Color Revolutions, Geopolitics and the Baku Pipeline »
Posted By dissent 5 months, 1 week ago in NewsAfter a short-term fall in price below the $50 a barrel level, oil is now bounding back towards $60 a barrel and likely far higher. In this situation one might think that the announcement of the opening of a major new oil pipeline to pump Caspian oil to world markets might dampen the relentless rise in prices.
However, even when OPEC agreed on June 15 to raise its formal production quota by another 500,000 barrels per day (bpd), the reaction of NYMEX oil futures prices was to rise, not fall. Estimates are that world demand in the second half of 2005 will average at least 3 million barrels a day more than the first half.
Oil has become the central theme of world political and military operations planning, even when not always openly said.
Caspian Pipeline Opens a Pandora’s Box
In this situation it is worth looking at the overall significance of the May opening of the Baku to Ceyhan, Turkey oil pipeline. This 1,762 km long oil pipeline was completed some months ahead of plan.
The BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan) Oil Pipeline was begun in 2002 after four years of intense international dispute. It cost some $3.6 billion, making it one of the most expensive oil projects ever. The main backer was BP, whose chairman Lord Browne is a close adviser to Britain’s Tony Blair. BP built it in a consortium including Unocal of the US and Turkish Petroleum Inc., and other partners.
It will take until at least late September before 10.4 milllion barrels can provide the needed volume to start oil delivery to the Turkish port Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. Ceyhan is conveniently near to the US airbase Incirlik. The BTC has been a US strategic priority ever since Clinton first backed it in 1998. Indeed, for the opening ceremonies in May, US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman attended and delivered a personal note of congratulations from US President George W. Bush.
As the political makeup of the Central Asia Caspian region is complex, especially since the decomposition of the Soviet Union opened up a scramble in the oil-rich region of the Caspian from the outside, above all from the United States, it is important to bear in mind the major power blocs which have emerged.
They are two. On the one side is an alliance of US-Turkey-Azerbaijan and, since the Rose Revolution, Georgia, that small but critical country directly on the pipeline route. Opposed to it, in terms of where the pipeline route carrying the Caspian oil should go, is Russia, which until 1990 held control over the entire Caspian outside the Iran littoral. Today, Russia has cultivated an uneasy but definite alliance with Iran and with Armenia, in opposition to the US group. This two-camp grouping is essential to understand developments in the region since 1991.
Now that the BTC oil pipeline has finally been completed, and the route through Georgia has been put firmly in pro-Washington hands, an essential precondition to completing the pipeline, the question becomes how will Moscow react? Does Putin have any serious options left short of the ultimate nuclear one?
A clear strategy
A geopolitical pattern has become clear over the past months. One-by-one, with documented overt and covert Washington backing and financing, new US-friendly regimes have been put in place in former Soviet states which are in a strategic relation to possible pipeline routes from the Caspian Sea.
Ukraine is now more or less in the hands of a Washington-backed ‘democratic’ regime under Viktor Yushchenko and his billionaire Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko, known in Ukraine as the ‘gas princess’ for the fortune she made as a government official, allegedly through her dubious dealings earlier with Ukraine Energy Minister Pavlo Lazarenko and Gazprom.
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dissent
we live in a culture of war.
let's make it a culture of peace.
"my country is the world. and my religion is to ...
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dissent5 months, 1 week ago
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btw... this story came out june 25, 2005. given the penchant for "color" revolutions either atop of oil and/or surrounding the caspian oil basin -- red (rose) in georgia, orange in ukraine, even yellow in kyrgyztan, and now of course, green in iran -- this is just as relevant as it was 4 years ago. perhaps more so. unfortunately 4 years ago the tide of popular and manipulated opinion ensured it was swept well away under the rug somewhere
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there was also to have been another pipeline on the eastern side which was to have passed through, yes you guessed it, afghanistan, then pakistan and onto tankers in the indian ocean. that fell through when the taliban awarded the bid to argentinian oil company, bridas, leaving unocal's ten or so years of serenading, well.... unrequited. bridas, alas, has had that deal fall through as well due to, oh my, a war. a seemingly spiteful war of apparently jilted jealousy at that. go figure.-
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hyperbola5 months, 1 week ago
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You can be sure that the rest of the world notices our "oil imperialism" even if it is a taboo subject inside the US.
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Welcome to Pipelineistan - Liquid War
Our good ol' friend the nonsensical "global war on terror", which the Pentagon has slyly rebranded "the Long War", sports a far more important, if half-hidden, twin - a global energy war. I like to think of it as the Liquid War, because its bloodstream is the pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet. Put another way, if its crucial embattled frontier these days is the Caspian Basin, the whole of Eurasia is its chessboard. Think of it, geographically, as Pipelineistan.
Forget the mainstream media's obsession with al-Qaeda, Osama "dead or alive" bin Laden, the Taliban - neo, light or classic - or that "war on terror", whatever name it goes by. These are diversions compared to the high-stakes, hardcore geopolitical game that follows what flows along the pipelines of the planet.
...Global financial crisis or not, oil and natural gas are the long-term keys to an inexorable transfer of economic power from the West to Asia. Those who control Pipelineistan - and despite all the dreaming and planning that's gone on there, it's unlikely to be Washington - will have the upper hand in whatever is to come, and there's not a terrorist in the world, or even a "long war", that can change that.
....According to the view from Beijing, the rising world order of the 21st century will be significantly determined by a quadrangle of BRIC countries - for those of you by now collecting New Great Game acronyms, that stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China - plus the future Islamic triangle of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Add in a unified South America, no longer in thrall to Washington, and you have a global SCO-plus. On the drawing boards, at least, it's a high-octane dream.
... Welcome, then, to Pipelineistan! Whether we like it or not, in good times and bad, it's a reasonable bet that we're all going to be Pipeline tourists. So, go with the flow. Learn the crucial acronyms, keep an eye out for what happens to all those US bases across the oil heartlands of the planet, watch where the pipelines are being built, and do your best to keep tabs on the next set of monster Chinese energy deals and fabulous coups by Russia's Gazprom.
http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/03/26/welcome-...
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