http://www.monbiot.com/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=544
In the Crocodile’s
Mouth
Blair is appeasing
Bush partly in order to get a share of the
world’s diminishing supplies of oil
By George Monbiot.
Published in the Guardian 5th November 2002
Tony Blair's loyalty
to George Bush looks like slow political suicide.
His preparedness to follow him over every precipice jeopardises
Britain's relationships with its allies, conjures up enemies all
over the world and infuriates voters of all political colours.
And yet he never misses an opportunity to show what a trusting
friend he is.
There are several plausible
and well-established explanations
for this unnatural coupling. But there might also be a new one.
Blair may have calculated that sticking to Bush is the only way
in which our unsustainable economy can meet its need for energy.
Britain is running
out of time. According to the Oil Depletion
Analysis Centre, the UK's North Sea production has been declining
since 1999. Nuclear power in Britain is, in effect, finished:
on Saturday, the EU revealed that it had prohibited the
government's latest desperate attempt to keep it afloat
with massive subsidies. But, partly because of corporate
lobbying, partly because of his unhealthy fear of "Mondeo
man"
or "Worcester woman", or whatever the floating voter
of
Middle England has now become, Tony Blair has also flatly
rejected both an effective energy reduction policy and a
massive investment in alternative power. The only remaining
way of meeting future energy demand is to import ever greater
quantities of oil and gas.
And here the government
runs into an intractable political
reality. As available reserves decline, the world's oil-hungry
nations are tussling to grab as much as they can for themselves.
Almost everywhere on earth, the United States is winning.
It is positioning itself to become the gatekeeper to the
world's remaining oil and gas. If it succeeds, it will both
secure its own future supplies and massively enhance its
hegemonic power.
The world's oil reserves,
the depletion analysis centre claims,
appear to be declining almost as swiftly as the North Sea's.
Conventional oil supplies, it suggests, will peak within five
or ten years, and decline by around two million barrels per
day
every year from then on. New kinds of fossil fuel have only
a limited potential to ameliorate the coming crisis. In the
Middle East, the only nation which could significantly
increase its output is Iraq.
In 2001, a report sponsored
by the US Council on Foreign
Relations and the Baker Institute for Public Policy began
to spell out some of the implications of this decline for
America's national security. The problem, it noted, is that
"the American people continue to demand plentiful and cheap
energy without sacrifice or inconvenience". Transport,
for example, is responsible for 66% of the petroleum
the US burns. Simply switching from "light trucks" (the
giant gas-guzzlers many Americans drive) to ordinary
cars would save nearly a million barrels per day of
crude oil. But, as the president's dad once said,
"the American way of life is not up for negotiation".
"The world,"
the report continues, "is currently precariously
close to utilizing all of its available global oil production
capacity". The impending crisis is increasing "U.S.
and global
vulnerability to disruption". Over the previous year, for
example, Iraq had "effectively become a swing producer,
turning its taps on and off when it has felt such action
was in its strategic interest". If the global demand for
oil continues to rise, world shortages could reduce the
status of the US to that of "a poor developing country".
This crisis, the report
insists, demands "a reassessment of
the role of energy in American foreign policy ... Such a
strategy will require difficult tradeoffs, in both domestic
and foreign policy. But there is no alternative. And there
is no time to waste." By assuming "a leadership role
in the
formation of new rules of the game", the United States will
prevent any other power from exploiting its dependency and
seizing the strategic initiative.
The US government has
not been slow to act upon such intelligence.
Over the past two years, it has been seizing all the Caspian oil
it can lay hands on, cutting out both Russia and Iran by negotiating
to pipe it out through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Afghanistan. Last
week, though all the sages of the British and American right
insisted during the Afghan war that it couldn't possibly happen,
the presidents of Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Pakistan met
to discuss the first of the Afghan pipelines. American soldiers
have now been stationed in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan,
Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Georgia, all of which are critical
to the Caspian oil trade. According to the security firm
Stratfor, "the U.S. military presence will help ensure that
a majority of oil and gas from the Caspian basin will go
westward -- bypassing the United States' geopolitical rivals,
Russia and China." The reason why Vladimir Putin is so
determined to keep Chechnya under Russian control, whatever
the cost to both the Chechens and the Russians may be,
is that Chechnya is one of the last available routes for
Caspian oil.
The US has been playing
the same game in the Middle East.
A recent report by the Brookings Institution notes that
"U.S. strategic domination over the entire region, including
the whole lane of sea communications from the strait of
Hormuz, will be perceived as the primary vulnerability
of China's energy supply." Last month a senior US general,
Carlton Fulford, visited Sao Tomé and Principe, the islands
halfway between Nigeria and Angola, to discuss the
possibility of establishing a military base there.
Both nations see the base as a threatening staging
post, which the US could use to help gain exclusive
access to West African oil. Earlier this year, George
Bush negotiated a "North American Energy Initiative"
with Canada and Mexico. The US is hoping to extend
the arrangement to the rest of the Americas, which
could help to explain the coup which nearly toppled
Venezuela's president in April.
Oh, and there's the
small matter of the one nation
in the Middle East whose oil production could be
substantially increased, with the help of a little
external encouragement. Last week the leader of the
exiled Iraqi National Congress met executives from
three major American oil companies, to start negotiations
about who gets what once the US has taken over. This
carve-up would mean cancelling the big contracts Russia
and France have struck with Saddam Hussein. Lord Browne,
the head of BP, warned that Britain might also be squeezed
out of Iraq.
The United States,
in other words, appears rapidly to be
monopolising the world's remaining oil. Every government
knows this. Ours appears to have calculated that the only
way it can obtain the energy required to permit the men
and women of Middle England to stay in their cars is to
appease the United States, whatever the cost may be.
Britain's role in the impending war is that of the egret
in the crocodile's mouth, picking the scraps of flesh
from between its teeth.
In 1929 the novelist
Ilya Ehrenburg observed that
"the automobile can't be blamed for anything. Its
conscience is as clear as Monsieur Citroen's conscience.
It only fulfills its destiny: it is destined to wipe
out the world." Our struggle over the next few months
is to prove him wrong.
5th November 2002
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