I haven’t been in the UK since 1990. A lot of things changed and changed almost completely. The UK was always a multi-cultural country but sixteen ago British culture was a part of this “multi”. How ironic! British women spent hundred of years fighting for equality but today they see hundreds of creatures completely clad in black sacks who are treated as house animals by their husbands.
What is even more striking – everyone I know realizes how many problems the “multi-culture” brings but don’t say it aloud. That’s not PC. It reminds me of the Soviet times when everyone understood total imbecility of Soviet propaganda but could discuss it only among friends at kitchen tables. The kitchen table discussions are back in the UK. Is there any political party in the UK that actually voices evident concerns are “multi-culturalism”? There are more and more people on British soil that sincerely hate British culture and British life-styles. What would it lead to?
Some other observations. British kids became very unruly. Women started drinking like men. Much more litter on the streets. Hobos have much fewer teeth.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Monday, December 25, 2006
Friday, November 10, 2006
Where is America's Politkovskaya? Part 2.
This is my answer to Mark Ames question.
Any war dehumanizes people. No matter what were the reasons for war the moment people start killing each other humaneness is lost and sooner or later only the need to survive remains. But fighting nations need soldiers who beyond survival can also behave “heroically”. How can you force a sane person into killing more enthusiastically? He must hate the enemy. He must hate not an abstract enemy but any concrete enemy soldier who looks exactly like you and me. One needs some magic to transform an ordinary person into beast, insect, disgusting piece of dirt, sadist and not actually a human being at all. This task at war is performed by war journalists.
War journalists should satisfy a number of hard demands, like
- The should be brave and courageous. This is a real war after all.
- They should be sincere and truly believe in what they write even when they fantasize.
- They should be able to find some real facts about enemy’s crimes to sound credible.
- They should be able to write beautiful fiction and to add chilling details to the facts they find. Who at war is really interested that two children were killed by a hellicopter missle? A real war correspondent should decribe in great details how the pilot was intentionally hunting the poor kids, how tears of the helpless babies were streaming down their faces, how the pilot was laughing demonically when pushing the button and how horrible their mutilated bodies looked. Some call it death porn but for a war correspondent it’s job – nobody says wars are pretty.
- In case there are no facts at hand war correspondents should always be able to find credible witnesses and make interviews with them.
That's exactly what Anna Politkovskaya was – a war journalist fighting on the side of Chechen rebels. And she did her job fine. I believe her books and articles helped dozens of Chechen men and women to become guirillas and suicide bombers. During proper wars like WW2 nations don’t have war correspondents writing “truth” about their soldiers but in case an army is fighting guerillas like in Chechnya or Iraq things are different. First, such wars are mostly distant and don’t disturb everyday activities of ordinary citizens. Second, we live in a very politically correct world where big transnational NGO’s keep a close eye on human rights and power abuses. This way it’s normal that there’re many Politkovskayas both in Russia and in America. Only people both in Russia or America have very little interest to read books where their sons are described as sadistic orcs from Mordor. Enemy war correspondents are almost always marginal figures to the general public in there native countries but are extremely popular in countries that support their enemies. This is why Politkovskaya was so popular in the West and Gore Vidal is so loved in Iran.
Things would be very different if the war with Iraq would’ve been real. Imagine – Iraqi tanks at the gates of Chicago, half of the country lies in ruins, office workers of yesterday are toiling at production lines. What kind of reaction newspaper stories about American soldiers raping helpless Iraqis would provoke?
Taken, for example, into the context of WW2 Politkovskaya’s best stories would sound outrageous. Imagine a Christmas 1944 Time issue with an article by Ann Politkoff. Young American intelligence officers arrest two poor German farmers Hans and Fritz, put them into a pit with water where they lie naked in their own excements when the temperature is at ice point. From time to time American officers rape them saying, “We do so because your German women don’t want to sleep with us”. At last Hans and Fritz are set free. They find Ann and tell her the story but she has to keep them anonymous as well as the place where they were tortured – evil Americans would certainly hunt them down and kill. “Now the only thing I want is revenge, - says Fritz – That’s why everyone in American uniform is a legitimate target for me.”
The story sounds absolutely absurd. How long can a person survive in a pit with freezing water? Did young intelligence offices washed the poor guys from excrements before raping them? How comes they don’t rape German women who don’t want to sleep with them? Why at last didn’t they kill them? On the other hand if this story would've been published in Voelkischer Beobachter Germans in 1944 would’ve found it totally credible – everybody knows Americans are irrational sadists and perverts.
Any war dehumanizes people. No matter what were the reasons for war the moment people start killing each other humaneness is lost and sooner or later only the need to survive remains. But fighting nations need soldiers who beyond survival can also behave “heroically”. How can you force a sane person into killing more enthusiastically? He must hate the enemy. He must hate not an abstract enemy but any concrete enemy soldier who looks exactly like you and me. One needs some magic to transform an ordinary person into beast, insect, disgusting piece of dirt, sadist and not actually a human being at all. This task at war is performed by war journalists.
War journalists should satisfy a number of hard demands, like
- The should be brave and courageous. This is a real war after all.
- They should be sincere and truly believe in what they write even when they fantasize.
- They should be able to find some real facts about enemy’s crimes to sound credible.
- They should be able to write beautiful fiction and to add chilling details to the facts they find. Who at war is really interested that two children were killed by a hellicopter missle? A real war correspondent should decribe in great details how the pilot was intentionally hunting the poor kids, how tears of the helpless babies were streaming down their faces, how the pilot was laughing demonically when pushing the button and how horrible their mutilated bodies looked. Some call it death porn but for a war correspondent it’s job – nobody says wars are pretty.
- In case there are no facts at hand war correspondents should always be able to find credible witnesses and make interviews with them.
That's exactly what Anna Politkovskaya was – a war journalist fighting on the side of Chechen rebels. And she did her job fine. I believe her books and articles helped dozens of Chechen men and women to become guirillas and suicide bombers. During proper wars like WW2 nations don’t have war correspondents writing “truth” about their soldiers but in case an army is fighting guerillas like in Chechnya or Iraq things are different. First, such wars are mostly distant and don’t disturb everyday activities of ordinary citizens. Second, we live in a very politically correct world where big transnational NGO’s keep a close eye on human rights and power abuses. This way it’s normal that there’re many Politkovskayas both in Russia and in America. Only people both in Russia or America have very little interest to read books where their sons are described as sadistic orcs from Mordor. Enemy war correspondents are almost always marginal figures to the general public in there native countries but are extremely popular in countries that support their enemies. This is why Politkovskaya was so popular in the West and Gore Vidal is so loved in Iran.
Things would be very different if the war with Iraq would’ve been real. Imagine – Iraqi tanks at the gates of Chicago, half of the country lies in ruins, office workers of yesterday are toiling at production lines. What kind of reaction newspaper stories about American soldiers raping helpless Iraqis would provoke?
Taken, for example, into the context of WW2 Politkovskaya’s best stories would sound outrageous. Imagine a Christmas 1944 Time issue with an article by Ann Politkoff. Young American intelligence officers arrest two poor German farmers Hans and Fritz, put them into a pit with water where they lie naked in their own excements when the temperature is at ice point. From time to time American officers rape them saying, “We do so because your German women don’t want to sleep with us”. At last Hans and Fritz are set free. They find Ann and tell her the story but she has to keep them anonymous as well as the place where they were tortured – evil Americans would certainly hunt them down and kill. “Now the only thing I want is revenge, - says Fritz – That’s why everyone in American uniform is a legitimate target for me.”
The story sounds absolutely absurd. How long can a person survive in a pit with freezing water? Did young intelligence offices washed the poor guys from excrements before raping them? How comes they don’t rape German women who don’t want to sleep with them? Why at last didn’t they kill them? On the other hand if this story would've been published in Voelkischer Beobachter Germans in 1944 would’ve found it totally credible – everybody knows Americans are irrational sadists and perverts.
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Sticking it up Vladimir the Impaler
This is an article by N.Petro published at Asian Times Online.
Sticking it up Vladimir the Impaler
By Nicolai N Petro
Among Russian President Vladimir Putin's many sins, surely the most outrageous is that he dares to compare Russia to the West. He has clearly forgotten Russia's proper role in our Narrative of Western Civilization: to serve as a poignant example of all the sins that we never commit. Putin has the temerity to suggest that Russia and the West face similar problems, and the gall to think that the West could even learn a thing or two from Russia.
Quite understandably the US media have responded to such insolence with a collective "ecrasez l'infame!" After the Group of Eight summit on July 19, the venerable Times of London politely told Putin that we Westerners didn't appreciate his wisecracks about the scandals surrounding Lord Levy (Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief fundraiser, dubbed "Lord Cashpoint") or democracy in Iraq. "A little more grace, and less hubris," if you please, wrote The Times.
Hear, hear! The last thing any of us needs is to hear about corruption, criminality, and violence in our own countries. Why, the next thing you know Putin will discover racism in some benighted corner of our enlightened lands and start quoting Samuel Johnson at Americans: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"
The Times editorial quite properly pointed out that, as host at the G8, it was quite ungracious of Putin to give voice to such piffle. As every civilized person knows, the mark of true gentility is to attack your guest at a private dinner in his honor, as the president of the European Parliament, Josep Borrell, did at recent the EU-Russia summit in Lahti, Finland.
According the Italian daily La Stampa, Borrell introduced his guest by sarcastically remarking that "we should be thanking Putin for closing the pipelines to Ukraine last January, which has brought us here to talk about energy". From there he spoke movingly of his concern for human rights, non-governmental organizations and the free press (only in Russia, of course). "We buy oil from the worst countries," he added sadly, "but we don't ask them to share our values."
What subtlety! What grace! What a coincidence that his remarks at an event closed to the press were leaked in time for the morning editions.
Putin, though, has still not learned to sit quietly and bow his head in shame. First, he slyly admitted that he too was concerned about crime, but then added that surely Russia wasn't the only country that had such problems. What about the recent criminal indictments of several Spanish mayors, and oh, by the way, "The mafia was not born in Russia."
One could have heard a fork drop on the fine linen tablecloth. The 25 European Union leaders who had gathered to gang up on the Russian president that evening could scarcely believe their ears. Once again Putin had violated one of the cardinal principles of our relations with Russia by comparing his problems to ours.
The danger in such behavior should be apparent to all. If Russia's problems are seen as in any sense comparable to our own, then it can no longer be excluded from Western institutions on the basis of its cultural incompatibility, and what else is really left?
Militarily, as everyone knows, Russia is but a shadow of the former Soviet Union. It poses so little threat that when Georgia seized four Russian military officers, the Russian parliament responded by speeding up the withdrawal of its remaining forces. Georgian Minister of Defense Irakli Okruashvili now regularly dares Russia to try to invade his country.
Economically Russia has done better, but its foreign investments overseas still put it on a par with Malaysia. As an energy provider, Russia supplies Europe with about a quarter of its natural gas, but this is two-thirds of Russia's gas exports, so that actually Russia is far more dependent on its European consumers than they are on it.
Putin's wily retorts pose a real and present danger to the West, however, precisely because they erode the sharp distinction between Western and Russian identity, between Western and Russian values, that are needed to safeguard Western Unity.
If this distinction disappears, pray tell, how will we be able to sustain our fear of Russia? If Russia's domestic debates are likened to our own, or if the Western press should begin reporting about all the areas of cultural, economic and political similarities that already exist between Russia and the West, I ask you, how will we preserve a proper sense of Russia's fundamental alienness?
Will we still be able to distinguish clearly between the perfectly tolerable levels of corruption, intolerance, and violence in the West and the totally intolerable levels of the same in Russia? In Russia's reflection, might not our own domestic and foreign policies soon begin appear less than ideal?
This is a very slippery slope. Ultimately, such thinking could lead to questions about whether "Western values" are truly the best for all nations at all times. The faint-hearted among us might even be drawn to consider the possibility of cross-cultural dialogue about the meaning and political usefulness of such terms as "democracy" and "human rights".
Down this treacherous path one can envisage multilateral initiatives, based on more culturally inclusive definitions of democracy, taking the place of the tried and true strategies of "regime change" and "democratic-values education" promoted by the administration of US President George W Bush. Perish the thought!
That is why it is of such vital importance that Putin's uppity attitude be firmly swatted down at every opportunity and why I, for one, applaud the Western media for their diligence in this regard. The alternatives are simply too awful to contemplate.
Nicolai N Petro served as the US State Department's special assistant for policy on the Soviet Union under president George H W Bush, and now teaches international politics at the University of Rhode Island.
Sticking it up Vladimir the Impaler
By Nicolai N Petro
Among Russian President Vladimir Putin's many sins, surely the most outrageous is that he dares to compare Russia to the West. He has clearly forgotten Russia's proper role in our Narrative of Western Civilization: to serve as a poignant example of all the sins that we never commit. Putin has the temerity to suggest that Russia and the West face similar problems, and the gall to think that the West could even learn a thing or two from Russia.
Quite understandably the US media have responded to such insolence with a collective "ecrasez l'infame!" After the Group of Eight summit on July 19, the venerable Times of London politely told Putin that we Westerners didn't appreciate his wisecracks about the scandals surrounding Lord Levy (Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief fundraiser, dubbed "Lord Cashpoint") or democracy in Iraq. "A little more grace, and less hubris," if you please, wrote The Times.
Hear, hear! The last thing any of us needs is to hear about corruption, criminality, and violence in our own countries. Why, the next thing you know Putin will discover racism in some benighted corner of our enlightened lands and start quoting Samuel Johnson at Americans: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"
The Times editorial quite properly pointed out that, as host at the G8, it was quite ungracious of Putin to give voice to such piffle. As every civilized person knows, the mark of true gentility is to attack your guest at a private dinner in his honor, as the president of the European Parliament, Josep Borrell, did at recent the EU-Russia summit in Lahti, Finland.
According the Italian daily La Stampa, Borrell introduced his guest by sarcastically remarking that "we should be thanking Putin for closing the pipelines to Ukraine last January, which has brought us here to talk about energy". From there he spoke movingly of his concern for human rights, non-governmental organizations and the free press (only in Russia, of course). "We buy oil from the worst countries," he added sadly, "but we don't ask them to share our values."
What subtlety! What grace! What a coincidence that his remarks at an event closed to the press were leaked in time for the morning editions.
Putin, though, has still not learned to sit quietly and bow his head in shame. First, he slyly admitted that he too was concerned about crime, but then added that surely Russia wasn't the only country that had such problems. What about the recent criminal indictments of several Spanish mayors, and oh, by the way, "The mafia was not born in Russia."
One could have heard a fork drop on the fine linen tablecloth. The 25 European Union leaders who had gathered to gang up on the Russian president that evening could scarcely believe their ears. Once again Putin had violated one of the cardinal principles of our relations with Russia by comparing his problems to ours.
The danger in such behavior should be apparent to all. If Russia's problems are seen as in any sense comparable to our own, then it can no longer be excluded from Western institutions on the basis of its cultural incompatibility, and what else is really left?
Militarily, as everyone knows, Russia is but a shadow of the former Soviet Union. It poses so little threat that when Georgia seized four Russian military officers, the Russian parliament responded by speeding up the withdrawal of its remaining forces. Georgian Minister of Defense Irakli Okruashvili now regularly dares Russia to try to invade his country.
Economically Russia has done better, but its foreign investments overseas still put it on a par with Malaysia. As an energy provider, Russia supplies Europe with about a quarter of its natural gas, but this is two-thirds of Russia's gas exports, so that actually Russia is far more dependent on its European consumers than they are on it.
Putin's wily retorts pose a real and present danger to the West, however, precisely because they erode the sharp distinction between Western and Russian identity, between Western and Russian values, that are needed to safeguard Western Unity.
If this distinction disappears, pray tell, how will we be able to sustain our fear of Russia? If Russia's domestic debates are likened to our own, or if the Western press should begin reporting about all the areas of cultural, economic and political similarities that already exist between Russia and the West, I ask you, how will we preserve a proper sense of Russia's fundamental alienness?
Will we still be able to distinguish clearly between the perfectly tolerable levels of corruption, intolerance, and violence in the West and the totally intolerable levels of the same in Russia? In Russia's reflection, might not our own domestic and foreign policies soon begin appear less than ideal?
This is a very slippery slope. Ultimately, such thinking could lead to questions about whether "Western values" are truly the best for all nations at all times. The faint-hearted among us might even be drawn to consider the possibility of cross-cultural dialogue about the meaning and political usefulness of such terms as "democracy" and "human rights".
Down this treacherous path one can envisage multilateral initiatives, based on more culturally inclusive definitions of democracy, taking the place of the tried and true strategies of "regime change" and "democratic-values education" promoted by the administration of US President George W Bush. Perish the thought!
That is why it is of such vital importance that Putin's uppity attitude be firmly swatted down at every opportunity and why I, for one, applaud the Western media for their diligence in this regard. The alternatives are simply too awful to contemplate.
Nicolai N Petro served as the US State Department's special assistant for policy on the Soviet Union under president George H W Bush, and now teaches international politics at the University of Rhode Island.
Friday, October 27, 2006
Where Is America's Politkovskaya?
This article by Mark Ames was published in eXile a week ago. Here's the link to the original.
The murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was one of those horrible events which trigger the worst in everyone, when all the wrong lessons are drawn, and all the spite and savagery explode. Even by the 21st century's already sub-vile standards, her assassination managed to inspire an entirely new level of hysteria, opportunism and tactlessness so sphincter-twisting that it makes you wonder if it wouldn't just be better to hand the entire Judeo-Christian world over to the Chinese now, rather than waiting another agonizing 20 years. At least the Chinese have tact, for chrissakes.
On one side of the Global Toilet was President Putin, normally an impressive politician, but who, at critical times, cannot contain his own viciously raw vanity. By keeping silent for two days after her murder, and then finally speaking out only to minimize her importance, Putin came off looking like a regular asshole. Leaving aside for now the issue of whether or not Putin was "right" in minimizing Politkovskaya's importance in Russia -- technically he was largely "correct" -- what mattered was what his nasty reaction revealed about his character. Any skilled politician would have swallowed his petty grudges and embraced her corpse, squeezing out of it as much political capital as possible. This isn't rocket science stuff -- it's just cynical politicking 101, and it's the right thing to do. Why did Putin's normally adept bloodless skills fail him on this occasion? I think for the same reason that Bush fled from the battle scene on 9/11, snagglepussing at Mach-3 to a snakehole in Nebraska until the coast was long clear, rather than flying straight from Florida to DC and looking the part of the fearless hero. He couldn't help himself. Big, unexpected events reveal the smallness in our leaders.
Most Russians I know reacted somewhere between indifference and mild disgust at the murder. But if you read the Russian internet, you'd realize that Putin came off as a weepy liberal: a good part of the "active" community only wished that Politkovskaya had been killed far more slowly, much sooner, and that they could have perhaps been part of the hit team who did it. Nice, really fucking nice.
On the other side -- the side that matters far more to me -- was the West. Unlike Putin, the Western media wasted no time in seizing Politkovskaya's corpse for their own purposes, parading it around and milking it for every ounce it was worth.
What exactly was Anna Politkovskaya's bullet-riddled corpse worth to the West? No surprise here: A juicy opportunity to demonize Putin and Russia.
Immediately after her murder, Reuters showed how her death was going to be spun with the headline, "Outspoken Putin Critic Shot Dead In Moscow." The implication was obvious: Putin ordered it.
Articles noted that she was killed on Putin's birthday, implying that it was a gift to himself. On the eve of his visit to Germany to close a big energy contract. Can you imagine Putin actually ordering the hit on his birthday, just before meeting Merkel for a key energy summit? "Okay, here's the plan, Sechin. I want you to kill Politkovskaya. I know, it's true that her articles have almost no effect on our policies in Chechnya and are ignored by all but a small percentage of liberal Russians, but so what. Oo, she makes me so angry! Once she's out of the way, my grip on power will finally be secured. Mwah-hah-hah! But wait, that's not all. Oh no, I'm much more dastardly than that. See, I'm not asking for much for my birthday, Sechin. Forget the Bulgari watches that you guys give me every year. I want her corpse brought to me with a big red birthday bow tied around it. I want to kill her on my birthday, just before my big meeting in Germany. They'll understand. After all, they're Germans. You know--Nazis, just like me! Deal? Yeah? Oh, goodie! I'm so deliciously evil, even Stewie would envy me. Why, this is going to be the best birthday of my life! Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday to me!..."
But that was just the beginning. The notoriously Russophobic Fred Hiatt at the Washington Post published an editorial that more directly implicated Putin: "It is quite possible, without performing any detective work, to say what is ultimately responsible for these deaths: It is the climate of brutality that has flourished under Mr. Putin."
This is a cheap way of saying that Putin is responsible, but like most Russia-haters, they leave out some obvious contradictions. Such as, for example, is Putin also responsible for the hit on Paul Klebnikov, who was profoundly pro-Putin? And what about all the journalists murdered during Yeltsin's tenure? Did Hiatt or any of the others ever blame Yeltsin -- the one who truly introduced the brutality, corruption and lawlessness into Russia? No, of course not, because Yeltsin did The West's bidding. Crimes committed while being pro-American simply do not exist.
Anne Applebaum, one of the Post's resident neocons, went the extra sleazy mile when she got ahold of Politkovskaya's corpse. In her October 9th column, "A Moscow Murder Story," Applebaum simply lied about the circumstances of her murder, and quite consciously so, when she essentially blamed Klebnikov's inconvenient death, as well as other provincial journalists killed for investigating local corruption, on Putin. Interestingly, in her article she openly narrows her focus on "journalists killed after 2000" -- gee, how convenient. Because that means she wouldn't have to mention all the journalists killed during Yeltsin's term, since that would muddy up the good/evil picture that her entire thesis rests on.
Applebaum is a special case, one of those moral crusaders, the American Anna Politkovskaya, who has made a living courageously exposing state crimes committed by...get this...not her own country, oh heck no! Because her own country only does good! Nope, Anne Applebaum makes her living by sitting in the safety of Washington DC, and exposing crimes committed by a country on the other side of the globe! That country being Russia of course. Hey, give that woman a Pulitzer, will ya?! Hence her book Gulag, packed with all the affected moral outrage that you'd expect. Indeed, one thing that has always filled Applebaum with rage is wondering why Russians don't take her seriously (a question she poses as more abstract -- ie, why don't Russians care about the Gulags as much as Anne does?). Here's why: Can you imagine how much moral authority a right-wing Russian journalist's book about the American genocide of Indians would have in America? Answer: about as much as Anne's book has in Russia. None.
Yes, it's dangerous work to dedicate your life to exposing the horrors committed by a country that your husband hates. Applebaum's husband is Poland's right-wing Defense Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who also serves in the neocon American Enterprise Institute, the same institute that essentially invented the current Iraq war. The current government that Sikorski serves in, by the way, includes the extreme right-wing party The League of Polish Families, leading to protests from Israel because of the party's open anti-Semitism and xenophobia, and its notorious skinhead youth group. But that's okay by Anne, because Poland likes America and is a member of the Coalition of the Willing. Meaning no hissy articles from Anne Applebaum about her husband's pals or Poland's repulsive history of Jewish slaughter. Nor will you read too many articles by Applebaum about her own country's atrocious crimes committed in Iraq, and the hundreds of thousands her government has killed.
No person could be as far from Politkovskaya as Anne Applebaum. Given all of Applebaum's influence and access, she only uses that power to demonize Russia and whitewash America's fascism. Politkovskaya, on the other hand, speaking from extreme weakness and danger, used what little influence she had to risk all for the victims of her own goverment's cruelty, fighting from within.
Easily the most absurd Politkovskaya article was by the notorious Brit hack Olga Craig, in her piece in the Sunday Telegraph titled "Cross Putin And Die." It begins with an obviously manufactured story of a terrified small-time journalist supposedly fleeing for his life from Putin's Russia -- the invented journalist is given a pseudonym, "Zakayev," he's apparently so scared... and from there, well, you can fill in the blanks yourself. His alleged crime is that he criticized the disgusting crackdown on ethnic Georgians--and yet, there was vicious open criticism of the crackdown as fascistic all over the Russian print and internet media. But supposedly, this guy had to flee for his life -- "Now 'Zakayev' is convinced that someone, most probably a hired hitman with links to the Kremlin, is already stalking his movements." It's pure cartoon bullshit, one of the worst made-up hack stories you'll read in your life.
But the knockout blow was yet to be delivered. Politkovskaya's corpse could not be buried before the Western press squeezed it for the biggest prize of all: Pure, total demonization. The "F" word. Yes, the Economist declared, "It is an over-used word, and a controversial one, especially in Russia. It is not there yet, but Russia sometimes seems to be heading towards fascism."
If Fascism means gas chambers, then all talk of it is utterly meaningless and empty--it's the most over-abused epithet, and simply by acknowledging that doesn't excuse the Economist of rank historial distortion. However, if "Fascism" means what I think they mean -- violence and lies and hate -- then America, which used a lie as a pretext to invade a country on the other side of the globe, completely leveled a city of 300,000, and killed half a million citizens, all the while violently suppressing the truth and anyone who tries to get it out -- is guilty as charged.
The West has used poor Anna Politkovskaya's corpse to do exactly what she fought against: whipping up national hatred, lying, and focusing on evils committed safely far away, rather than on the evils committed by your own country. The West has exploited her death with all of the crudity and cynicism of an Arab mob funeral...only at least the Arabs use their own people's corpses to demonize an enemy that actually kills them. Whereas in this case, the West stole another country's corpse, then paraded it at home in order to whip up hatred against the corpse's birthplace. It would be like the Palestinians slipping into Tel Aviv, grave-robbing Rabin's corpse after his murder, then parading it around Gaza City, ululating hate towards Israel for allowing the great peacemaker to get killed.
That's kind of how Russians reacted when they saw that the West crudely exploited Politkovskaya's murder. The West's crude reaction only increased Russia's crude counter-reaction...
If you ask me, what is most significant for us in the West about Anna Politkovskaya's death, and her courageous life (btw, a big "fuck you" to our nationalist readers who don't agree with this), is not so much what it says about Russia -- it doesn't say much new at all, to be honest, but instead is another chapter in an increasingly depressing story that started under Yeltsin.
Rather, what is significant about her death is this: Why doesn't America have an Anna Politkovskaya? Why don't we have someone as courageous as she was to tell the story of how we razed Fallujah to the ground Grozny-style? How we bombed to smithereens and ethnically cleansed a city of 300,000 people in retaliation for the deaths of four American contractors? Where is the American Anna Politkovskaya who will tell us about how we directly killed roughly 200,000 Iraqis, and indirectly are responsible for about half a million Iraq deaths since our invasion? Why isn't there a single American willing to risk almost certain death, the way Politkovskaya did, in the pursuit of truth and humanity?
One reason why is because they risk getting killed not only by Iraqi insurgents and Al Qaeda terrorists, but also by the highly efficient American forces. (Not that this stopped Politkovskaya, but it stops America's righteous Politkovskaya-bearers.) And even if they get the story out, it gets quashed by the mainstream press, you lose your job, and you get met by a hostile, even bloodthirsty public who doesn't want to hear about it.
Take the case of Yasser Salihee, an Iraqi correspondent for Knight Ridder. Salihee was shot by an American sniper with a bullet to his head on June 24, 2005. At the time, he was gathering material for an investigative piece about how the US was training death squads -- the very same death squads which are now responsible for the savage civil war that kicked into high gear this year.
Salihee was killed; the American sniper was cleared; and Knight Ridder washed its hands, declaring "there's no reason to think that the shooting had anything to do with his reporting work." Imagine an analogous situation in Chechnya, the hue and cry from the Applebaums -- it'd be as inversely loud as the silence over Salihee's death. At least even the Kremlin admits Politkovskaya was killed for her reporting.
Indeed Salihee is just one of a number of journalists killed in Iraq, by far the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. And it's not all the insurgents' fault either. Some more marginal journalists, from Robert Fisk to Dahr Jamail, have written about how US forces in Iraq target journalists for murder. But no one wants to hear that -- so these kinds of reports stay on the margins. Journalists were targeted and killed at Al Jazeera; at first, reports that the Americans targeted them were dismissed as "conspiracy theory" talk, but recently, admissions that Bush, Blair, and a former Blair minister all explored ways to bomb Al Jazeera during the war are finally raising questions. Well, not really. Should be raising questions, leading to impassioned editorials by the Post and Anne Applebaum. But they're not, because they're too busy demonizing Russia.
Giuliana Sgrena, the Italian journalist who was kidnapped last year in Iraq and freed by an Italian intelligence agent, was shot and wounded (the agent was killed) by US forces when she was returning to freedom. She insisted that US troops deliberately targeted her. A smear campaign in the US press -- labeling her a Communist and an anti-American with Stockholm Syndrome-- effectively nullified her story, but even pro-Bush Berlusconi was so incensed by the incident that he started to back away from Bush's war.
Italian TV later discovered evidence that US forces had used an illegal WMD, white phosphorus chemicals, during its destruction of Fallujah the year before. In spite of all the evidence, including burned corpses whose clothes were still intact, eyewitnesses, and even friendly Iraqi ministers who denounced it, the American media largely ignored it. Why the fuck did Italian TV, and not American TV, break this story? Where was Anne Applebaum on the atrocities in Fallujah?
The case of Eason Jordan, CNN's longtime superstar news chief, might explain the mainstream American media's silence. This is what happens when you're a mainstream American media man who dares to tell the ugly truth about Iraq. While hobnobbing with the Global Aristocracy at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January of 2005, Jordan made the mistake of telling his fellow elite what was really happening in Iraq: American forces were "out to get journalists, and some were deliberately targeting journalists."
Within two weeks, the longtime CNN honcho was out of work. His resignation came complete with a Stalin-esque confession that's chilling to read today:
"After 23 years at CNN," he wrote, "I have decided to resign in an effort to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my recent remarks regarding the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq. I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists, and I apologize to anyone who thought I said or believed otherwise."
Yes, he was a wrecker and a Trotskyite, and he begged for forgiveness. Because the man was dead -- in America, losing your job like that, after bad-mouthing America, means you're as good as dead.
A number of journalists have had their careers destroyed for not following the Party Line: Peter Arnett, Ashleigh Banfield, to name two of the most prominent. Meanwhile, the editors at the New York Times and the Washington Post who pushed for war, who spread lies about WMDs and helped bring about the 500,000 deaths reported today (a figure that of course is being attacked and demonized by the same people who cheer an organization's "courage" when such figures are arrived at in Chechnya), get to keep their jobs.
You can see now why we have no Politkovskaya, as badly as we need one. If you go against the "fascist" tendency in your home country, you're targeted for death and career destruction by the government and a bloodthirsty right-wing population. Just as with Chechnya, Iraq has been made too dangerous to work in, and the American government has put a perfectly air-tight lid on information, not even allowing photographs of the coffins of dead American servicemen.
The way Putin managed to bring the media more tightly under his heel than Yeltsin managed during his tenure was by a combination of brute intimidation and career-intimidation. Media heads were pressured, critics were harassed and ruthlessly mocked. Putin also managed to tap into a growing nationalist backlash against the anti-government criticism in the liberal media, much as Republicans constantly tap the American public's rabid patriotism and hatred of the "liberal media" for criticizing or questioning right-wing, militaristic policies. All of the good Russian journalists I know got out a few years ago because it was a bad career, unless you were going to do the equivalent of FOX News, which most refused to do. American journalists, on the other hand, manage to stay working under these circumstances because they can comfort themselves with homegrown lies, such as, "Sure I'd like to print something else, but I don't want to risk it. But the difference is, at least we have the RIGHT to publish what we want about Iraq."
The lesson of Anna Politkovskaya's fearless journalism was completely lost on the West. It's up to Russians to figure out the significance of her murder to their culture and their civilization. But in a West increasingly drowning in lies, war, murder and hatred, the last thing her death should give us is the opportunity to create another enemy, another nation to hate, another regime to be changed.
Mark Ames "Where Is America's Politkovskaya?"
The murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was one of those horrible events which trigger the worst in everyone, when all the wrong lessons are drawn, and all the spite and savagery explode. Even by the 21st century's already sub-vile standards, her assassination managed to inspire an entirely new level of hysteria, opportunism and tactlessness so sphincter-twisting that it makes you wonder if it wouldn't just be better to hand the entire Judeo-Christian world over to the Chinese now, rather than waiting another agonizing 20 years. At least the Chinese have tact, for chrissakes.
On one side of the Global Toilet was President Putin, normally an impressive politician, but who, at critical times, cannot contain his own viciously raw vanity. By keeping silent for two days after her murder, and then finally speaking out only to minimize her importance, Putin came off looking like a regular asshole. Leaving aside for now the issue of whether or not Putin was "right" in minimizing Politkovskaya's importance in Russia -- technically he was largely "correct" -- what mattered was what his nasty reaction revealed about his character. Any skilled politician would have swallowed his petty grudges and embraced her corpse, squeezing out of it as much political capital as possible. This isn't rocket science stuff -- it's just cynical politicking 101, and it's the right thing to do. Why did Putin's normally adept bloodless skills fail him on this occasion? I think for the same reason that Bush fled from the battle scene on 9/11, snagglepussing at Mach-3 to a snakehole in Nebraska until the coast was long clear, rather than flying straight from Florida to DC and looking the part of the fearless hero. He couldn't help himself. Big, unexpected events reveal the smallness in our leaders.
Most Russians I know reacted somewhere between indifference and mild disgust at the murder. But if you read the Russian internet, you'd realize that Putin came off as a weepy liberal: a good part of the "active" community only wished that Politkovskaya had been killed far more slowly, much sooner, and that they could have perhaps been part of the hit team who did it. Nice, really fucking nice.
On the other side -- the side that matters far more to me -- was the West. Unlike Putin, the Western media wasted no time in seizing Politkovskaya's corpse for their own purposes, parading it around and milking it for every ounce it was worth.
What exactly was Anna Politkovskaya's bullet-riddled corpse worth to the West? No surprise here: A juicy opportunity to demonize Putin and Russia.
Immediately after her murder, Reuters showed how her death was going to be spun with the headline, "Outspoken Putin Critic Shot Dead In Moscow." The implication was obvious: Putin ordered it.
Articles noted that she was killed on Putin's birthday, implying that it was a gift to himself. On the eve of his visit to Germany to close a big energy contract. Can you imagine Putin actually ordering the hit on his birthday, just before meeting Merkel for a key energy summit? "Okay, here's the plan, Sechin. I want you to kill Politkovskaya. I know, it's true that her articles have almost no effect on our policies in Chechnya and are ignored by all but a small percentage of liberal Russians, but so what. Oo, she makes me so angry! Once she's out of the way, my grip on power will finally be secured. Mwah-hah-hah! But wait, that's not all. Oh no, I'm much more dastardly than that. See, I'm not asking for much for my birthday, Sechin. Forget the Bulgari watches that you guys give me every year. I want her corpse brought to me with a big red birthday bow tied around it. I want to kill her on my birthday, just before my big meeting in Germany. They'll understand. After all, they're Germans. You know--Nazis, just like me! Deal? Yeah? Oh, goodie! I'm so deliciously evil, even Stewie would envy me. Why, this is going to be the best birthday of my life! Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday to me!..."
But that was just the beginning. The notoriously Russophobic Fred Hiatt at the Washington Post published an editorial that more directly implicated Putin: "It is quite possible, without performing any detective work, to say what is ultimately responsible for these deaths: It is the climate of brutality that has flourished under Mr. Putin."
This is a cheap way of saying that Putin is responsible, but like most Russia-haters, they leave out some obvious contradictions. Such as, for example, is Putin also responsible for the hit on Paul Klebnikov, who was profoundly pro-Putin? And what about all the journalists murdered during Yeltsin's tenure? Did Hiatt or any of the others ever blame Yeltsin -- the one who truly introduced the brutality, corruption and lawlessness into Russia? No, of course not, because Yeltsin did The West's bidding. Crimes committed while being pro-American simply do not exist.
Anne Applebaum, one of the Post's resident neocons, went the extra sleazy mile when she got ahold of Politkovskaya's corpse. In her October 9th column, "A Moscow Murder Story," Applebaum simply lied about the circumstances of her murder, and quite consciously so, when she essentially blamed Klebnikov's inconvenient death, as well as other provincial journalists killed for investigating local corruption, on Putin. Interestingly, in her article she openly narrows her focus on "journalists killed after 2000" -- gee, how convenient. Because that means she wouldn't have to mention all the journalists killed during Yeltsin's term, since that would muddy up the good/evil picture that her entire thesis rests on.
Applebaum is a special case, one of those moral crusaders, the American Anna Politkovskaya, who has made a living courageously exposing state crimes committed by...get this...not her own country, oh heck no! Because her own country only does good! Nope, Anne Applebaum makes her living by sitting in the safety of Washington DC, and exposing crimes committed by a country on the other side of the globe! That country being Russia of course. Hey, give that woman a Pulitzer, will ya?! Hence her book Gulag, packed with all the affected moral outrage that you'd expect. Indeed, one thing that has always filled Applebaum with rage is wondering why Russians don't take her seriously (a question she poses as more abstract -- ie, why don't Russians care about the Gulags as much as Anne does?). Here's why: Can you imagine how much moral authority a right-wing Russian journalist's book about the American genocide of Indians would have in America? Answer: about as much as Anne's book has in Russia. None.
Yes, it's dangerous work to dedicate your life to exposing the horrors committed by a country that your husband hates. Applebaum's husband is Poland's right-wing Defense Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who also serves in the neocon American Enterprise Institute, the same institute that essentially invented the current Iraq war. The current government that Sikorski serves in, by the way, includes the extreme right-wing party The League of Polish Families, leading to protests from Israel because of the party's open anti-Semitism and xenophobia, and its notorious skinhead youth group. But that's okay by Anne, because Poland likes America and is a member of the Coalition of the Willing. Meaning no hissy articles from Anne Applebaum about her husband's pals or Poland's repulsive history of Jewish slaughter. Nor will you read too many articles by Applebaum about her own country's atrocious crimes committed in Iraq, and the hundreds of thousands her government has killed.
No person could be as far from Politkovskaya as Anne Applebaum. Given all of Applebaum's influence and access, she only uses that power to demonize Russia and whitewash America's fascism. Politkovskaya, on the other hand, speaking from extreme weakness and danger, used what little influence she had to risk all for the victims of her own goverment's cruelty, fighting from within.
Easily the most absurd Politkovskaya article was by the notorious Brit hack Olga Craig, in her piece in the Sunday Telegraph titled "Cross Putin And Die." It begins with an obviously manufactured story of a terrified small-time journalist supposedly fleeing for his life from Putin's Russia -- the invented journalist is given a pseudonym, "Zakayev," he's apparently so scared... and from there, well, you can fill in the blanks yourself. His alleged crime is that he criticized the disgusting crackdown on ethnic Georgians--and yet, there was vicious open criticism of the crackdown as fascistic all over the Russian print and internet media. But supposedly, this guy had to flee for his life -- "Now 'Zakayev' is convinced that someone, most probably a hired hitman with links to the Kremlin, is already stalking his movements." It's pure cartoon bullshit, one of the worst made-up hack stories you'll read in your life.
But the knockout blow was yet to be delivered. Politkovskaya's corpse could not be buried before the Western press squeezed it for the biggest prize of all: Pure, total demonization. The "F" word. Yes, the Economist declared, "It is an over-used word, and a controversial one, especially in Russia. It is not there yet, but Russia sometimes seems to be heading towards fascism."
If Fascism means gas chambers, then all talk of it is utterly meaningless and empty--it's the most over-abused epithet, and simply by acknowledging that doesn't excuse the Economist of rank historial distortion. However, if "Fascism" means what I think they mean -- violence and lies and hate -- then America, which used a lie as a pretext to invade a country on the other side of the globe, completely leveled a city of 300,000, and killed half a million citizens, all the while violently suppressing the truth and anyone who tries to get it out -- is guilty as charged.
The West has used poor Anna Politkovskaya's corpse to do exactly what she fought against: whipping up national hatred, lying, and focusing on evils committed safely far away, rather than on the evils committed by your own country. The West has exploited her death with all of the crudity and cynicism of an Arab mob funeral...only at least the Arabs use their own people's corpses to demonize an enemy that actually kills them. Whereas in this case, the West stole another country's corpse, then paraded it at home in order to whip up hatred against the corpse's birthplace. It would be like the Palestinians slipping into Tel Aviv, grave-robbing Rabin's corpse after his murder, then parading it around Gaza City, ululating hate towards Israel for allowing the great peacemaker to get killed.
That's kind of how Russians reacted when they saw that the West crudely exploited Politkovskaya's murder. The West's crude reaction only increased Russia's crude counter-reaction...
If you ask me, what is most significant for us in the West about Anna Politkovskaya's death, and her courageous life (btw, a big "fuck you" to our nationalist readers who don't agree with this), is not so much what it says about Russia -- it doesn't say much new at all, to be honest, but instead is another chapter in an increasingly depressing story that started under Yeltsin.
Rather, what is significant about her death is this: Why doesn't America have an Anna Politkovskaya? Why don't we have someone as courageous as she was to tell the story of how we razed Fallujah to the ground Grozny-style? How we bombed to smithereens and ethnically cleansed a city of 300,000 people in retaliation for the deaths of four American contractors? Where is the American Anna Politkovskaya who will tell us about how we directly killed roughly 200,000 Iraqis, and indirectly are responsible for about half a million Iraq deaths since our invasion? Why isn't there a single American willing to risk almost certain death, the way Politkovskaya did, in the pursuit of truth and humanity?
One reason why is because they risk getting killed not only by Iraqi insurgents and Al Qaeda terrorists, but also by the highly efficient American forces. (Not that this stopped Politkovskaya, but it stops America's righteous Politkovskaya-bearers.) And even if they get the story out, it gets quashed by the mainstream press, you lose your job, and you get met by a hostile, even bloodthirsty public who doesn't want to hear about it.
Take the case of Yasser Salihee, an Iraqi correspondent for Knight Ridder. Salihee was shot by an American sniper with a bullet to his head on June 24, 2005. At the time, he was gathering material for an investigative piece about how the US was training death squads -- the very same death squads which are now responsible for the savage civil war that kicked into high gear this year.
Salihee was killed; the American sniper was cleared; and Knight Ridder washed its hands, declaring "there's no reason to think that the shooting had anything to do with his reporting work." Imagine an analogous situation in Chechnya, the hue and cry from the Applebaums -- it'd be as inversely loud as the silence over Salihee's death. At least even the Kremlin admits Politkovskaya was killed for her reporting.
Indeed Salihee is just one of a number of journalists killed in Iraq, by far the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. And it's not all the insurgents' fault either. Some more marginal journalists, from Robert Fisk to Dahr Jamail, have written about how US forces in Iraq target journalists for murder. But no one wants to hear that -- so these kinds of reports stay on the margins. Journalists were targeted and killed at Al Jazeera; at first, reports that the Americans targeted them were dismissed as "conspiracy theory" talk, but recently, admissions that Bush, Blair, and a former Blair minister all explored ways to bomb Al Jazeera during the war are finally raising questions. Well, not really. Should be raising questions, leading to impassioned editorials by the Post and Anne Applebaum. But they're not, because they're too busy demonizing Russia.
Giuliana Sgrena, the Italian journalist who was kidnapped last year in Iraq and freed by an Italian intelligence agent, was shot and wounded (the agent was killed) by US forces when she was returning to freedom. She insisted that US troops deliberately targeted her. A smear campaign in the US press -- labeling her a Communist and an anti-American with Stockholm Syndrome-- effectively nullified her story, but even pro-Bush Berlusconi was so incensed by the incident that he started to back away from Bush's war.
Italian TV later discovered evidence that US forces had used an illegal WMD, white phosphorus chemicals, during its destruction of Fallujah the year before. In spite of all the evidence, including burned corpses whose clothes were still intact, eyewitnesses, and even friendly Iraqi ministers who denounced it, the American media largely ignored it. Why the fuck did Italian TV, and not American TV, break this story? Where was Anne Applebaum on the atrocities in Fallujah?
The case of Eason Jordan, CNN's longtime superstar news chief, might explain the mainstream American media's silence. This is what happens when you're a mainstream American media man who dares to tell the ugly truth about Iraq. While hobnobbing with the Global Aristocracy at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January of 2005, Jordan made the mistake of telling his fellow elite what was really happening in Iraq: American forces were "out to get journalists, and some were deliberately targeting journalists."
Within two weeks, the longtime CNN honcho was out of work. His resignation came complete with a Stalin-esque confession that's chilling to read today:
"After 23 years at CNN," he wrote, "I have decided to resign in an effort to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my recent remarks regarding the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq. I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists, and I apologize to anyone who thought I said or believed otherwise."
Yes, he was a wrecker and a Trotskyite, and he begged for forgiveness. Because the man was dead -- in America, losing your job like that, after bad-mouthing America, means you're as good as dead.
A number of journalists have had their careers destroyed for not following the Party Line: Peter Arnett, Ashleigh Banfield, to name two of the most prominent. Meanwhile, the editors at the New York Times and the Washington Post who pushed for war, who spread lies about WMDs and helped bring about the 500,000 deaths reported today (a figure that of course is being attacked and demonized by the same people who cheer an organization's "courage" when such figures are arrived at in Chechnya), get to keep their jobs.
You can see now why we have no Politkovskaya, as badly as we need one. If you go against the "fascist" tendency in your home country, you're targeted for death and career destruction by the government and a bloodthirsty right-wing population. Just as with Chechnya, Iraq has been made too dangerous to work in, and the American government has put a perfectly air-tight lid on information, not even allowing photographs of the coffins of dead American servicemen.
The way Putin managed to bring the media more tightly under his heel than Yeltsin managed during his tenure was by a combination of brute intimidation and career-intimidation. Media heads were pressured, critics were harassed and ruthlessly mocked. Putin also managed to tap into a growing nationalist backlash against the anti-government criticism in the liberal media, much as Republicans constantly tap the American public's rabid patriotism and hatred of the "liberal media" for criticizing or questioning right-wing, militaristic policies. All of the good Russian journalists I know got out a few years ago because it was a bad career, unless you were going to do the equivalent of FOX News, which most refused to do. American journalists, on the other hand, manage to stay working under these circumstances because they can comfort themselves with homegrown lies, such as, "Sure I'd like to print something else, but I don't want to risk it. But the difference is, at least we have the RIGHT to publish what we want about Iraq."
The lesson of Anna Politkovskaya's fearless journalism was completely lost on the West. It's up to Russians to figure out the significance of her murder to their culture and their civilization. But in a West increasingly drowning in lies, war, murder and hatred, the last thing her death should give us is the opportunity to create another enemy, another nation to hate, another regime to be changed.
Mark Ames "Where Is America's Politkovskaya?"
Friday, October 20, 2006
The Emerging Russian Giant Plays its Cards Strategically
The Emerging Russian Giant Plays its Cards Strategically
by F. William Engdahl
October 7, 2006
GlobalResearch.ca
The September 2006 summit in Paris between Russia’s Vladimir Putin, French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, underscored the re-emerging of Russia as a major global power. The new Russia is gaining in influence through a series of strategic moves revolving around its geopolitical assets in energy—most notably its oil and natural gas. It’s doing so by shrewdly taking advantage of the strategic follies and major political blunders of Washington. The new Russia also realizes that if it does not act decisively, it soon will be encircled and trumped by a military rival, USA, for which it has little defenses left. The battle, largely unspoken, is the highest stakes battle in world politics today. Iran and Syria are seen by Washington strategists as mere steps to this great Russian End Game.
The formal Paris summit agenda included French investment in Russia and the issue of Iran’s (Russian-built) nuclear program. Notably, however, it also included the question of future Russian energy supplies to the European Union, notably, Germany. It was an indication of the new strength of Putin’s Russia. Putin told the German Chancellor that Russia would ‘possibly’ redirect some of the future natural gas from its giant Shtokman field in the Barents Sea. The $20 billion project is due to come online 2010 and had been slated to provide liquified natural gas to United States terminals.
Since the devastating setbacks two years ago from the US-sponsored ‘color revolutions’ in Georgia, and then Ukraine, Russia has begun to play its strategic energy cards extremely carefully, from nuclear reactors in Iran to military sales to Venezuela and other Latin American states, to strategic market cooperation deals in natural gas with Algeria.
At the same time, the Bush Administration has dug itself deeper into a geopolitical morass, through a foreign policy agenda which has reckless disregard for its allies as well as its foes. That reckless policy has been associated with former Halliburton CEO, Dick Cheney, more than any other figure in Washington.
The ‘Cheney Presidency,’ which is what historians will no doubt dub the George W. Bush years, has been based on a clear strategy. It has often been misunderstood by critics who had overly focussed on its most visible component, namely, Iraq, the Middle East and the strident war-hawks around the Vice President and his old crony, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld.
The ‘Cheney strategy’ has been a US foreign policy based on securing direct global energy control, control by the Big Four US or US-tied private oil giants-- ChevronTexaco or ExxonMobil, BP or Royal Dutch Shell. Above all, it has aimed at control of all the world’s major oil regions, along with the major natural gas fields. That control has moved in tandem with a growing bid by the United States for total military primacy over the one potential threat to its global ambitions—Russia. Cheney is perhaps the ideal person to weave the US military and energy policies together into a coherent strategy of dominance. During the early 1990’s under father Bush, Cheney was also Secretary of Defense.
The Cheney-Bush administration has been dominated by a coalition of interests between Big Oil and the top industries of the American military-industrial complex. These private corporate interests exercise their power through control of the government policy of the United States. An aggressive militaristic agenda has been essential to it. It is epitomized by Cheney’s former company, Halliburton Inc., at one and the same time the world’s largest energy and geophysical services company, and the world’s largest constructor of military bases.
To comprehend the policy it’s important to look at how Cheney, as Halliburton CEO, viewed the problem of future oil supply on the eve of his becoming Vice President.
‘Where the Prize Ultimately Lies’: Cheney’s 1999 London speech
Back in September 1999, a full year before the US elections which made him the most powerful Vice President in history, Cheney gave a revealing speech before his oil industry peers at the London Institute of Petroleum.. In a global review of the outlook for Big Oil, Cheney made the following comment:
"By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the national oil companies are obviously controlling about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world‘s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies. Even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow. It is true that technology, privatisation and the opening up of a number of countries have created many new opportunities in areas around the world for various oil companies, but looking back to the early 1990‘s, expectations were that significant amounts of the world‘s new resources would come from such areas as the former Soviet Union and from China. Of course that didn‘t turn out quite as expected. Instead it turned out to be deep water successes that yielded the bonanza of the 1990‘s."
The Cheney remarks are worth a careful reading. He posits a conservative rise in global demand for oil by the end of the present decade, i.e. in about 4 years. He estimates the world will need to find an added 50 million barrels of daily output. Total daily oil production at present hovers around the level of some 83 million barrels oil equivalent. This means that to avert catastrophic shortages and the resultant devastating impact on global economic growth, by Cheney’s 1999 estimate, the world must find new oil production equal to more than 50% of the 1999 daily global output, and that, by about 2010. That is the equivalent of five new oil regions equal to today’s Saudi Arabian size. That is a whopping amount of new oil.
Given that it can take up to seven years or more to bring a new major oilfield into full production, that’s also not much time if a horrendous energy crunch and sky-high oil and gas prices are to be averted. Cheney’s estimate was also based on an overly conservative estimate of future oil import demand in China and India, today the two fastest growing oil consumers on the planet.
A second notable point of Cheney’s 1999 London comments was his remark that, ‘the Middle East with two thirds of the world‘s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.’ However, as he revealingly remarked, the oil ‘prize’ of the Middle East was in national or government hands, not open to exploitation by the private market, and thus, hard for Cheney’s Halliburton and his friends in ExxonMobil or Chevron or Shell or BP to get their hands on.
At that time, Iraq, with the second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, was under the rule of Saddam Hussein. Iran, which has the world’s second largest reserves of natural gas, in addition to its huge oil reserves, was ruled by a nationalist theocracy which was not open to US private company oil tenders. The Caspian Sea oil reserves were a subject of bitter geopolitical battle between Washington and Russia.
Cheney’s remark that ‘Oil remains fundamentally a government business,’ and not private, takes on a new significance when we do a fast forward to September 2000, in the heat of the 2000 Bush-Cheney election campaign. That month Cheney, along with Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and many others who went on to join the new Bush Administration, issued a policy report titled, ‘Re-building America’s Defenses.’ The paper was issued by an entity named Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
Cheney’s PNAC group called on the new US President-to-be to find a suitable pretext to declare war on Iraq, in order to occupy it and take direct control over the second largest oil reserves in the Middle East. Their report stated bluntly, ‘While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification (sic), the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein ...’
Cheney signed on to a policy document in September 2000 which declared that the key issue was ‘American force presence in the Gulf,’ and regime change in Iraq, regardless whether Saddam Hussein was good, bad or ugly. It was the first step in moving the US military to ‘where the prize ultimately lies.’
No coincidence that Cheney immediately got the task of heading a Presidential Energy Task Force review in early 2001, where he worked closely with his friends in Big Oil, including the late Ken Lay of Enron, with whom Cheney earlier had been involved in an Afghan gas pipeline project, as well as with James Baker III.
Buried in the debate leading to the US bombing and occupation of Iraq in March 2003 was a lawsuit under the US Freedom of Information Act brought by Sierra Club and Judicial Watch., initially to find data on Cheney’s role in the California energy crisis. The suit demanded that Vice President Cheney make public all documents and records of meetings related to his 2001 Energy Task Force project.
The US Commerce Department in summer 2003 ultimately released part of the documents, over ferocious Cheney and White House opposition. Amid the files of the domestic US energy review was, curiously enough, a detailed map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and ‘Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.’ The ‘foreign suitors’ included Russia, China and France, three UN Security Council members who openly opposed granting the US UN approval for invading Iraq.
The first act of post-war occupation by Washington was to declare null and void any contracts between the Iraqi government and Russia, China and France. Iraqi oil was to be an American affair, handled by American companies or their close cronies in Britain, the first victory in the high-stakes quest, ‘where the prize ultimately lies.’
This was precisely what Cheney had alluded to in his 1999 London speech. Get the Middle East oil resources out of independent national hands and into US-controlled hands. The military occupation of Iraq was the first major step in this US strategy. Control of Russian energy reserves, however, was Washington’s ultimate ‘prize.’
De-construction of Russia: The ‘ultimate prize’
For obvious military and political reasons, Washington could not admit openly that its strategic focus, since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, had been the dismemberment or de-construction of Russia, and gaining effective control of its huge oil and gas resources, the ‘ultimate prize.’ The Russian Bear still had formidable military means, however dilapidated, and she still had nuclear teeth.
In the mid-1990’s Washington began a deliberate process of bringing one after the other former satellite Soviet state into not just the European Union, but into the Washington-dominated NATO. By 2004 Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia all had been admitted into NATO, and the Republic of Georgia was being groomed to join.
This surprising spread of NATO, to the alarm of some in western Europe, as well as to Russia, had been part of the strategy advocated by Cheney’s friends at the Project for the New American Century, in their ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ report and even before.
Already in 1996, PNAC member and Cheney crony, Bruce Jackson, then a top executive with US defense giant, LockheedMartin, was head of the US Committee to Expand NATO, later renamed the US Committee on Nato, a very powerful Washington lobby group.
The US Committee to Expand NATO also included PNAC members Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Stephen Hadley and Robert Kagan. Kagan’s wife is Victoria Nuland, now the US Ambassador to NATO. From 2000 - 2003, she was a foreign policy advisor to Cheney. Hadley, a hardline hawk close to Vice President Cheney, was named by President Bush to replace Condoleezza Rice as his National Security Adviser.
The warhawk Cheney network moved from the PNAC into key posts within the Bush Administration to run NATO and Pentagon policy. Bruce Jackson and others, after successfully lobbying Congress to expand NATO to Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in 1999, moved to organize the so-called Vilnius Group that lobbied to bring ten more former Warsaw Pact countries on Russia’s periphery into NATO. Jackson called this the ‘Big Bang.’
President Bush repeatedly used the term ‘New Europe’ in statements about NATO enlargement. In a July 5, 2002 speech hailing the leaders of the Vilnius group, Bush declared, ‘Our nations share a common vision of a new Europe, where free European states are united with each other, and with the United States through cooperation, partnership, and alliance.’
Lockheed Martin’s former executive, Bruce Jackson, took credit for bringing the Baltic and other members of the Vilnius Group into NATO. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 1, 2003, Jackson claimed he originated the ‘Big Bang’ concept of NATO enlargement, later adopted by the Vilnius Group of Baltic and Eastern European nations. As Jackson noted, his ‘Big Bang’ briefing ‘proposed the inclusion of these seven countries in NATO and claimed for this enlargement strategic advantages for NATO and moral (sic) benefits for the democratic community of nations.’ On May 19, 2000 in Vilnius, Lithuania, these propositions were adopted by nine of Europe's new democracies as their own. It became the objectives of the Vilnius Group.’ Jackson could also have noted the benefits to US military defense industry, including his old cronies at Lockheed Martin, with the creation of a vast new NATO arms market on the borders to Russia.
Once that NATO goal was reached, Bruce Jackson and other members of the NATO eastern expansion lobby, closed the US Committee on Nato in 2003, and, seamlessly, in the very same office, re-opened as a new lobby organization, the Project on Transitional Democracies, which according to their own statement was ‘organized to exploit the opportunities to accelerate democratic reform and integration which we believe will exist in the broader Euro-Atlantic region over the next decade.’ In other words, to foster the series of Color Revolutions and regime change across Russian Eurasia. All three principals of the Project on Transitional Democracies worked for the Republican Party, and Jackson and Scheunemann have close ties with major military contractors, notably Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
Jackson and other PNAC and U.S. Committee on NATO members also created a powerful lobby organization, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI). CLI's advisory panel included hardline Democrats such as Rep. Stephen Solarz and Sen. Robert Kerrey. It was dominated by neo-conservatives and Republican Party stalwarts like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Robert Kagan, Richard Perle, William Kristol, and former CIA Director, James Woolsey. Serving as honorary co-chairs were Senators Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and John McCain (R-AZ). Jackson related that friends in the White House had asked him to create the CRI in 2002 to replicate the success he had had pushing for NATO expansion through his US. Committee on NATO by establishing an outfit aimed at supporting the administration's campaign to convince Congress and the public to support a war. “‘People in the White House said, ‘We need you to do for Iraq what you did for NATO',” Jackson told American Prospect magazine in a January 1, 2003 interview.
In brief, NATO encirclement of Russia, Color Revolutions across Eurasia, and the war in Iraq, were all one and the same American geopolitical strategy, part of a grand strategy to ultimately de-construct Russia once and for all as a potential rival to a sole US Superpower hegemony. Russia-- not Iraq and not Iran-- was the primary target of that strategy.
During a White House welcoming ceremony to greet the ten new NATO members in 2004, President Bush noted that NATO’s mission now extended far beyond the perimeter of the alliance. ‘NATO members are reaching out to the nations of the Middle East, to strengthen our ability to fight terror, and to provide for our common security,’ he said. But NATO’s mission now would extend beyond even global security. Bush added, ‘We’re discussing how we can support and increase the momentum of freedom in the greater Middle East.’ Freedom, that is, to come into the orbit of a Washington-controlled NATO alliance.
The end of the Yeltsin era put a slight crimp in the US plans. Putin began slowly and cautiously to emerge as a dynamic national force, committed to rebuilding Russia, following the IMF-guided looting of the country by a combination of Western banks and corrupt Russian oligarchs.
Russian oil output had risen since the collapse of the Soviet Union to the point that, by the time of the 2003 US war on Iraq, Russia was the world’s second largest oil producer behind Saudi Arabia.
The real significance of the Yukos Affair
The defining event in the new Russian energy geopolitics under Vladimir Putin took place in 2003. It was just as Washington was making it brutally clear it was going to militarize Iraq and the Middle East, regardless of world protest or UN niceties.
A brief review of the spectacular October 2003 arrest of Russia’s billionaire ‘oligarch’ Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and state seizure of his giant Yukos oil group, is essential to understand Russian energy geopolitics.
Khodorkovsky was arrested at Novosibirsk airport on October 25, 2003, by the Russian Prosecutor General's office on charges of tax evasion. The Putin government froze shares of Yukos Oil because of tax charges. They then took further actions against Yukos, leading to a collapse in the share price.
What was little mentioned in Western media accounts, which typically portrayed the Putin government actions as a reversion to Soviet-era methods, was what had triggered Putin’s dramatic action in the first place.
Khodorkovsky had been arrested just four weeks before a decisive Russian Duma or lower house election, in which Khodorkovsky had managed to buy the votes of a majority in the Duma using his vast wealth. Control of the Duma was to be the first step by Khodorkovsky in a plan to run against Putin the next year as President. The Duma victory would have allowed him to change election laws in his favor, as well as to alter a controversial law being drafted in the Duma, ‘The Law on Underground Resources.’ That law would prevent Yukos and other private companies from gaining control of raw materials in the ground, or from developing private pipeline routes independent of the Russian state pipelines.
Khodorkovsky had violated the pledge of the Oligarchs made to Putin, that they be allowed to keep their assets--de facto stolen from the state in the rigged auctions under Yeltsin--if they stayed out of Russian politics and repatriated a share of their stolen money. Khodorkovsky, the most powerful oligarch at the time, was serving as the vehicle for what was becoming an obvious Washington-backed putsch against Putin.
The Khodorkovsky arrest followed an unpublicized meeting earlier that year on July 14, 2003 between Khodorkovsky and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Following the Cheney meeting, Khodorkovsky began talks with ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, Condi Rice’s old firm, about taking a major state in Yukos, said to have been between 25% and 40%. That was intended to give Khodorkovsky de facto immunity from possible Putin government interference by tying Yukos to the big US oil giants and, hence, to Washington. It would also have given Washington, via the US oil giants, a de facto veto power over future Russian oil and gas pipelines and oil deals. Days before his October 2003 arrest on tax fraud charges, Khodorkovsky had entertained George H.W. Bush, the representative of the powerful and secretive Washington Carlyle Group in Moscow. They were discussing the final details of the US oil company share buy-in of Yukos.
Yukos had also just made a bid to acquire rival Sibneft from Boris Berezovsky, another Yeltsin-era Oligarch. YukosSibneft, with 19.5 billion barrels of oil and gas, would then own the second-largest oil and gas reserves in the world after ExxonMobil. YukosSibneft would be the fourth largest in the world in terms of production, pumping 2.3 million barrels of crude oil a day. The Exxon or Chevron buy-up of YukosSibneft would have been a literal energy coup d’etat. Cheney knew it; Bush knew it; Khodorkovsky knew it.
Above all, Vladimir Putin knew it and moved decisively to block it.
Khodokorvsky had cultivated very impressive ties to the Anglo-American power establishment. He created a philanthropic foundation, the Open Russia Foundation, modelled on the Open Society foundation of his close friend George Soros. On the select board of Open Russia Foundation sat Henry Kissinger and Kissinger’s friend, Jacob Lord Rothschild, London scion of the banking family. Arthur Hartman, a former US Ambassador to Moscow, also sat on the foundation’s board.
Following Khodorkovsky's arrest, the Washington Post reported that the imprisoned Russian billionaire had retained the services of Stuart Eizenstat - former deputy Treasury Secretary, Undersecretary of State, Undersecretary of Commerce during the Clinton Administration - to lobby in Washington for his freedom. Khodorkovsky was in deep with the Anglo-American establishment.
Subsequent western media and official protest about Russia’s return to communist methods and raw power politics, conveniently ignored the fact that Khodorkovsky was hardly Snow White himself. Earlier, Khodorkovsky had unilaterally ripped up his contract with British Petroleum. BP had been a partner with Yukos, and had spent $300 million in drilling the highly promising Priobskoye oil field in Siberia.
Once the BP drilling had been done, Khodorkovsky forced BP out, using gangster methods that would be unlawful in most of the developed world. By 2003 Priobskoye oil production reached 129 million barrels, equivalent to a value on the market of some $8 billions. Earlier, in 1998, after the IMF had given billions to Russia to prevent a collapse of the Ruble, Khodokorvosky’s Bank Menatep diverted an eye-popping $4.8 billion in IMF funds to his hand-picked bank cronies, some US banks among them. The howls of protest from Washington at the October 2003 arrest of Khodorkovsky were disingenuous, if not outright hypocritical. As seen from the Kremlin, Washington had been caught with its fat hand in the Russian cookie jar.
The Putin-Khodorkovsky showdown signalled a decisive turn by the Putin government towards rebuilding Russia and erecting strategic defenses from the foreign onslaught led by Cheney and friend Tony Blair in Britain. It took place in the context of a brazen US grab for Iraq in 2003 and of a unilateral Bush Administration announcement that the USA was abrogating its solemn treaty obligations with Russia under their earlier Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, in order to go ahead with development of US missile defenses, an act which could only be viewed in Moscow as a hostile act aimed at her security.
By 2003, indeed, it took little strategic military prowess to realize that the Pentagon hawks and their allies in the military industry and Big Oil had a vision of a United States unfettered by international agreements and acting unilaterally in its own best interests, as defined, of course, by the hawks. Their recommendations were published by one of the many Washington hawk conservative Think-Tanks. In January 2001 The National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP) issued Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control, just as the Bush-Cheney Administration began. The report, demanding a unilateral US end to nuclear force reduction, was signed by 27 senior officials from past and current administrations. The list included the man who today is Bush’s National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley; it included the special assistant to the Secretary of Defense, Stephen Cambone, and it included Admiral James Woolsey, the former head of CIA and chairman of the Washington NGO, Freedom House. Freedom House played a central role in Ukraine’s US-sponsored ‘Orange Revolution’ and all other ‘Color Revolutions’ across the former Soviet Union.
These events were soon followed by the Washington-financed series of covert destabilizations of a number of governments in Russia’s periphery which had been close to Moscow. It included the November 2003 ‘Rose Revolution’ in Georgia which ousted Edouard Shevardnadze in favour of a young, US-educated and pro-NATO President, Mikheil Saakashvili. The 37-year-old Saakashvili had conveniently agreed to back the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline that would avoid Moscow pipeline control of Azerbaijan’s Caspian oil. The United States has maintained close ties with Georgia since President Mikheil Saakashvili has come to power. American military trainers instruct Georgian troops and Washington has poured millions of dollars into preparing Georgia to become part of NATO.
Following its Rose Revolution in Georgia, Woolsey’s Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Soros Foundation and other Washington-backed NGOs organized the brazenly provocative November 2004 Ukraine ‘Orange Revolution.’ The aim of the Orange Revolution was to install a pro-NATO regime there under the contested Presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, in a land strategically able to cut the major pipeline flows from Russian oil and gas to Western Europe. Washington-backed ‘democratic opposition’ movements in neighboring Belarus also began receiving millions of dollars of Bush Administration largesse, along with Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan and more remote former Soviet states which also happen to form a barrier between potential energy pipelines linking China with Russia and the former Soviet states like Kazkhstan..
Again, energy and oil and gas pipeline control lay at the heart of the US moves. Little wonder, perhaps, that some people inside the Kremlin, notably Vladimir Putin, began to wonder if Putin’s new born-again Texan partner-in-prayer, George W. Bush, was in fact speaking to Putin with forked tongue, as the Indians would say.
By the end of 2004 it was clear in Moscow that a new Cold War, this one over strategic energy control and unilateral nuclear primacy, was fully underway. It was also clear from the unmistakeable pattern of Washington actions since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, that End Game for USA policy vis-?-vis Eurasia was not China, not Iraq, and not Iran.
The geopolitical ‘End Game’ for Washington was the complete de-construction of Russia, the one state in Eurasia capable of organizing an effective combination of alliances using its vast oil and gas resources. That, of course, could never be openly declared.
After 2003 Putin and Russian foreign policy, especially energy policy, reverted to their basic response to the ‘Heartland’ geopolitics of Sir Halford Mackinder, politics which had been the basis of Soviet Cold War strategy since 1946.
Putin began to make a series of defensive moves to restore some tenable form of equilibrium in face of the increasingly obvious Washington policy of encircling and weakening Russia. Subsequent US strategic blunders have made the job a bit easier for Russia. Now, with the stakes rising on both sides—NATO and Russia—Putin’s Russia has moved beyond simple defense to a new dynamic offensive, to secure a more viable geopolitical position, using its energy as the lever.
Mackinder’s Heartland and Brzezinski’s Chess Game
It’s essential to understand the historic background to the term geopolitics. In 1904, an academic British geographer named Halford Mackinder made an address before the Royal Geographic Society in London which was to change history. In his speech, titled, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History,’ Mackinder sought to define the relation between a nation’s or region’s geography—its topography, relation to the sea or land, its climate—with its politics and position in the world. He posited two classes of powers: sea powers including Britain and the United States as well as Japan; and he posited the large land powers of Eurasia, which, with development of the railroad, were able to unite large land masses free from dependency on the seas.
For Mackinder, an ardent Empire advocate, the implicit lesson for continued hegemony of the British Empire following the 1914-1917 World War, was to prevent at all costs a convergence of interests between the nations of East Europe—Poland, Czechoslovakia , Austria-Hungary--and the Russia-centered Eurasia ‘Heartland’ or ‘pivot’ land,as he termed it. After the Versailles peace talks, Mackinder summed up his ideas in the following famous dictum:
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
Who rules the World-Island commands the world.
Mackinder's Heartland was the core area of Eurasia, and the World-Island was all of Eurasia, including Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Great Britain, never a part of Continental Europe, he saw as a separate naval or sea-power. The Mackinder geopolitical perspective shaped Britain’s entry into the 1914 Great War, it shaped her entry into World War Two. It shaped Churchill’s calculated provocations of an increasingly paranoid Stalin, beginning 1943, to entice Russia into what became the Cold War.
From a US perspective, the 1946-1991 Cold War era was all about who shall control Mackinder’s World-Island, and, concretely, how to prevent the Eurasian Heartland, centered on Russia, from doing just that. A look at a polar projection map of US military alliances during the Cold War makes the point: The Soviet Union had been geopolitically contained and prevented from any significant linkup with Western Europe or the Middle East or Asia. The Cold War was about Russian efforts to circumvent that NATO-centered Iron Curtain.
Former US National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, writing in the post-Soviet era in 1997, drew on Mackinder’s geopolitics by name, in describing the principal strategic aim of the United States to keep Eurasia from unifying as a coherent economic and military bloc or counterweight to the sole superpower status of the United States.
To understand US foreign policy since the onset of the Bush-Cheney Presidency in 2001, therefore, it’s useful to cite a revealing New York Council on Foreign Relations Foreign Affairs article by Brzezinski from September/October 1997:
"Eurasia is home to most of the world's politically assertive and dynamic states. All the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia. The world's most populous aspirants to regional hegemony, China and India, are in Eurasia, as are all the potential political or economic challengers to American primacy. After the United States, the next six largest economies and military spenders are there, as are all but one of the world's overt nuclear powers, and all but one of the covert ones. Eurasia accounts for 75 percent of the world's population, 60 percent of its GNP, and 75 percent of its energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia's potential power overshadows even America's.
Eurasia is the world's axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy...’(emphasis added-w.e.)
If we take the words of Washington strategist Brzezinski and understand the axioms of Halford Mackinder as the driving motive for Anglo, and later, American foreign policy for more than an entire century, it begins to become clear why a reorganized Russian state under the Presidency of Vladimir Putin has gone into motion to resist the overtures and overt attempts at deconstruction being promoted by Washington in the name of democracy. How has Putin acted to shore up Russian defenses? In a word: energy.
Russian energy geopolitics
In terms of the overall standard of living, mortality and economic prosperity, Russia today is not a world class power. In terms of energy, it is a colossus. In terms of landmass it is still the single largest nation in land area in the world, spanning from the Pacific to the door of Europe. It has vast territory, vast natural resources, and it has the world’s largest reserves of natural gas, the energy source currently the focus of major global power plays. In addition, it is the only power on the face of the earth with the military capabilities able to match that of the United States despite the collapse of the USSR and deterioration in the military since.
Russia has more than 130,000 oil wells and some 2000 oil and gas deposits explored of which at least 900 are not in use. Oil reserves have been estimated at 150 billion barrels, similar perhaps to Iraq. They could be far larger but have not yet been exploited owing to difficulty of drilling in some remote arctic regions. Oil prices above $60 a barrel begin to make it economical to explore in those remote regions.
Currently Russian oil products can be exported to foreign markets in three routes: Western Europe via the Baltic Sea and Black Sea; Northern route; Far East to China or Japan and East Asian markets. Russia has oil terminals on the Baltic at St. Petersburg for oil and a newly expanded oil terminal at Primorsk. There are added oil terminals under construction at Vysotsk, Batareynaya Bay and Ust-Luga.
Russia’s state-owned natural gas pipeline network, its so-called ‘unified gas transportation system’ includes a vast network of pipelines and compressor stations extending more than 150,000 kilometers across Russia. By law only the state-owned Gazprom is allowed to use the pipeline. The network is perhaps the most valued Russian state asset outside the oil and gas itself. Here is the heart of Putin’s new natural gas geopolitics and the focus of conflict with western oil and gas companies as well as the European Union, whose Energy Commissioner, Andras Piebalgs, is from new NATO member Latvia, formerly part of the USSR.
In 2001, as it became clear in Moscow that Washington would find a way to bring the Baltic republics into NATO, Putin backed the development of a major new oil port on the Russian coast of the Baltic Sea in Primorsk at a cost of $2.2 billion. This project, known as the Baltic Pipeline System (BPS), greatly lessens export dependency on Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. The Baltic is Russia’s main oil export route, carrying crude oil from Russia's West Siberian and Timan-Pechora oil provinces westward to the port of Primorsk in the Russian Gulf of Finland. The BPS was completed in March 2006 with capacity to carry more than1.3 million barrels/day of Russian oil to western markets in Europe and beyond.
The same month, March 2006, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was named chairman of a Russian-German consortium building a natural gas pipeline going some 1,200 km under the Baltic Sea. Majority shareholder in this North European Gas Pipeline (NEGP) project, with 51%, is the Russian state-controlled Gazprom, the world’s largest natural gas company. The German companies BASF and E.On each hold 24.5%. The project, estimated to cost €4.7 billion, was started late 2005 and will connect the gas terminal at the Russian port city of Vyborg on the Baltic near St. Petersburg with the Baltic city of Greifswald in eastern Germany. The Yuzhno-Russkoye gas field in West Siberia will be developed in a joint venture between Gazprom and BASF to feed the pipeline. It was Gerhard Schroeder’s last major act as Chancellor, and provoked howls of protest from the pro-Washington Polish government, as well as Ukraine, who both stood to lose control over pipeline flows from Russia. Despite her close ties to the Bush Administration, Chancellor Angela Merkel has been forced to swallow hard and accept the project. Germany’s industry is simply dependent on the Russian energy import. Russia is by far the largest supplier of natural gas to Germany.
The giant Shtokman gas deposit in the Russian sector of the Barents Sea, north of the Murmansk harbor, will ultimately also be a part of the gas supply of the NEGP. When completed in two parallel pipelines, NEGP will supply Germany up to 55 billion cubic meters more a year of Russian gas.
In April 2006 the Putin government announced the first stage of construction of the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean Pipeline (ESPO), a vast oil pipeline from Taishet in the Irkutsk Region near Lake Baikal in East Siberia, to Perevoznaya Bay on Russia’s Pacific Ocean coast, to be built at a cost of more than $11.5 billion. Transneft, the Russian state-owned pipeline company will build it. When finished, it will pump up to 1.6 million barrels/day from Siberia to the Russian Far East and from there on to the energy-hungry Asia-Pacific, mainly to China. The first stage is due to be completed by end of 2008. In addition, Putin has announced plans to construct an oil refinery on the Amur River near the China border in Russia’s Far East to allow sale of refined product to China and Asian markets. Presently the Siberian oil can only be delivered to the Pacific via rail.
For Russia, the Taishet to Perevoznaya route will maximize its national strategic benefits while taking oil exports to China and Japan into account at the same time. In the future, the country will be able to export oil to Japan directly from the Nakhodka Port. Oil-import-dependent Japan is frantic to find new secure oil sources outside the unstable Middle East. The ESPO can also supply oil to the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea through building from Vladivostok branch lines leading to the two countries and to China via a branch pipe between Blagoveshchensk and Daqing. The Taishet route provides a clear roadmap for energy cooperation between Russia and China, Japan and other Asia-Pacific countries.
Sakhalin: Russia reins in Big Oil
In late September 2006 a seemingly minor dispute exploded and resulted in the revocation of the environmental permit for Royal Dutch Shell’s Sakhalin II Liquified Natural Gas project, which had been due to deliver LNG to Japan, South Korea and other customers by 2008. Shell is lead energy partner in an Anglo-Japanese oil and gas development project on Russia’s Far East island of Sakhalin, a vast island north of Hokkaido Japan.
At the same time, the Putin government announced environmental requirements had also not been met by ExxonMobil for their De Kastri oil terminal built on Sakhalin as part of its Sakhalin I oil and gas development project. Sakhalin I contains an estimated 8 billion barrels of oil and vast volumes of gas, making the field a rare Super-Giant oil find, in geologists’ terminology.
In the early 1990’s the Yeltsin government made a desperation bid to attract needed investment capital and technology into exploiting Russian oil and gas regions at a time the government was broke and oil prices very low. In a bold departure, Yeltsin granted US and other western oil majors generous exploration rights to two large oil projects, Sakhalin I and Sakhalin II. Under a so-called PSA or Production Sharing Agreement, ExxonMobil, lead partner of the Sakhalin I oil project, got tax-free Russian concessions.
Under the terms of the PSA’s, typical between major Anglo-American oil majors and weak Third World countries, Russia’s government would instead get paid for the oil and gas rights in a share of eventual oil or gas produced. But the first drops of oil to Russia would flow only after all project production costs had first been covered. PSA’s were originally developed by Washington and Big Oil to facilitate favorable control by the oil companies of large oil projects in third countries. The major US oil giants, working with the James Baker’s James Baker Institute, which drafted Dick Cheney’s 2001 Energy Task Force Review, used the PSA form to regain control over Iraq’s oil production, hidden behind the fa?ade of an Iraqi state-owned oil company.
Shortly before the Russian government told ExxonMobil it had problems with its terminal on Sakhalin, ExxonMobil had announced yet another cost increase in the project. ExxonMobil, whose attorney is James Baker III, and which is a close partner to the Cheney-Bush White House, announced a 30% cost increase, something that would put even further off any Russian oil flow share from the PSA. The news came on the eve of ExxonMobil plans to open an oil terminal at De Kastri on Sakhalin. The Russian Environment Ministry and the Agency for Subsoil Use suddenly announced the terminal did ‘not meet environmental requirements’ and is reportedly considering halting production by ExxonMobil as well.
Britain’s Royal Dutch Shell under another PSA holds rights to develop the oil and gas resources in Sakhalin II region, and build Russia’s first Liquified Natural Gas project. The $20 billion project, employing over 17,000 people, is 80% complete. It’s the world’s largest integrated oil and gas project, and includes Russia’s first offshore oil production, as well as Russia’s first offshore integrated gas platform.
The clear Russian government moves against ExxonMobil and Shell have been interpreted in the industry as an atttempt by the Putin government to regain control of Russian oil and gas resources it gave away during the Yeltsin era. It would cohere with Putin’s emerging energy strategy.
Russia-Turkey Blue Stream gas project
In November 2005 Russia’s Gazprom completed the final stage of its 1,213 kilometer $3.2 billion Blue Stream gas pipeline. The project brings gas from its gas fields in Krasnodar, then by underwater pipelines across the Black Sea to the Durusu Terminal near Samsun inon the Turkish Black Sea coast. From there the pipeline supplies Russian gas to Ankara. When it reaches full capacity in 2010 it will carry an estimated 16 billion cubic meters gas a year.
Gazprom is now discussing transit of Russian gas to the countries of South Europe and East Mediterranean, including based on new contracts and new volumes of gas. Greece, South Italy and Israel all are in some form of negotiation with Gazprom to tap gas from the Blue Stream pipeline across the territory of Turkey. A new route for the gas supply is being developed now - the one via the countries of East and Central Europe. The interim title of the project is the South-European Gas Pipeline. The main issue here is to establish a new gas transmission system, both from Russian origin and from the third countries
In sum, not including the emerging potentials of Gazprom’s entry into the fast-developing Liquified Natural Gas markets globally, energy, oil and gas and nuclear, is firmly at the heart of Russian attempts to build new economic alliance partners across Eurasia in the coming showdown with the United States.
US plans for ‘Nuclear Primacy’
The key to the ability of Putin’s Russia to succeed is its ability to defend its Eurasian energy strategy with a credible military deterrent, to counter now-obvious Washington military plans for what the Pentagon terms Full Spectrum Dominance.
In a revealing article titled ‘The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy,’ in the March/April 2006 Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, authors Kier Lieber and Daryl Press made the following claim,
‘Today, for the first time in almost 50 years, the United States stands on the verge of attaining nuclear primacy. It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike. This dramatic shift in the nuclear balance of power stems from a series of improvements in the United States' nuclear systems, the precipitous decline of Russia's arsenal, and the glacial pace of modernization of China's nuclear forces. Unless Washington's policies change or Moscow and Beijing take steps to increase the size and readiness of their forces, Russia and China -- and the rest of the world -- will live in the shadow of U.S. nuclear primacy for many years to come.’
The US authors claim, accurately, that since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia’s strategic nuclear arsenal has ‘sharply deteriorated.’ They also conclude that the United States is and has been for some time, intentionally pursuing global nuclear primacy. The September 2002 Bush Administration National Security Strategy explicitly stated that it was official US policy to establish global military primacy, an unsettling thought for many nations today given the recent actions of Washington since the events of September, 2001.
One of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s priority projects has been the multi-billion dollar construction of a US missile defense. It has been sold to American voters as a defense against possible terror attacks. In reality, as has been openly recognized in Moscow and Beijing, it is aimed at the only two real nuclear powers, Russia and China.
As the Foreign Affairs article points out, ‘the sort of missile defenses that the United States might plausibly deploy would be valuable primarily in an offensive context, not a defensive one -- as an adjunct to a U.S. first-strike capability, not as a stand-alone shield. If the United States launched a nuclear attack against Russia (or China), the targeted country would be left with a tiny surviving arsenal -- if any at all. At that point, even a relatively modest or inefficient missile-defense system might well be enough to protect against any retaliatory strikes, because the devastated enemy would have so few warheads and decoys left.’
In the context of a United States which has actively moved the troops of its NATO partners into Afghanistan, now Lebanon, and which is clearly backing the former USSR member Georgia, today a critical factor in the Caspian Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Turkey oil pipeline, in Georgia’s move to join NATO and push Russian troops away, it is little surprise that Moscow might be just a bit uncomfortable with the American President’s promises of spreading democracy through a US-defined Greater Middle East. The invented term, Greater Middle East is the creation of various Washington think-tanks close to Cheney including his Project for the New American Century, to refer to the non-Arabic countries of Turkey, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Central Asian (former USSR) countries, and Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia. At the G-8 Summit in Summer 2004 President Bush first officially used the term to refer to the region included in Washington’s project to spread ‘democracy’ in the region.
On October 3, the Russian Foreign Ministry warned that Russia would ‘take appropriate measures’ should Poland deploy elements of the new US missile defense system. Poland is now a NATO member. Its Defense Minister, Radek Sikorski was a former Resident in Washington at Richard Perle’s hawkish AEI think-tank. He was also Executive Director of the New Atlantic Initiative, a project designed to bring the former Warsaw Pact countries of eastern Europe into NATO under the guise of spreading democracy. The United States is also building, via NATO, a European Missile Defense System.
The only conceivable target of such a system would be Russia in the sense of enabling a US first strike success. Completion of the European missile defense system, the militarization of the entire Middle East, the encirclement of Russia and of China from a connected web of new US military bases, many put up in the name of the War on Terror, all now appear to the Kremlin as part of a deliberate US strategy of Full Spectrum Dominance. The Pentagon refers to it also as ‘Escalation Dominance,’ the ability to win a war at any level of violence, including a nuclear war.
Moscow’s military status
Moscow has not been entirely passive in the face of this growing reality. In his May 2003 State of the Nation Address, Vladimir Putin spoke of strengthening and modernizing Russia’s nuclear deterrent by creating new types of weapons, including for Russia’s strategic forces, which will ‘ensure the defense capability of Russia and its allies in the long term.’ Russia stopped withdrawing and destroying its SS-18 MIRVed missiles once the Bush Administration unilaterally declared an end to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and its de facto annulling of the Start II Treaty.
Russia never stopped being a powerful entity that produced state-of-the-art military technologies -- a trend that continued from its inception as a modern state. While its army, navy and air force are in derelict conditions, the elements for Russia's resurgence as a military powerhouse are still in place. Russia has been consistently fielding top-notch military technology at various international trade shows, and has been effective in the demonstration of its capabilities.
In spite of financial and economic difficulties, Russia still produces state-of-the-art military technologies, according to a 2004 analysis by the Washington-based think tank, Power and Interest News Report (PINR). One of its best achievements after the dissolution of the Soviet Union has been its armored fighting vehicle BMP-3, which has been chosen over Western vehicles in contracts for the United Arab Emirates and Oman.
Russia's surface-to-air missile systems, the S-300, and its more powerful successor, the S-400, are reported to be more potent than American-made Patriot systems. The once-anticipated military exercise between the Patriot and the S-300 never materialized, leaving the Russian complex with an undisputed, yet unproven, claim of superiority over the American system. Continuing this list is the Kamov-50 family of military helicopters that incorporate the latest cutting-edge technologies and tactics, making them an equal force to the best Washington has. European helicopter industry sources confirm this.
In recent joint Indo-American air force exercises, where the Indian Air Force was equipped with modern Russian-made Su-30 fighters, the Indian Air Force out-maneuvered American-made F-15 planes in a majority of their engagements, prompting US Air Force General Hal Homburg to admit that Russian technology in Indian hands has given the US Air Force a ‘wake-up call.’ The Russian military establishment is continuing to design other helicopters, tanks and armored vehicles that are on par with the best that the West has to offer.
Weapons export, in addition to oil and gas, has been one of the best ways for Russia to earn much-needed hard currency. Already, Russia is the second-largest worldwide exporter of military technology after the United States. As reported in various magazines, journals and periodicals, at present, Russia's modern military technology is more likely to be exported than supplied to its own armies due to the existing financial constraints and limitations of Russia's armed forces. This has implications for America's future combat operations since practically all insurgent, guerrilla, breakaway or terrorist armed formations across the globe -- the very formations that the United States will most likely face in its future wars -- are fielded with Russian weapons or its derivatives.
Russian nuclear arsenal has played an important political role since the end of the Soviet Union, providing fundamental security for the Russian state. After a bitter intra-services fight within the Russian General Staff which lasted from 1998 to 2003, the General Staff realized along with the Defense Ministry that a further policy of neglect of nuclear forces in favor of funding rebuilding conventional forces in the face of tight budget constraints, was not tolerable. In 2003 Russia had to buy from Ukraine strategic bombers and ICBMs warehoused there. Since then strategic nuclear forces have been a priority. Today, the finances of the Russian state, thanks largely to high prices of oil and gas exports, are on a strong footing. The Russian Central Bank has become one of the five largest dollar reserve holders with reserves of more than $270 billions.
The material foundation of the Russian military is its defense industry. After 1991 the Russian Federation inherited the bulk of the Soviet defense industrial complex.
Today, with little fanfare, the US is building up its influence and military presence in the Middle East despite a general draw-down in its military commitments and expenditure. Why? Oil is certainly a large part of the answer. But in geopolitical terms, it is also to the Eurasian land power, Russia from access to the seas - just as Mackinder argued had to be done. The push for a US ‘nuclear primacy’ over Russia is the factor in world politics today which has the most potential for bringing the world into a nuclear conflagration by miscalculation.
The basic argument of the Mackinder’s geopolitics is still relevant: ‘The great geographical realities remain: land power versus sea power, heartland versus rimland, centre versus periphery...’ This Russia understands every bit as Washington.
F. William Engdahl is a Global Research Contributing Editor and author of the book, ‘A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,’ Pluto Press Ltd. He has completed a soon-to-be published book on GMO titled, ‘Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Political Agenda Behind GMO’. He may be contacted through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
by F. William Engdahl
October 7, 2006
GlobalResearch.ca
The September 2006 summit in Paris between Russia’s Vladimir Putin, French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, underscored the re-emerging of Russia as a major global power. The new Russia is gaining in influence through a series of strategic moves revolving around its geopolitical assets in energy—most notably its oil and natural gas. It’s doing so by shrewdly taking advantage of the strategic follies and major political blunders of Washington. The new Russia also realizes that if it does not act decisively, it soon will be encircled and trumped by a military rival, USA, for which it has little defenses left. The battle, largely unspoken, is the highest stakes battle in world politics today. Iran and Syria are seen by Washington strategists as mere steps to this great Russian End Game.
The formal Paris summit agenda included French investment in Russia and the issue of Iran’s (Russian-built) nuclear program. Notably, however, it also included the question of future Russian energy supplies to the European Union, notably, Germany. It was an indication of the new strength of Putin’s Russia. Putin told the German Chancellor that Russia would ‘possibly’ redirect some of the future natural gas from its giant Shtokman field in the Barents Sea. The $20 billion project is due to come online 2010 and had been slated to provide liquified natural gas to United States terminals.
Since the devastating setbacks two years ago from the US-sponsored ‘color revolutions’ in Georgia, and then Ukraine, Russia has begun to play its strategic energy cards extremely carefully, from nuclear reactors in Iran to military sales to Venezuela and other Latin American states, to strategic market cooperation deals in natural gas with Algeria.
At the same time, the Bush Administration has dug itself deeper into a geopolitical morass, through a foreign policy agenda which has reckless disregard for its allies as well as its foes. That reckless policy has been associated with former Halliburton CEO, Dick Cheney, more than any other figure in Washington.
The ‘Cheney Presidency,’ which is what historians will no doubt dub the George W. Bush years, has been based on a clear strategy. It has often been misunderstood by critics who had overly focussed on its most visible component, namely, Iraq, the Middle East and the strident war-hawks around the Vice President and his old crony, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld.
The ‘Cheney strategy’ has been a US foreign policy based on securing direct global energy control, control by the Big Four US or US-tied private oil giants-- ChevronTexaco or ExxonMobil, BP or Royal Dutch Shell. Above all, it has aimed at control of all the world’s major oil regions, along with the major natural gas fields. That control has moved in tandem with a growing bid by the United States for total military primacy over the one potential threat to its global ambitions—Russia. Cheney is perhaps the ideal person to weave the US military and energy policies together into a coherent strategy of dominance. During the early 1990’s under father Bush, Cheney was also Secretary of Defense.
The Cheney-Bush administration has been dominated by a coalition of interests between Big Oil and the top industries of the American military-industrial complex. These private corporate interests exercise their power through control of the government policy of the United States. An aggressive militaristic agenda has been essential to it. It is epitomized by Cheney’s former company, Halliburton Inc., at one and the same time the world’s largest energy and geophysical services company, and the world’s largest constructor of military bases.
To comprehend the policy it’s important to look at how Cheney, as Halliburton CEO, viewed the problem of future oil supply on the eve of his becoming Vice President.
‘Where the Prize Ultimately Lies’: Cheney’s 1999 London speech
Back in September 1999, a full year before the US elections which made him the most powerful Vice President in history, Cheney gave a revealing speech before his oil industry peers at the London Institute of Petroleum.. In a global review of the outlook for Big Oil, Cheney made the following comment:
"By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the national oil companies are obviously controlling about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world‘s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies. Even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow. It is true that technology, privatisation and the opening up of a number of countries have created many new opportunities in areas around the world for various oil companies, but looking back to the early 1990‘s, expectations were that significant amounts of the world‘s new resources would come from such areas as the former Soviet Union and from China. Of course that didn‘t turn out quite as expected. Instead it turned out to be deep water successes that yielded the bonanza of the 1990‘s."
The Cheney remarks are worth a careful reading. He posits a conservative rise in global demand for oil by the end of the present decade, i.e. in about 4 years. He estimates the world will need to find an added 50 million barrels of daily output. Total daily oil production at present hovers around the level of some 83 million barrels oil equivalent. This means that to avert catastrophic shortages and the resultant devastating impact on global economic growth, by Cheney’s 1999 estimate, the world must find new oil production equal to more than 50% of the 1999 daily global output, and that, by about 2010. That is the equivalent of five new oil regions equal to today’s Saudi Arabian size. That is a whopping amount of new oil.
Given that it can take up to seven years or more to bring a new major oilfield into full production, that’s also not much time if a horrendous energy crunch and sky-high oil and gas prices are to be averted. Cheney’s estimate was also based on an overly conservative estimate of future oil import demand in China and India, today the two fastest growing oil consumers on the planet.
A second notable point of Cheney’s 1999 London comments was his remark that, ‘the Middle East with two thirds of the world‘s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.’ However, as he revealingly remarked, the oil ‘prize’ of the Middle East was in national or government hands, not open to exploitation by the private market, and thus, hard for Cheney’s Halliburton and his friends in ExxonMobil or Chevron or Shell or BP to get their hands on.
At that time, Iraq, with the second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, was under the rule of Saddam Hussein. Iran, which has the world’s second largest reserves of natural gas, in addition to its huge oil reserves, was ruled by a nationalist theocracy which was not open to US private company oil tenders. The Caspian Sea oil reserves were a subject of bitter geopolitical battle between Washington and Russia.
Cheney’s remark that ‘Oil remains fundamentally a government business,’ and not private, takes on a new significance when we do a fast forward to September 2000, in the heat of the 2000 Bush-Cheney election campaign. That month Cheney, along with Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and many others who went on to join the new Bush Administration, issued a policy report titled, ‘Re-building America’s Defenses.’ The paper was issued by an entity named Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
Cheney’s PNAC group called on the new US President-to-be to find a suitable pretext to declare war on Iraq, in order to occupy it and take direct control over the second largest oil reserves in the Middle East. Their report stated bluntly, ‘While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification (sic), the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein ...’
Cheney signed on to a policy document in September 2000 which declared that the key issue was ‘American force presence in the Gulf,’ and regime change in Iraq, regardless whether Saddam Hussein was good, bad or ugly. It was the first step in moving the US military to ‘where the prize ultimately lies.’
No coincidence that Cheney immediately got the task of heading a Presidential Energy Task Force review in early 2001, where he worked closely with his friends in Big Oil, including the late Ken Lay of Enron, with whom Cheney earlier had been involved in an Afghan gas pipeline project, as well as with James Baker III.
Buried in the debate leading to the US bombing and occupation of Iraq in March 2003 was a lawsuit under the US Freedom of Information Act brought by Sierra Club and Judicial Watch., initially to find data on Cheney’s role in the California energy crisis. The suit demanded that Vice President Cheney make public all documents and records of meetings related to his 2001 Energy Task Force project.
The US Commerce Department in summer 2003 ultimately released part of the documents, over ferocious Cheney and White House opposition. Amid the files of the domestic US energy review was, curiously enough, a detailed map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and ‘Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.’ The ‘foreign suitors’ included Russia, China and France, three UN Security Council members who openly opposed granting the US UN approval for invading Iraq.
The first act of post-war occupation by Washington was to declare null and void any contracts between the Iraqi government and Russia, China and France. Iraqi oil was to be an American affair, handled by American companies or their close cronies in Britain, the first victory in the high-stakes quest, ‘where the prize ultimately lies.’
This was precisely what Cheney had alluded to in his 1999 London speech. Get the Middle East oil resources out of independent national hands and into US-controlled hands. The military occupation of Iraq was the first major step in this US strategy. Control of Russian energy reserves, however, was Washington’s ultimate ‘prize.’
De-construction of Russia: The ‘ultimate prize’
For obvious military and political reasons, Washington could not admit openly that its strategic focus, since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, had been the dismemberment or de-construction of Russia, and gaining effective control of its huge oil and gas resources, the ‘ultimate prize.’ The Russian Bear still had formidable military means, however dilapidated, and she still had nuclear teeth.
In the mid-1990’s Washington began a deliberate process of bringing one after the other former satellite Soviet state into not just the European Union, but into the Washington-dominated NATO. By 2004 Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia all had been admitted into NATO, and the Republic of Georgia was being groomed to join.
This surprising spread of NATO, to the alarm of some in western Europe, as well as to Russia, had been part of the strategy advocated by Cheney’s friends at the Project for the New American Century, in their ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ report and even before.
Already in 1996, PNAC member and Cheney crony, Bruce Jackson, then a top executive with US defense giant, LockheedMartin, was head of the US Committee to Expand NATO, later renamed the US Committee on Nato, a very powerful Washington lobby group.
The US Committee to Expand NATO also included PNAC members Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Stephen Hadley and Robert Kagan. Kagan’s wife is Victoria Nuland, now the US Ambassador to NATO. From 2000 - 2003, she was a foreign policy advisor to Cheney. Hadley, a hardline hawk close to Vice President Cheney, was named by President Bush to replace Condoleezza Rice as his National Security Adviser.
The warhawk Cheney network moved from the PNAC into key posts within the Bush Administration to run NATO and Pentagon policy. Bruce Jackson and others, after successfully lobbying Congress to expand NATO to Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in 1999, moved to organize the so-called Vilnius Group that lobbied to bring ten more former Warsaw Pact countries on Russia’s periphery into NATO. Jackson called this the ‘Big Bang.’
President Bush repeatedly used the term ‘New Europe’ in statements about NATO enlargement. In a July 5, 2002 speech hailing the leaders of the Vilnius group, Bush declared, ‘Our nations share a common vision of a new Europe, where free European states are united with each other, and with the United States through cooperation, partnership, and alliance.’
Lockheed Martin’s former executive, Bruce Jackson, took credit for bringing the Baltic and other members of the Vilnius Group into NATO. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 1, 2003, Jackson claimed he originated the ‘Big Bang’ concept of NATO enlargement, later adopted by the Vilnius Group of Baltic and Eastern European nations. As Jackson noted, his ‘Big Bang’ briefing ‘proposed the inclusion of these seven countries in NATO and claimed for this enlargement strategic advantages for NATO and moral (sic) benefits for the democratic community of nations.’ On May 19, 2000 in Vilnius, Lithuania, these propositions were adopted by nine of Europe's new democracies as their own. It became the objectives of the Vilnius Group.’ Jackson could also have noted the benefits to US military defense industry, including his old cronies at Lockheed Martin, with the creation of a vast new NATO arms market on the borders to Russia.
Once that NATO goal was reached, Bruce Jackson and other members of the NATO eastern expansion lobby, closed the US Committee on Nato in 2003, and, seamlessly, in the very same office, re-opened as a new lobby organization, the Project on Transitional Democracies, which according to their own statement was ‘organized to exploit the opportunities to accelerate democratic reform and integration which we believe will exist in the broader Euro-Atlantic region over the next decade.’ In other words, to foster the series of Color Revolutions and regime change across Russian Eurasia. All three principals of the Project on Transitional Democracies worked for the Republican Party, and Jackson and Scheunemann have close ties with major military contractors, notably Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
Jackson and other PNAC and U.S. Committee on NATO members also created a powerful lobby organization, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI). CLI's advisory panel included hardline Democrats such as Rep. Stephen Solarz and Sen. Robert Kerrey. It was dominated by neo-conservatives and Republican Party stalwarts like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Robert Kagan, Richard Perle, William Kristol, and former CIA Director, James Woolsey. Serving as honorary co-chairs were Senators Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and John McCain (R-AZ). Jackson related that friends in the White House had asked him to create the CRI in 2002 to replicate the success he had had pushing for NATO expansion through his US. Committee on NATO by establishing an outfit aimed at supporting the administration's campaign to convince Congress and the public to support a war. “‘People in the White House said, ‘We need you to do for Iraq what you did for NATO',” Jackson told American Prospect magazine in a January 1, 2003 interview.
In brief, NATO encirclement of Russia, Color Revolutions across Eurasia, and the war in Iraq, were all one and the same American geopolitical strategy, part of a grand strategy to ultimately de-construct Russia once and for all as a potential rival to a sole US Superpower hegemony. Russia-- not Iraq and not Iran-- was the primary target of that strategy.
During a White House welcoming ceremony to greet the ten new NATO members in 2004, President Bush noted that NATO’s mission now extended far beyond the perimeter of the alliance. ‘NATO members are reaching out to the nations of the Middle East, to strengthen our ability to fight terror, and to provide for our common security,’ he said. But NATO’s mission now would extend beyond even global security. Bush added, ‘We’re discussing how we can support and increase the momentum of freedom in the greater Middle East.’ Freedom, that is, to come into the orbit of a Washington-controlled NATO alliance.
The end of the Yeltsin era put a slight crimp in the US plans. Putin began slowly and cautiously to emerge as a dynamic national force, committed to rebuilding Russia, following the IMF-guided looting of the country by a combination of Western banks and corrupt Russian oligarchs.
Russian oil output had risen since the collapse of the Soviet Union to the point that, by the time of the 2003 US war on Iraq, Russia was the world’s second largest oil producer behind Saudi Arabia.
The real significance of the Yukos Affair
The defining event in the new Russian energy geopolitics under Vladimir Putin took place in 2003. It was just as Washington was making it brutally clear it was going to militarize Iraq and the Middle East, regardless of world protest or UN niceties.
A brief review of the spectacular October 2003 arrest of Russia’s billionaire ‘oligarch’ Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and state seizure of his giant Yukos oil group, is essential to understand Russian energy geopolitics.
Khodorkovsky was arrested at Novosibirsk airport on October 25, 2003, by the Russian Prosecutor General's office on charges of tax evasion. The Putin government froze shares of Yukos Oil because of tax charges. They then took further actions against Yukos, leading to a collapse in the share price.
What was little mentioned in Western media accounts, which typically portrayed the Putin government actions as a reversion to Soviet-era methods, was what had triggered Putin’s dramatic action in the first place.
Khodorkovsky had been arrested just four weeks before a decisive Russian Duma or lower house election, in which Khodorkovsky had managed to buy the votes of a majority in the Duma using his vast wealth. Control of the Duma was to be the first step by Khodorkovsky in a plan to run against Putin the next year as President. The Duma victory would have allowed him to change election laws in his favor, as well as to alter a controversial law being drafted in the Duma, ‘The Law on Underground Resources.’ That law would prevent Yukos and other private companies from gaining control of raw materials in the ground, or from developing private pipeline routes independent of the Russian state pipelines.
Khodorkovsky had violated the pledge of the Oligarchs made to Putin, that they be allowed to keep their assets--de facto stolen from the state in the rigged auctions under Yeltsin--if they stayed out of Russian politics and repatriated a share of their stolen money. Khodorkovsky, the most powerful oligarch at the time, was serving as the vehicle for what was becoming an obvious Washington-backed putsch against Putin.
The Khodorkovsky arrest followed an unpublicized meeting earlier that year on July 14, 2003 between Khodorkovsky and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Following the Cheney meeting, Khodorkovsky began talks with ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, Condi Rice’s old firm, about taking a major state in Yukos, said to have been between 25% and 40%. That was intended to give Khodorkovsky de facto immunity from possible Putin government interference by tying Yukos to the big US oil giants and, hence, to Washington. It would also have given Washington, via the US oil giants, a de facto veto power over future Russian oil and gas pipelines and oil deals. Days before his October 2003 arrest on tax fraud charges, Khodorkovsky had entertained George H.W. Bush, the representative of the powerful and secretive Washington Carlyle Group in Moscow. They were discussing the final details of the US oil company share buy-in of Yukos.
Yukos had also just made a bid to acquire rival Sibneft from Boris Berezovsky, another Yeltsin-era Oligarch. YukosSibneft, with 19.5 billion barrels of oil and gas, would then own the second-largest oil and gas reserves in the world after ExxonMobil. YukosSibneft would be the fourth largest in the world in terms of production, pumping 2.3 million barrels of crude oil a day. The Exxon or Chevron buy-up of YukosSibneft would have been a literal energy coup d’etat. Cheney knew it; Bush knew it; Khodorkovsky knew it.
Above all, Vladimir Putin knew it and moved decisively to block it.
Khodokorvsky had cultivated very impressive ties to the Anglo-American power establishment. He created a philanthropic foundation, the Open Russia Foundation, modelled on the Open Society foundation of his close friend George Soros. On the select board of Open Russia Foundation sat Henry Kissinger and Kissinger’s friend, Jacob Lord Rothschild, London scion of the banking family. Arthur Hartman, a former US Ambassador to Moscow, also sat on the foundation’s board.
Following Khodorkovsky's arrest, the Washington Post reported that the imprisoned Russian billionaire had retained the services of Stuart Eizenstat - former deputy Treasury Secretary, Undersecretary of State, Undersecretary of Commerce during the Clinton Administration - to lobby in Washington for his freedom. Khodorkovsky was in deep with the Anglo-American establishment.
Subsequent western media and official protest about Russia’s return to communist methods and raw power politics, conveniently ignored the fact that Khodorkovsky was hardly Snow White himself. Earlier, Khodorkovsky had unilaterally ripped up his contract with British Petroleum. BP had been a partner with Yukos, and had spent $300 million in drilling the highly promising Priobskoye oil field in Siberia.
Once the BP drilling had been done, Khodorkovsky forced BP out, using gangster methods that would be unlawful in most of the developed world. By 2003 Priobskoye oil production reached 129 million barrels, equivalent to a value on the market of some $8 billions. Earlier, in 1998, after the IMF had given billions to Russia to prevent a collapse of the Ruble, Khodokorvosky’s Bank Menatep diverted an eye-popping $4.8 billion in IMF funds to his hand-picked bank cronies, some US banks among them. The howls of protest from Washington at the October 2003 arrest of Khodorkovsky were disingenuous, if not outright hypocritical. As seen from the Kremlin, Washington had been caught with its fat hand in the Russian cookie jar.
The Putin-Khodorkovsky showdown signalled a decisive turn by the Putin government towards rebuilding Russia and erecting strategic defenses from the foreign onslaught led by Cheney and friend Tony Blair in Britain. It took place in the context of a brazen US grab for Iraq in 2003 and of a unilateral Bush Administration announcement that the USA was abrogating its solemn treaty obligations with Russia under their earlier Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, in order to go ahead with development of US missile defenses, an act which could only be viewed in Moscow as a hostile act aimed at her security.
By 2003, indeed, it took little strategic military prowess to realize that the Pentagon hawks and their allies in the military industry and Big Oil had a vision of a United States unfettered by international agreements and acting unilaterally in its own best interests, as defined, of course, by the hawks. Their recommendations were published by one of the many Washington hawk conservative Think-Tanks. In January 2001 The National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP) issued Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control, just as the Bush-Cheney Administration began. The report, demanding a unilateral US end to nuclear force reduction, was signed by 27 senior officials from past and current administrations. The list included the man who today is Bush’s National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley; it included the special assistant to the Secretary of Defense, Stephen Cambone, and it included Admiral James Woolsey, the former head of CIA and chairman of the Washington NGO, Freedom House. Freedom House played a central role in Ukraine’s US-sponsored ‘Orange Revolution’ and all other ‘Color Revolutions’ across the former Soviet Union.
These events were soon followed by the Washington-financed series of covert destabilizations of a number of governments in Russia’s periphery which had been close to Moscow. It included the November 2003 ‘Rose Revolution’ in Georgia which ousted Edouard Shevardnadze in favour of a young, US-educated and pro-NATO President, Mikheil Saakashvili. The 37-year-old Saakashvili had conveniently agreed to back the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline that would avoid Moscow pipeline control of Azerbaijan’s Caspian oil. The United States has maintained close ties with Georgia since President Mikheil Saakashvili has come to power. American military trainers instruct Georgian troops and Washington has poured millions of dollars into preparing Georgia to become part of NATO.
Following its Rose Revolution in Georgia, Woolsey’s Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Soros Foundation and other Washington-backed NGOs organized the brazenly provocative November 2004 Ukraine ‘Orange Revolution.’ The aim of the Orange Revolution was to install a pro-NATO regime there under the contested Presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, in a land strategically able to cut the major pipeline flows from Russian oil and gas to Western Europe. Washington-backed ‘democratic opposition’ movements in neighboring Belarus also began receiving millions of dollars of Bush Administration largesse, along with Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan and more remote former Soviet states which also happen to form a barrier between potential energy pipelines linking China with Russia and the former Soviet states like Kazkhstan..
Again, energy and oil and gas pipeline control lay at the heart of the US moves. Little wonder, perhaps, that some people inside the Kremlin, notably Vladimir Putin, began to wonder if Putin’s new born-again Texan partner-in-prayer, George W. Bush, was in fact speaking to Putin with forked tongue, as the Indians would say.
By the end of 2004 it was clear in Moscow that a new Cold War, this one over strategic energy control and unilateral nuclear primacy, was fully underway. It was also clear from the unmistakeable pattern of Washington actions since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, that End Game for USA policy vis-?-vis Eurasia was not China, not Iraq, and not Iran.
The geopolitical ‘End Game’ for Washington was the complete de-construction of Russia, the one state in Eurasia capable of organizing an effective combination of alliances using its vast oil and gas resources. That, of course, could never be openly declared.
After 2003 Putin and Russian foreign policy, especially energy policy, reverted to their basic response to the ‘Heartland’ geopolitics of Sir Halford Mackinder, politics which had been the basis of Soviet Cold War strategy since 1946.
Putin began to make a series of defensive moves to restore some tenable form of equilibrium in face of the increasingly obvious Washington policy of encircling and weakening Russia. Subsequent US strategic blunders have made the job a bit easier for Russia. Now, with the stakes rising on both sides—NATO and Russia—Putin’s Russia has moved beyond simple defense to a new dynamic offensive, to secure a more viable geopolitical position, using its energy as the lever.
Mackinder’s Heartland and Brzezinski’s Chess Game
It’s essential to understand the historic background to the term geopolitics. In 1904, an academic British geographer named Halford Mackinder made an address before the Royal Geographic Society in London which was to change history. In his speech, titled, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History,’ Mackinder sought to define the relation between a nation’s or region’s geography—its topography, relation to the sea or land, its climate—with its politics and position in the world. He posited two classes of powers: sea powers including Britain and the United States as well as Japan; and he posited the large land powers of Eurasia, which, with development of the railroad, were able to unite large land masses free from dependency on the seas.
For Mackinder, an ardent Empire advocate, the implicit lesson for continued hegemony of the British Empire following the 1914-1917 World War, was to prevent at all costs a convergence of interests between the nations of East Europe—Poland, Czechoslovakia , Austria-Hungary--and the Russia-centered Eurasia ‘Heartland’ or ‘pivot’ land,as he termed it. After the Versailles peace talks, Mackinder summed up his ideas in the following famous dictum:
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
Who rules the World-Island commands the world.
Mackinder's Heartland was the core area of Eurasia, and the World-Island was all of Eurasia, including Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Great Britain, never a part of Continental Europe, he saw as a separate naval or sea-power. The Mackinder geopolitical perspective shaped Britain’s entry into the 1914 Great War, it shaped her entry into World War Two. It shaped Churchill’s calculated provocations of an increasingly paranoid Stalin, beginning 1943, to entice Russia into what became the Cold War.
From a US perspective, the 1946-1991 Cold War era was all about who shall control Mackinder’s World-Island, and, concretely, how to prevent the Eurasian Heartland, centered on Russia, from doing just that. A look at a polar projection map of US military alliances during the Cold War makes the point: The Soviet Union had been geopolitically contained and prevented from any significant linkup with Western Europe or the Middle East or Asia. The Cold War was about Russian efforts to circumvent that NATO-centered Iron Curtain.
Former US National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, writing in the post-Soviet era in 1997, drew on Mackinder’s geopolitics by name, in describing the principal strategic aim of the United States to keep Eurasia from unifying as a coherent economic and military bloc or counterweight to the sole superpower status of the United States.
To understand US foreign policy since the onset of the Bush-Cheney Presidency in 2001, therefore, it’s useful to cite a revealing New York Council on Foreign Relations Foreign Affairs article by Brzezinski from September/October 1997:
"Eurasia is home to most of the world's politically assertive and dynamic states. All the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia. The world's most populous aspirants to regional hegemony, China and India, are in Eurasia, as are all the potential political or economic challengers to American primacy. After the United States, the next six largest economies and military spenders are there, as are all but one of the world's overt nuclear powers, and all but one of the covert ones. Eurasia accounts for 75 percent of the world's population, 60 percent of its GNP, and 75 percent of its energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia's potential power overshadows even America's.
Eurasia is the world's axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy...’(emphasis added-w.e.)
If we take the words of Washington strategist Brzezinski and understand the axioms of Halford Mackinder as the driving motive for Anglo, and later, American foreign policy for more than an entire century, it begins to become clear why a reorganized Russian state under the Presidency of Vladimir Putin has gone into motion to resist the overtures and overt attempts at deconstruction being promoted by Washington in the name of democracy. How has Putin acted to shore up Russian defenses? In a word: energy.
Russian energy geopolitics
In terms of the overall standard of living, mortality and economic prosperity, Russia today is not a world class power. In terms of energy, it is a colossus. In terms of landmass it is still the single largest nation in land area in the world, spanning from the Pacific to the door of Europe. It has vast territory, vast natural resources, and it has the world’s largest reserves of natural gas, the energy source currently the focus of major global power plays. In addition, it is the only power on the face of the earth with the military capabilities able to match that of the United States despite the collapse of the USSR and deterioration in the military since.
Russia has more than 130,000 oil wells and some 2000 oil and gas deposits explored of which at least 900 are not in use. Oil reserves have been estimated at 150 billion barrels, similar perhaps to Iraq. They could be far larger but have not yet been exploited owing to difficulty of drilling in some remote arctic regions. Oil prices above $60 a barrel begin to make it economical to explore in those remote regions.
Currently Russian oil products can be exported to foreign markets in three routes: Western Europe via the Baltic Sea and Black Sea; Northern route; Far East to China or Japan and East Asian markets. Russia has oil terminals on the Baltic at St. Petersburg for oil and a newly expanded oil terminal at Primorsk. There are added oil terminals under construction at Vysotsk, Batareynaya Bay and Ust-Luga.
Russia’s state-owned natural gas pipeline network, its so-called ‘unified gas transportation system’ includes a vast network of pipelines and compressor stations extending more than 150,000 kilometers across Russia. By law only the state-owned Gazprom is allowed to use the pipeline. The network is perhaps the most valued Russian state asset outside the oil and gas itself. Here is the heart of Putin’s new natural gas geopolitics and the focus of conflict with western oil and gas companies as well as the European Union, whose Energy Commissioner, Andras Piebalgs, is from new NATO member Latvia, formerly part of the USSR.
In 2001, as it became clear in Moscow that Washington would find a way to bring the Baltic republics into NATO, Putin backed the development of a major new oil port on the Russian coast of the Baltic Sea in Primorsk at a cost of $2.2 billion. This project, known as the Baltic Pipeline System (BPS), greatly lessens export dependency on Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. The Baltic is Russia’s main oil export route, carrying crude oil from Russia's West Siberian and Timan-Pechora oil provinces westward to the port of Primorsk in the Russian Gulf of Finland. The BPS was completed in March 2006 with capacity to carry more than1.3 million barrels/day of Russian oil to western markets in Europe and beyond.
The same month, March 2006, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was named chairman of a Russian-German consortium building a natural gas pipeline going some 1,200 km under the Baltic Sea. Majority shareholder in this North European Gas Pipeline (NEGP) project, with 51%, is the Russian state-controlled Gazprom, the world’s largest natural gas company. The German companies BASF and E.On each hold 24.5%. The project, estimated to cost €4.7 billion, was started late 2005 and will connect the gas terminal at the Russian port city of Vyborg on the Baltic near St. Petersburg with the Baltic city of Greifswald in eastern Germany. The Yuzhno-Russkoye gas field in West Siberia will be developed in a joint venture between Gazprom and BASF to feed the pipeline. It was Gerhard Schroeder’s last major act as Chancellor, and provoked howls of protest from the pro-Washington Polish government, as well as Ukraine, who both stood to lose control over pipeline flows from Russia. Despite her close ties to the Bush Administration, Chancellor Angela Merkel has been forced to swallow hard and accept the project. Germany’s industry is simply dependent on the Russian energy import. Russia is by far the largest supplier of natural gas to Germany.
The giant Shtokman gas deposit in the Russian sector of the Barents Sea, north of the Murmansk harbor, will ultimately also be a part of the gas supply of the NEGP. When completed in two parallel pipelines, NEGP will supply Germany up to 55 billion cubic meters more a year of Russian gas.
In April 2006 the Putin government announced the first stage of construction of the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean Pipeline (ESPO), a vast oil pipeline from Taishet in the Irkutsk Region near Lake Baikal in East Siberia, to Perevoznaya Bay on Russia’s Pacific Ocean coast, to be built at a cost of more than $11.5 billion. Transneft, the Russian state-owned pipeline company will build it. When finished, it will pump up to 1.6 million barrels/day from Siberia to the Russian Far East and from there on to the energy-hungry Asia-Pacific, mainly to China. The first stage is due to be completed by end of 2008. In addition, Putin has announced plans to construct an oil refinery on the Amur River near the China border in Russia’s Far East to allow sale of refined product to China and Asian markets. Presently the Siberian oil can only be delivered to the Pacific via rail.
For Russia, the Taishet to Perevoznaya route will maximize its national strategic benefits while taking oil exports to China and Japan into account at the same time. In the future, the country will be able to export oil to Japan directly from the Nakhodka Port. Oil-import-dependent Japan is frantic to find new secure oil sources outside the unstable Middle East. The ESPO can also supply oil to the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea through building from Vladivostok branch lines leading to the two countries and to China via a branch pipe between Blagoveshchensk and Daqing. The Taishet route provides a clear roadmap for energy cooperation between Russia and China, Japan and other Asia-Pacific countries.
Sakhalin: Russia reins in Big Oil
In late September 2006 a seemingly minor dispute exploded and resulted in the revocation of the environmental permit for Royal Dutch Shell’s Sakhalin II Liquified Natural Gas project, which had been due to deliver LNG to Japan, South Korea and other customers by 2008. Shell is lead energy partner in an Anglo-Japanese oil and gas development project on Russia’s Far East island of Sakhalin, a vast island north of Hokkaido Japan.
At the same time, the Putin government announced environmental requirements had also not been met by ExxonMobil for their De Kastri oil terminal built on Sakhalin as part of its Sakhalin I oil and gas development project. Sakhalin I contains an estimated 8 billion barrels of oil and vast volumes of gas, making the field a rare Super-Giant oil find, in geologists’ terminology.
In the early 1990’s the Yeltsin government made a desperation bid to attract needed investment capital and technology into exploiting Russian oil and gas regions at a time the government was broke and oil prices very low. In a bold departure, Yeltsin granted US and other western oil majors generous exploration rights to two large oil projects, Sakhalin I and Sakhalin II. Under a so-called PSA or Production Sharing Agreement, ExxonMobil, lead partner of the Sakhalin I oil project, got tax-free Russian concessions.
Under the terms of the PSA’s, typical between major Anglo-American oil majors and weak Third World countries, Russia’s government would instead get paid for the oil and gas rights in a share of eventual oil or gas produced. But the first drops of oil to Russia would flow only after all project production costs had first been covered. PSA’s were originally developed by Washington and Big Oil to facilitate favorable control by the oil companies of large oil projects in third countries. The major US oil giants, working with the James Baker’s James Baker Institute, which drafted Dick Cheney’s 2001 Energy Task Force Review, used the PSA form to regain control over Iraq’s oil production, hidden behind the fa?ade of an Iraqi state-owned oil company.
Shortly before the Russian government told ExxonMobil it had problems with its terminal on Sakhalin, ExxonMobil had announced yet another cost increase in the project. ExxonMobil, whose attorney is James Baker III, and which is a close partner to the Cheney-Bush White House, announced a 30% cost increase, something that would put even further off any Russian oil flow share from the PSA. The news came on the eve of ExxonMobil plans to open an oil terminal at De Kastri on Sakhalin. The Russian Environment Ministry and the Agency for Subsoil Use suddenly announced the terminal did ‘not meet environmental requirements’ and is reportedly considering halting production by ExxonMobil as well.
Britain’s Royal Dutch Shell under another PSA holds rights to develop the oil and gas resources in Sakhalin II region, and build Russia’s first Liquified Natural Gas project. The $20 billion project, employing over 17,000 people, is 80% complete. It’s the world’s largest integrated oil and gas project, and includes Russia’s first offshore oil production, as well as Russia’s first offshore integrated gas platform.
The clear Russian government moves against ExxonMobil and Shell have been interpreted in the industry as an atttempt by the Putin government to regain control of Russian oil and gas resources it gave away during the Yeltsin era. It would cohere with Putin’s emerging energy strategy.
Russia-Turkey Blue Stream gas project
In November 2005 Russia’s Gazprom completed the final stage of its 1,213 kilometer $3.2 billion Blue Stream gas pipeline. The project brings gas from its gas fields in Krasnodar, then by underwater pipelines across the Black Sea to the Durusu Terminal near Samsun inon the Turkish Black Sea coast. From there the pipeline supplies Russian gas to Ankara. When it reaches full capacity in 2010 it will carry an estimated 16 billion cubic meters gas a year.
Gazprom is now discussing transit of Russian gas to the countries of South Europe and East Mediterranean, including based on new contracts and new volumes of gas. Greece, South Italy and Israel all are in some form of negotiation with Gazprom to tap gas from the Blue Stream pipeline across the territory of Turkey. A new route for the gas supply is being developed now - the one via the countries of East and Central Europe. The interim title of the project is the South-European Gas Pipeline. The main issue here is to establish a new gas transmission system, both from Russian origin and from the third countries
In sum, not including the emerging potentials of Gazprom’s entry into the fast-developing Liquified Natural Gas markets globally, energy, oil and gas and nuclear, is firmly at the heart of Russian attempts to build new economic alliance partners across Eurasia in the coming showdown with the United States.
US plans for ‘Nuclear Primacy’
The key to the ability of Putin’s Russia to succeed is its ability to defend its Eurasian energy strategy with a credible military deterrent, to counter now-obvious Washington military plans for what the Pentagon terms Full Spectrum Dominance.
In a revealing article titled ‘The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy,’ in the March/April 2006 Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, authors Kier Lieber and Daryl Press made the following claim,
‘Today, for the first time in almost 50 years, the United States stands on the verge of attaining nuclear primacy. It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike. This dramatic shift in the nuclear balance of power stems from a series of improvements in the United States' nuclear systems, the precipitous decline of Russia's arsenal, and the glacial pace of modernization of China's nuclear forces. Unless Washington's policies change or Moscow and Beijing take steps to increase the size and readiness of their forces, Russia and China -- and the rest of the world -- will live in the shadow of U.S. nuclear primacy for many years to come.’
The US authors claim, accurately, that since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia’s strategic nuclear arsenal has ‘sharply deteriorated.’ They also conclude that the United States is and has been for some time, intentionally pursuing global nuclear primacy. The September 2002 Bush Administration National Security Strategy explicitly stated that it was official US policy to establish global military primacy, an unsettling thought for many nations today given the recent actions of Washington since the events of September, 2001.
One of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s priority projects has been the multi-billion dollar construction of a US missile defense. It has been sold to American voters as a defense against possible terror attacks. In reality, as has been openly recognized in Moscow and Beijing, it is aimed at the only two real nuclear powers, Russia and China.
As the Foreign Affairs article points out, ‘the sort of missile defenses that the United States might plausibly deploy would be valuable primarily in an offensive context, not a defensive one -- as an adjunct to a U.S. first-strike capability, not as a stand-alone shield. If the United States launched a nuclear attack against Russia (or China), the targeted country would be left with a tiny surviving arsenal -- if any at all. At that point, even a relatively modest or inefficient missile-defense system might well be enough to protect against any retaliatory strikes, because the devastated enemy would have so few warheads and decoys left.’
In the context of a United States which has actively moved the troops of its NATO partners into Afghanistan, now Lebanon, and which is clearly backing the former USSR member Georgia, today a critical factor in the Caspian Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Turkey oil pipeline, in Georgia’s move to join NATO and push Russian troops away, it is little surprise that Moscow might be just a bit uncomfortable with the American President’s promises of spreading democracy through a US-defined Greater Middle East. The invented term, Greater Middle East is the creation of various Washington think-tanks close to Cheney including his Project for the New American Century, to refer to the non-Arabic countries of Turkey, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Central Asian (former USSR) countries, and Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia. At the G-8 Summit in Summer 2004 President Bush first officially used the term to refer to the region included in Washington’s project to spread ‘democracy’ in the region.
On October 3, the Russian Foreign Ministry warned that Russia would ‘take appropriate measures’ should Poland deploy elements of the new US missile defense system. Poland is now a NATO member. Its Defense Minister, Radek Sikorski was a former Resident in Washington at Richard Perle’s hawkish AEI think-tank. He was also Executive Director of the New Atlantic Initiative, a project designed to bring the former Warsaw Pact countries of eastern Europe into NATO under the guise of spreading democracy. The United States is also building, via NATO, a European Missile Defense System.
The only conceivable target of such a system would be Russia in the sense of enabling a US first strike success. Completion of the European missile defense system, the militarization of the entire Middle East, the encirclement of Russia and of China from a connected web of new US military bases, many put up in the name of the War on Terror, all now appear to the Kremlin as part of a deliberate US strategy of Full Spectrum Dominance. The Pentagon refers to it also as ‘Escalation Dominance,’ the ability to win a war at any level of violence, including a nuclear war.
Moscow’s military status
Moscow has not been entirely passive in the face of this growing reality. In his May 2003 State of the Nation Address, Vladimir Putin spoke of strengthening and modernizing Russia’s nuclear deterrent by creating new types of weapons, including for Russia’s strategic forces, which will ‘ensure the defense capability of Russia and its allies in the long term.’ Russia stopped withdrawing and destroying its SS-18 MIRVed missiles once the Bush Administration unilaterally declared an end to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and its de facto annulling of the Start II Treaty.
Russia never stopped being a powerful entity that produced state-of-the-art military technologies -- a trend that continued from its inception as a modern state. While its army, navy and air force are in derelict conditions, the elements for Russia's resurgence as a military powerhouse are still in place. Russia has been consistently fielding top-notch military technology at various international trade shows, and has been effective in the demonstration of its capabilities.
In spite of financial and economic difficulties, Russia still produces state-of-the-art military technologies, according to a 2004 analysis by the Washington-based think tank, Power and Interest News Report (PINR). One of its best achievements after the dissolution of the Soviet Union has been its armored fighting vehicle BMP-3, which has been chosen over Western vehicles in contracts for the United Arab Emirates and Oman.
Russia's surface-to-air missile systems, the S-300, and its more powerful successor, the S-400, are reported to be more potent than American-made Patriot systems. The once-anticipated military exercise between the Patriot and the S-300 never materialized, leaving the Russian complex with an undisputed, yet unproven, claim of superiority over the American system. Continuing this list is the Kamov-50 family of military helicopters that incorporate the latest cutting-edge technologies and tactics, making them an equal force to the best Washington has. European helicopter industry sources confirm this.
In recent joint Indo-American air force exercises, where the Indian Air Force was equipped with modern Russian-made Su-30 fighters, the Indian Air Force out-maneuvered American-made F-15 planes in a majority of their engagements, prompting US Air Force General Hal Homburg to admit that Russian technology in Indian hands has given the US Air Force a ‘wake-up call.’ The Russian military establishment is continuing to design other helicopters, tanks and armored vehicles that are on par with the best that the West has to offer.
Weapons export, in addition to oil and gas, has been one of the best ways for Russia to earn much-needed hard currency. Already, Russia is the second-largest worldwide exporter of military technology after the United States. As reported in various magazines, journals and periodicals, at present, Russia's modern military technology is more likely to be exported than supplied to its own armies due to the existing financial constraints and limitations of Russia's armed forces. This has implications for America's future combat operations since practically all insurgent, guerrilla, breakaway or terrorist armed formations across the globe -- the very formations that the United States will most likely face in its future wars -- are fielded with Russian weapons or its derivatives.
Russian nuclear arsenal has played an important political role since the end of the Soviet Union, providing fundamental security for the Russian state. After a bitter intra-services fight within the Russian General Staff which lasted from 1998 to 2003, the General Staff realized along with the Defense Ministry that a further policy of neglect of nuclear forces in favor of funding rebuilding conventional forces in the face of tight budget constraints, was not tolerable. In 2003 Russia had to buy from Ukraine strategic bombers and ICBMs warehoused there. Since then strategic nuclear forces have been a priority. Today, the finances of the Russian state, thanks largely to high prices of oil and gas exports, are on a strong footing. The Russian Central Bank has become one of the five largest dollar reserve holders with reserves of more than $270 billions.
The material foundation of the Russian military is its defense industry. After 1991 the Russian Federation inherited the bulk of the Soviet defense industrial complex.
Today, with little fanfare, the US is building up its influence and military presence in the Middle East despite a general draw-down in its military commitments and expenditure. Why? Oil is certainly a large part of the answer. But in geopolitical terms, it is also to the Eurasian land power, Russia from access to the seas - just as Mackinder argued had to be done. The push for a US ‘nuclear primacy’ over Russia is the factor in world politics today which has the most potential for bringing the world into a nuclear conflagration by miscalculation.
The basic argument of the Mackinder’s geopolitics is still relevant: ‘The great geographical realities remain: land power versus sea power, heartland versus rimland, centre versus periphery...’ This Russia understands every bit as Washington.
F. William Engdahl is a Global Research Contributing Editor and author of the book, ‘A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,’ Pluto Press Ltd. He has completed a soon-to-be published book on GMO titled, ‘Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Political Agenda Behind GMO’. He may be contacted through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Yahoo Forum
Anti-Georgia campaign heats up in Russia - this piece of Yahoo World News generated an emotional discussion that you can read here. My favorite posts:
- I had no idea Russia had troops in GA
- Why is the Russian Army in Atlanta?
- Russia! Out of US now!!!!!!
- Carter should've never allowed Russian troops in his home state.
- I had no idea Russia had troops in GA
- Why is the Russian Army in Atlanta?
- Russia! Out of US now!!!!!!
- Carter should've never allowed Russian troops in his home state.
Monday, October 02, 2006
Revolution and Evolution
I definitely agree with Wally Shedd and with Sir Churchill that nothing better then democracy was invented to make countries stable and happy for long periods of time. Still democracy is a technology and a technical model that properly works only under certain conditions. It also means that as a technology it should be developed and adjusted depending on circumstances, standards of living, culture, social diversity, etc. This process should be regarded as adjustments but not as a “right” or “wrong” way from democracy. The only criteria to keep in mind – do such adjustments make life of people better: stable, prosperous, happy. In the long run the only criteria that separates democracy from tyranny, as Karl Popper put it, is the ability of the people to change the government without bloodshed.
What I find fundamentally wrong is the view that there is one ideal model of democracy and the task of the government is to bring the country to this ideal as close as possible. Any society is an open system that develops evolutionary and the best way to bring stability to the system is to let it develop by its own laws. Self-organization is always better then forceful intervention even with the best intentions. Even if you think that your model of government is the best in the world forcing a society into this model means a system shock and every systems responds to outside shocks by chaos. Saddam was definitely a tyrant but Saddam’s Iraq was a stable system that worked by its own laws. An ant hill might be very badly and ineffectively organized and it is possible that you know a much better model of ant hill organization. What is the best way to “reform” the ant hill? By evolution or by revolution? By destroying the old ant hill and starting building a new one from scratch? Or by introducing step-by-step improvements, working by trial and error, developing improvements that work and eliminating changes that turned out to be erroneous? I believe that even bad evolution is always better then good revolution.
It’s really surprising that even today US politics is guided by the philosophy of Enlightenment – an archaic 300-years old teaching based on the notion that human society is ruled by the same rules as nature. The first grand failure of this biological approach was first demonstrated by the consequences of the French revolution.
Das sind die Folgen der Revolution
Und ihrer fatalen Doktrine;
An Allem ist Schuld Jean Jacques Rousseau,
Voltaire und die Guillotine.
Heinrich Heine “Romanzero” 1851
I also think that Jean Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire are guilty of spreading ideas that humans are nothing but thinking ants and that there are ‘organic’ laws of social development, that this development can “progressive”, that humans have “natural” rights. But above all they are guilty of discovering “immutable laws” of social development. Karl Popper was the best philosopher who exposed such social theories as basically corrupt. He called such theories ‘historicism’. Historicism is a belief that history develops inexorably and necessarily according to some principles or rules towards a determinate end (democracy, socialism, communism, national state, etc.)
Historicists cannot make a distinction between laws and trends. First, they make an inductive mistake – pointing at a chain of certain events in the past and inventing a “law” based on the discovered trend. But the number of factors that led to a certain event was almost infinite and a social “scientist” needs beforehand a theory that would help him to pick up “right” events and dismiss all others as insignificant. Second, a social “scientist” believes that he can make predictions about future events based on the social “laws”. As Popper puts it, there can be no doubt that "the habit of confusing trends with laws, together with the intuitive observation of trends such as technical progress, inspired the central doctrines of ... historicism." (The Poverty of Historicism). Popper does not, of course, dispute the existence of trends, and he doesn’t deny that the observation of trends can be of practical value - but the essential point is that a trend is something which itself ultimately stands in need of scientific explanation, and it cannot therefore function as the frame of reference in terms of which anything else can be scientifically explained or predicted.
Karl Popper explored the failure of German Nazism and Soviet Socialism – societies that were constructed in accordance with “laws”. But I think today we should add to this list Freedom in Iraq or Democracy in Russia as another example of dogmatic and irresponsible utopian engineering.
What I find fundamentally wrong is the view that there is one ideal model of democracy and the task of the government is to bring the country to this ideal as close as possible. Any society is an open system that develops evolutionary and the best way to bring stability to the system is to let it develop by its own laws. Self-organization is always better then forceful intervention even with the best intentions. Even if you think that your model of government is the best in the world forcing a society into this model means a system shock and every systems responds to outside shocks by chaos. Saddam was definitely a tyrant but Saddam’s Iraq was a stable system that worked by its own laws. An ant hill might be very badly and ineffectively organized and it is possible that you know a much better model of ant hill organization. What is the best way to “reform” the ant hill? By evolution or by revolution? By destroying the old ant hill and starting building a new one from scratch? Or by introducing step-by-step improvements, working by trial and error, developing improvements that work and eliminating changes that turned out to be erroneous? I believe that even bad evolution is always better then good revolution.
It’s really surprising that even today US politics is guided by the philosophy of Enlightenment – an archaic 300-years old teaching based on the notion that human society is ruled by the same rules as nature. The first grand failure of this biological approach was first demonstrated by the consequences of the French revolution.
Das sind die Folgen der Revolution
Und ihrer fatalen Doktrine;
An Allem ist Schuld Jean Jacques Rousseau,
Voltaire und die Guillotine.
Heinrich Heine “Romanzero” 1851
I also think that Jean Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire are guilty of spreading ideas that humans are nothing but thinking ants and that there are ‘organic’ laws of social development, that this development can “progressive”, that humans have “natural” rights. But above all they are guilty of discovering “immutable laws” of social development. Karl Popper was the best philosopher who exposed such social theories as basically corrupt. He called such theories ‘historicism’. Historicism is a belief that history develops inexorably and necessarily according to some principles or rules towards a determinate end (democracy, socialism, communism, national state, etc.)
Historicists cannot make a distinction between laws and trends. First, they make an inductive mistake – pointing at a chain of certain events in the past and inventing a “law” based on the discovered trend. But the number of factors that led to a certain event was almost infinite and a social “scientist” needs beforehand a theory that would help him to pick up “right” events and dismiss all others as insignificant. Second, a social “scientist” believes that he can make predictions about future events based on the social “laws”. As Popper puts it, there can be no doubt that "the habit of confusing trends with laws, together with the intuitive observation of trends such as technical progress, inspired the central doctrines of ... historicism." (The Poverty of Historicism). Popper does not, of course, dispute the existence of trends, and he doesn’t deny that the observation of trends can be of practical value - but the essential point is that a trend is something which itself ultimately stands in need of scientific explanation, and it cannot therefore function as the frame of reference in terms of which anything else can be scientifically explained or predicted.
Karl Popper explored the failure of German Nazism and Soviet Socialism – societies that were constructed in accordance with “laws”. But I think today we should add to this list Freedom in Iraq or Democracy in Russia as another example of dogmatic and irresponsible utopian engineering.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Mission impossible
When I first met Mormons and talked to them one thing really amazed me - total inability to think critically about life and deeds of Joseph Smith. Unlike many great prophets Smith didn’t live a thousand years ago and there’re tons of tangible evidence that he was a liar, a con artist and an impostor. Still so many well educated and otherwise smart people who somehow manage to block all their mental activity when it comes to discuss – how comes Smith’s translation of the Egyptian Book of Dead is complete gibberish.
We are talking about pure belief – something that is so deeply ingrained in consciousness that critical approach is almost impossible. Destruction of basic mental axioms can lead to destruction of personality. There cannot be any rational verification for religious beliefs as well as for many cultural beliefs that are close to religious.
What I find fascinating about American mentality – their notions of democracy and freedom are also ingrained. This is the case even with the most educated, sophisticated and intellectual. This is not the case with Europeans. While Brits or Frenchmen also believe in freedom and democracy they are not religious about it and don’t regard it with enthusiastic devotion. With my English friend I can freely discuss problems of democracy and our disputes are not just normal but they also help to discover something new, change to some extent our views or find compromise. With Americans it’s almost always a missionary talking to a heathen. To treat democracy as just another technical model of effective government organization and freedom as a personal feeling of limitations for self-realization is the same as trampling down on the bible. What’s the use of discussing the origins of the Book of Mormon with a faithful Mormon?
This could be just a curious cultural phenomenon if Americans were not so proactive. When your notion of freedom and democracy is so religious and you sincerely believe that your country is democratic and free then you view the world out there also religiously. You divide the world into the Forces of Good (you and your friends) and the Forces of Evil (your enemies). In-between live ignorant and uneducated heathens. You send missionaries to their jungles, educate them, give them holy books, fight with missionaries of wrong churches and get frustrated with the total stupidity of barbarians. They dare to be critical! Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormons from Egyptian. Right? He never studied Egyptian before. Right? Then how comes you don’t see that Jesus gave him the gift of understanding the language!
We are talking about pure belief – something that is so deeply ingrained in consciousness that critical approach is almost impossible. Destruction of basic mental axioms can lead to destruction of personality. There cannot be any rational verification for religious beliefs as well as for many cultural beliefs that are close to religious.
What I find fascinating about American mentality – their notions of democracy and freedom are also ingrained. This is the case even with the most educated, sophisticated and intellectual. This is not the case with Europeans. While Brits or Frenchmen also believe in freedom and democracy they are not religious about it and don’t regard it with enthusiastic devotion. With my English friend I can freely discuss problems of democracy and our disputes are not just normal but they also help to discover something new, change to some extent our views or find compromise. With Americans it’s almost always a missionary talking to a heathen. To treat democracy as just another technical model of effective government organization and freedom as a personal feeling of limitations for self-realization is the same as trampling down on the bible. What’s the use of discussing the origins of the Book of Mormon with a faithful Mormon?
This could be just a curious cultural phenomenon if Americans were not so proactive. When your notion of freedom and democracy is so religious and you sincerely believe that your country is democratic and free then you view the world out there also religiously. You divide the world into the Forces of Good (you and your friends) and the Forces of Evil (your enemies). In-between live ignorant and uneducated heathens. You send missionaries to their jungles, educate them, give them holy books, fight with missionaries of wrong churches and get frustrated with the total stupidity of barbarians. They dare to be critical! Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormons from Egyptian. Right? He never studied Egyptian before. Right? Then how comes you don’t see that Jesus gave him the gift of understanding the language!
Friday, September 15, 2006
Kim Diagnosed At Last
Thanks to my friend who happens to be a professional psychiatrist we finally managed to diagnose Kim Zigfeld - Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). If you were among those unlucky who happened to argue with La Russophobikha click here . "NPD traits discussed" is hilarious! And it is written by a person who was married to a narcissist.
The most telling thing that narcissists do is contradict themselves. They will do this virtually in the same sentence, without even stopping to take a breath. It can be trivial (e.g., about what they want for lunch) or it can be serious (e.g., about whether or not they love you). When you ask them which one they mean, they'll deny ever saying the first one, though it may literally have been only seconds since they said it -- really, how could you think they'd ever have said that? You need to have your head examined! They will contradict FACTS. They will lie to you about things that you did together. They will misquote you to yourself. If you disagree with them, they'll say you're lying, making stuff up, or are crazy. [At this point, if you're like me, you sort of panic and want to talk to anyone who will listen about what is going on: this is a healthy reaction; it's a reality check ("who's the crazy one here?"); that you're confused by the narcissist's contrariness, that you turn to another person to help you keep your bearings, that you know something is seriously wrong and worry that it might be you are all signs that you are not a narcissist].
Read more...
The most telling thing that narcissists do is contradict themselves. They will do this virtually in the same sentence, without even stopping to take a breath. It can be trivial (e.g., about what they want for lunch) or it can be serious (e.g., about whether or not they love you). When you ask them which one they mean, they'll deny ever saying the first one, though it may literally have been only seconds since they said it -- really, how could you think they'd ever have said that? You need to have your head examined! They will contradict FACTS. They will lie to you about things that you did together. They will misquote you to yourself. If you disagree with them, they'll say you're lying, making stuff up, or are crazy. [At this point, if you're like me, you sort of panic and want to talk to anyone who will listen about what is going on: this is a healthy reaction; it's a reality check ("who's the crazy one here?"); that you're confused by the narcissist's contrariness, that you turn to another person to help you keep your bearings, that you know something is seriously wrong and worry that it might be you are all signs that you are not a narcissist].
Read more...
Friday, September 08, 2006
Kondopoga
Here’s a very good example how liberastian media is covering the “racist” conflict in Kondopoga. Clair Bigg from Radio Free Europe\Radio Liberty reports;
The incident was the latest in a string of attacks against ethnic Chechens and other ethnic minorities in Kondopoga that has prompted dozens of Chechen families to flee the city.
The violence was sparked by restaurant brawl between ethnic Russians and Chechens last week that left two of the Russians dead. The restaurant, "Chaika," was owned by a Chechen man.
That’s all. There’s was a brawl that left two of the Russians dead. Nothing is said about the cause of their death. Could they have a heart attack? Quite possible. Here’s the actual chain of events. Two Russians at the restaurant “Chaika” had a brawl with the waiter who supposedly brought them cheap vodka in a bottle from expensive one. Russians refused to pay for it. The barman called the local Chechen “rescue team”. It arrived an hour later when Russians who actually started the brawl already left. About 15 Chechens armed with knives, sharpened steel bars and baseball bats rushed into the restaurant, cried, “Allahu Akbar!” and started thrashing indiscriminately everyone who was unlucky to be at the restaurant by that time. People were defending themselves with chairs and tables. In less than 5 minutes the Chechen “rescue team” killed two men and mutilated 15, eight of them were beaten within an inch of their life. Having done that Chechens left the restaurant. During the “brawl” two local police cars were staying right at the restaurant and later a third one came. Policemen didn’t interfere. Later it became known that they actually were on the rescue team’s payroll and in fact were giving protection to the bandits.
Angry mobs burned down the restaurant where the Russians were killed and destroyed a street market and several stores owned by Chechens and other people from the Caucasus.
One gets an impression that immediately after the “brawl” angry mobs started mad rampaging. In a small town like Kondopoga where people now each other the news about the “brawl” spread very quickly. People gathered after the funeral (the deceased faces were mutilated beyond recognition) on a square at the City Council bringing the following demands: (1) Bring to justice corrupt police officers, (2) Bring to justice the Chechen “rescue team” that has been terrorizing the town residents for several years already. (3) Bring to justice the owner of the restaurant (and several other businesses) that uses the Chechen “rescue team” as his personal army. Please take a note – in the first place the angered was directed at the local police that was supposed to protect residents. When the very same policemen who a day before did nothing to stop Chechens started to “disperse the unsanctioned meeting” they were attacked and on the spur of the moment about 20-30 teenagers tried to put the Chechen restaurant on fire (they did put it on fire a day later) and broke windows of the several stores. The mayor realized that things are getting out of control called Petrozavodsk riot police.
The violence has been accompanied by street rallies in Kondopoga demanding the expulsion of immigrants.
Several nationalist parties have expressed support for the riots. Some reports claim these parties actually orchestrated them.
On the next day residents of Kondopoga gathered again. This time there were about 2000 of them (6% of the total population that would equivalent to 500 000 in Moscow). Representatives of the nationalist parties together with journalists flocked to the town like carrion-crows. In the true liberastian manner journalists started interviewing nationalists from Moscow and St.Petersburg forgetting the residents of Kondopoga altogether. And – yes – nationalists claimed that they orchestrated the riots, that residents are demanding expulsion of all immigrants – all the usual PR blah blah.
"People gathered spontaneously to express their demands," Belov said. "Their demands were simple: [foreigners] get out of here, you have 24 hours. Why? You've come here without invitation and we're fed up with you. These are the two reasons behind the problems in Kondopoga and elsewhere."
Belov said representatives of his movement, know for its aggressive xenophobic rhetoric, had plans to station representatives permanently in Karelia to "help," in his words, local residents.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the prime minister of the pro-Moscow government in Chechnya, has blamed Karelian officials for failing to stop the riots and has vowed to restore order if necessary.
Yes, indeed. Kadyrov’s guys know how to restore order. No wonder the Kondopoga’s Chechens are Kadyrov's strong supporters.
The incident was the latest in a string of attacks against ethnic Chechens and other ethnic minorities in Kondopoga that has prompted dozens of Chechen families to flee the city.
The violence was sparked by restaurant brawl between ethnic Russians and Chechens last week that left two of the Russians dead. The restaurant, "Chaika," was owned by a Chechen man.
That’s all. There’s was a brawl that left two of the Russians dead. Nothing is said about the cause of their death. Could they have a heart attack? Quite possible. Here’s the actual chain of events. Two Russians at the restaurant “Chaika” had a brawl with the waiter who supposedly brought them cheap vodka in a bottle from expensive one. Russians refused to pay for it. The barman called the local Chechen “rescue team”. It arrived an hour later when Russians who actually started the brawl already left. About 15 Chechens armed with knives, sharpened steel bars and baseball bats rushed into the restaurant, cried, “Allahu Akbar!” and started thrashing indiscriminately everyone who was unlucky to be at the restaurant by that time. People were defending themselves with chairs and tables. In less than 5 minutes the Chechen “rescue team” killed two men and mutilated 15, eight of them were beaten within an inch of their life. Having done that Chechens left the restaurant. During the “brawl” two local police cars were staying right at the restaurant and later a third one came. Policemen didn’t interfere. Later it became known that they actually were on the rescue team’s payroll and in fact were giving protection to the bandits.
Angry mobs burned down the restaurant where the Russians were killed and destroyed a street market and several stores owned by Chechens and other people from the Caucasus.
One gets an impression that immediately after the “brawl” angry mobs started mad rampaging. In a small town like Kondopoga where people now each other the news about the “brawl” spread very quickly. People gathered after the funeral (the deceased faces were mutilated beyond recognition) on a square at the City Council bringing the following demands: (1) Bring to justice corrupt police officers, (2) Bring to justice the Chechen “rescue team” that has been terrorizing the town residents for several years already. (3) Bring to justice the owner of the restaurant (and several other businesses) that uses the Chechen “rescue team” as his personal army. Please take a note – in the first place the angered was directed at the local police that was supposed to protect residents. When the very same policemen who a day before did nothing to stop Chechens started to “disperse the unsanctioned meeting” they were attacked and on the spur of the moment about 20-30 teenagers tried to put the Chechen restaurant on fire (they did put it on fire a day later) and broke windows of the several stores. The mayor realized that things are getting out of control called Petrozavodsk riot police.
The violence has been accompanied by street rallies in Kondopoga demanding the expulsion of immigrants.
Several nationalist parties have expressed support for the riots. Some reports claim these parties actually orchestrated them.
On the next day residents of Kondopoga gathered again. This time there were about 2000 of them (6% of the total population that would equivalent to 500 000 in Moscow). Representatives of the nationalist parties together with journalists flocked to the town like carrion-crows. In the true liberastian manner journalists started interviewing nationalists from Moscow and St.Petersburg forgetting the residents of Kondopoga altogether. And – yes – nationalists claimed that they orchestrated the riots, that residents are demanding expulsion of all immigrants – all the usual PR blah blah.
"People gathered spontaneously to express their demands," Belov said. "Their demands were simple: [foreigners] get out of here, you have 24 hours. Why? You've come here without invitation and we're fed up with you. These are the two reasons behind the problems in Kondopoga and elsewhere."
Belov said representatives of his movement, know for its aggressive xenophobic rhetoric, had plans to station representatives permanently in Karelia to "help," in his words, local residents.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the prime minister of the pro-Moscow government in Chechnya, has blamed Karelian officials for failing to stop the riots and has vowed to restore order if necessary.
Yes, indeed. Kadyrov’s guys know how to restore order. No wonder the Kondopoga’s Chechens are Kadyrov's strong supporters.
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