Yes, it is about oil: Iraq, Central Asia, and "alternative energy" sources

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

If only the hot air of the UN General Assembly could be harnessed as “alternative energy”.

But alas! we still live in a world – the Italian blackout the latest lesson – based on conventional sources, mostly oil, natural gas, coal, and much maligned nuclear.

Continued exposure to Sadaam Hussein’s heinous crimes [despite the mass destruction (WMD)debate] has submerged the argument of President Bush’s critics the war was about “oil”. The truth is that it was about oil. It was, after all, Sadaam’s enormous financial resources that made him a menace. It was his threat to takeover his Persian Gulf neighbors reserves that led the U.S. to restrain him in the First [unfinished] Gulf War.

True, a pariah North Korea armed with WMD, protected from final bankruptcy by its old ally Communist China which supplies 80% of its energy, poses a similar threat for which Washington has not yet a solution. But it is Iran’s oil – and the second largest world gas reserves – revenues that now have plunged the world into a third and unresolved crisis about a rogue state which sponsors international terrorism and covets WMD.

Oil, too, was intimately linked to our 9/11 catastrophe. For more than half a century the U.S. allied itself with Saudi Arabia in a mutually beneficial collaboration to exploit the world’s largest oil and gas resources, to bring benefits to the Saudi people, and to feed the energy maw of the industrial world. When the terrorists attacked on U.S. soil, the footsoldiers, largely, were Saudi Arabians. Osama Ben Ladin, reared in Saudi upper echelons, ran his terrorist machine, largely, from his family resources and benefactors in Saudi Arabia. That added a new and sinister element to the relationship. In a feudal regime of family, tribe, and clan, how far the tentacles of terrorist sympathy, funding, and participation reach into Saudi officialdom may never be known and, indeed, may be almost irrelevant.

What is apparent is that the Saudi state is in deep trouble. Its modernization strategies have failed. They neither benefit large segments of its population — most modern sector jobs are filled by foreigners, most not Arab, many not even Moslem. There is widespread unemployment. Education has failed to prepare for modern society. Through the dark information veil, reports of flushing out of local terrorist indicate the infection is widespread.

As the Saudi leadership for its own survival tries to sort out fundamentalist clergy that preached hatred and anti-Westernism and the internal terrorist network, it is certainly prudent the U.S. to think about “alternative” energy sources. [Not the least of problems: an unstable Castroite regime has taken over in Venezuela, our traditional first foreign supplier.] And that brings us full circle to Iraq, the world’s second largest reserves of oil and gas.

It is no accident, as the Communists loved to say, that France was Sadaam Hussein’s main trading partner. Nor that a French bank long held the monopoly in handling $60 billion in the oil for food exchange, an effort intended by humanitarians [and others] at the UN to feed Iraq’s starving children. U.S. soldiers, unfortunately, have seen the palaces and arms caches for which those funds paid. Behind the diplomatese of the Quai d’Orsay [and President Chirac’s hand kissing] is France’s [and Russia’s, who sold Sadaam weapons] effort to get back on the Iraq gravy train.

Washington’s delicate job is to bring Iraq’s oil back on the international market –traditionally the second exporter – and reassure the Iraqis that its profits will be used for its people. Degradation of equipment, postponement of prospecting, and continuing sabotage have brought delays. But OPEC, the producers’ cartel, welcomed an unofficial Iraqi delegation to their meetings – a sign of where reality lies.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is pursuing “alternative” sources. No doubt Bush’s recent public warmth for Russia’s President Putin -- despite Moscow’s continued billion dollar sales to Iran’s nuclear program – has to do, in part at least, with Russia’s growing oil exports. New Russian Western Siberian reserves are now a bone of contention between Tokyo and Beijing, with Japan proposing to finance a pipeline to the Pacific which would have Japan – and the U.S. – as markets rather than China’s attempt to cover its growing energy deficit with imports. The U.S. is pushing strategic development of the newest finds in the Caspian Basin and other Central Asian reserves – to carry them west through Georgia and Turkey [instead of through Russia and Iran]. A cloud hangs over those efforts with Azerbaijan’s terminally ill ex-Communist leader Heidar Aliev, giving way to his untried anointed successor, his son. And there is the proposal for a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan, with the world’s largest gas reserves, transiting Afghanistan to Pakistan, and eventually reaching the world on the Indian ocean.

Maintaining the post-9/11 foothold in still wild and wooly Afghanistan, and in Central Asia, as well as winning the battle to rebuild Iraq, are part and parcel of the U.S. strategy – and, yes, it is about oil.