Page 2 of 2 Liquid war: Welcome to Pipelineistan
By Pepe Escobar
much in the world to come. And this was where the empire of US military bases
(think, for instance, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo) met Pipelineistan (represented,
way back in 1999, by the AMBO pipeline).
AMBO, short for Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corporation, an entity
registered in the US, is building a $1.1 billion pipeline, aka "the
Trans-Balkan", slated to be finished by 2011. It will bring Caspian oil to the
West without taking it through either Russia or Iran. As a pipeline, AMBO fit
well into a geopolitical strategy of creating a US-controlled energy-security
grid that was first developed by president Bill Clinton's energy secretary Bill
Richardson and later by Cheney.
Behind the idea of that "grid" lay a go-for-broke militarization of an energy
corridor that would stretch from the Caspian Sea in Central Asia through a
series of now independent former SSRs of the Soviet Union to Turkey, and from
there into the Balkans (from thence onto Europe). It was meant to sabotage the
larger energy plans of both Russia and Iran. AMBO itself would bring oil from
the Caspian basin to a terminal in the former SSR of Georgia in the Caucasus,
and then transport it by tanker through the Black Sea to the Bulgarian port of
Burgas, where another pipeline would connect to Macedonia and then to the
Albanian port of Vlora.
As for Camp Bondsteel, it was the "enduring" military base that Washington
gained from the wars for the remains of Yugoslavia. It would be the largest
overseas base the US had built since the Vietnam War. Halliburton's subsidiary
Kellogg Brown & Root would, with the Army Corps of Engineers, put it up on
400 hectares of farmland near the Macedonian border in southern Kosovo.
Think of it as a user-friendly, five-star version of Guantanamo with perks for
those stationed there that included Thai massage and loads of junk food.
Bondsteel is the Balkan equivalent of a giant immobile aircraft carrier,
capable of exercising surveillance not only over the Balkans but also over
Turkey and the Black Sea region (considered in the neo-con-speak of the Bush
years "the new interface" between the "Euro-Atlantic community" and the
"Greater Middle East").
How could Russia, China, and Iran not interpret the war in Kosovo, then the
invasion of Afghanistan (where Washington had previously tried to pair with the
Taliban and encourage the building of another of those avoid-Iran, avoid-Russia
pipelines), followed by the invasion of Iraq (that country of vast oil
reserves), and finally the recent clash in Georgia (that crucial energy
transportation junction) as straightforward wars for Pipelineistan?
Though seldom imagined this way in our mainstream media, the Russian and
Chinese leaderships saw a stark "continuity" of policy stretching from Bill
Clinton's humanitarian imperialism to Bush's "global war on terror". Blowback,
as then Russian President Vladimir Putin himself warned publicly, was
inevitable - but that's another magic-carpet story, another cave to enter
another time.
Rainy night in Georgia
If you want to understand Washington's version of Pipelineistan, you have to
start with Mafia-ridden Georgia. Though its army was crushed in its recent war
with Russia, Georgia remains crucial to Washington's energy policy in what, by
now, has become a genuine arc of instability - in part because of a continuing
obsession with cutting Iran out of the energy flow.
It was around the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, as I pointed out in my
book Globalistan in 2007, that American policy congealed. Zbig
Brzezinski himself flew into Baku in 1995 as an "energy consultant", less than
four years after Azerbaijan became independent, and sold the idea to the
Azerbaijani elite. The BTC was to run from the Sangachal Terminal, half-an-hour
south of Baku, across neighboring Georgia to the Marine Terminal in the Turkish
port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean.
Now operational, that 1,767-kilometer-long, 44-meter-wide steel serpent
straddles no less than six war zones, ongoing or potential: Nagorno-Karabakh
(an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan), Chechnya and Dagestan (both embattled
regions of Russia), South Ossetia and Abkhazia (on which the 2008
Russia-Georgia war pivoted), and Turkish Kurdistan.
From a purely economic point of view, the BTC made no sense. A "BTK" pipeline,
running from Baku through Tehran to Iran's Kharg Island, could have been built
for, relatively speaking, next to nothing - and it would have had the added
advantage of bypassing both mafia-corroded Georgia and wobbly Kurdish-populated
Eastern Anatolia. That would have been the really cheap way to bring Caspian
oil and gas to Europe.
The New Great Game ensured that that was not to be, and much followed from that
decision. Even though Moscow never planned to occupy Georgia long-term in its
2008 war, or take over the BTC pipeline that now runs through its territory,
Alfa Bank oil and gas analyst Konstantin Batunin pointed out the obvious: by
briefly cutting off the BTC oil flow, Russian troops made it all too clear to
global investors that Georgia wasn't a reliable energy transit country. In
other words, the Russians made a mockery of Zbig's world.
For its part, Azerbaijan was, until recently, the real success story in the US
version of Pipelineistan. Advised by Zbig, Bill Clinton literally "stole" Baku
from Russia's "near abroad" by promoting the BTC and the wealth that would flow
from it. Now, however, with the message of the Russia-Georgia War sinking in,
Baku is again allowing itself to be seduced by Russia. To top it off,
Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev can't stand Georgia's brash President Mikhail
Saakashvili. That's hardly surprising. After all, Saakashvili's rash military
moves caused Azerbaijan to lose at least $500 million when the BTC was shut
down during the war.
Russia's energy seduction blitzkrieg is focused like a laser on Central Asia as
well. (We'll talk about it more in the next Pipelineistan installment.) It
revolves around offering to buy Kazakh, Uzbek, and Turkmen gas at European
prices instead of previous, much lower Russian prices. The Russians, in fact,
have offered the same deal to the Azeris: so now, Baku is negotiating a deal
involving more capacity for the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline, which makes its way
to the Russian borders of the Black Sea, while considering pumping less oil for
the BTC.
Obama needs to understand the dire implications of this. Less Azeri oil on the
BTC - its full capacity is 1 million barrels a day, mostly shipped to Europe -
means the pipeline may go broke, which is exactly what Russia wants.
In Central Asia, some of the biggest stakes revolve around the monster Kashagan
oil field in "snow leopard" Kazakhstan, the absolute jewel in the Caspian crown
with reserves of as many as 9 billion barrels. As usual in Pipelineistan, it
all comes down to which routes will deliver Kashagan's oil to the world after
production starts in 2013. This spells, of course, Liquid War. Wily Kazakh
President Nursultan Nazarbayev would like to use the Russian-controlled Caspian
Pipeline Consortium (CPC) to pump Kashagan crude to the Black Sea.
In this case, the Kazakhs hold all the cards. How oil will flow from Kashagan
will decide whether the BTC - once hyped by Washington as the ultimate Western
escape route from dependence on Persian Gulf oil - lives or dies.
Welcome, then, to Pipelineistan! Whether we like it or not, in good times and
bad, it's a reasonable bet that we're all going to be Pipeline tourists. So, go
with the flow. Learn the crucial acronyms, keep an eye out for what happens to
all those US bases across the oil heartlands of the planet, watch where the
pipelines are being built, and do your best to keep tabs on the next set of
monster Chinese energy deals and fabulous coups by Russia's Gazprom.
And, while you're at it, consider this just the first postcard sent off from
our tour of Pipelineistan. We'll be back (to slightly adapt a quote from Terminator).
Think of this as a door opening onto a future in which what flows where and to
whom may turn out to be the most important question on the planet.
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