Oil Diplomacy
By Robert Dreyfuss
05/18/06 "Tom
Paine" -- -- Nothing the Bush administration ever
does is about oil. It didn’t invade Iraq because that country
might have more oil than Saudi Arabia. It isn’t threatening Iran
because Iran has a tenth of the world’s oil and one-sixth of its
natural gas. And the United States isn’t cozying up to autocrats
in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan because the Caspian Sea is a
mini-Persian Gulf in the middle of Central Asia, either.
So it
stands to reason, doesn’t it, that Washington isn’t making a
fuss over Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez because that country is a
major supplier of oil to the United States? And that it isn’t
making nice to Libya’s erratic Colonel Gadhafi because of oil,
either?
“This decision is not undertaken because Libya has oil,” said
David Welch, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near East
affairs, in announcing that the United States is restoring
diplomatic ties with Libya and removing that country from the
hard-to-get-off-of list of nations linked to terrorism.
Nevertheless, expect U.S. oil companies to flock into Libya.
Let me hasten to add that it’s better to normalize relations
with Libya than to paint another regime change bull’s-eye on the
map. And certainly the fact that the United States was willing
to engage in direct talks with Libya—and successfully—underlines
the absurdity of the American refusal to engage Iran, North
Korea, Syria, Hamas and, for that matter, the Taliban. In
addition, it needs to be pointed out that the United States and
Libya have been involved in a behind-the-scenes minuet for
years, one led in part by the CIA’s Steve Kappes—the covert
operative who was forced out of the agency by Porter Goss and
who will now be brought back into the fold by Michael Hayden,
the director-designate. Neoconservatives who claim that Libya’s
agreed to end its weapons of mass destruction programs because
it was terrified of being the next Iraq are flat wrong since the
deal was in the works long before the spring of 2003.
Still, it’s hard not to get a queasy feeling about the
rehabilitation of the Libyan colonel. He is indisputably a loose
cannon with agents and operatives all over sub-Saharan Africa,
North Africa and the Middle East, including Chad, Sudan and
elsewhere. And, perhaps ominously if you are the king of Saudi
Arabia or the president of Egypt, the head of Libya’s
Revolutionary Committees announced that Tripoli is ready to help
President Bush “to spread democracy around the world together.”
Just a couple of years ago, Libya cheerfully tried to spread
democracy to Saudi Arabia by plotting the assassination of Saudi
Arabia’s King Abdullah, who was then crown prince.
Whatever the merits of the U.S.-Libyan rapprochement, it
boggles the mind that the United States is moving in the
opposite direction in regard to Venezuela. (Piling irony on
irony, Chavez arrived in Libya on Wednesday to meet Gadhafi.)
Even as it subtracted Libya, the United States took a major step
toward adding Venezuela to the list of terrorism-supporting
countries. The State Department announced that it is imposing a
ban on the sale of weapons, including spare parts for F-16
Falcons, to Venezuela. In doing so, the spokesman for the State
Department—noting that he “can’t get into all the details of
it”—essentially accused Venezuela’s intelligence service of
working with Iran and Cuba to support terrorism and drug gangs
in neighboring Colombia.
The charges are absurd on their face and, unsurprisingly, the
government of Venezuela angrily rejected the accusations. In
fact, Venezuela has more reason to add the United States on
its list of terrorism-supporting countries. The United
States is harboring
a former Venezuelan intelligence official, Luis Posada
Cariles, who blew up a Cuban airplane in 1976. At the time
Cariles was operating out of Caracas in coordination with
anti-Castro extremists. In 1985 he escaped from a Venezuelan
prison and today Venezuela is seeking his extradition from the
United States. In addition, in a move that was not exactly a
manifestation of the Good Neighbor policy, the
Bush administration endorsed a coup d’etat two
years ago in which the Venezuelan right briefly toppled Chavez.
Although the Bush administration claims to be engaged in a
global war on terrorism and a campaign to extend U.S.-style
democracy, it is more than apparent that Washington is in fact
pursuing a worldwide strategy driven by the geopolitics of
oil—and not just in regard to Libya and Venezuela. Iran and
Iraq, of course, come to mind. More broadly, in recent weeks
President Bush played obsequious host to President Ilham Aliev
of oil-rich Azerbaijan. Bush warmly embraced Aliev, a
less-than-democratic leader whose energy resources and strategic
position make him an important player both in pipeline politics
and in regard to U.S. plans for regime change in Iran.
One-fourth of Iran’s population is comprised of Azeris. Then
Vice President Cheney trundled into oil-rich and autocratic
Kazakhstan last week, on a jaunt during which he warned Russia
against using “oil and gas [as] tools of intimidation and
blackmail.”
Of course. Using oil and gas for intimidation and blackmail?
That’s America’s job.
Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United
States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry
Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a contributing
editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a
senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent
contributor to Rolling Stone.He can be reached through his
website: www.robertdreyfuss.com
© 2006 TomPaine.com
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