|
Nazar's PayPal Account |
|
Support thehanoudiletter.com in making a small donation:
|
|
|
|
|
The Gulf: The Oil Jugular |
|
|
|
|
Thursday, 02 November 2006 |
No arm of the sea has been, or is of greater interest alike to geologists, archaeologists, historians, geographers, merchants or the students of strategy than the inland water known as the gulf. The story of the gulf area stretches back thousands of years to the early stirrings of man's civilization, here in southern Iraq on the topmost part of the gulf in a piece of land 70,000 kms in size. Humans settled in this land after thousands of centuries of wandering and hunting, built cities, domesticated animals and invented writing and began history a process which within a very short time blossomed into the astonishingly beautiful flower, the Sumerian Civilization which lasted for more than a thousand years. But on both sides of the gulf the relationships between its various settlers was very often very uneasy and greatly strained because of cultural and religious conflicts, which have been ongoing for centuries had to a very great extent shaped its present. Nowadays the Gulf's strategic significance centers on two features, its location and its oil.
Events in the gulf show very dramatically how places that for a very long time seemed remote and exotic can present the world with crises of incredible seriousness and urgency the whole world could awake to find that a region once celebrated largely in romantic fantasy to find its future and its fate in its hands or more precisely in its sands. Both economic and military power nowadays depend on oil, sometime in the future nuclear, solar, geothermal and other energy sources may be sufficiently developed to power the world. For now we live in the hydrocarbon age, the age of oil which gives the gulf area its extraordinary significance, one of the world's most turbulent and unstable areas is in fact its most vital one. In the industrial age energy is the lifeblood of the economic system, and economic power is the foundation of military power. Britain was the first big industrial power and in the nineteenth century it became the world's leading political and military power, Britain got a head start on the world because it was virtually an island made of coal and because at that time coal was what powered the industrial revolution, but as the age of coal gave way to the age of oil, Britain the world's first superpower gave way to the United States the first oil superpower.
The first oil well in the United States was drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania in
1859, Rockefeller's oil trust was the OPEC of those days, the Unites States became the world's major oil producer after a few years of domination of the world oil market by Baku in Azerbaijan. Oil fueled the automobiles, and the other paraphernalia of the western civilization, it powered ships, airplanes and trucks civilian and military, access to oil in warfare became an absolute necessity, at the end of the first world war the then British foreign minister lord Curzon said, the allies floated to victory on a wave of oil, in world war two. General George Patton was streaking across Europe followed by pipeline experts from Texas who were running behind him laying pipes, in fact one of the most principal advantages of the allies which facilitated their advances during that long war was that they controlled almost 90% of the world's crude oil, with most of it coming from United States wells. The Americans were living a very serious fantasy; they thought that their oil wells will never dry and that they will continue to produce forever so they were using their reserves carelessly, without any thought about the future. The Americans were driving huge gas guzzling cars which were coming from very big plants in Detroit in the millions who themselves were using millions of barrels to power theses plants, and were ignoring very serious warnings that oil is a very rare commodity and is not going to last forever, but they were very happy with their fantasy and never changed their habits and continued to delude themselves even when they had to start to import oil from abroad. The situation which started to assert itself during the second half of the last century when they became increasingly reliant supplies from outside their own borders especially the Middle East which nowadays provides the United States with more than 80% of its requirements all of this has told the users a very important lesson, the gulf's oil is the key to who control what in the world.
The Americans persisted with their delusion about their own oil and carried on with their careless and extravagant use of oil, but they were to receive a very serious jolt, in the fall of 1973, American and the west had a stunning dramatic and an extremely painful lesson in the new realities of the oil age. Against the backdrop of renewed Arab Israeli fighting Arab oil producers in the Middle East declared a selective boycott against the consuming countries that were seen on the side of the Israelis especially the United States. OPEC feeling its strength decreed a quadrupling in the price of oil. The barrel that sold for $3.00 in September was raised to $11.65 in December and overnight the economic structure of the world was turned upside down, but the west and the United States in particular had discovered its Achilles heel. Oil being so cheap and available so cheap to buy and so versatile to use had so widely replaced all other energy sources and that the industrial economies had become so dependant on it and now the sources of the vitally needed oil were no longer secure. By that time the control of this vital commodity had shifted from the multinational companies the so called seven sisters which were mostly American the control of oil has shifted to the host countries the medieval leaders of the gulf states were holding the key to America's survival, they were threatening the jugular.
To make things worse it was becoming increasingly evident that America's own reserves were not going to last forever, very reliable studies which began in the late sixties of the last century mainly those of the prominent petrogeologist Mr. M. King Hubbert were predicting that the oil reserves of the United States would peak in around the year 2000 but more recent studies using advanced technologies like remote sensing, magnetic resonance imaging and ultra sound are suggesting that the peak will start in 2000 or early 2006 and then they will begin to decline and by 2025 America's reserves would have dwindled to extremely low levels. This situation left the policy makers with a very serious dilemma, but Britain's withdrawal from the Middle East and the troubles the old Soviet Union was having as a result of their adventure in Afghanistan was leading these planners and strategists to think more aggressively, they started to think in military terms. And they started with the post Shah Iran.
After the shah Iran came under the rule of a religious oligarchy a group of mullahs under leadership of an old man who was intending to export his revolution to the gulf and beyond so the Americans sent Saddam Hussein after him and provided him with intelligence and advanced weaponry which allowed him to engage the mullahs for eight years at the end of it both countries came out impoverished and debilitated. Saddam came out with a massive military machine by which he was now threatening the gulf and its various sheikhs and emirs which culminated with a good nod from the Americans to go into Kuwait and occupied it at that moment these same people who have encouraged him in his adventure started crying wolf. Bush senior who was president at that time said, this shall not last and his faithful ally Margaret Thatcher said it time to finish this new Hitler and the two of them succeeded after six months of occupation in kicking out of Kuwait defeated and humiliated but Saddam was saved at the last moment by president Bush himself who suddenly signed a cease fire agreement with him when the American forces were less than 200 kms south of Baghdad, a cease fire which gave another 13 more years to Saddam to rule the country. Iraq which was subjected to an extremely harsh sanctions which were supposed to contain Saddam, but the ones who suffered from them were the people of Iraq alone but Saddam's adventure in Kuwait has taught the leaders of those countries who should be in control of the precious oil and who should be obeyed if they wanted to keep their thrones but it also gave the Americans the time to plan their next step which is the control of the Iraqi oil reserves.
Iraq has tremendous oil reserve, it contains beneath its soil even more than what Saudi Arabia is said to have and the only people who know exactly how much oil is there beneath its sands are the Americans themselves and they are keeping those figures to themselves and are not sharing them even with the Iraqis. The control of those reserves was one of the most important reasons why the junior Bush invaded Iraq and it was the execution of a very vital strategy for nothing less than the survival of the United States itself, all the pre invasion talk about Iraqi freedom and releasing the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein's tyranny and protecting the world from the menace of his weapons of mass destruction was nothing but disinformation and propaganda and all the current talk about withdrawal and timetables for leaving Iraq are only party politics and part of a musical chairs game between the Republicans and Democrats. The Americans are going to stay in Iraq whether under the command of George Bush or whoever succeeds him until those reserves are depleted.
Najeeb Hanoudi
Baghdad, Iraq
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Email:
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
|
|
|
|
|
