What do bagpipes have to do with the war in Libya? On NATO’s website, you can read about Marc Forterre, a French colonel and avid piper, whose musical instrument was mistaken for a weapon by airport staff in Addis Ababa. It would make a charming vignette, if it wasn’t for how the tale segues into editorialising about how the alliance helps the African Union to conduct its own military operations.
This celebration of trans-continental harmony is deceitful. It omits any acknowledgment of how most African governments are at odds with NATO over its attacks on Libya – and with good reason.
Apologists for the war maintain that it is based on the “responsibility to protect”, a concept usually abbreviated as R2P. Yet by examining past comments of James Jones, the decorated general who was Barack Obama’s national security adviser until November last, we might get a more accurate explanation. “As commander of NATO, I worried early in the mornings about how to protect energy facilities and supply chain routes as far away as Africa, the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea,” Jones said in 2008. (It is instructive that he joined the board of Chevron earlier that year).
Though the main tenets of R2P look laudable, the background of its chief proponent Gareth Evans can only arouse suspicion. When he was Australia’s foreign minister in 1989, Evans signed the Timor Gap Treaty with his then Indonesian counterpart Ali Alatas. This enabled the theft of oil resources off East Timor, where 250,000 people died in one of the twentieth century’s most brutal occupations.
Just as the motives of a sham humanitarian like Evans should be questioned, doubts must be cast on Obama’s sincerity when he defended bombing Libya on the pretext “we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific scale”. Could the haste with which the West intervened not have more to do with Libya boasting Africa’s largest proven oil reserves? And were Western leaders and their chums in BP and Total not jittery over threats made by Muammar Gaddafi in 2009 (and reiterated in the past few weeks) to nationalise those resources?
Yes, it may be too reductionist to describe what is happening in Libya as another war for oil. The truth is probably that it is not only a war for oil but also to assert the control of America and its European stooges over Africa.
Having already declared war in Europe (Serbia) and taken charge of one in Asia (Afghanistan), it was perhaps logical that NATO would soon stretch its imperial tentacles into Africa. In 2007, Africom, its command for operations in Africa, was set up. “Factsheets” churned out from Africom’s headquarters in Stuttgart bragged of support for health, education and water projects. Yet that mask of charity belies a remark made by Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, then NATO’s secretary-general, the previous year, when he said the alliance was willing to use warplanes to secure oil and gas supply routes from Africa.
No war is fought for noble motives. If you really think that Sarkozy or Obama wished to protect civilian lives, study the eyewitness account signed by Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian doctors working in Libya on 24 March. They document how dozens of innocent people were killed and maimed by NATO bombs falling on residential areas of Tajhura, a suburb of Tripoli. The onslaught led to the roof collapsing in the maternity ward of a hospital, causing numerous miscarriages.
This serves as a reminder of how NATO bombed Serbia in 1999. On that occasion, a children’s hospital in Belgrade’s embassy district was targeted. As Michel Chossudovsky, a Canadian economist, points out on the website Global Research, sleeping babies were spared by the alliance’s missiles. Generators were hit instead, depriving incubators of power.
Moreover, there is a distinct possibility that the consequences of NATO’s actions will continue to be felt in Libya long after the bombs have stopped falling, especially if those bombs were coated with depleted uranium (DU). While the Pentagon has said it has no reports that the substance is being used, the A-10 Warthogs flown by the US Air Force are equipped with guns designed to fire DU-tipped munitions.
I called a NATO spokesman to ask if the alliance has any policy or rules on depleted uranium. “The jury is still out scientifically on what the ramifications and dangers of using it are,” the spokesman told me. That appears to me as a flimsy attempt to justify the unjustifiable. While it may be impossible to prove that the upsurge of childhood cancer found in Iraq following the First Gulf War (1991) was linked to DU, there is ample circumstantial evidence to suggest it can have lethal consequences. Jawad Khadim al-Ali, an Iraqi doctor, is among those to have found an abnormally high incidence of cancer in parts of Basra where intense bombardment took place.
If you still need reasons why NATO should not be trusted, check out Rolling Stone’s new account of what young soldiers serving with the alliance got up to in Afghanistan. After Andrew Holmes, a corporal, nonchalantly shot dead an unarmed farmer, his squad leader presented him with the man’s finger as a trophy.
“Our values are firmly based on freedom, democracy and the rule of law,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary general and former Danish premier, said at the end of March. How are those values compatible with rewarding a murderer?
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 3-9 April 2011
Showing posts with label energy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label energy. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
NATO's dangerous games in Asia
Colin Powell was regularly called a “dove” when he was America’s secretary of state. It was a misnomer. While he may have quarrelled with other members of the Bush administration on tactical issues, Powell’s entire military and political career was dedicated to world domination. One of his first acts as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was to lead an invasion of Panama. “We have to put a shingle on our door saying ‘Superpower lives here’,” he said on its first day in December 1989.
Hype would have us believe, too, that there is a substantial difference between Republicans and Democrats on foreign and economic policies. In reality, there is little. Barack Obama has been eager to convince the world that he is not under the spell of the oil industry in the way that George W Bush was. Yet the perks enjoyed by energy giants remain largely unchanged; on top of not having to pay any corporate income tax last year, Exxon Mobil was given a refund worth $156 million.
That businessmen headquartered in the state of Texas continue to wield enormous clout in Washington can be seen from a presentation given by Robert Blake, a State Department official dealing with Central and South Asia, in Houston during January. Blake suggested that the regions covered by his portfolio were replete with untapped resources, declaring – with considerable understatement – that these were bound to be of interest in the Lone Star state. The passage about Uzbekistan read like it was copied from a brochure for an industry fair: “Though often overlooked as an energy source, Uzbekistan has substantial hydrocarbon reserves of its own and produces about as much natural gas as Turkmenistan. Located at the heart of Central Asia, much of the region’s infrastructure – roads, railroads, transmission lines, and pipelines - goes through Uzbekistan, offering it a unique opportunity to expand its exports with little investment in new infrastructure.”
There was no mention of how Uzbekistan is ruled by the brutal dictator Islam Karimov (the same Karimov who was welcomed to the headquarters of NATO and the European Commission recently). Exploiting “overlooked” resources was evidently deemed more important than the lives of the hundreds of unarmed demonstrators killed at Karimov’s behest during the Andijan massacre in 2005.
Blake was – perhaps unwittingly – expanding on a theory posited by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the political scientist and one-time national security adviser to Jimmy Carter. In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Brzenzinski argued that control of Asia was essential if the US was to cement its position as the world’s only superpower. “For half a millennium, world affairs were dominated by Eurasian powers and peoples who fought with one another for regional domination and reached out for global power,” he wrote. “Now a non-Eurasian power is pre-eminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”
NATO, Brezinski added, would be a vital tool in preserving that dominance. His words appear prescient. According to the official narrative, the invasion of Afghanistan and the consequent expansion of Western military bases in neighbouring countries were a response to how the Taliban was sheltering Osama bin Laden. But can it be a coincidence that the war followed the establishment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation a few months earlier? Was it not a signal to the SCO members like Russia, China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan that the US was the boss, so they had better reduce their ambitions for greater energy cooperation?
Ever the obedient servant, some of the EU’s most powerful states are helping to increase US penetration into Asia. Following the Andijan massacre, the Union imposed sanctions on Uzbekistan in 2005. The newspaper Tageszeitung revealed last year that Germany defied the sanctions by secretly giving military training to 35 Uzbek soldiers. In 2009, Angela Merkel’s government succeeded in convincing the EU to drop those sanctions. Access to the German military base at Termez in Uzbekistan – which hosts aircraft used in the war in Afghanistan – shouldn’t be affected by something as trivial as human rights, she decided.
NATO has also supplied troops to bases in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, both of which neighbour China. Statements pumped out in Washington and Brussels might habitually describe Beijing as a “partner”. But the games played by NATO in China’s backyard tell another story.
It is a similar situation with Russia. Visiting Georgia last summer, Hillary Clinton effectively told Moscow that only the US and NATO could station troops in the former Soviet Union. Ordering Russia to withdraw its troops from Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the Secretary of State said: “The United States does not recognise spheres of influence.”
During his aforementioned trip to Houston, Robert Blake told his audience that Turkmenistan may hold the key to one of the five largest reserves of gas on the planet. To emphasise their interests in getting hold of gas from the Caspian Sea, delegations from the European Commission and the US government visited Turkmenistan in January. It is hard to imagine that those delegations had not seen a warning issued late last year from Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, about certain countries wishing to “interfere” in the Caspian region.
The scholar Edward Herman has described NATO as a “US and imperial pitbull”. The pitbull is barking simultaneously in the directions of Russia, China and Iran. It needs to be sedated.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 6-12 February 2011
Hype would have us believe, too, that there is a substantial difference between Republicans and Democrats on foreign and economic policies. In reality, there is little. Barack Obama has been eager to convince the world that he is not under the spell of the oil industry in the way that George W Bush was. Yet the perks enjoyed by energy giants remain largely unchanged; on top of not having to pay any corporate income tax last year, Exxon Mobil was given a refund worth $156 million.
That businessmen headquartered in the state of Texas continue to wield enormous clout in Washington can be seen from a presentation given by Robert Blake, a State Department official dealing with Central and South Asia, in Houston during January. Blake suggested that the regions covered by his portfolio were replete with untapped resources, declaring – with considerable understatement – that these were bound to be of interest in the Lone Star state. The passage about Uzbekistan read like it was copied from a brochure for an industry fair: “Though often overlooked as an energy source, Uzbekistan has substantial hydrocarbon reserves of its own and produces about as much natural gas as Turkmenistan. Located at the heart of Central Asia, much of the region’s infrastructure – roads, railroads, transmission lines, and pipelines - goes through Uzbekistan, offering it a unique opportunity to expand its exports with little investment in new infrastructure.”
There was no mention of how Uzbekistan is ruled by the brutal dictator Islam Karimov (the same Karimov who was welcomed to the headquarters of NATO and the European Commission recently). Exploiting “overlooked” resources was evidently deemed more important than the lives of the hundreds of unarmed demonstrators killed at Karimov’s behest during the Andijan massacre in 2005.
Blake was – perhaps unwittingly – expanding on a theory posited by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the political scientist and one-time national security adviser to Jimmy Carter. In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Brzenzinski argued that control of Asia was essential if the US was to cement its position as the world’s only superpower. “For half a millennium, world affairs were dominated by Eurasian powers and peoples who fought with one another for regional domination and reached out for global power,” he wrote. “Now a non-Eurasian power is pre-eminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”
NATO, Brezinski added, would be a vital tool in preserving that dominance. His words appear prescient. According to the official narrative, the invasion of Afghanistan and the consequent expansion of Western military bases in neighbouring countries were a response to how the Taliban was sheltering Osama bin Laden. But can it be a coincidence that the war followed the establishment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation a few months earlier? Was it not a signal to the SCO members like Russia, China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan that the US was the boss, so they had better reduce their ambitions for greater energy cooperation?
Ever the obedient servant, some of the EU’s most powerful states are helping to increase US penetration into Asia. Following the Andijan massacre, the Union imposed sanctions on Uzbekistan in 2005. The newspaper Tageszeitung revealed last year that Germany defied the sanctions by secretly giving military training to 35 Uzbek soldiers. In 2009, Angela Merkel’s government succeeded in convincing the EU to drop those sanctions. Access to the German military base at Termez in Uzbekistan – which hosts aircraft used in the war in Afghanistan – shouldn’t be affected by something as trivial as human rights, she decided.
NATO has also supplied troops to bases in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, both of which neighbour China. Statements pumped out in Washington and Brussels might habitually describe Beijing as a “partner”. But the games played by NATO in China’s backyard tell another story.
It is a similar situation with Russia. Visiting Georgia last summer, Hillary Clinton effectively told Moscow that only the US and NATO could station troops in the former Soviet Union. Ordering Russia to withdraw its troops from Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the Secretary of State said: “The United States does not recognise spheres of influence.”
During his aforementioned trip to Houston, Robert Blake told his audience that Turkmenistan may hold the key to one of the five largest reserves of gas on the planet. To emphasise their interests in getting hold of gas from the Caspian Sea, delegations from the European Commission and the US government visited Turkmenistan in January. It is hard to imagine that those delegations had not seen a warning issued late last year from Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, about certain countries wishing to “interfere” in the Caspian region.
The scholar Edward Herman has described NATO as a “US and imperial pitbull”. The pitbull is barking simultaneously in the directions of Russia, China and Iran. It needs to be sedated.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 6-12 February 2011
Monday, January 10, 2011
Barroso's growth delusion
I have a guilty secret to confess. Despite loathing the tittle-tattle about celebrities that routinely masquerades as journalism, I sometimes pay too much attention to ephemera. On Saturday mornings, my eyes tend to ignore the news headlines in The Financial Times and instead fix themselves on a feature called Lunch with the FT. The only justification I have for this weakness is that it affords me an opportunity to scoff at the powerful diners portrayed.
Among the recent beneficiaries of the FT’s expense account was José Manuel Barroso. The European Commission president chose an old haunt for his free meal – York House in Lisbon – and insisted that the menu of foie gras and John Dory was chosen not by him but by the restaurant’s manager. Yet the fact that he was sating himself on such delicacies at a time when more than 85 million people in the EU – or 17% of its population - live below the poverty line illustrates how aloof he is from the citizens he purports to champion.
Barroso also claimed that one of the guiding principles in his life is to embrace things that are new and different. Although this may be true of his penchant for experimental jazz, it is impossible to detect any signs of fresh thinking in the two most important activities on his schedule this week.
On Wednesday, Barroso will present the Commission’s annual “growth survey”. This will be heralded as the beginning of a cycle of economic governance, under which EU governments coordinate their national budget plans with unelected officials in Brussels. The paper will also contend that the savage cutbacks to public spending being taken across the Union must continue in order to please the goddess TINA (there is no alternative).
The “survey” will be a follow-up to the “Europe 2020” strategy agreed by the Union’s key bodies last year for achieving “smart, sustainable and inclusive growth” this decade. Barroso and his ilk tend to recite those buzzwords as if they amount to an incantation. Experience proves, however, that economic growth as it is currently defined can be neither sustainable nor inclusive. This is because it is measured using a crude and antiquated indicator called gross domestic product (GDP).
Back in 2007, Barroso himself acknowledged that using GDP - developed during the Great Depression era of the 1930s - as an economic compass was “not sufficient” today. Addressing a conference in Brussels, he pointed out that GDP calculates market activity, rather than well-being and intimated that relying on it alone can be catastrophic. He inferred, for example, that policy-makers could refuse to take measures essential for the survival of the human species – such as protecting the rainforest – if they were harmful to growth.
Some work has been undertaken by the Commission – mainly by its environment department – since then on devising measures to “complement” GDP. Similarly, the governments of Britain and France have sought studies on how the impacts of economic policies on the environment and even “happiness” can be gauged. It is telling, however, that the EU as a bloc still attaches more importance to GDP, a three-letter acronym, than to ensuring that each child realises his or her potential.
The notion that the EU will find a magic formula to make growth “inclusive” is particularly fanciful. The neo-liberal orthodoxy to which the Union is wedded has resulted in a situation where the world’s 200 companies account for 28% of global GDP, yet employ less than 0.25% of the global workforce. All of the euro-zone economies now in severe difficulty saw significant GDP growth per head of population between 1990 and 2010 – Ireland by 107%, Greece by 53%, Spain by 38% and Portugal by 32%. Yet none of these countries witnessed any comparable narrowing in the gap between rich and poor. Eurostat, the EU’s in-house number-crunchers, has published data indicating that the levels of income inequality recorded for Spain and Greece were higher in 2009 than in 2000.
Barroso has identified energy as “the next great European integration project” and as a “growth-enhancing sector”. Yet while he is extolling the virtues of renewable energy and of energy efficiency, the other important item on his schedule this week proves that his talk about steering Europe in a more “sustainable” direction cannot be taken seriously. As part of a visit to Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, he and Günther Oettinger, the EU’s energy commissioner, will discuss the future of the 3,300km Nabucco pipeline project for bringing gas from Central Asia to Europe.
The project underscores just how skewed the priorities of EU energy policy are. The consortium behind the project – which includes Germany’s RWE - is seeking a €2 billion loan from the European Investment Bank. Yet in 2009, that bank allocated a mere €190 million for measures ostensibly promoting energy efficiency in EU’s 12 newest entrants from central and Eastern Europe.
Once completed, the Nabucco project would mean that a large proportion of the EU’s energy comes from Turkmenistan, a country where the ruling regime brooks no opposition and where human rights organisations are forbidden. You can be sure that Barroso is not going there to tell the authorities that the condition of buying Turkmen gas is that they become less repressive. For all of his rhetoric about Europe’s commitment to values like human rights and democracy, it is the value of business contracts that concerns him most.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 9-15 January 2011
Among the recent beneficiaries of the FT’s expense account was José Manuel Barroso. The European Commission president chose an old haunt for his free meal – York House in Lisbon – and insisted that the menu of foie gras and John Dory was chosen not by him but by the restaurant’s manager. Yet the fact that he was sating himself on such delicacies at a time when more than 85 million people in the EU – or 17% of its population - live below the poverty line illustrates how aloof he is from the citizens he purports to champion.
Barroso also claimed that one of the guiding principles in his life is to embrace things that are new and different. Although this may be true of his penchant for experimental jazz, it is impossible to detect any signs of fresh thinking in the two most important activities on his schedule this week.
On Wednesday, Barroso will present the Commission’s annual “growth survey”. This will be heralded as the beginning of a cycle of economic governance, under which EU governments coordinate their national budget plans with unelected officials in Brussels. The paper will also contend that the savage cutbacks to public spending being taken across the Union must continue in order to please the goddess TINA (there is no alternative).
The “survey” will be a follow-up to the “Europe 2020” strategy agreed by the Union’s key bodies last year for achieving “smart, sustainable and inclusive growth” this decade. Barroso and his ilk tend to recite those buzzwords as if they amount to an incantation. Experience proves, however, that economic growth as it is currently defined can be neither sustainable nor inclusive. This is because it is measured using a crude and antiquated indicator called gross domestic product (GDP).
Back in 2007, Barroso himself acknowledged that using GDP - developed during the Great Depression era of the 1930s - as an economic compass was “not sufficient” today. Addressing a conference in Brussels, he pointed out that GDP calculates market activity, rather than well-being and intimated that relying on it alone can be catastrophic. He inferred, for example, that policy-makers could refuse to take measures essential for the survival of the human species – such as protecting the rainforest – if they were harmful to growth.
Some work has been undertaken by the Commission – mainly by its environment department – since then on devising measures to “complement” GDP. Similarly, the governments of Britain and France have sought studies on how the impacts of economic policies on the environment and even “happiness” can be gauged. It is telling, however, that the EU as a bloc still attaches more importance to GDP, a three-letter acronym, than to ensuring that each child realises his or her potential.
The notion that the EU will find a magic formula to make growth “inclusive” is particularly fanciful. The neo-liberal orthodoxy to which the Union is wedded has resulted in a situation where the world’s 200 companies account for 28% of global GDP, yet employ less than 0.25% of the global workforce. All of the euro-zone economies now in severe difficulty saw significant GDP growth per head of population between 1990 and 2010 – Ireland by 107%, Greece by 53%, Spain by 38% and Portugal by 32%. Yet none of these countries witnessed any comparable narrowing in the gap between rich and poor. Eurostat, the EU’s in-house number-crunchers, has published data indicating that the levels of income inequality recorded for Spain and Greece were higher in 2009 than in 2000.
Barroso has identified energy as “the next great European integration project” and as a “growth-enhancing sector”. Yet while he is extolling the virtues of renewable energy and of energy efficiency, the other important item on his schedule this week proves that his talk about steering Europe in a more “sustainable” direction cannot be taken seriously. As part of a visit to Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, he and Günther Oettinger, the EU’s energy commissioner, will discuss the future of the 3,300km Nabucco pipeline project for bringing gas from Central Asia to Europe.
The project underscores just how skewed the priorities of EU energy policy are. The consortium behind the project – which includes Germany’s RWE - is seeking a €2 billion loan from the European Investment Bank. Yet in 2009, that bank allocated a mere €190 million for measures ostensibly promoting energy efficiency in EU’s 12 newest entrants from central and Eastern Europe.
Once completed, the Nabucco project would mean that a large proportion of the EU’s energy comes from Turkmenistan, a country where the ruling regime brooks no opposition and where human rights organisations are forbidden. You can be sure that Barroso is not going there to tell the authorities that the condition of buying Turkmen gas is that they become less repressive. For all of his rhetoric about Europe’s commitment to values like human rights and democracy, it is the value of business contracts that concerns him most.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 9-15 January 2011
Monday, September 20, 2010
Pentagon pulls Europe's strings
One little known fact about Brussels is that it a sliver of the city has a US address. American staff working in NATO headquarters can send letters to mom and pop or take deliveries from on-line retailers like Amazon, paying the same postage and shipping fees as they would within their home country. Under the “Air Post Office” zip code applying to this mail, the Belgian capital is considered part of New York City.
This may seem trivial but it is symptomatic of how the Pentagon regards most of Europe as its puppet. Worse again, senior officials working for our governments promote the subservience as desirable. “What is the point of the Belgian army today?” Robert Cooper, one of the EU’s top politico-military strategists and a former adviser to Tony Blair, has written. “It is not to defend Belgium, since no one is going to attack it. Rather, it is to demonstrate a sufficient commitment to the ‘West’ that friends and allies, above all the USA, will be there if ever Belgium should need help.”
During their summit last week, the EU’s presidents and prime ministers tasked foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton with drawing up a blueprint for developing closer ties between the Union and NATO. No doubt, Ashton will do her best to present the military alliance as a benevolent one, intent on preventing nascent conflicts from escalating. Gamblers could not expect high odds on terms such as “we wish to exploit the synergies between the two organisations” appearing in her blueprint.
Yet no amount of turgid phrasing can mask how NATO and the EU have already become deeply enmeshed. Officially, six of the EU’s 27 countries are not full members of NATO: Austria, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Malta and Cyprus. Stealthily, however, the entire Union is being drawn into the US-dominated alliance. Sweden and Finland both have troops serving under NATO in Afghanistan, eroding their pretence to be neutral. Cyprus is the only EU country to have so far remained outside NATO’s misnamed Partnership for Peace.
In the past, the “Partnership” has often proven to be a waiting room for NATO accession. There is one exception to this general trend: Russia. Despite joining the Partnership in 1994, Russia has seen its relations with NATO deteriorate over the past decade. A military doctrine approved by Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, in February identified NATO’s continuous expansion into eastern Europe as one of the “main external threats of war”.
Rather than trying to assuage the Kremlin, NATO is still provocatively stretching its tentacles into Russia’s immediate neighbourhood. Ukraine failed to have its bid to join the alliance accepted at the 2008 NATO summit, but has more recently been promised a compensation prize. Within the next five or six years, Ukraine is scheduled to be the first country outside the alliance admitted to its “response force”. This carries the real risk that Kiev will sign up for participation in a conflict that Moscow opposes.
Russia has every right to be concerned, too, by the content of the “strategic concept” that will be rubber-stamped when NATO leaders assemble in Lisbon in November. This policy document will be based on the findings of a recent report indicating that competition for oil and other energy sources will be an issue of critical importance for the alliance in the decades ahead.
Drafted under the guidance of former Shell chief executive Jeroen van der Veer, the report eerily echoes a warning contained in a Russian intelligence assessment from 2007. According to that assessment, a confrontation between Russia and other nations determined to exploit the Arctic’s resources is a distinct possibility. Russia has sounded a bellicose note itself lately; for the first time in 20 years, it has resumed air patrols in a region containing 30% of the world’s undiscovered natural gas and 13% of undiscovered oil, if estimates by American geologists are accurate. Canada, one of several NATO members asserting a claim over the Arctic, has further ratcheted up the tension with Russia by conducting a series of “sovereignty exercises” in the Arctic.
It is no secret, of course, that the US has a seemingly insatiable lust for fossil fuels. Barack Obama may be trying to convince us that America is winding down its military operations in Iraq but major corporations have no intention of quitting the country’s oil-fields. The colonial conquest of Afghanistan, meanwhile, cannot be separated from a plan that the US has had since at least the 1990s to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan. In 2007, Richard Boucher, then the US assistant secretary of state, acknowledged that Washington hoped to source energy from a pipeline linking south and central Asia.
As if the spiralling costs of these wars were not high enough, the US – egged on by Israel – is preparing to attack Iran, home to about 10% of the world’s oil and gas reserves. A recent article by Michel Chossudovsky, economics professor with the University of Ottawa, contends that US wishes not only to control Iran’s energy supplies but also to challenge the influence of Russia and China in the Middle East. The reasons he cites appear far more credible than the official narrative from Washington about wishing to stop Iran from developing a nuclear bomb.
By parroting American propaganda, its allies in NATO and the EU are trying to hoodwink the public into accepting another disastrous war.
•First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 19-25 September 2010
This may seem trivial but it is symptomatic of how the Pentagon regards most of Europe as its puppet. Worse again, senior officials working for our governments promote the subservience as desirable. “What is the point of the Belgian army today?” Robert Cooper, one of the EU’s top politico-military strategists and a former adviser to Tony Blair, has written. “It is not to defend Belgium, since no one is going to attack it. Rather, it is to demonstrate a sufficient commitment to the ‘West’ that friends and allies, above all the USA, will be there if ever Belgium should need help.”
During their summit last week, the EU’s presidents and prime ministers tasked foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton with drawing up a blueprint for developing closer ties between the Union and NATO. No doubt, Ashton will do her best to present the military alliance as a benevolent one, intent on preventing nascent conflicts from escalating. Gamblers could not expect high odds on terms such as “we wish to exploit the synergies between the two organisations” appearing in her blueprint.
Yet no amount of turgid phrasing can mask how NATO and the EU have already become deeply enmeshed. Officially, six of the EU’s 27 countries are not full members of NATO: Austria, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Malta and Cyprus. Stealthily, however, the entire Union is being drawn into the US-dominated alliance. Sweden and Finland both have troops serving under NATO in Afghanistan, eroding their pretence to be neutral. Cyprus is the only EU country to have so far remained outside NATO’s misnamed Partnership for Peace.
In the past, the “Partnership” has often proven to be a waiting room for NATO accession. There is one exception to this general trend: Russia. Despite joining the Partnership in 1994, Russia has seen its relations with NATO deteriorate over the past decade. A military doctrine approved by Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, in February identified NATO’s continuous expansion into eastern Europe as one of the “main external threats of war”.
Rather than trying to assuage the Kremlin, NATO is still provocatively stretching its tentacles into Russia’s immediate neighbourhood. Ukraine failed to have its bid to join the alliance accepted at the 2008 NATO summit, but has more recently been promised a compensation prize. Within the next five or six years, Ukraine is scheduled to be the first country outside the alliance admitted to its “response force”. This carries the real risk that Kiev will sign up for participation in a conflict that Moscow opposes.
Russia has every right to be concerned, too, by the content of the “strategic concept” that will be rubber-stamped when NATO leaders assemble in Lisbon in November. This policy document will be based on the findings of a recent report indicating that competition for oil and other energy sources will be an issue of critical importance for the alliance in the decades ahead.
Drafted under the guidance of former Shell chief executive Jeroen van der Veer, the report eerily echoes a warning contained in a Russian intelligence assessment from 2007. According to that assessment, a confrontation between Russia and other nations determined to exploit the Arctic’s resources is a distinct possibility. Russia has sounded a bellicose note itself lately; for the first time in 20 years, it has resumed air patrols in a region containing 30% of the world’s undiscovered natural gas and 13% of undiscovered oil, if estimates by American geologists are accurate. Canada, one of several NATO members asserting a claim over the Arctic, has further ratcheted up the tension with Russia by conducting a series of “sovereignty exercises” in the Arctic.
It is no secret, of course, that the US has a seemingly insatiable lust for fossil fuels. Barack Obama may be trying to convince us that America is winding down its military operations in Iraq but major corporations have no intention of quitting the country’s oil-fields. The colonial conquest of Afghanistan, meanwhile, cannot be separated from a plan that the US has had since at least the 1990s to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan. In 2007, Richard Boucher, then the US assistant secretary of state, acknowledged that Washington hoped to source energy from a pipeline linking south and central Asia.
As if the spiralling costs of these wars were not high enough, the US – egged on by Israel – is preparing to attack Iran, home to about 10% of the world’s oil and gas reserves. A recent article by Michel Chossudovsky, economics professor with the University of Ottawa, contends that US wishes not only to control Iran’s energy supplies but also to challenge the influence of Russia and China in the Middle East. The reasons he cites appear far more credible than the official narrative from Washington about wishing to stop Iran from developing a nuclear bomb.
By parroting American propaganda, its allies in NATO and the EU are trying to hoodwink the public into accepting another disastrous war.
•First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 19-25 September 2010
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