Myths, Lies and Oil Wars

238 Pages·2012·2.74 MB·english

by  F. William Engdahl

MYTHS, LIES AND OIL WARS
F. William Engdahl
edition.engdahl Wiesbaden
Copyright © 2012 by F. William Engdahl
The rights of F. William Engdahl to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright
Laws of the United States of America and the UK Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission
of the publisher and author.
Library of Congress cataloging in Publication Data applied for
Edited by Margot L. White
Cover design:
Kay Coenen, Infographicmedia.Nl + 06 421 46 0 46 +
+ http://www.infographicmedia.com +
Published by edition.engdahl Wiesbaden, Germany
www.williamengdahl.com
ISBN 978-3-9813263-6-9 Printed in USA
To George L. Mehren— invaluable friend, honest critic and intellectual
architect of the concept behind this book and to Vladimir Kutcherov,
friend and teacher whose passion for scientific truth guided me in this
writing.
CONTENTS
A UTHOR’S INTRODUCTION ................................................................. 1
From Spice Wars to Oil Wars
.............................................................................. 1
Oil wars and politics
............................................................................................ 3
1. A CATASTROPHIC BLUNDER REPEATED ....................................... 7
Painful lessons
..................................................................................................... 7
A small oversight
................................................................................................. 8
Secret War for the Baghdad Railway
.................................................................. 10
Stealing Mesopotamia for the Empire
................................................................ 11
A little war for rich booty
.................................................................................. 13
Grabbing Iraq by
ruse........................................................................................ 15
World War II: Catastrophic Blunder Repeated
.................................................. 17
Wehrmacht out of gas
....................................................................................... 20
2. A GLOBAL POWER SHIFT ............................................................ 25
A new oil imperialism
........................................................................................ 25
Running Trolley Cars into the Ground
............................................................. 26
The trains next...
............................................................................................... 28
3. S ILENT WEAPONS FOR QUIET WARS .......................................... 33
The new kings of oil
.......................................................................................... 33
A fateful Harvard project
................................................................................... 34
Keeping oil prices high
...................................................................................... 36
Big Oil finds a new King
................................................................................... 38
Hubbert’s Malthusian energy model
.................................................................. 42
Big oil uses Hubbert
.......................................................................................... 44
Seven Powerful Sisters
....................................................................................... 45
4. A DRAMATIC SHOCK ................................................................... 51
A US economy in
eclipse.................................................................................... 51
Preparing a dramatic shock
................................................................................ 53
Elites meet in Sweden
........................................................................................ 53
A Dutch Hotel and Atlanticist schemes
.............................................................. 57
Kissinger’s Oil Shock
......................................................................................... 58
Germany was a target, not an ally
....................................................................... 60
An almost perfect crime
..................................................................................... 61
Kissinger’s Alchemy – oil becomes the new gold
................................................. 64
Hubbert’s Day in the Sun
.................................................................................. 66
5. A MALTHUSIAN ENERGY STRATEGY ........................................... 71
Rockefeller’s paradigm shift
................................................................................ 71
Creating the new paradigm
................................................................................ 72
‘Limits to Growth’
............................................................................................. 73
The real enemy: Humanity
................................................................................ 76
Paradigm Shift via NGOs
.................................................................................. 78
A mysterious Canadian insider
........................................................................... 81
‘Silent weapons for Quiet wars’
.......................................................................... 83
6. A HOSTAGE TO CHASE MANHATTAN ......................................... 89
Hiding an oil glut
.............................................................................................. 89
Losing the oil lever
............................................................................................. 90
A Trilateral initiative
.......................................................................................... 92
A predictable energy strategy
.............................................................................. 93
Rockefeller loses, then uses an old buddy
........................................................... 95
7. O IL WARS BY PROXY ................................................................. 103
A very bloody OPEC oil
war............................................................................ 103
Saddam, Kissinger and the BNL
....................................................................... 107
CIA ties to Saddam
.......................................................................................... 109
October Surprises
............................................................................................. 111
Washington’s ‘reverse’ oil shock
....................................................................... 114
Bringing the Soviets to their knees
................................................................... 116
8. C ONTROLLING ALL OIL, EVERYWHERE ................................... 123
Luring Saddam into a Honey Trap...again
........................................................123
Getting Kuwait on board
..................................................................................124
April’s fateful chat with Saddam
.......................................................................127
9. G RABBING SOVIET OIL RESOURCES ......................................... 135
Control of oil, everywhere...
.............................................................................135
Washington targets Russia
................................................................................136
Grabbing the oil treasure
..................................................................................138
Chechen oil wars
..............................................................................................140
Washington’s alternative pipeline
.....................................................................142
Washington’s proxy wars
..................................................................................143
1994 A Turning
Point......................................................................................145
10. A NEW RUSSIAN REVOLUTION .................................................. 149
A Russian revolution in petroleum science
........................................................149
Deep oil origins
................................................................................................153
Oil ‘in all the wrong places’
..............................................................................154
Russian geophysics comes to
Vietnam...............................................................155
Stalin’s Mandate – self-sufficiency in oil
...........................................................156
Oil Fields that refill?
.........................................................................................159
11. B IG OIL COUNTERATTACKS—HUBBERT’S PEAK REVIVED ....... 167
An unscientific Scientific American
..................................................................167
Cheney echoes Hubbert’s friends
......................................................................169
Washington’s ‘clash of civilizations’
..................................................................170
Cheney’s Energy Task Force
.............................................................................172
Cheney’s Peak Oil Friend
.................................................................................173
‘Twilight’ in the Saudi
Desert?..........................................................................175
The Saudi surprise
............................................................................................178
12. R USSIA AND CHENEY’S OIL WARS ............................................. 183
Going ‘where the oil is’
.................................................................................... 183
Iraq and the China danger
............................................................................... 183
‘It was about
oil...’............................................................................................ 184
War on Terror or War on
Oil?......................................................................... 186
The new energy wars
........................................................................................ 187
Brzezinski’s pipeline
......................................................................................... 188
Washington’s Rose Revolution
......................................................................... 189
Tbilisi to Kiev: Ukraine’s Orange Revolution
................................................... 190
13. C HINA BECOMES THE NEW TARGET ........................................ 195
Emerging rival China
....................................................................................... 195
Beijing’s 9/11 shock
......................................................................................... 196
Beijing moves to secure its energy
..................................................................... 199
Wooing Africa
................................................................................................. 201
Darfur: ‘It’s about oil, Stupid’
.......................................................................... 203
AFRICOM
...................................................................................................... 204
14. W ASHINGTON’S GREATER MIDDLE EAST WAR ........................ 209
A Prairie Fire Begins in Tunisia
........................................................................ 209
Washington’s Greater Middle East Project
....................................................... 211
Project for a ‘Greater Middle East’
................................................................... 213
Washington’s ‘soft’
revolutions......................................................................... 215
Kefaya—Pentagon ‘non-violent warfare’
.......................................................... 216
RAND and Kefaya
........................................................................................... 217
Libya: A NATO war is necessary
...................................................................... 219
The strategic goal
............................................................................................. 222
APPENDIX ....................................................................................... 227
Select Scientifric Papers on Oil Origins and Reserves
....................................... 227
We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its
population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves
and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the
object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is
to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain
this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national
security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and
day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated
everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not
deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and
worldbenefaction…
We should dispense with the aspiration to "be liked" or to be regarded
as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should
stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper
and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should
cease to talk about vague and…unreal objectives such as human
rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The
day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power
concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the
better.
⎯ George F. Kennan, US State Department, Policy Planning Study 23
(PPS23), Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1948
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
From Spice Wars to Oil Wars
In the words of George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the
past are condemned to repeat it.” The history of the last century is
unique in significant respects, but in terms of manifesting
fundamental features of human behavior and actions, it is anything
but unique.
In September 2001 after the destruction of the World Trade Center
towers and the attack on the Pentagon, President George W. Bush
declared a US War on Terrorism, calling it a “new crusade,” a war of
good versus evil: “You’re either with us or against us.” His choice of
words was revealing as it evoked for the rest of the world —
especially the nations of the oil-rich, predominantly Arab Middle East
– more than two centuries of European “Holy Crusades” against the
Muslim peoples of the Middle East. The historical comparison by
Bush was revealing, so much so that Bush was quickly advised to
drop the word ‘crusade’ from his rhetoric.
Almost eight centuries before the dramatic events of September
2001, the Arab/North African world had been at the center of world
geopolitical conflict. Arab traders across North Africa and what is
today called by the West the ‘Middle East’ had secured a tightly-
controlled monopoly on the most valuable commodity of that day —
the spices from Asia.
The clever Arab tradesmen kept the origins of their spices—
cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg and other spices—a de facto military
secret of the highest strategic importance. They went to extraordinary
lengths to perpetuate a myth of great scarcity in order to maintain
monopoly control of the remote sources of the much desired spices
and, thereby, to attain colossal profit margins of as much as 4000%
on their trade.
Venice, then a City State on the Adriatic Sea, had close ties to the
Orient. As a result of its trade ties to Arab spice merchants, as well,
Venice rose to a position of unprecedented wealth and power in the
13th Century. Venice became the mightiest naval empire of Europe
based on dominating and controlling the European import of oriental
spices traded by the Arabs.
When Venice was threatened by an Arab cutoff of those spices, the
City State launched one of history’s most brutal and grandiose looting
operations — the religious crusade of 1204, a naked imperial
conquest masquerading as a Holy War.