The Bush Coalition & the New Middle East

 

The New U.S.-British Oil Imperialism Norman D. Livergood   The U.S. invasion of Iraq to loot its oil and politically restructure the Middle East, is part of a policy of military imperialism that the American and British ruling circles have been engaged in for several centuries. The American revolution was fought to bring the United States under new, non-British rulers, with the new regime sold to the public as a democracy. Beginning in the twentieth century, these American ruling elites have revolved around the Rockefeller, Brown, Harriman, and Morgan family dynasties. The Bush family, beginning with Prescott Bush, have served as satraps of the Rockefeller, Brown, and Harriman interests. The British and American ruling cabal decided that the energy of choice for the world would be oil and natural gas (not coal)--just as the drugs of choice would be alcohol and tobacco. To overcome the problem of his oil holdings being broken apart by the U.S. government in 1911, John Rockefeller set out to control the world's energy reserves. World War I was the strategy of the world oil cartel (Standard, Shell, British Petroleum) to take over the colonies of France, Holland, Spain and Portugal. The engines of war now ran on petroleum-based products, so ownership of oil could determine who won or lost a war--therefore who would rule the world. Oil, instead of gold, became the token of power.   By 1919, the Oil Empire, not based on countries or nations, but on private corporations, ruled the world.   The Big Three oil cartel, which controlled oil in the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia areas, wanted to gain control over the vast oil reserves in the southern part of the Soviet Union. They financed the fascist regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan with the hope that they would invade and control Russia. The Oil Rulers planned to defeat the German, Italian, and Japanese regimes and take control of the oil reserves in the Soviet Union. The Rockefeller circle also planned to take control of Persian Gulf oil from the British-Persian Oil cartel and seize control of southeast Asian oil from Royal Dutch Shell. The United States was brought into the Second World War when in July 1941, President Roosevelt signed an embargo to stop all shipping to Japan. This was said to be in retaliation for the Japanese invasion of French Indo-China. Roosevelt's U.S. embargo cut off the Japanese oil supply, which would have quickly shut down Japan's entire economy. In late November 1941 the Japanese sent a written "war warning" through diplomatic channels to Washington, demanding that the embargo be stopped, or else American sites in the Pacific would be attacked in retaliation. That formal diplomatic warning was ignored and the U.S. made no reply. Just two weeks later the Japanese bombed the American embargo ships located in Pearl Harbor.   In 1939 and '40, the Germans and Italians did not attack Russia as the Big Three had planned. Instead, German General Rommel rushed across North Africa to grab the Suez Canal and control all oil shipping through the canal. Rommel then planned to drive through to Persia and toss out the British from the British-Persian oil fields. Meanwhile, after a failed attack on Russia in 1939, the Japanese swept through Southeast Asia and seized all the oil holdings of Royal Dutch Shell. With the defeat of Japan in 1945, most of those Royal Dutch fields came under the control of Rockefeller's Standard Oil.   Hitler had planned to capture the oil fields in Romania by 1939 so Germany would have its own supply of oil. This was accomplished. Then Rommel was to have captured the oil fields in Persia by 1941, the oil fields in Russia in 1942. Only then would Hitler have sufficient fuel for prosecuting a war with the United States. But less than a week after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese convinced Hitler to declare war on the United States. Hitler agreed only if the Japanese would attack Russia, since German troops were now bogged down in Russia and Hitler would gain strategic advantage if the Russians had to defend themselves from Japan on their eastern flank. When the Japanese failed to attack Russia, Hitler was driven out of Russia and now was without a fuel source. The Romanian oil fields in Ploesti were insufficient for Germany to carry on a war on two fronts, and Germany's war effort began to collapse. The last major German campaign was the Battle of the Bulge, in which Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt was to attack the invading allies with his tanks, then capture the Allied fuel dumps. This would stop the American and British forces and obtain the necessary fuel for Germany to continue its war effort. But General Eisenhower ordered the Allied fuel dumps burned and Germany was defeated. At the end of World War II, the British-Persian Oil Company controlled the vast oil fields in Iran. The Persians had declared their alignment with Adolf Hitler's Nazi "Aryan Race" movement and were fully expecting German General Rommel to come rushing across Africa and "free" them from the British. They had even proclaimed their alignment with Hitler by changing the name of their country from Persia to "Aryan," (or "Iran" in the Farsi language), but the Germans failed to save them. To take control of Persian Gulf oil from the British, in 1954 Kermit Roosevelt, nephew of Franklin, led an American CIA coup to take control of Iran and place in power the American-backed Shah of Iran. The Shah expelled the British, and Rockefeller's Standard Oil now had control of the British-Persian petroleum fields.    In the early 1950s, Occidental Petroleum's Armand Hammer, a satrap of the Rockefellers, negotiated a deal with Russian dictator Josef Stalin to buy his oil--thus effectively stealing it from the Russian people. Russian oil was then sold on the world market at a much higher price than Stalin could get by marketing it himself, because few countries were willing to buy oil from Stalin.   Occidental Petroleum and Russia built two large pipelines, from the Russian oil fields down along both sides of the Caspian Sea, terminating in the old British-Persian--now Standard Oil--oil fields in Iran. For the next 45 years, Russia secretly sent its oil out through those pipelines and Standard Oil sold the oil on the world market at the "West Texas Crude" price by calling it Iranian oil. For almost fifty years most Americans have been using Russian oil in their cars.   Standard Oil refineries, which produce gasoline from crude oil, are located at large sea ports like San Francisco, Houston or Los Angeles, not near any of the large American oil fields. Most oil from the Persian Gulf is shipped in oil tankers to those large American refinery-ports.   In 1979, the Standard Oil-backed Shah of Iran was thrown out by a British-backed coup and the long-time British asset, Ayatollah Khomeni, put into power. The flow of Russian oil through Iran suddenly stopped. Other oil pipelines were constructed through Iraq and Turkey. The Russian oil was now called OPEC Arabian-Middle Eastern oil and marketed at the even higher "spot market" price. So in 1979, in America and Europe, we suddenly experienced gasoline shortages and huge increases in the price of gasoline. Also in 1979 Standard Oil-Russian oil interests tried to secure an alternate, short, safe oil pipeline route from Russia through neighboring Afghanistan, but this only resulted in a prolonged war and the project was abandoned.   When the new British-controlled regime in Iran came into power, the Rockefeller-influenced U.S. government immediately threatened to seize $7.9 billion of Iranian assets located in the U.S. On November 4, 1979 Iranian "terrorists" captured and held hostage 65 Americans. Essentially, Standard Oil was being blackmailed by the hostage strategy. After lengthy negotiations, the Rockefeller-created President Jimmy Carter approved the electronic transfer of 7.9 billion dollars from U.S. accounts to the Iranian regime on January 20, 1981.   On Wednesday January 27, 1988, as announced in the Wall Street Journal, Standard Oil merged with British Petroleum. This actually represents Standard Oil's buyout of British Petroleum, the name of the newly merged company being BP-America. The Wall Street Journal did not see fit to mention worries about the world-wide predatory marketing practices of a deceptively titled Standard Oil regime.   During the last 13 years, BP-America has merged with, or controls, all of the old Standard Oil "mini-companies" which existed before the original break-up by the U.S. government in 1911. The new Standard Oil regime is now known as BP-AMOCO, and few people in the world realize what has happened. It's now possible to understand why British Prime Minister Blair has become the spokesman for the new wars against terrorism (actually the war for Caspian Sea and Iraq oil).   At the end of WWII, General Douglas MacArthur became the military Governor of Japan. MacArthur's assistant was Laurence Rockefeller, one of John D. Rockefeller's four grandsons. As the second world war was drawing to a close, the U.S. was preparing for a massive invasion of the Japanese home islands.   The military had stockpiled vast supplies of weapons and munitions on the island of Okinawa. Some sources claim that with Vice-governor Laurence Rockefeller's assistance most of the armaments were sold to the leader of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, for something like one U.S. dollar and Ho’s "goodwill." One might wonder why these expensive and critical military supplies were "given" to the North Vietnamese.    To answer that question we have to go to an almost unknown study in the 1920's prepared by a man named Herbert Hoover, later to become President of the United States. The study showed that one of the world's largest oil fields ran along the coast of the South China Sea right off French Indo-China, now known as Vietnam. This was before offshore drilling had been invented and before a man named George Herbert Walker Bush was to become the CEO of a world-wide offshore drilling company.          In 1945, Vietnam was still a colony of the French. Laurence Rockefeller, it appears, had given the extensive store of weapons to Ho Chi Minh with the hope that Vietnam would drive out the French so that Standard Oil would be able to take over the as yet undeveloped offshore fields. In 1954, Vietnamese General Giap finally defeated and drove out the French at Dien Bien Phu with weaponry provided by the U.S. However, Ho Chi Minh reneged on the deal since he could read too, and he was well aware of the Hoover resource report and knew there was a vast supply of oil off the Vietnamese coast.   In the 1950's a method of undersea oil exploration was perfected which used small explosions deep in the water and then recorded the sound echoes bouncing off the various layers of rock below. The surveyor could then determine the exact location of the arched salt domes which hold the accumulated oil beneath them. But if this method were used off the Vietnam coast on property Standard didn't own or have the rights to, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, the Japanese and probably even the French would quickly run to the United Nations and complain that America was stealing the oil, and that would shut down the operation.   In 1964, after Vietnam was divided into North and South, and the contrived Gulf of Tonkin incident, several U.S. aircraft carriers were stationed offshore of Vietnam and the 'war' was started. Every day jet planes would take off from the carriers, bomb locations in North and South Vietnam, and then using normal military procedure when returning would dump their unsafe or unused bombs in the ocean before landing back on the carriers. Safe ordnance drop zones were designated for this purpose away from the carriers.   Even close-up observers would only notice many small explosions occurring daily in the waters of the South China Sea and thought it was only part of the 'war.' The U.S. Navy carriers had begun Operation Linebacker One, and Standard Oil had begun its ten year oil survey of the seabed off of Vietnam. And the Vietnamese, Chinese and everybody else around, including the Americans, were none the wiser. The oil survey hardly cost Standard Oil a nickel, the U.S. taxpayers paid for it.   ~Marshall Douglas Smith,  Black Gold Hot Gold       So twenty years later and 57,000 Americans and half a million Vietnamese dead, Standard Oil had enough data and the war in Vietnam could end. Nelson Rockefeller's personal assistant, Henry Kissinger, represented the U.S. at the Vietnam/Paris Peace talks and won a Nobel Peace Prize in the bargain.   After the dust had settled from the war, Vietnam divided their offshore coastal area into numerous oil lots and allowed foreign companies to bid on the lots, with the proviso that Vietnam got a percentage of the action. Norway's Statoil, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, Russia, Germany and Australia all won bids and began drilling within their areas. Strange it was that none of them struck oil. However, the lots which Standard Oil bid for and won proved to have vast oil reserves. Their extensive undersea seismic research appears to have paid off.   Unfortunately, Big Oil's greed has not abated a whit. The American and British rulers have a new imperialistic strategy by which they hope to gain total control of the world's energy supplies and the strategic Eurasian land mass. First, they sell armaments to a regime (for example, Panama, Iraq, Yugoslavia/Kosovo, Afghan/Pakistan/Taliban Mujaheddin, Saudi Arabia). Then, they demonize the regime to which they sold the armaments and declare war on it (e.g. Panama Invasion, Gulf War, UN Kosovo war, Afghanistan war, Iraq War). After the war, they station permanent military bases in the country and use the military bases to control the energy resources in the surrounding countries. Current U.S. foreign policy is governed by the doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance": the U.S. must control military, economic and political developments everywhere.   If you want to rule the world, you need to control oil. All the oil. Anywhere.   ~Monopoly, by Michel Collon   This new strategy began with the Panama invasion, next created the so-called Gulf War, continued with the UN-sanctioned war in the Balkans, and now expands with the new wars against terrorism (Afghanistan, the Philippines, Iraq, and beyond). On January 20, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that he was willing to deploy U.S. military forces in "another 15 countries" if that is what it takes to combat terrorism. The reason the so-called "War Against Terrorism" began in Afghanistan is because it is critical to the U.S.-British rulers' plans to control the Caspian Sea area oil and gas.   The UN-sanctioned war in the Balkans was all about oil and the pipeline easement for Caspian Sea oil to Western European markets through Kosovo to the Mediterranean Sea. When Yugoslavia refused to play ball with the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. and Germany began a systematic campaign of destabilization, even using some of the veterans of Afghanistan in that "war." Yugoslavia was broken up into compliant statelets, and the former Soviet Union was contained. The outcome: the de facto U.S. occupation of Kosovo--where America built its largest military base since the Vietnam War   The Caspian Sea area has proven oil reserves of fifteen to twenty-eight billion barrels plus estimated reserves of 40-178 billion, a total of 206 billion barrels--16 percent of the earth's potential oil reserves (compared to Saudi's 261 billion barrels of oil and America's own 22 billion barrels). Even at today's low prices, that could add up to $3 trillion in oil. With the Saudi regime tottering--an aging king about to die, widespread internal corruption creating calls for revolutionary overthrow--and a new source of oil and gas in the Caucasus, the Standard Oil suzerainty is looking to create a new regime in Saudi Arabia and develop a new center of operations in Southern Asia--think Iraq.   The huge oil and gas reserves in the Caspian Sea must either be moved west to European markets or south to Asian markets. The western route is to move oil from Chechnya, across the Black Sea and through the Bosporus to the Mediterranean, but the narrow Bosporus channel is already clogged with oil tankers from the Black Sea oil fields. An alternate route would be to move the tankers from the Black Sea, bypassing the Bosporus, up the Danube River and then through a very short pipeline across Kosovo to the Mediterranean at Tirana, Albania. However, that process was stopped by the Chinese who have supplied and armed the Albanians, as a client state, since 1949.   The other difficulty with the western route is that Western Europe is a tough market, characterized by high prices for oil products, an aging population, and increasing competition from natural gas. Furthermore, the region is fiercely competitive, now being serviced by oil from the Middle East, the North Sea, Scandinavia, and Russia. Western Europe is not a very attractive market, because substantial infrastructure would have to be developed to bring that oil from the Caspian to an already overly-competitive European market.   The only other ways to get Caspian Sea oil and gas to Asian markets is through China, which is too long a route, or through Iran, which is politically and economically inimical to U.S.-Standard Oil objectives.   As soon as the Soviets discovered the vast Caspian Sea oil fields in the late 1970's, they attempted to take control of Afghanistan to build a massive north-south pipeline system to allow the Soviets to send their oil directly through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean seaport. The result was the decades long Soviet-Afghan war. The Standard Oil-influenced U.S. government saw the danger of a Russian north-south pipeline and the CIA trained and funded armed terrorist groups, including Osama bin Laden, who defeated the Soviets in the late 1980's.    The Russians then tried to control the flow of oil and gas through its monopoly on pipelines. The Southern Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union--Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan--saw through this Russian monopolistic ploy and began to consult with Western companies.   The Standard Oil-influenced U.S. government now plans to thrust further along the 40th parallel from the Balkans through these Southern Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union. The U.S. military has already set up a permanent operations base in Uzbekistan. The so-called anti-terrorist strategy is clearly designed to simultaneously consolidate control over Middle Eastern and South Asian oil, and contain and neutralize the former Soviet Union. With that strategy, Afghanistan is exactly where they need to be.   Russia, realizing its weaker position vis-à-vis the United States, has been making noises as if it fully agreed with the U.S. incursions in Afghanistan. But Russia has joined the Shangahi Cooperation Organization (SCO) which includes China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Takijistan and Uzbekistan. China is using the SCO to try to align Russia economically and politically towards China and northeast Asia. Russia's membership in the SCO is an attempt to maintain its traditional hegemony in Central Asia. The underlying rationale of the SCO is the control of its members' enormous reserves of oil and gas.   Despite the misgivings of Russia, China, India, or any other nation, Afghanistan and Iraq will now become the base of operations in destabilizing, isolating, and establishing control over the South Asian regimes and the Middle-East. [Note that Iran stands between Iraq and Afghanistan and you can understand why bush included Iran in the "Axis of Evil."] After the conquest of this area is complete and the permanent military posts are set up, they will begin construction of a pipeline through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to deliver petroleum to the Asian market.   UNOCAL, the spearhead for Standard Oil interests, has been trying to build the north-south pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean for several decades. In 1998, the California-based UNOCAL, which held 46.5 percent stakes in Central Asia Gas (CentGas), a consortium that planned an ambitious gas pipeline across Afghanistan, withdrew in frustration after several fruitless years. The pipeline was to stretch 1,271 km from Turkmenistan's Dauletabad fields to Multan in Pakistan at an estimated cost of $1.9 billion. An additional $600 million would have brought the pipeline to energy-hungry India.     In the spring of 2001, Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's company, signed a major contract with the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan to develop a 6000-square-meter marine base to support offshore oil construction in the Caspian Sea. The base will be used to assist Halliburton's catamaran crane vessel, the Qurban Abbasov, in upcoming offshore pipe-laying and sub sea activities, according to a statement the company released May 15, 2001.   UNOCAL cut off its earlier agreement with the Taliban in 1998 when it became clear that the Taliban could not control all of Afghanistan and provide a stable political environment for a north-south pipeline construction project. It was likely at this juncture that a new "war against terrorism" ploy was conceived by the Standard Oil-influenced U.S. government. The "war against terrorism" in Afghanistan has come to a hiatus, with war-lords once again ruling the country, and the Bush administration has put their own man, Karzai, in power to control Afghanistan.   Karzai was a top adviser to UNOCAL during the negotiations with the Taliban to construct a Central Asia Gas (CentGas) pipeline from Turkmenistan through western Afghanistan to Pakistan. Karzai is the leader of the southern Afghan Pashtun Durrani tribe. A member of the mujaheddin that fought the Soviets during the 1980s, Karzai was a top contact for the CIA, maintaining close relations with CIA Director William Casey, Vice President George Bush, and their Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) Service go-between. After the Soviet Union left Afghanistan, the CIA sponsored the relocation of Karzai and a number of his brothers to the U.S.   The real motives for the Bush administration's war in Afghanistan are clear for all to see. The U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlain, met with Pakistan's oil minister, Usman Aminuddin, in January, 2002 to continue plans for the north-south pipeline, encouraging the construction of Pakistan's Arabian Sea oil terminus for the pipeline.   President Bush says our military will continue its presence in Afghanistan, which means that while the U.N. forces serve as a paramilitary police force, U.S. soldiers will be guarding the construction of the north-south pipeline.   To assure that the pipeline project will proceed apace, the Afghani-American Zalmay Khalilzad, a previous member of the CentGas project, became President Bush's Special National Security Assistant. Khalilzad has recently been named presidential Special Envoy for Afghanistan. Khalilzad is a Pashtun and the son of a former government official under King Mohammed Zahir Shah. Along with being a consultant to the RAND Corporation, he was a special liaison between UNOCAL and the Taliban government. Khalilzad also worked on various risk analyses for the project under the direction of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, a former member of the board of Chevron.   Now that the Afghanistan portion of the "War on Terrorism" is concluded--with permanent U.S. military bases in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan in place--where next will the Standard Oil-influenced U.S. government look to gain further control over oil in the world? Coincidentally, most of those places are in countries which have been branded as harborers of terrorists: Iraq, Syria, Iran, and South America, among others.   Bush Sr.'s Gulf War in 1991 resulted in securing access to the huge Rumaila oil field of southern Iraq by expanding the boundaries of Kuwait after the war. This allows Kuwait, controlled by Standard Oil, to double its prewar oil output.   Iraq, which recently discovered an oil field in its western desert, is widely regarded as having more oil than Saudi Arabia once its deposits are developed. Prior to the 2003 U.S. pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, Iraq was producing 3 million barrels a day, funneling most of it to world markets through a United Nations-monitored program that directed the proceeds to food and medicine for the Iraqi people. Saddam Hussein was still exporting his oil to Syria, which was glad to resell Iraqi oil as if it were Syrian. The United States was one of Syria's biggest customers, because it liked the low sulphur content of Iraqi oil, according to Nimrod Raphaeli, publisher of the Middle East Economic News, a Washington-based newsletter. Iraq earned $1.5 billion a year from oil smuggling and oil sales outside UN controls, through Syria, Turkey, and Jordan, as well as by ship down the Gulf. Beginning in September of 2001, the Bush regime threatened to include Iraq in its "War on Terrorism." Any incursion into Iraq had to deal with the reality that American companies, such as Cheney's Halliburton and G.E. were making billions in Iraq by selling them goods and services. Also, the difficulty that the eradication of the Saddam Hussein regime would seriously compromise America's establishment of bases on the Arabian peninsula on the pretext of protecting poor Arab sheikhs against the Iraqi Evil Monster.   Prior to the 2003 Iraq war, Saddan was desperately trying to ingratiate himself with the Gulf Arab Cooperation Council (GCC) members: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to gain support for the lifting of the U.N. sanctions against it. Russia, Iraq's closest U.N. Security Council ally and a major beneficiary of contracts to purchase Iraqi oil and to sell Iraq humanitarian supplies, was demanding "a comprehensive settlement" of the sanctions issue, including steps leading to lifting the military embargo against Iraq. On January 24, 2002, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov made a formal statement that Moscow was opposed to any U.S. military operation against Iraq.   Russia's Lukoil Oil Company and two Russian government agencies had a 23-year contract to develop Iraq's West Qurna oil field. By the terms of the contract, Lukoil was to get one half, Iraq one quarter, and the Russian government agencies were to get one quarter of the oil field's 667 million tons of crude, potentially a $20 billion deal. Iraq still owed Russia at least $8 billion from the old cold war days when Russia armed Iraq, considering it a client state. Is it any wonder that Russia opposed Bush's war on Iraq?   But because of United Nations sanctions on Iraq, Lukoil had not pumped a drop from West Qurna since it won drilling rights in 1997. In 2001, Saddam gave Russia $1.3 billion in oil contracts under the United Nations oil-for-food program that allowed Iraq to sell oil to buy supplies to help Iraqi civilians. In September, 2001, Saddam announced plans to award Russian companies another $40 billion in contracts as soon as United Nations sanctions were lifted.   In February 2002, Russia's foreign minister, Igor S. Ivanov, said that Russia and Iraq saw eye to eye on questions of extremism and terrorism and that the American-backed sanctions against Iraq were counterproductive and should be lifted. He then emphasized that Russia solidly opposed "spreading or applying the international antiterror operation to any arbitrarily chosen state, including Iraq."   The 2003 Standard Oil-Bush junta war against Iraq ended all the prior Iraqi agreements with nations such as Russia, Germany, and France. The opposition by these Eurasian nations to Dubya's pre-emptive attack on Iraq was understandable--and Dubya's rush to war with Iraq now makes sense.   Also to be considered in any plans to extend the Standard Oil/Bush oil imperialism is China's growing interest in supporting Middle-East nations in their struggle against the U.S. During Jordanian King Abdallah II's January, 2002 visit to China, Chinese President Jiang Zemin said that China wanted stronger ties with Arab countries to help promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Yeah, sure, that's the reason China wants to put its foot into the Middle East, to promote peace. China has supplied military weaponry to Pakistan and may intervene if the Standard Oil/Bush imperialists continue to expand their empire in the Middle East.   But the Standard Oil/Bush imperialists don't concern themselves with the threat of China in the Middle East. They've seized control of Iraq's oil and now have their eye on Syria's and Iran's oil as well. We're now in phase two of the war on terrorism: invading countries that Bush says harbor terrorists, with the real intent to seize those countries' energy sources. And since U.S.-British a.k.a. Standard Oil imperialism now--since 9/11--results in the killing of American civilians, we can say that the next phase of the war on terrorism will soon be at a theater near you.   U.S. soldiers are now guarding the north-south pipeline as it's built in Afghanistan. In the meantime, the hypocrisy of Bush's "War on Terrorism" is apparent for all to see in Colombia where Bush proposes to spend $98 million to protect Occidental Petroleum's 480-mile-long pipeline which runs from Colombia's second-largest oil field to the Caribbean coast. The $98 million will follow the $1.3 billion the U.S. has already given to Colombia, ostensibly to fight the "drug terrorists." In 2001, the Cano Limon pipeline was closed for 266 days, due to holes blasted in it. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels have blown holes in the pipeline for the past fifteen years, resulting in 2.5 million barrels of spilled oil oozing into Colombia's rivers and streams, about ten times the amount of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.   If Bush enters this 38-year old conflict in Colombia which has resulted in 40,000 deaths in the past decade, he'll be involving the U.S. in a dead-end power struggle among FARC, the Cuban-inspired National Liberation Army (ELN), ultra-right paramilitary groups and the U.S.-supported fascist government. The excuse for spending U.S. taxpayers' money in Afghanistan was that Bin Laden was responsible for the September 11th attacks. Now the only pretext for spending taxpayers' money in Colombia is to combat the FARC and ELN "terrorists" who only threaten U.S. oil company resources, not American lives.   Invading Colombia follows the British-U.S. oil imperialism pattern: going where the oil is. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, Colombian oil production rose from only 100,000 barrels per day in the early 1980s to approximately 844,000 barrels in early 1999 -- an increase of nearly 750 percent. Colombian oil exports to the United States have also risen sharply, and today Colombia is this country's seventh largest supplier of petroleum. Colombia harbors large reserves of untapped oil and natural gas, possibly as much as 20 billion barrels (and Venezuela has 73 billion barrels in proven reserves); hence Colombia--and its oil-rich neighbor countries--become one of many new oil imperialism targets. The United States imports more oil from Colombia and its neighbors, Venezuela and Ecuador, than from all of the Persian Gulf.   A revealing feature of the South American "War on Terrorism" is that, unlike the Taliban and al Qaeda, the Bush administration is not destroying the numerous South American drug terrorists. Why? Because the Bush administration and its plutocratic controllers are at the center of the $1.5 trillion per year in U.S. cash transactions that result from the international drug trade.   A drug terrorist, like a Carlos Lehder, a Pablo Escobar, an Amado Fuentes, a Matta Ballesteros or a Hank Rohn, constantly has something like ten billion dollars of useless illegal money that he has to put in a cooperative bank or business venture that will launder it for him. The drug lord is then more than happy to loan the laundered money at five percent interest to underwrite the large corporations and crooked politicians throughout the world.   Wall Street and the Bush administration depend on the South American drug barons for hundreds of millions of dollars for corporate income and election campaign finances. For every million dollars of increased sales or increased revenues that a company like Enron realized from a buyout, the stock equity of the one per cent who control Wall Street increases twenty to thirty times.    In June, 1999, Colombia's president Andres Pastrana arranged for Richard Grasso, head of the New York Stock Exchange, to meet with Raúl Reyes, the head of FARC finances, in the cocaine-producing DMZ of Colombia. The two were caught in an infamous embrace that saw very little exposure in the media.   Grasso, however, wasn't the only American big-money representative to cozy up to Colombian drug terrorists. Several months after Grasso's visit, two wealthy members of the American Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) captured world headlines by flying to a FARC redoubt in the Colombian jungles to palaver with the terrorists' founder, 70-year-old Manuel Marulanda. After meeting with the communist drug terrorist, James Kimsey, co-founder and chairman emeritus of America Online Inc., and Joseph Robert, head of J.E. Robert Company, a global real estate empire, flew to Bogota to consult with Colombian president Pastrana. On returning to Washington, the CFR representatives said they were convinced that Marulanda and FARC are sincere in their claims of wanting peace and economic reform.   It may seem hard to believe that U.S. banks and corporations would be involved in laundering drug money from South American terrorists. Even the supine media have had to report some of this criminal behavior. A 1983 ABC News "Close up" on drugs and money laundering fingered Citibank, Marine Midland, Chase Manhattan, and most of the 250 banks and branches in Miami. When Ramon Milian Rodriguez, a top accountant and money launderer for the Medellin Cartel, testified before a Senate subcommittee in 1988, he implicated a veritable "Who's Who" in U.S. finance:   Citibank Citicorp Bank of America First National Bank of Boston    "In every instance," said Rodriguez, "the banks knew who they were dealing with...." The evidence indicates that Rodriguez is right; the banks often play dumb, but they know what they're doing.   A 1998 investigation of Citibank by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) revealed that Citibank had secretly transferred between $90 million and $100 million of alleged drug money for a Mexican client, using many creative methods to camouflage the movement of the assets.   Oil imperialism rests on our continued dependence on oil, which not only threatens the future of humanity through prolonged and bloody conflict, but through another even more insidious threat--climate change and ecological collapse.   Oil imperialism flourishes when a supine press cheers and a groveling congress grants unconstitutional authority to the oil-saturated Demonic Cabal. Despite our grief and rage over terrorist atrocities, a "war on terrorism" cannot be fought with bombs and missiles alone. Citizens throughout the world must awaken to this new U.S.-British imperialism and reclaim their governments. Once democracy is re-established, we can start a war on homelessness, poverty, and economic and political inequalities, and begin work to achieve ecological sustainability for our planet.   Bibliography   Brisard, J, and Dasquie, G. Forbidden Truth, 2002   Rashid, Ahmed, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, 2000 Pilger, John, Hidden Agenda   Klare, Michael, Resource Wars   Yergin, Daniel, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, (1991)   Pepe Escobar, The War for Pipelineistan, Asian Times (1/26/02) British Petroleum (BP) Chairman Lord Browne has complained that state-owned petroleum companies from Asia where skewing the oil market. He claimed that oil producing nations could be best served if only they made deals with private international companies like BP. He said the Asian firms benefited from government-to-government deals, which did not always make economic sense. Lord Browne would have been right if we did not have things like the BTC pipeline. This project is evidence to the fact that Big Oil can leverage funds that exist beyond their balance sheets. Why else would the U.S. government pour billions of dollars of American taxpayer's money setting the stage for a largely British project in which American companies have only marginal investments? Billed as "the project of the century", the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline is now complete. BP says it cost $3.6 billion* to build - making it the costliest oil pipeline in the world. The pipeline starts in Azerbaijan, goes through Georgia and ends in Turkey, connecting the landlocked Caspian Sea with the Mediterranean. The ideal route to take Caspian oil out to its markets would have been through Iran or Russia but this is something the West has been keen to avoid.   The U.S. has established an airbase near Ceyhan at Incirlik. A massive military deployment around the pipeline has been planned.   The 1,770 kilometer-long pipeline will take 6 months and 10 million barrels of oil to fill from end to end. Oil filled at Baku will take 10 days to reach Ceyhan. The pipeline is expected to carry 1 million barrels a day from the Caspian sea. But, where is this oil going to come from?   Production in the entire Caspian region currently stands at only 2 million barrels per day (bpd). The Caspian sea has proven reserves of 33 billion barrels of oil, making it the third largest in the world. (The Persian Gulf has over 700 billion barrels.) Turkey has no oil. Georgia has lots of mineral water.† And, Azerbaijan? Well, it is suspected that Azeri authorities vastly overestimated their reserves and sold the idea to the Americans, who seemed to have swallowed it whole. Either that or the Americans have some secret information about the oil reserves that they are not telling anyone.   To make the pipeline more viable, Azerbaijan offered to let Russia send its oil through the pipeline. To add pressure, Turkey placed restrictions on Russian oil tankers that currently take oil across the Black Sea through the narrow Bosphorous straits. Russia has so far refused to join the project adding that its oil will bypass the Bosphorous with the new Burgas pipeline, which runs over Bulgaria to Greece. Thus, the only other country that can make the project viable is Kazakhastan. However, President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhastan is a cool player who does not place all his eggs in one basket. He likes to keep a safe distance from both Moscow and Washington. Today, companies from Russia, North America, and Europe are already working in Kazakhastan. There is a possibility that Kazakhastan's oil and gas go East to China. If it did, then the BTC pipeline would be doomed. So, many observers wondering if the U.S. is giving shape to a "color revolution" for Kazakhastan.   A study of the color revolutions of Eastern Europe and Central Asia are a good way to measure how much money the U.S. has spent to help make Western oil companies like BP richer. During elections in Ukraine, the U.S. embassy was seen in great action. Special camps were conducted to train journalists in "democratic values." The U.S. financed the exit polls, which predicted a huge win for the pro-Western candidate Yushchenko. When Yushchenko lost, the "pro-democracy activists" from the youth movement called Pora (It's Time) (which again was financed by the U.S.) effected the "Orange Revolution." Elections were conducted again and the pro-US candidate Yushchenko won. In Azerbaijan, a "good dictator" (pro-American) Haidar Aliyev was in power when the pipeline talks began.   When Haider Aliyev died, his son Ilham Aliyev succeeded him in an election that was rigged but to the U.S. was fair. But, things are not going very well for him. The U.S. is now financing opposition groups fashioned on the Ukrainian Pora. Central Asian republics lying in the direction of a possible Kazakhastan-China route are now facing serious threats. A radical Islamic movement led by Hizbut-Tehrir (HT) and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) is operating from the Ferhana valley whose stated aim is to create a pan-Central Asian caliphate covering Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. Hizbut Tehrir operates from Whitehall, London. Britain has refused to ban it although Germany has already done so. Interestingly, the group is now headed by an IT professional named Jalaluddin Patel.   * - The project was financed by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), which is owned by Western countries.   ‡ - They literally coached him - no metaphor is used here.   † - The pipeline goes through the Borjomi region of Georgia. Borjomi is home to Georgia’s mineral water industry, which contributes 10% percent of Georgia’s exports. It is also the largest employer and contributor to the budget in this economically depressed region. While the BTC consortium has pledged to adopt extra safety measures in the Borjomi region, such as thicker pipes and additional block valves, members of the mineral water industry worry that the market for mineral water is dependent on image and reputation, and that the Borjomi brand could suffer irreparable harm, even if there is no spill or leakage. Georgia is known throughout the former Soviet Union (FSU) for its mineral water resources. The Borjomi brand of mineral water has been distributed throughout the FSU for more than a century and is widely recognized. There have been reports that the BTC did not really fulfill the promises in their haste to complete the project ahead of schedule. The Georgian government is powerless to do anything because as part of the agreement with the BTC consortium it has ceded sovereignity over the narrow stretch of land where pipeline has been laid. This has prompted many commentators to refer to the BTC pipeline as Pipelineistan.   UPDATE: Last year (2005), China acquired PetroKazakhastan, a Canadian company with operations in Kazakhastan. China also built the 988-kilometer-long Atasu-Alashankou pipeline a record 10 months to carry the oil from the oil fields of PetroKazakhastan.