In
the Crocodile’s Mouth
by George Monbiot
Dissident
Voice
November 5,
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.
George Monbiot is Honorary Professor at the Department of Politics in Keele
and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at the
University of East London. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper
of London. His articles and contact info can be found at his website: www.monbiot.com