultancy, says that the peak of new discoveries was long ago. “We're living off a lottery we won 30 years ago,” he argues.

It is true that the big firms are struggling to replace reserves. But that does not mean the world is running out of oil, just that they do not have access to the vast deposits of cheap and easy oil that are left in Russia and members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). And as the great fields of the North Sea and Alaska mature, non-OPEC oil production will probably peak by 2010 or 2015. That is soon—but it says nothing of what really matters, which is the global picture.

quote:

When the United States Geological Survey (USGS) studied the matter closely, it concluded that the world had around 3 trillion barrels of recoverable conventional oil in the ground. Of that, only one-third has been produced. That, argued the USGS, puts the global peak beyond 2025. And if “unconventional” hydrocarbons such as tar sands and shale oil (which can be converted with greater effort to petrol) are included, the resource base grows dramatically—and the peak recedes much further into the future.

quote:

It is also true that oilmen will probably discover no more “super-giant” fields like Saudi Arabia's Ghawar (which alone produces 5m bpd). But there are even bigger resources available right under their noses. Technological breakthroughs such as multi-lateral drilling helped defy predictions of decline in Britain's North Sea that have been made since the 1980s: the region is only now peaking.

Globally, the oil industry recovers only about one-third of the oil that is known to exist in any given reservoir. New technologies like 4-D seismic analysis and electromagnetic “direct detection” of hydrocarbons are lifting that “recovery rate”, and even a rise of a few percentage points would provide more oil to the market than another discovery on the scale of those in the Caspian or North Sea.

Further, just because there are no more Ghawars does not mean an end to discovery altogether. Using ever fancier technologies, the oil business is drilling in deeper waters, more difficult terrain and even in the Arctic (which, as global warming melts the polar ice cap, will perversely become the next great prize in oil). Large parts of Siberia, Iraq and Saudi Arabia have not even been explored with modern kit.

quote:

The petro-pessimists' most forceful argument is that the Persian Gulf, officially home to most of the world's oil reserves, is overrated. Matthew Simmons, an American energy investment banker, argues in his book, “Twilight in the Desert”, that Saudi Arabia's oil fields are in trouble. In recent weeks a scandal has engulfed Kuwait, too. Petroleum Intelligence Weekly (PIW), a respected industry newsletter, got hold of government documents suggesting that Kuwait might have only half of the nearly 100 billion barrels in oil reserves that it claims (Saudi Arabia claims 260 billion barrels).

Tom Wallin, publisher of PIW, warns that “the lesson from Kuwait is that the reserves figures of national governments must be viewed with caution.” But that still need not mean that a global peak is imminent. So vast are the remaining reserves, and so well distributed are today's producing areas, that a radical revision downwards—even in an OPEC country—does not mean a global peak is here.

For one thing, Kuwait's official numbers always looked dodgy. IHS Energy, an industry research outfit that constructs its reserve estimates from the bottom up rather than relying on official proclamations, had long been using a figure of 50 billion barrels for Kuwait. Ron Mobed, boss of IHS, sees no crisis today: “Even using our smaller number, Kuwait still has 50 years of production left at current rates.” As for Saudi Arabia, most independent contractors and oil majors that have first-hand knowledge of its fields are convinced that the Saudis have all the oil they claim—and that more remains to be found.

Pessimists worry that Saudi Arabia's giant fields could decline rapidly before any new supply is brought online. In Jeremy Leggett's thoughtful, but gloomy, book, “The Empty Tank”, Mr Simmons laments that “the only alternative right now is to shrink our economies.” That poses a second big question: whenever the production peak comes, will it inevitably prompt a global economic crisis?

quote:

The baleful thesis arises from concerns both that a cliff lies beyond any peak in production and that alternatives to oil will not be available. If the world oil supply peaked one day and then fell away sharply, prices would indeed rocket, shortages and panic buying would wreak havoc and a global recession would ensue. But there are good reasons to think that a global peak, whenever it comes, need not lead to a collapse in output.

For one thing, the nightmare scenario of Ghawar suddenly peaking is not as grim as it first seems. When it peaks, the whole “super-giant” will not drop from 5m bpd to zero, because it is actually a network of inter-linked fields, some old and some newer. Experts say a decline would probably be gentler and prolonged. That would allow, indeed encourage, the Saudis to develop new fields to replace lost output. Saudi Arabia's oil minister, Ali Naimi, points to an unexplored area on the Iraqi-Saudi border the size of California, and argues that such untapped resources could add 200 billion barrels to his country's tally. This contains worries of its own—Saudi Arabia's market share will grow dramatically as non-OPEC oil peaks, and with it the potential for mischief. But it helps to debunk claims of a sudden change.

The notion of a sharp global peak in production does not withstand scrutiny, either. CERA's Peter Jackson points out that the price signals that would surely foreshadow any “peak” would encourage efficiency, promote new oil discoveries and speed investments in alternatives to oil. That, he reckons, means the metaphor of a peak is misleading: “The right picture is of an undulating plateau.”

What of the notion that oil scarcity will lead to economic disaster? Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren of the Cato Institute, an American think-tank, insist the key is to avoid the price controls and monetary-policy blunders of the sort that turned the 1970s oil shocks into economic disasters. Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard professor and the former chief economist of the IMF, thinks concerns about peak oil are greatly overblown: “The oil market is highly developed, with worldwide trading and long-dated futures going out five to seven years. As oil production slows, prices will rise up and down the futures curve, stimulating new technology and conservation. We might be running low on $20 oil, but for $60 we have adequate oil supplies for decades to come.”

quote:

The good news is that this is not unique. China also has deposits of heavy oil that would benefit from such an advanced approach. America, Canada and Venezuela have deposits of heavy hydrocarbons that surpass even the Saudi oil reserves in size. The Saudis have invited Chevron to apply its steam-injection techniques to recover heavy oil in the neutral zone that the country shares with Kuwait. Mr Naimi, the oil minister, recently estimated that this new technology would lift the share of the reserve that could be recovered as useful oil from a pitiful 6% to above 40%.

All this explains why, in the words of Exxon Mobil, the oil production peak is unlikely “for decades to come”. Governments may decide to shift away from petroleum because of its nasty geopolitics or its contribution to global warming. But it is wrong to imagine the world's addiction to oil will end soon, as a result of genuine scarcity. As Western oil companies seek to cope with being locked out of the Middle East, the new era of manufactured fuel will further delay the onset of peak production. The irony would be if manufactured fuel also did something far more dramatic—if it served as a bridge to whatever comes beyond the nexus of petrol and the internal combustion engine that for a century has held the world in its grip.

quote:

Op vrijdag 10 november 2006 13:06 schreef pberends het volgende:
VS heeft toch Irak aangevallen omdat ze hun olie in euro's wilden verhandelen? En dat zou de alleenheerschappij van de Amerikaanse dollar in gevaar brengen, en dat is met name gevaarlijk omdat Amerika een groot handelstekort heeft.

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Op donderdag 9 november 2006 20:27 schreef gorgg het volgende:
Olie zal imo zeker meegespeeld hebben bij het nemen van de beslissing om Irak en Afganistan binnen te vallen. Maar dan vooral om de stroom olie naar de westerse wereld te vrijwaren, en niet om er rechtstreeks veel geld mee te verdienen. De pijplijn door Afganistan bv. is er nog steeds niet en zal er waarschijnlijk ook in de nabije toekomst niet komen.

quote:

De war on terror is volgens mij gestart omdat er terroristen zijn die aanslagen willen plegen en de paniek daarvoor na 9/11. De aanpak ervan zal best wel wat bijgestuurd worden door belangen her en der, maar de hoofddoelstelling blijft imo.

quote:

Op vrijdag 10 november 2006 14:34 schreef Pietverdriet het volgende:
Wat is nu precies het punt van TS? Dat het om de knaken draait in de wereld?
Wel wel wel
Stop de persen.

quote:

Smoking Gun: The CIA's Interest in Peak Oil

(Special to From the Wilderness)
by Richard Heinberg


Introduction Michael Ruppert

[A recently declassified 1977 CIA study on Peak Oil in the Soviet Union is a telling indicator that Peak Oil issues have been of secret concern to policy makers in the US for a long time. Here, Professor Richard Heinberg, author of the best-selling book "The Party's Over" describes what the CIA was looking at, and offers some insight as to why.

I recently discussed the CIA document with Professor Kjell Aleklett of the University of Uppsala in Sweden, who is the current President for the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (www.peakoil.net). Aleklett shed further light on the current phenomenon of large Russian oil exports by noting that the demise of the Soviet Union and Russian economic crashes of the mid-to-late 1990s effectively delayed Russia's peak for about ten years. This is the so-called "second peak" for Russia, which production graphs currently show.

What this also means is that while Russia is currently a major oil exporter, selling oil hand over fist, it will not be able to sustain either its economic recovery or its current production rates for more than a few more years. Russia's continued salvation and future economic clout will no doubt be based upon the fact that it possesses half of all the natural gas reserves on the planet. Current business and economic developments with Britain and Western Europe indicate that Europe, and especially Britain -- already experiencing severe gas shortages – are well aware of this reality.

For those who have not already read Heinberg's book "The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies," I cannot encourage it enough. It is the blueprint for what is to come, even as a massive and yet unexplained power outage cripples the Northeast US and parts of Canada. Whatever the cause of this blackout it is a future-image of what is coming for all of us. FTW now has the book for sale at discount rate at www.fromthewilderness.com. It's about the best investment for your future that I can think of. – MCR]


August 15, 2003, 1200 PDT, (FTW) -- A recently declassified CIA document casts new light on some of the most significant geopolitical events of the past quarter century. This document, an Intelligence Memorandum titled "The Impending Soviet Oil Crisis (ER 77-10147)," was issued in March 1977 by the Office of Economic Research and classified "Secret" until its public release in January 2001 in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. (1) Until now, the document has prompted little discussion.

The Memorandum predicts an impending peak in Soviet oil production "not later than the early 1980s" (the actual peak occurred in 1987 at 12.6 million barrels per day, following a preliminary peak in 1983 of 12.5 Mb/d). "During the next decade," the unnamed authors of the document conclude, "the USSR may well find itself not only unable to supply oil to Eastern Europe and the West on the present scale, but also having to compete for OPEC oil for its own use." The Memorandum predicts that the oil peak will have important economic impacts: "When oil production stops growing, and perhaps even before, profound repercussions will be felt on the domestic economy of the USSR and on its international economic relations."

The significance of the document requires some unpacking. First, we must understand the historical context in which it appeared.

Oil production in the US had peaked in 1970, just a few years earlier. This was arguably the most important economic event of the past half-century: until then America was the world's foremost oil producer; for much of the twentieth century it was also the world's foremost oil exporter. American oil won both World Wars for the Allies and made the US the world's richest and most powerful nation. Meanwhile, throughout most of this same period the USSR remained the world's second foremost oil-producing nation.

The American oil peak signaled the end of an era: from that point on, the US would become increasingly dependent on imports—and this dependence would entail serious costs, as became apparent with the Arab OPEC oil embargo of 1973, which sent the US economy into a tailspin. (2) Clearly, CIA analysts in 1977 understood the importance of the American oil peak and believed that a peak of petroleum production in the USSR would have similar or even graver consequences for that nation.

This much is clear and undisputable. Less clear is what was done with the information. Soon after assuming office in 1981, the Reagan Administration abandoned the established policy of pursuing détente with the Soviet Union and instead instituted a massive arms buildup; it also fomented proxy wars in areas of Soviet influence, while denying the Soviets desperately needed oil equipment and technology. Then, in the mid-1980s, Washington persuaded Saudi Arabia to flood the world market with cheap oil. Throughout the last decade of its existence, the USSR pumped and sold its oil at the maximum possible rate in order to earn foreign exchange income with which to keep up in the arms race and prosecute its war in Afghanistan. Yet with markets awash with cheap Saudi oil, the Soviets were earning less even as they pumped more. Two years after their oil production peaked, the economy of the USSR crumbled and its government collapsed.

Did the Reagan administration base its Cold War strategy on the CIA study, in the expectation that a Soviet Union economically weakened by oil depletion would collapse if pushed hard on other fronts?

That question is mostly of historical interest. But the Agency's focus on the phenomenon of oil peaks has important implications for the present. For the past decade, oil experts have been debating when global oil production will peak. Pessimists say the global peak may already have occurred in 2000; optimists say it won't come until 2025 or so. A growing consensus of petroleum geologists places this pivotal event in the mid-range period of 2006 to 2015. (3) From a certain perspective, the amount of time in dispute is not of great significance: whether we have a year or two or a decade or two before the supply of oil can no longer meet demand is relatively trivial from a historical, analytical point of view (though of considerable significance for billions of individual humans needing to make plans for the years ahead); the result in either case will be the same—a slow motion global economic and industrial collapse.

The 1977 CIA document shows clear and detailed awareness of oil issues, including depletion, extraction technologies, pipelines, areas of likely new discovery, the quality of existing reserves, and the dynamics of the global oil market. The CIA has obviously been studying oil very carefully for some time and must therefore understand the issue of global oil peak.

This begs the questions: Does the Agency have a strategy for dealing with this impending mega-event? Or is the Agency's job merely to provide information, and allow the current Administration to formulate policy?

Here we must speculate. The developing semi-public row between the neoconservatives of the present Administration and CIA insiders suggests that the Bush team's plan for invading Iraq and subsequently redrawing the map of the Middle East may not exactly coincide with Agency recommendations. We know that the Bush-Cheney team is independently aware of the issue of peak oil because international oil investment banker Matthew Simmons, who has written extensively and forcefully on depletion issues, was an advisor to Vice President Cheney's now-infamous Energy Task Force in 2001. (4)

If policy makers and their intelligence analysts understand the phenomenon of peak oil, and perhaps even used it strategically during the 1980s to undermine the Soviet Union, and are aware of the upcoming global peak, they must be interested to direct geopolitical events accordingly. What thoughts may be occurring to them in this regard?

The Middle East boasts 70% of global proven reserves of oil. Saudi Arabia has the world's largest reserves (25% of the total), and most of the 9/11 hijackers are alleged to have come from that country. Osama bin Laden is a Saudi native, and his published statements center on the project of ejecting American influence from the nation of Medina and Mecca.

If, as the neoconservatives have repeatedly hinted, Iraq is only the first stage in a larger project of regional regime change, then the real prize must lie just to the south in the giant fields east of Riyadh. One cannot help but wonder if the long-coddled Saudi government is even now being set up for a fall.

As events unfold, it will be of more than passing interest to see whether the CIA and the Bush Administration reconcile their differences, or whether the neoconservatives' hubris and ideological monomania will be their undoing.

Meanwhile, the real motives and long-term strategies of policy makers and intelligence gatherers alike will likely remain opaque to citizens who pay in blood and dollars for their government's military adventures. "The Impending Soviet Oil Crisis" gives us a rare, limited glimpse into the machinery of covert information analysis and decision-making that shape history as we live it.

Bron: http://www.fromthewildern(...)03_cia_russ_oil.html

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The New Geopolitics

by Michael Klare

The war in Iraq has reconfigured the global geopolitical landscape in many ways, some of which may not be apparent for years or even decades to come. It has certainly altered the U.S. relationship with Europe and the Middle East. But its impact goes well beyond this. More than anything else, the war reveals that the new central pivot of world competition is the south-central area of Eurasia.

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This ideology disappeared to some degree during the Cold War in favor of a model of ideological competition. That is to say, geopolitical ideology appeared inconsistent with the high-minded justifications (in which “democracy” and “freedom” largely figured) given for interventions in the third world.

But really, if you study the history of the Cold War, the overt conflicts that took place were consciously framed by a geopolitical orientation from the American point of view. The United States had to control the Middle East and its oil. That was the basis of the Truman Doctrine and the Eisenhower Doctrine and the Carter Doctrine. The United States had to control parts of Africa because of its mineral wealth in copper, cobalt, and platinum. That’s why the United States backed the apartheid regime in South Africa. And the reason for both the Korean War and the Vietnam War was understood at the highest levels in terms of the U.S. interest in control of the Pacific Rim.

Today, we are seeing a resurgence of unabashed geopolitical ideology among the leadership cadres of the major powers, above all in the United States. In fact, the best way to see what’s happening today in Iraq and elsewhere is through a geopolitical prism. American leaders have embarked on the classical geopolitical project of assuring U.S. dominance of the most important resource areas, understood as the sources of power and wealth. There is an ideological consistency to what they’re doing, and it is this geopolitical mode of thinking.

Perhaps there is some question as to exactly how conscious this is, but you can see this way of thinking in the overt discourse of many contemporary leaders. Dick Cheney and some prominent neoconservatives especially, but also Democrats such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, speak in this manner. They openly state that the United States is engaged in a struggle to maintain its power vis-à-vis other contending great powers and that America must prevail.

Now, you might ask, what contending great powers? From our point of view it is far from obvious that any exist. But if you read what these folks write and hear what they say, you will find that they are absolutely obsessed by the potential emergence of rival great powers; Russia, China, a European combination of some sort, Japan, and even India.

This is the essence of the Wolfowitz Doctrine, first articulated in the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guidance document for 1994–1999, first leaked to the press in February 1992. This document calls for proactive U.S. military intervention to deter and prevent the rise of a contending peer (or equal) competitor, and asserts that the United States must use any and all means necessary to prevent that from happening. At the time this statement was met with such howls of outrage from U.S. allies that then President Bush had to squelch the document, and it was revised to take out this language.

But this doctrine lingered in the think-tank writings of the 1990s, re-emerging as the official global military policy of the Bush II administration. It has now been incorporated as the core principle of the document known as the National Security Strategy of the United States of America (September 2002), available for download from the White House website. This document states explicitly that the ultimate purpose of American power is to prevent the rise of a competing great power, and that the United States shall use any means necessary to prevent that from happening, including preventive military force when needed, but also through spending so much money on defense that no other peer competitor can ever arise.

Against this background, it can hardly be questioned that the purpose of the war in Iraq is to redraw the geopolitical map of Eurasia so as to insure and embed American power and dominance in this region vis-E0-vis these other potential competitors.

Now let us step back for a minute and return to the classical geo-political thinking of the early part of the last century, particularly the views of Sir Halford Mackinder of Great Britain. This perspective held that Eurasia was the most important part—the “heartland” of the civilized world, and that whoever controlled this heartland by definition controlled the rest of the world because of the concentration there of population, resources, and industrial might. In classical geopolitical thinking, world politics is essentially a struggle over who will control the Eurasian heartland.

The strategists of the turn of the twentieth century saw two ways through which global dominance could arise. One was through the emergence of a continental power (or a combination of continental powers) that dominated Eurasia and was, therefore, the master of the world. It was precisely this fear—that a German-controlled continental Europe and Russia, together with a Japanese-dominated China and Southeast Asia, would merge into a vast continental power and dominate the Eurasian heartland, thereby reducing the United States to a marginal power—that galvanized American leaders at the onset of the Second World War. Franklin D. Roosevelt was deeply steeped in this mode of analysis, and it is this ideological–strategic view that triggered U.S. intervention in the Second World War.

The other approach to global dominance perceived by early twentieth century geopolitical strategists was to control the “rimlands” of Eurasia—that is, Western Europe, the Pacific Rim, and the Middle East—and thereby contain any emerging “heartland” power. After the Second World War, the United States determined that it would in fact maintain a permanent military presence in all of the rimlands of Eurasia. This is what we know of as the “containment” strategy. And it was this outlook that led to the formation of NATO, the Marshall Plan, SEATO, CENTO, and the U.S. military alliances with Japan and Taiwan. For most of the time since the Second World War, the focus was on the eastern and western ends of Eurasia—Europe and the Far East.

What is happening now, I believe, is that U.S. elites have concluded that the European and East Asian rimlands of Eurasia are securely in American hands or less important, or both. The new center of geopolitical competition, as they see it, is South-Central Eurasia, encompassing the Persian Gulf area, which possesses two-thirds of the world’s oil, the Caspian Sea basin, which has a large chunk of what’s left, and the surrounding countries of Central Asia. This is the new center of world struggle and conflict, and the Bush administration is determined that the United States shall dominate and control this critical area.

Until now, the contested rimlands of Eurasia were the base of U.S. power, while in the south-central region there was but a very modest presence of U.S. forces. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the primary U.S. military realignment has entailed the drawdown of American forces in East Asia and Europe along with the buildup of forces in the south-central region. U.S. bases in Europe are being closed, while new military bases are being established in the Persian Gulf area and in Central Asia.

It is important to note that this is a process that began before 9/11. September 11 quickened the process and gave it a popular mandate, but this was entirely serendipitous from the point of view of U.S. strategists. It was President Clinton who initiated U.S. military ties with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, and who built up the U.S. capacity to intervene in the Persian Gulf / Caspian Sea area. The U.S. victory in Iraq was not a victory of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld; it was Clinton’s work that made this victory possible.

The war against Iraq was intended to provide the United States with a dominant position in the Persian Gulf region, and to serve as a springboard for further conquests and assertion of power in the region. It was aimed as much, if not more, at China, Russia, and Europe as at Syria or Iran. It is part of a larger process of asserting dominant U.S. power in south-central Eurasia, in the very heartland of this mega-continent.

But why specifically the Persian Gulf/Caspian Sea area, and why now? In part, this is so because this is where most of the world’s remaining oil is located—approximately 70 percent of known petroleum reserves. And you have to think of oil not just as a source of fuel—although that’s very important—but as a source of power. As U.S. strategists see it, whoever controls Persian Gulf oil controls the world’s economy and, therefore, has the ultimate lever over all competing powers.

In September 1990, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Saddam Hussein would acquire a “stranglehold” over the U.S. and world economy if he captured Saudi Arabia’s oilfields along with those of Kuwait. This was the main reason, he testified, why the United States must send troops to the area and repel Hussein’s forces. He used much the same language in a speech last August to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. I believe that in his mind it is clear that the United States must retain a stranglehold on the world economy by controlling this area. This is just as important, in the administration’s view, as retaining America’s advantage in military technology.

Ten years from now, China is expected to be totally dependent on the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea area for the oil it will need to sustain its economic growth. Europe, Japan, and South Korea will be in much the same position. Control over the oil spigot may be a somewhat cartoonish image, but it is an image that has motivated U.S. policy since the end of the Cold War and has gained even more prominence in the Bush-Cheney administration.

This region is also the only area in the world where the interests of the putative great powers collide. In the hotly-contested Caspian Sea area, Russia is an expanding power, China is an expanding power, and the United States is an expanding power. There is no other place in the world like this. They are struggling with one another consciously and actively. The Bush administration is determined to dominate this area and to subordinate these two potential challengers and prevent them from forming a common front against the United States. (For more on the emerging power struggle in the Caspian Sea basin, see my Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict [Henry Holt/Metropolitan, 2001].)

What then are the implications of this great realignment of U.S. geo-political strategy made possible by the Cold War defeat of the Soviet Union?

It is obviously much too early to draw any definitive conclusions on this, but some things can be said. First, Iraq is just the beginning of a U.S. drive into this area. We will see further extensions and expressions of U.S. power in the region. This will provoke resistance and self-conscious opposition to the United States by insurgent groups and regimes. But the United States will also become enmeshed in local conflicts that arose long before America’s involvement in the region. For example, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and that between Abkhazia and Georgia—both of which have a long history—will come to impact on U.S. security as the United States becomes dependent on a newly-constructed trans-Caucasian oil pipeline. The Chechen and Afghani wars continue and bracket the region. In all such disputes there is a likelihood of indirect or direct, covert or overt intervention by the United States and the other contending powers.

We are at the beginning, I believe, of a new Cold War in south-central Eurasia, with many possibilities for crises and flare-ups, because nowhere else in the world are Russia and China directly involved and supporting groups and regimes that are opposed to the United States. Even during the height of the Cold War, there wasn’t anything quite comparable to this. American troops will be there for a long time, with a high risk of violent engagement and the potential for great human suffering. It appears, then, that the U.S. and international peace movement will have a lot of work ahead!


Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the author, most recently, of Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict

Bron: http://www.monthlyreview.org/0703klare.htm