Was it worth it? The answer partly depends on whether one works for or has holdings in one of the oil companies that made out well in the aftermath.

The final major prize in the war, southern Iraq’s giant Rumaila oil field, was finally awarded on November third with mixed results from an American standpoint. This is because the only successful bidders for it were BP and China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and the second organization, it can be assumed, will primarily support Asian interests over ones favoring Western nations.

Nonetheless, plans are moving forward by the BP-CNPC consortium to invest $US15 billion into Rumaila, the fifth biggest known single reserve of oil in the world, to almost triple production from one million barrels daily to 2.85m and, if successful, the field would be the world’s second biggest in existence. While BP will own a 38 percent stake, CNPC will retain a 37 percent share and Iraq will hold 25 percent.

Meanwhile, the US government, that invested so much in the Iraq War, is said to be disappointed in the overall outcome, particularly in that CNPC was awarded another favorable ($US3bn) deal in Iraq — rights to the Ahdeb field in Wasit province in southeastern Iraq. On account, it is by far the largest foreign player.

This being the case is probably above all vexing since the Chinese people did not have to sacrifice lots of lives and taxpayer money into the Iraq war since their focus was concentrated on strengthening the economy in their homeland all the while the USA and its NATO allies remained largely set on trying to gain control of the fossil fuels for themselves through invasion. Even so, the USA and NATO partners, despite an all-out effort to dominate the region, lost most of the reward.

“The Chinese are very aggressive here.” According to Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh, “They are very eager to build up their presence in Iraq’s oil industry.” Furthermore, a CNPC-led consortium is one of the three bidders for West Qurna 1, another gargantuan field. A group overseen by Russia’s Lukoil and another conglomerate commanded by Exxon Mobil are also in the running for this field.

In consideration of its tremendous success to date, CNPC has developed, along with another Chinese oil company, a special Iraq-focused joint enterprise, called Al-Wah — an Arabic term meaning ‘the oasis’ — to expand the Chinese presence and work in Iraq. At the same time, the Chinese, along with not having to subsume any of the war costs, do not have to bear any guilt over the heavy human toll — assessed by some groups to be a million and a third Iraqis killed, along with 4,680 American military personnel and additional foreign forces from other nations.

At the same time that various organizations involved with fossil fuels are competing to obtain profitably favorable arrangements for themselves and the respective countries to which they supply fuels, leading climate change scientist around the world are putting out an entirely contrary message. They are indicating that, very quickly, global fossil fuel dependence has to greatly shrink to avoid run-away climate change that would cause much of the world’s surface to be inhospitable to life. In other words, an almost complete cessation of its use must occur fairly soon despite ever increased worldwide demand.

For example, John Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the main environmental scientist for the German government, told officials from Barack Obama’s administration that U.S. carbon emissions must fall from its annual 20 tons per person to zero if there is going to be an even slight possibility for the climate to stabilize with a 2C increase.

As Stephen Leahy points out in “Four Degrees Of Devastation“: “Eighteen months ago, no one dared imagine humanity pushing the climate beyond an additional two degrees C of heating, but rising carbon emissions and inability to agree on cuts has meant science must now consider the previously unthinkable.”

He goes on to add:

A four-degree C overall increase means a world where temperatures will be two degrees warmer in some places, 12 degrees and more in others, making them uninhabitable.

It is a world with a one- to two-metre sea level rise by 2100, leaving hundreds of millions homeless. This will head to 12 metres in the coming centuries as the Greenland and Western Antarctic ice sheets melt, according to papers presented at the [UK international climate science] conference [recently held] in Oxford.

Four degrees of warming would be hotter than any time in the last 30 million years, and it could happen as soon as 2060 to 2070.

As Clive Hamilton, Charles Sturt Professor of Public Ethics at the Australian National University, points out in “Is It Too Late to Prevent Catastrophic Climate Change?“, “It is clear that limiting warming to 2ºC is beyond us; the question now is whether we can limit warming to 4ºC. The conclusion that, even if we act promptly and resolutely, the world is on a path to reach 650 ppm and associated warming of 4°C is almost too frightening to accept. Yet that is the reluctant conclusion of the world’s leading climate scientists. Even with the most optimistic set of assumptions — the ending of deforestation, a halving of emissions associated with food production, global emissions peaking in 2020 and then falling by 3 per cent a year for a few decades — we have no chance of preventing emissions rising well above a number of critical tipping points that will spark uncontrollable climate change.”

At the same time, his views are echoed by Lord Stern, former World Bank chief economist, who stated, “A rise of 5C would be a temperature the world has not seen for 30 to 50 million years. We’ve been around only 100,000 years as human beings. We don’t know what that’s like. We haven’t seen 3C for a few million years, and we don’t know what that looks like either.”

“Do politicians understand just how difficult it could be, just how devastating rises of 4C, 5C or 6C could be? I think, not yet,” Lord Stern shared with a group of scientists gathered in Copenhagen after which he went on to warn that the risk associated with governments not adequately addressing climate change in time to avert the brunt of the disaster would lead to horrendous consequences. According to him, these involve risking at least a third of the world’s aggregate wealth, including a minimum of a thirty percent reduction in consumption per person worldwide or, put another way, global GDP would drop to at least 70 percent of current output.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media (MSM) in the United States reveals little information about the degree that the public must radically change lifestyle habits and expectations for economic growth. Little is mentioned about the degree that climate change could have catastrophic impacts across the globe and no government or business leaders are suggesting that reduced consumption of material goods, delimitations in fossil fuel use and other major changes should be carried out very soon. Likewise, none are encouraging ecologically friendly, self-sustaining, financially vibrant communities to be strengthened, nor hinting that transnational patterns of commerce drain dollars out of the country.

In a similar vein, none indicate that these very same globalized patterns that enrich corporate tycoons exacerbate our reliance on fossil fuels due to long distance transportation of raw materials and finished products, as well as the extraordinary amounts of energy used in a massive production of lots of unnecessary merchandise. Obviously, their doing so would be run counter to their extraordinary financial gains at the expense of the poorly paid, everyday work force.

So instead, we have “a business as usual” mentality shoveled forth with bailouts for major commercial organizations, policies to purchase cars subsidized by the federal government, happy-go-lucky TV programs that focus on trivial topics and plenty of advertisements informing the populace that it ought to purchase this or that item to have the latest look in fall fashion, the best anti-aging formula or whatever else for which doing so will, obviously, raise one’s personal carbon and overall ecological footprints in most instances.

At the same time, one can assume that there are no immediate plans to direct society into a pattern of living that is regionally self-reliant (so as to avoid carbon footprints from imports derived from other areas) and restricted in terms of the types of goods available from distant locations. In light of the financial recession and the desire for ever more economic growth based on further globalization of transnational industry and fossil fuel use, quite the opposite pattern is emerging despite the disastrous implications in terms of our breaching climate change tipping points, and the fact that, at some point, fossil fuels, themselves, will no longer be available.

On account, a wise program would be to jumpstart an all out effort to put the means for alternative benign energy sources into place while using the larger portion of fossil fuels to build and install these alternatives across the landscape, as well as help communities to transition away from fossil fuel use altogether. Without a doubt, this would especially be positive in light of the fact that almost 71 percent of electricity in the U.S. is currently supplied by fossil fuels while modern agriculture, industry and transportation all have petroleum at their cores.

Meanwhile the largely consensual opinion reached at the annual conference of the U.S. contingent for the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO-USA) is that conventional crude peaked in 2005. Further, biofuels are not expected to be any sort of panacea to make up for pending large-scale oil deficits.¹

Despite the increasing number of indicators that humanity needs to change course in its fossil fuel use, the policy makers sit in their safe government offices planning new dangerous military operations for others to conduct in resource rich regions abroad regardless of the fact that the death toll is rising in these invasions and it seems highly unlikely that the Taliban or any other groups defending their homelands will be easily defeated if at all despite that ever more Pentagon funding is provided toward that aim.

Added up, the expenses to contain Iran, strive to obtain Venezuelan and newly found Cuban oil, fight for arctic fossil fuels, carry out Afghanistan and Pakistan operations, and ramp up covert or military operations via AFRICOM in Africa all together create a recipe for extreme U.S. bankruptcy and assorted other disasters. At the same time, the U.S. undertaking such endeavors merely postpone the inevitable fossil fuel shortfall, anyway, while not ensuring that the country and its citizens are prepared for the huge transition away from fossil fuels. In addition, such ever enlarging, Pentagon run ventures entail an inordinate amount of national sacrifice as money that could be used to support programs at home drains into war costs and the military’s ramped up fossil fuel use.

In relation, is there any question whatsoever as to the reason that there are proposals for greatly diminished funding of certain key social programs, including ones connected to healthcare and public education, in the homeland? How could outcomes be otherwise when 54 percent of every U.S. federal tax dollar goes to plans related to the U.S. military and another 19 percent goes to interest payments on the current federal debt, which leaves 27 percent for all other provisions (excluding the further sums to be borrowed to fund costly bailouts, war expansion plans, etc). Accordingly, the federal budget is at present almost twice the amount taken in from American taxpayers — an irresponsible and disastrous state of affairs with dire repercussions for many years ahead.

In addition, it’s difficult to imagine that, starting with Reagan, U.S. Presidents did not see the long term ramifications in their push for:

• Deregulated globalized U.S. industry, which led into greater oil use due to greater reliance on importation, along with offshoring and outsourcing of U.S. jobs so as to effectively hollow out the economic base at home and harm the average American worker. Ultimately financial contraction in the U.S. and tangentially abroad could be the only anticipated outcome.
• A lack in adequate oversight of Wall Street activities and the banking industry.
• An ever enlarging, expensive war program for obtainment of fossil fuels and other finite resources.
• Ratification of many other destructive patterns, such as the huge repeated government bailouts, and acceptance of costly no bid contracts in response to various Pentagon requests.

Just where did they think that such a set of irresponsible orientations would ultimately lead? Could none of them see the consequences, such as the federal deficit reaching a record $1.42 Trillion, representing 10 percent of the economy or the highest amount since W.W. II, along with continuing to rapidly shoot upward?

It’s hard to imagine that they were all of them so ignorant, nefarious or outright stupid so as to not see where their intended trajectories would in combination land, especially when the speed with which rapidly diminishing oil reserves would disappear is thrown into the mix. Likewise, the quest for unbridled economic growth is equally if not ever more calamitous when the long view’s taken.

It’s simply not supportable, as Michael Bond points out in these three sections from “Why Economic Growth Is Unsustainable“:

The present economy is obliged to grow annually at between 3% and 6%. Too much less than 3% for too long and the economy will collapse from lack of currency. Too much over 6% for too long and inflation will spiral out of control, rendering currency meaningless.

Below is a table that points out how long it takes for something to double, triple, etc. in size, when it increases at rates of 3%, 4%, 5% and 6% per year. For the last 15 years, the global economy has been growing at an average of about 4% per year. Note that at 4% growth the economy doubles every 19 years, and grows 10 times its size in a mere 59 years.

The second problem stems from the fact that in order to sustain 4% annual economic growth, global debt must increase at about 10% annually. Because it is annual growth, this means it is exponential rather than mathematical growth. The difference between the two is shown below.

The Global Economy is on course to collapse well before 2030 due to a looming global inability to repay annual interest. The reason why debt outpaces economic growth stems from a fault in global money supply. This fault is described in the article Money – Deadlier Than Plutonium…

Moreover, people collectively can’t keep taking and taking ever more resources from the natural world and expecting that they can keep raising ever higher the human population and the standard of living for all. It just won’t work because the world is largely limited. At the same time, it should be absolutely clear that our current economic programs for the most part do not work either. Anyone who asserts otherwise perhaps needs to be reminded that nearly half of the world comprising of over three billion people live on less than $2.50 a day. How could this possibly seem like any sort of a success, especially when others, parasitically siphoning the wealth towards themselves off the backs of underpaid laborers and through ravage of the natural world, individually make a financial killing in the millions and billions of dollars at the same time?

It’s a killing, all right. The signs of the social and ecological costs are all around us to see.

In truth, an expectation for relentless growth comes with a very high price tag as is well explained at “Interconnectedness of World Problems, a Conceptual Map by Fritjof Capra based on Plan B 3.0, by Lester Brown” — a vision that goes well beyond a simple, barely accurate, linear model. Likewise, the evaluation of Joel Kovel’s “The Enemy of Nature” is a well thought out, comparable assessment, as are Bill Mckibben’s “A Timely Reminder of the Real Limits to Growth” and David Model’s analysis at “The Elephant in the Room. Ignoring Unsustainable Growth.”²

Real limits in mind, this excerpt from Wikipedia’s coverage of the Carter Doctrine is particularly dicey. Simultaneously, it shows a fallacious (arrogant?) sense that the U.S.A. can enact any course of action that it pleases, is completely invincible and is impervious to any internal or external influences, whether social or environmental in nature, that would undercut its kingpin position in the world.

The Carter Doctrine:

Meeting this challenge will take national will, diplomatic and political wisdom, economic sacrifice, and, of course, military capability. We must call on the best that is in us to preserve the security of this crucial region.

Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.

This last, key sentence of the Carter Doctrine, was written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Adviser. Brzezinski modeled the wording of the Carter Doctrine on the Truman Doctrine, and insisted that the sentence be included in the speech “to make it very clear that the Soviets should stay away from the Persian Gulf.

In The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, author Daniel Yergin notes that the Carter Doctrine “bore striking similarities” to a 1903 British declaration, in which British Foreign Secretary Lord Landsdowne warned Russia and Germany that the British would ‘regard the establishment of a naval base or of a fortified port in the Persian Gulf by any other power as a very grave menace to British interests, and we should certainly resist it with all the means at our disposal.”

All the same, Mamoun Fandy of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University identifies, in “U.S. Oil Policy in the Middle East,” that the U.S. faces some key problems in its quest for oil dominance. These difficulties include:

• Controlling oil access is a cornerstone of U.S. Middle East policy.
• U.S. reliance on imported oil is very high.
• Oil from the Persian Gulf accounts for 10% of the oil used in the U.S.
• Dual containment of Iran and Iraq, along with a broader military engagement policy, is key to U.S. strategy in assuring the flow of oil.

Despite the absolute need to drastically and immediately rein in fossil fuel use for a number of compelling reasons, the U.S. government continues to pursue a forceful and antagonistic policy abroad aimed toward unilateral control over global energy supplies. Using a combination of outright military invasion in an expanding number of countries and threats (i.e., towards Iran and Venezuela), U.S. legislators demonstrate little noticeable remorse over the high fiscal (bankrupting), environmental and social costs of these operations. These include that “The Pentagon Is The Largest Consumer Of Oil In The World,” the number of war related deaths continue to rise, there’s depleted uranium (DU) spread across the Middle East, the war efforts and resultant obtained oil ensure that the climate change devastation to come is sped into place, inadequate funding is allocated for provision of alternative energy supplies and improvement of the electrical grid, public transportation is not sufficiently expanded, and other tragic outcomes will unfold.

There are many ways that humanity can move forward to create “the good life” as long as a plan is sound. In 1970, Henry Kissinger claimed, “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.” However, one group’s domination of oil and food stocks, while denying the needs of other groups, is reckless, unethical and expensive.

Frankly, we’ve had enough of resource wars. More to the point, conflicts can only get worse as fossil fuel reserves increasingly dwindle and the perception of the diminishment merely strengthens that we have to have the dregs regardless of the grave social and environmental consequences.

No, we do not. In fact, we can no longer afford to fight over material supplies — particularly the ones, like oil, that are going run out or, like food, be at risk to largely run out due to climate change effects brought on in large measure by our lust for rich energy sources.

Sometimes it’s rueful to ponder the way that the present would be different had the U.S. followed Denmark’s example on the same timetable while using the funds that were to become allocated to fossil fuel wars towards development of the self-reliant energy security as Tomas Friedman indirectly suggests in “Flush With Energy” in which he states “Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it didn’t happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.)”

Meanwhile, there’s growing public awareness that the Pentagon’s worldwide mission IS to get command over oil and gas supplies — as is explained in an elucidating report by Rick Rozoff with many outstanding factual details. Likewise, it is obvious that the IMF and WB goals are en simpatico with the mission and, as a result, are on a disastrously wrong track as “The grave ecological destruction sponsored by the World Bank,” by Eric De Ruest and Hélene Baillot, undeniably indicates.

As an aside, the first TV announcements routinely popped up, several weeks ago, to suggest that the U.S. populace ought to pitch in and cut it energy consumption by 3 percent per person. While the objective is admirable, the recommended curtailment is far too small and the diminishment process is starting around twenty OR MORE years too late. Besides, why don’t we even go a few steps further and take Walden Bello’s advise from “The Virtues of Deglobalization“:

The aim of the deglobalization paradigm is to move beyond the economics of narrow efficiency, in which the key criterion is the reduction of unit cost, never mind the social and ecological destabilization this process brings about. It is to move beyond a system of economic calculation that, in the words of John Maynard Keynes, made ‘the whole conduct of life…into a paradox of an accountant’s nightmare.’ An effective economics, rather, strengthens social solidarity by subordinating the operations of the market to the values of equity, justice, and community by enlarging the sphere of democratic decision making. To use the language of the great Hungarian thinker Karl Polanyi in his book The Great Transformation, deglobalization is about ‘re-embedding’ the economy in society, instead of having society driven by the economy.

In tandem, let’s realize, as did Shamus Cooke, that “the industrial basis for an alternative energy superstructure needs to be created. Only by doing this can we seriously address the needs of the planet. Transforming our giant auto plants — many laying idle — into producers of solar panels, windmills, electricity–producing buoy’s, high-speed trains, electric busses and cars, etc., while massively investing in new research and technology to deal with climate change, is the only realistic way to drastically change direction in the time allotted.”

The alternative path to his, of course, is the exact one that we are following. We all know to where it leads — a 4C (or even) hotter world filled with massive loss of human and other forms of life, ruinous economic consequences, devastating weather patterns, an ocean level rise that puts many coastal regions at risk, massive fresh water shortages, food shortfalls, spreading pestilence and invasive species, and an extremely tenuous future for many generations to come.

Like our ancestors before fossil fuel were discovered, we can live without its benefits. Humankind, throughout our history on this planet, has been able to adapt to widely varying circumstances. Anyone who doubts this to be the case simply needs to compare the way that Inuits live in relation to 67 different uncontacted tribes in Brazil.

In other words, we CAN still adjust to widely varying conditions — even ones without fossil fuel. However, we, absolutely, cannot prepare to exist in a world that has states outside of the ranges that gave rise to and support of human life. All the same, we — out of willfulness, wishful thinking or ignorance — are willing to gamble that we can, it seems.

Perhaps we find it just too hard to give up our current ways of life even though our not doing so ensures that a large portion of the Earth will likely become unable to sustain life towards the end of this century. How tragically demented and selfish of us if, indeed, this is the case!

Of course, our drastically relinquishing fossil fuel use as much as is possible right away is not an easy action to endure. Yet, it can and has to be faced despite that the happening will mean hardship, privation and myriad kinds of losses.

After all, the sorts of difficulties that will exist after we forgo fossil fuel will be minor in comparison to the horrific adversities that would definitely be present if we do not deeply cut our collective carbon footprint in the near future. If anyone thinks that this cutting action is simply too hard to bear, he should for a moment picture the harshness that severe and worsening climate change could bring. Then, it becomes quickly clear about which trouble is doubtlessly preferable.

1. A review of the ASPO-USA conference from Chris Nelder: Oil and Gas Outlook. A further assessment from Steve Connor about the views of Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency (IEA): Warning: Oil supplies are running out fast.
2. PowerPoint – Earth Policy Institute – Building a …, Derek Wall’s review of The Enemy of Nature, by Joel Kovel; A Timely Reminder of the Real Limits to Growth (), and OpEdNews – Article: The Elephant in the Room. Ignoring …

I have heard Baldwin’s reasoning before in both my personal political conversations and even in other public forums. For example, President Obama made “ending our addiction to foreign oil” a primary issue in his campaign. The argument – which is rarely made specifically – basically follows that energy independence would end U.S. commerce in the Middle East, and if the U.S. no longer buys Arab oil, then the U.S. no longer has any interest in the Middle East. In essence – and this is the part Baldwin and others didn’t include – we could leave the Arabs to their own devices, their own problems, their own religious extremism, their own violent tendencies. And eventually they won’t have any reason to attack us again.

Clearly, this is myopic, reductive reasoning that fails to consider the complexities of global economics or the extent of our political involvement in the Middle East. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that we get some magic mineral or our scientists are able to perfect safe, reliable nuclear fusion, effectively ending our oil consumption. Would Obama immediately remove all our soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan? Not in the face of conservative commentators who still maintain that we have to fight “them over there” so we don’t have to fight them here. The more serious argument against immediate troop withdrawal suggests that things are too unstable for U.S. troops to leave. This argument seems to suggest that we are the glue holding Afghanistan together.

Most importantly, I doubt our reliance on oil prevents Obama from calling up Benjamin Netanyahu and simply saying, “Israel is officially on its own, buddy.” In fact, the Middle Eastern nations’ single greatest complaint about U.S. foreign policy is our consistent, uncritical support of Israel. And this support is increasing, or at least under pressure to increase. Mitt Romney, in what is doubtlessly a preparation for a 2012 run at the White House, spoke at the AIPAC (“America’s Pro Israel Lobby” according to its website) summit on October 19.¹ Before stating that Iran, a country of over 65 million people, is “unalloyed evil,” (para. 30), Romney wondered at “how little we ask of the Arab world” (para. 14) and proclaimed his personal and political affection for Israel. What is more, President Obama’s government has voted against endorsing the Goldstone Report, a U.N. investigation accusing both Israel and Hamas of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the 2008 war in Gaza. From both sides of the political spectrum, Israel enjoys remarkable latitude and political support.

But Baldwin’s statement is indicative of an even larger discursive problem. As a nation, we’ve failed to put our uncritical support for Israel up for question. Our national conversation has paid more attention to the Balloon Boy. Baldwin can present the argument that the U.S. is only tied to Middle East through oil because on the Sunday morning talk shows, the Goldstone Report got no play. As a nation, we don’t talk about whether or not we should support Israel, so it is understandable that Baldwin would elide this when he speaks of U.S.-Middle East relations.

What troubles me most is this: a focus only on oil also ignores the vast cultural advantages the U.S. has gained from Arab countries. The food, music, literature, architecture – and if none of those impress you, how about numbers? Yes, we got our numbers from Arabs! But in our discourse, isn’t it more than a little stereotypical that the only thing we can remember is oil? Doesn’t this deploy a repeating image in our cultural lexicon: the Arab gas station attendant? Is this to what our foreign policy reduces this vast region – the so-called cradle of civilization? My contention is that anti-Arab racism pervades our political discussion about the Middle East if we choose to restrict that conversation to oil and terrorism. And Baldwin’s idea – that if we free ourselves of our “addiction to foreign oil,” then the world will be a better place – underhandedly suggests that the ultimate goal for Middle East peace is to leave “them” alone, separate “them” from “us.” After all, so goes this argument, they are not fit for modernity. Essentially, this argument forces the Middle East endgame to be more about isolation than unity and more about fearing the radical differences between our cultures than the glaring sameness of our humanity. It seems to me that the hope of a lasting Middle East peace rests upon a common commitment to avoiding stereotypes and, possibly most of all, to treating Arab interests with respect and legitimacy.

About two weeks ago, I saw a bumper sticker that said, “Kick their ass. Take their gas.” After a brief surge of anger, during which I wanted to chase down the car and aggressively invite the driver for a cup of coffee and a picture show of Palestinian refugee camps, I comforted myself with one small hope. I hoped that the driver’s view was the minority. Sadly, I can’t say that I was right.

1. Romney, Mitt. “Address by Mitt Romney at AIPAC National Summit.” Real Clear Politics. 19 October 2009. 20 October 2009.

The demand for oil is categorized as “demand inelastic,” considering there are no ready substitutes available for oil, the implications being consumers have few opportunities to switch to other fuels for the myriad activities which oil enables. Strict supply conditions and a growing demand for oil give rise to an economic environment in which, as a rule of thumb, each 10% increase in the price of oil restricts U.S. GDP growth by up to 0.1 percentage points. Proceeding the Joint Economic Committee in April 2002, Alan Greenspan observed, “all economic downturns in the United States since 1973… have been preceded by sharp increases in the price of oil.”

U.S. oil consumption habits are quite extraordinary: for, due to a monumental privilege made possible by the U.S. dollars current status as reserve currency, the U.S. accounts for more than 25% of global daily demand, despite composing only 4% of the human population. Transportation accounts for 67% of U.S. oil consumption, and 97% of transportation in the U.S. is fueled by oil, with virtually no substitutes. An overwhelming amount of this movement of goods and services is on behalf of the major industries, featuring at center the military-industrial complex.

Over the past three years, gasoline prices in the U.S. and western world have fluctuated dramatically. In the summer of 2008, for instance, they rose to over $4/gallon but subsequently settled; decades of price inflation aside. Many analysts cite the reality of Peak Oil as the main reason for the inflationary and wild oil prices, however others argue that the price of crude oil today is not determined by the relation of supply to demand, but, rather, the control of oil through speculation by four major Anglo-American companies and their associates. This highly deferential pyramid in regards to the number of sellers in the oil market, in and of itself, results in higher prices. More sellers, on the other hand, would lead to more supply, leading to a more competitive environment with lower prices and higher quantity. Many maintain that Peak Oil not an ecological phenomenom, but, rather a political one, such as the prolific researcher and author William Engdahl.

At least 60% of the $128 per barrel price of crude oil in the summer of 2008 was, indeed, the outcome of unregulated futures speculation by hedge funds. While some of the spike has to do with summer’s status as driving season, other factors, such as the paper markets, play a significant role. U.S. rules as stated in Commodity Futures Trading Commission enable speculators to buy a crude oil futures contract on the NyMex, having only to pay 6% of the value of the contract. So, a futures trader in the Summer 2008 was required to pay approximately 8$ for every barrel, borrowing the other $120. This 16 to 1 hyper-leveraging of oil futures abated the high prices and ameliorated bank losses in sub-prime and other disasters by expenses suffered by the population.²

The selling of oil futures and derivatives contracts have major implications for where oil prices sit at any given time, for the number of buyers and expected prices shifts demand. Further, the process of fixing these prices is so open-ended, only few insiders, such as major oil trading banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, know who is buying the oil futures and derivatives contracts; that is, “paper oil.”

This perceived anticipation for the future affects our present demand, and when a multitude of investors bet on a bullish oil market, the price will increase. Similarly, cash for clunkers, for instance, increased consumer demand due to the tax write-off and deflated price of the cars featured in the program, shifting demand from the future to the present. In the future, profits of the auto industry and price of automobiles should fall due to depressed demand exacerbated, in part, by this program.

The appearance of unregulated international derivatives trading in oil futures over the past 15-20 years has made possible the present speculative bubble in oil prices. The advent of oil futures trading and the two major London and New York oil futures contracts has landed control of oil prices not with OPEC, but with Wall Street.

In June of 2006. a U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report entitled “The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices,” observed “…substantial evidence supporting the conclusion that the large amount of speculation in the current market has significantly increased prices.” The ability for certain firms to influence prices by way of speculation is one symptom of a decades long process of deregulation in the marketplace and the following explosion in derivatives trading.

The report noted, also, that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a regulation of financial futures, had been mandated by Congress to ensure the laws of supply and demand were reflected in the prices on the futures market. The U.S. Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) states, “Excessive speculation in any commodity under contracts of sale of such commodity for future deliver… causing sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in the price of such commodity, is an undue an unnecessary burden on interstate commerce in such commodity.” The CEA, moreover, instructs the CFTC to implement trading limits, “as the Commission finds are necessary to diminish, eliminate, or prevent such burden.”

The Commodity Futures Trading Trading Commission, a financial futures regulator, had been mandated by Congress to ensure that prices on the futures market reflect the laws of supply and demand rather than manipulative practices or excessive speculation. The US Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) states, “Excessive speculation in any commodity under contracts of sale of such commodity for future delivery … causing sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in the price of such commodity, is an undue and unnecessary burden on interstate commerce in such commodity.”

Therefore, the world’s keystone commodity market, oil, is unregulated and highly manipulated. The global economy runs, so to speak, on oil. The U.S. dollar, since 1971 under Nixon, has been a purely fiat currency, as are the majority of global currencies and all speculative instruments; in other words, it’s intrinsic value has been, since 1971, based solely on arbitrary pronouncement and maintained through responsible fiscal policies and management. No longer backed by gold or silver, paper and digital dollars were effectively backed by the world’s oil, especially when one considers that, in order to buy crude oil, virtually each nation had to first purchase US dollars. This dynamic is what Valery Giscard d’Estaing termed an “exorbitant privilege,” in reference to the benefit the U.S. enjoyed in the U.S. dollar being the international reserve currency: one outcome being, that the U.S. would not face a balance of payments crisis, because it purchased imports in its own currency.

The aforementioned US Senate Report further acknowledged:

Until recently, US energy futures were traded exclusively on regulated exchanges within the United States, like the NYMEX, which are subject to extensive oversight by the CFTC, including ongoing monitoring to detect and prevent price manipulation or fraud. In recent years, however, there has been a tremendous growth in the trading of contracts that look and are structured just like futures contracts, but which are traded on unregulated OTC electronic markets. Because of their similarity to futures contracts they are often called “futures look-alikes.”

The only practical difference between futures look-alike contracts and futures contracts is that the look-alikes are traded in unregulated markets whereas futures are traded on regulated exchanges. The trading of energy commodities by large firms on OTC electronic exchanges was exempted from CFTC oversight by a provision inserted at the behest of Enron and other large energy traders into the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 in the waning hours of the 106th Congress.

The impact on market oversight has been substantial. NYMEX traders, for example, are required to keep records of all trades and report large trades to the CFTC. These Large Trader Reports, together with daily trading data providing price and volume information, are the CFTC’s primary tools to gauge the extent of speculation in the markets and to detect, prevent, and prosecute price manipulation. CFTC Chairman Reuben Jeffrey recently stated: “The Commission’s Large Trader information system is one of the cornerstones of our surveillance program and enables detection of concentrated and coordinated positions that might be used by one or more traders to attempt manipulation.”

In contrast to trades conducted on the NYMEX, traders on unregulated OTC electronic exchanges are not required to keep records or file Large Trader Reports with the CFTC, and these trades are exempt from routine CFTC oversight. In contrast to trades conducted on regulated futures exchanges, there is no limit on the number of contracts a speculator may hold on an unregulated OTC electronic exchange, no monitoring of trading by the exchange itself, and no reporting of the amount of outstanding contracts (“open interest”) at the end of each day.

David Kelly of J.P Morgan Funds, the Chief market strategist for one of the world´s leading oil industry banks, recently told the Washington Post: “One of the things I think is very important to realize is that the growth in the world oil consumption is not that strong.” The story is floated around, and generally accepted for that matter, that China´s oil imports are exploding, meaning grave implications for the supply-demand equilibrium, and subsequently reason for the spike in prices. David Kelly´s enunciation, in contraposition, negates that hypothesis.³

OPEC, furthermore, left its 2008 global oil demand forecast unchanged, citing slowing economic growth in the industrialized world and slight growth in the emerging markets. OPEC predicted oil demand in 2008 to be, for the most part, unchanged from its previous estimate. Demand from China, the Middle East, India, and Latin America will rise, offset by lower demand in the EU and North America.

Big oil conglomerations profit enormously from high oil prices. Advocates of Peak Oil argue that, in the near future, Absolute Peak Oil was the coming end to cheap oil. One premise of Peak Oil holds fossil fuel to be the leftovers of fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, and so therefore characterized by finite supply. Alternatively, a theory of oil formation, arrived at in the Soviet Union of the 1950’s, criticizes the assumptions of western biologists to be unproveable, citing the fact that western geologists have warned an end to oil for more than century, thereafter discovering more supplies.

For the USSR, in the Cold War of the 1950’s, a domestic supply of oil was a geopolitical necessity, and a considerable boost to security. In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir’yev and a team of other scientists concluded: “Crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.” They termed this new theory “a-biotic,” or, in other words, non-biological.⁴

Implications of such a theory being that earth’s oil supply is limited only by the amount of organic hydrocarbon materials present deep in the earth at the time of earth’s formation, as well as the technology available to drill uber-deep wells and explore into the earth’s inner regions. The scientists argued that oil comes from deep in the earth, and from conditions of high temperatures and very high pressure. Porfir’yev: “Oil is a primordial material of deep origin which is transported at high pressure via ‘cold’ eruptive processes into the crust of the earth.”

The theory of Peak Oil originated in a 1956 paper by Marion King Hubbert, a Texas geologist employed by Shell Oil. Oil from wells is extracted, he argued, in a bell curve nature, and once a “peak” was reached, what he termed “Hubbert’s Curve,” decline ensued. By 1970, he argued, oil production in the United States would peak and the oil crises of the seventies are oft cited as evidence of the legitimacy of his theory. Free trade agreements world wide have taught us, on the other hand, that it is more likely the flooding of the US market with tariff free and dirt cheap Middle East imports by Shell, Mobil, Texaco, and the other Saudi Aramco made it impossible for California and many Texas producers to compete.

Exacerbating theories that political posturing promotes the illusion of limited oil supplies, the suppression of alternative modes of transportation is well-documented; from electro-magnetism to water powered cars. Why does the combustible engine reign supreme in an age of moon exploration, globalization and other seemingly sky-high technologies?

How do few companies get to the point of wielding so much influence?

By the 1870’s, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Empire enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the United States, as well as various foreign countries. The King of Holland, in 1890, supported the creation of an international oil company called Royal Dutch Oil Company for the purpose of refining and selling kerosene from Indonesia, then a Dutch colony. In the same year, a British company founded to ship oil, the Shell Transport Trading Company, “began transporting Royal Dutch oil from Sumatra to destinations everywhere,” and “the two companies merged to become Royal Dutch Shell.”⁵

In 2008, it was widely reported that the U.S. government secretly led dealings between Shell and the Iraqi Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts. Andrew Kramer, for the New York Times, uncovered the story that the world’s oil giants, “Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP… along with Chevron and a number of smaller companies” were present at “talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields.”

According to the Times, “A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies…”

There is much evidence that the Bush administration, foreign firms and Iraq’s Oil Ministry had conspired during the most important periods of the Iraq War. There are deep financial ties between the military occupation in Iraq and the aforementioned oil giants; for instance, the oil giants Exxon, Mobil, Shell, Total, BP, and Chevron often make appearances on the Pentagon’s payroll. In 2007, these five firms earned more than $4.1 billion from the Pentagon, with Royal Dutch Shell at the forefront with $2.1 billion.

The government of Iraq and Royal Dutch Shell eventually signed a $4 billion deal to “to establish a joint venture with [Iraq's] South Gas Company in the Basra district of of southern Iraq to process and market natural gas.” The Times reported that Shell “established an office in Baghdad.” A “Green Zone” was guaranteed, and Shell was handed a $338 million contract for aviation fuel by the Pentagon. Therefore, the U.S. government was heavily involved in dealings between Shell and the Iraqi Oil Ministry, and the U.S. military regularly pays Shell billions of dollars each year.⁶

These subsidies should drive the price of oil down, as, from the businesses´ perspective, subsidies lower costs and make firms willing to offer more at a given price.

In an October 6 Business Week article, Robert Fisk elaborates upon the coming demise of the dollar. The phenomenon will see Gulf Arabs, along with China, Russia, Japan and France end dollar dealings for oil. The break from the post World War II Bretton Woods world order will be an in-between period as the aforementioned nations shift to a bread basket of currencies; among which will be the Japanese yen, the Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a fledgling, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.⁷

It is possible that such plans partially explain the dramatic rise in the price of gold over the last few weeks. Certainly, they portend the end of the Dollar System as we have known it since the end of the Second World War. Further, these questions center on the strategic importance of Middle Eastern oil to both the rising giant of China and the waning United States. The deadline for the currency transition is 2018. Adding to the drama, Iran recently announced that its foreign currency reserves would from now on be held in euros as opposed to dollars. Many analysts recall what transpired after the last Middle East oil producer decided to sell its oil in euros than dollars. After the decision by Saddam Hussein, the U.S. and Britain invaded Iraq.

Others hold that the timeline for revaluation is much shorter. The decline in consumer spending, which makes up 70% of the U.S. economy, and unemployment rates, which, though their rise has slowed continue on an upward trajectory, are indicators of this. A revaluation of the US dollar, if even only by one-third, would seriously compromise the U.S.’s ability to import commodities, such as oil.

In September, U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs stated that oil price could potentially peak at $85 a barrel by the end of 2009, and average approximately $90 in 2010. Deutsche Bank, on the other hand, recently raised their prediction $10, but it still lands at $65 a barrel. This is after they predicted in 2008 $150 oil by 2010.⁸

1. Securing America’s Future Energy. Fundamentals of the Global Oil Market.
2. F W Engdahl. ‘Perhaps 60% of Today’s Oil Price is Pure Speculation‘. Global Research, 2 May 2008.
3. F W Engdahl. More On the Real Reason Behind High Oil Prices, Global Research, 21 May 2008.
4. F W Engdahl. War and Peak Oil. Global Research, 26 September 2007.
5. Andrew Gavin Marshall. Origins of the American Empire: Revolution, World Wars and World Order. Global Research, 28 July 2009.
6. Nick Turse. Pentagon Hands Iraq Oil Deal to Shell. Global Research, 4 October 2008.
7. Robert Fisk. Oil Not Priced in Dollars by 2018? The Independent, 6 October, 2009.
8. Deutsche Bank raises 2010 oil price forecast. Boiler Juice, 6 October 2009.

Same joke as last week, I am NOT talking about the lynch mob-like crowd scene on the National Mall that was literally choreographed by and for Fox “News” last week on Sept. 12, but the current, equally valid, environmental protesters being pre-harassed by the Pittsburgh PD in advance of this Thursday’s G20 Summit.

Quick reminder: This week economically devastated working class Pittsburgh hosts this year’s annual “G20 Summit.” Leaders of the world will dine on fine foods, couch their agendas in terms that sound magnanimous, size up the new American president, and, if possible, discern the best way to be on America’s best side. Let’s face it, even though China and India are doing blockbuster business in the way of catching up, the US is still the driving economy of the planet. For now.

The G20 Summit is the US’s turn to hang with the best of the rest. The G20 are the countries with the 19 biggest economies in the world plus the European Union en bloc. Long ago and far away, the group used to be a much more exclusive “G6,” also the even luckier sounding “G7,”and, after some entourage adjustment, the more sporty “G8.” Full disclosure: in an earlier feverish bid for inclusiveness back in ’99 they shot all the way up to the sonorous “The G33,” but backed off down to awkward sounding “G22,” which didn’t quite have the ring to it, so two more nations were jettisoned, and there you have it.

Working together, these nations’ economies control about 85% of all the money in the entire world. And their meetings have long attracted world class protests, but not in Rustbelt Pittsburgh, thus the crackdown. Racist posturing, propagandist pandering and mounds of trash on the National Mall to denigrate the president in as vulgar terms as possible = good clean fun for loyal Americans. Groups of environmentalist protesters staging street theater to try to draw attention to the catastrophe unfolding as we ignore Global Warming = clearly anti-American who thus need to be surveilled, and have their vans unlawfully searched and seized.

A lot of environmentalists hope to set the stage at the Summit for the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. It’ll be the first time in a long time that the rest of the world could possibly look to an American president in hopes of leadership in dealing with the pollutions that are poisoning the planet. Previously the Bush presidency played the bad boy and had scorned calls for stricter regulations on carbon emissions. At one point, in typical Bush fashion, he even mocked the assembled body and laughingly called himself, “the world’s polluter.”

Much of the world is wondering, with the rightwing holding Obama to the ropes, will there be hope for any environmental progress? The cultural warfare we’re engaged in as a nation over health care is just the warm-up for the battle we’ll see the Right put up when America tries to adjust our self-destructive addiction to pollution. Already the rightwing/Big Oil cabals are engineering the next set of protests Tea Party type Americans will be suckered into. Already they are working to challenge the president in so many ways that he can’t accomplish much beyond working to defend himself. As Yogi Berra once said, it’s déjà vu all over again.

Just as had happened in 1993 when Clinton came to power, like they had successfully done to Carter over a decade earlier, the right wing organized an all-out assault on the democratic president’s agenda in health care and energy. In Clinton’s case the onslaught took down both his plans for universal health care and energy consumption tax to regulate us off of fossil fuels.

The rest of the world has been waiting for us to join in the effort to keep the planet from choking itself to death. But they could be waiting a long time more if the Right has anything to do with it and it looks like they do. Just as the rest of the civilized world realized long ago that, as Tory MP Tony Benn so delightfully phrased in the Michael Moore movie, Sicko, “If you can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people.” It’s such a basic principle of human, one could even say Christian dignity, and still, look how not-far health care reform has gotten since the Right kicked up the noise machine. Here’s what’s next.

Oil corporations have already practiced staging Astroturf fake energy protests, in Houston no less, where oil company workers were shipped in for the protests, paid their company wages for being there and actual protesting citizens were kept out; and then the event was billed as a spontaneous citizens’ uprising at the American Petroleum Institute’s Energy Citizen event.

And as phony as that is, I just imagine Glen Beck will soon be leading the charge for a December 7th Club or something like that to ‘drop the bomb’ on Obama’s energy policies. And the rest of the world will keep watching while America continues to over-pollute, over-consume, underfund our education, over-fill our prisons, over-export war and weapons, undercut our own health care and overly congratulate ourselves for our freedom.

Meanwhile, while we weren’t looking, we’re losing another war. As of Monday, Sept. 21, 2009, TV news anchors and commentators talk about Afghanistan as if America’s chances are already over. The Taliban have virtually regained control of the country and if we want the control back, it’s going to take four times the manpower and four decades to do it. The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, had heartily concurred in the call for more troops. You remember Karzai, the former Unocal employee we installed in power within months of Sept. 11th 2001? The guy who recently claimed a reelection victory in an election widely recalled as a fraud. That Karzai. Well, Karzai still has that all that Unocal pipeline project to protect; so you can bet when it comes to getting an army to fight off Taliban, he would much rather borrow ours than create his own.

Currently the best estimates say that if we had the political will to send in 600,000 troops and to have generations of them stay there for 40, count ‘em, 40 years, then we might make some headway. Sounds like a mighty big amount of political will. But these days, most Americans barely have the political will to get out of bed in the morning, unless, of course, they’re being fueled on hatred of all things Obama. So, here’s the silver lining in all this:

That Afghanistan War is likely to go down the tubes too, once the Right Realize they can hate him for that as well. Iraq was Bush’s war to lose, and lose it he did, but Obama is likely to have Afghanistan taken away from him. When right-wingers can claim to be patriotic by calling for an end to “the Awful President’s Illegal War,” then you’ll know peace will soon be at hand.

Ivor van Heerden is the professor at Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Center who warned the levees of New Orleans were ready to blow — months and years before Katrina did the job.

For being right, van Heerden was rewarded with … getting fired. [See Katrina, Four Years Later: Expert Fired Who Warned Levees Would Burst]

But I’ve been in this investigating game long enough to know that van Heerden’s job didn’t die of natural causes or academic issues. This was a hit. Some very powerful folks wanted him disappeared and silenced — for good.

So who done it?

Here are the facts.

Dr. van Heerden has lots of friends, mostly the people of New Orleans, those who survived and cheered his fight to save their city. But he also has enemies, many of them, and they are powerful.

First, there is Big Oil. More than a decade ago, van Heerden pointed the finger at oil drilling as a culprit in threatening New Orleans and the Gulf Coast with flooding.

“Certainly he was critical of what the oil companies did to the coast,” Louisiana engineer HJ Bosworth told me. “Seeing what kind of bad citizens they were. Dozens and dozens of pipeline canals just carved the living daylights out of the coast just to find some oil.”

Well, we need oil, don’t we?

True, but Bosworth, who advises Levees.org, a non-profit group that birddogs hurricane safety work, explained the connection between flooding New Orleans and oil drilling quantified by van Heerden’s research. “Takes a million years to build (the protective coastal marsh); once you carve it up, it’s just like bleeding a wild animal, hang it up, carve some holes in it, and the juice just drains out of it. Saltwater and tide invade. You make [the state] susceptible to flooding from coastal and tidal surges.”

So I was amazed to learn that, shortly after van Heerden, wetlands protector, was given the heave-ho by LSU, a group calling itself “America’s Wetland” gave the university a fat check for $300,000.

After a little digging, I found that it wasn’t really “America’s Wetland,” the group with the oh-so-green name and love-Mother-Nature website, that provided the money. One-hundred percent of the loot, in fact, came from Chevron Oil Corporation. Chevron had merely “green-washed” the money through “Wetlands.”

Was this Big Oil’s “thank you” to LSU for canning van Heerden? The University refuses to talk to me about van Heerden’s firing (”It’s a confidential personnel matter”).

Bosworth notes such a grant to the University “doesn’t come without strings attached.” And this “Wetland” grant appears to have some tangled threads. LSU will monitor the coast’s environment, guided by a committee of what the school’s PR office describes as “experts” in coastal infrastructure and hurricane research. But the school is pointedly excluding its own expert, van Heerden. Instead of van Heerden, LSU announced it will rely on representatives from Chevron — and Shell Oil.

You can’t challenge Shell’s expertise on coastal erosion. The Gulf Restoration Network has calculated that the oil giant, “has dredged 8.8 million cubic yards material while laying pipelines since 1983 causing the loss of 22,624 acres.”

Shell too is a sponsor of “America’s Wetland.”

Bad Behavior

Van Heerden and his team of hurricane experts at LSU have other enemies, notably Big Oil’s little sisters: The Army Corp of Engineers and its contractors. One internal University memo that has come to light is a complaint from the Army Corp of Engineers’ Washington office to an LSU official demanding to know why van Heerden’s “irresponsible behavior is tolerated.”

By van Heerden’s bad “behavior,” they seem to be referring to the professor’s computer model of the Gulf which predicted, years before Katrina hit, that the levees built by the Army Corp were too short. The Army Corp, van Heerden asserts, compounded the danger to New Orleans by going shovel-crazy, with massive dredging and channel-cutting sought by shipping interests.

Following the complaint from Washington, the University took away van Heerden’s computer (no kidding). But they couldn’t take away his voice. He began to speak out. University officials do not deny they told him to shut up, to stop speaking to the press about his concerns. They were worried, they told van Heerden, that his statements jeopardized their government funding.

Van Heerden’s revelations were, indeed, damning. He revealed that the Bush White House knew, the night Katrina came ashore, that the levees were breaking up, but withheld this crucial information from the state’s emergency response center. As a result, the state slowed evacuation and stranded residents were left to drown. [See Big Easy to Big Empty.]

A class action lawsuit has been filed against the Army Corp of Engineers on behalf of all the people of the city who lost homes and loved ones because the Corp-designed levees had failed. Anyone with a TV and two eyes could see that. But the Bush Administration flat out denied it knew its system was flawed and refused any responsibility for the disaster.

Van Heerden, who had warned Washington, long before the flood, that the levees were 18 inches too short, would have been a devastating expert witness for the public. But the university ordered him not to testify, a relief for the Corps. (A verdict is expected soon in the non-jury case.)

The Army Corp and its contractors can feel safer now that van Heerden has been booted. His Hurricane Center will be downsized and instead, the University will expand its “Wetland” program, with Chevron’s checkbook.

Joining Chevron and Shell on the LSU board of “wetland” experts will be the Shaw Group, a huge Army Corp contractor.

If you’ve read John Perkins’ book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, you would know about Shaw Group, or at least the subsidiary for whom Perkins did his dirty work: an engineering outfit that used flim-flam, intimidation and fraud to turn a buck. (I once directed a government racketeering investigation of one of their projects before Shaw bought them up. In the 1988 case, a jury found the company was co-conspirator in a multi-billion-dollar fraud, charges the company settled with a civil payment.)

Shaw Group is also a sponsor of “America’s Wetland.” So is electricity giant Entergy Corporation. That’s the company that shut off the power in New Orleans during the flood, then sold the loose juice elsewhere, pocketing a multi-million-dollar windfall.

Yes, America’s Wetland does have a green cover, Environmental Defense, exposed in the Guardian UK in 1999 for its icky habit of licking the sugar off corporate candy canes. We caught them trying to set up a lucrative financial operation with the very polluters they were supposed to be challenging. [See Fill your lungs it's only borrowed grime]

I spoke with the Chairman of American Wetland, King Milling. Milling’s just a local good ol’ boy, a sincere guy, not a front for Big Oil. But he naively let his group be used to buy the debate over the environment and ice out un-bought experts like van Heerden.

Flood Warning

With LSU deep in the pocket of the corporate powers and under Army Corp pressure, van Heerden didn’t stand a chance. For doing nothing more than trying to save a few thousand lives, he has paid quite a price. As he told me this week from his home, “No good turn goes unpunished.”

That’s van Heerden’s fate. But what about the city’s? Is New Orleans ready for another Katrina?

His answer is not comforting: “No, definitely not. If anything, it’s worse than when Katrina hit. We’ve lost a lot of wetlands protection. It’s not very safe … A section of the flood wall itself has sunk about 9 inches, a result of [Hurricane] Gustav.”

Is anyone listening?

“The [Army] Corp won’t talk to me,” says van Heerden. “Like everybody else, they are crossing their fingers and hoping we don’t have a storm.”

Well, don’t say we didn’t warn you.

“In 1979, after the devastation of a decade under the tyrannical President Macias, then-Lieutenant Colonel Obiang took control of the government and was named President of the Supreme Military Council.”

What did Obiang do while working under Macias’ orders to stop the decade old devastation?

“In 1969 –the official history continues – Obiang becomes the National Guard Liuetenant, with all the forces and military quarters based in Malabo under his control.”

He became commander in chief of the Armed Forces in 1975, and “in 1979 a presidential decree made him vice-minister of the Popular Armed Forces.”

What did Obiang do in these 30 years to avoid another dictatorship?

In 1982, “Obiang became President of the Republic for an initial seven-year term. He was re-elected to additional terms in 1989, 1996 and 2003. (…) President Obiang won re-election once again in 1996. Infrastructure and housing is now being rebuilt more quickly as new water, sewage and drainage are being installed and hundreds of miles of new roadways are being built to connect all of Equatorial Guinea’s cities and towns. Healthcare and education also top the agenda as new, modern state-of-art hospitals and clinics are being built and staffed and teachers are being trained to better teach students.”

Buried under this mountain of promises about public works, lies one certain fact: Obiang wins election after election with more than 95% of the votes. In the 2002 presidential elections he got 97%, in the 2004 legislative and local elections he won 98 out of the 100 parliament seats plus 237 out of the 244 country’s municipalities. In the 2008 legislative elections he got 99 seats.

The main difference between the deposed president and the current one, is that Obiang knows how to read the signs of the times and to adapt himself accordingly. This has allowed him to hold on to power for thirty years, count on foreign support and enrich himself enormously thanks to the oil industry, also under his control.

The past thirty years can indeed be described as golden thirty years for Obiang, but not for the great majority of Equatorial Guinea’s inhabitants. Country reports published by the World Bank, the European Union and some of the United Nations agencies, let alone those by non governmental organisations, especially those devoted to human rights and human development, present a quite different reality.

Obiang is willing to play the democratic game in front of the international community, because in each game he marks the cards and keeps the best while deals the rest.

If appearances have to be kept up of regular elections, of honouring international treaties, of adhering to foreign initiatives on transparency, accountability and good governance, for Obiang this is no problem. He lets the opposition win a parliamentary seat, he signs international treaties only to honour them in the breach, and varnishes his masterwork with glowing propaganda about the government’s good works.

Obiang has many good friends who just happen to govern powerful countries. These convince public opinion that Obiang’s scam is legitimate and only needs a few tweaks and minor improvements. To that end, they offer technical assistance and cooperation, while making clear there is no great urgency. Since oil production started in Equatorial Guinea in the mid 90s, his friends have become even more reliable than ever, despite knowing the reality all too well:

The 2004 Department of State report on Equatorial Guinea accurately summarised its political situation: “Citizens did not have the ability to change their government peacefully.”

In 2009 the Department refers to the country as a “nominally multi-party Republic with strong domination by the executive branch.”

For his part, Obiang thinks it wise to take preventive measures. He sends soldiers and policemen to assassinate, kidnap and torture his “enemies”, and in general to make life difficult for political opponents.

In spite of this and of the fact that there is no shortage of people willing to get their share of the enormous oil cake in exchange for loyalty, some still remain who do not give up. Some of these string along with Obiang’s pretense of democracy. Others prefer to try and oust him.

Considering their actions so far, it can safely be said that Obiang has clearly defeated them all. He intimidates, persecutes and entertains members of the first group, according to his whims. He attacks members of the second whenever he can. These have managed to discomfit him once, but Obiang’s friends and luck have been on his side.

Neither group of the opposition can claim that their respective strategies have come anywhere close to achieving their goals. The reverse is true, as chances of success seem to be inversely proportional to the increase in their actions.

Playing Obiang’s democracy game is not an easy task. If a player does not perform as expected, other players will not take them seriously. Equatorial Guinea’s leader of the parliamentary opposition declares again and again to the international community, to the media, to various international political institutions, that his party plays by Obiang’s rules and also reassures the world that his party will only use non-violent means to achieve power.

But if the international community does not demand that Obiang play by internationally accepted rules to stay in power, why does the opposition think they have to do so? It seems the international community accepts opposition to Obiang as long as its leaders give up their people’s right to resist the Obiang regime’s human rights violations.

Philosophers dealt with the problem of using legitimate violence against an aggression many centuries ago. Since the 13th century it is accepted that “in the case of a deadly attack, there is more obligation to protect one’s own life than the attacker’s.”

If a political party which opposes a never ending dictatorship renounces legitimate defence against its violence, it is delegitimizing itself, because it actually helps the dictatorship it claims to oppose. When this party seeks support from international actors, despite their party’s poor record of resistance and even knowing full well their petition will be met with indifference, they are digging their own political grave.

It is true that a legitimate defence requires another condition, namely that there are reasonable chances of success. In this respect it has to be noted that it is all about not giving up the right to legitimate resistance. Further, there can be no likelihood of success if the possibility of resistance is totally abandoned.

The non-parliamentary opposition, made up of several small groups, has not renounced political violence. But its failure, too, is obvious and due mainly to lack of popular, militant support, to splits and internecine fighting and other shortcomings.

The option of a coup d’état has not yielded useful results. Nor is there much chance that it will. The lack of a popular militia and bad planning, along with the use of foreign mercenaries, explain the failure. Day after day, Obiang increases his own security, and he can count on foreign support. It seems that only a palace coup, like the one Obiang himself authored 30 years ago, is likely to succeed.

It can be said that the opposition too, like Obiang, have placed their hopes in foreign hands. The difference between the two camps is that European and North American Presidents and Prime Ministers prefer oil in their own countries to ensuring human rights in Equatorial Guinea.

The struggle carried out by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) is illuminating. The oil plunder plus the damages it causes to the Delta physical conditions and to its inhabitants’ health, together with the government’s repression, are the reasons the MEND mentions to explain its attacks against the interests of the foreign companies that benefit from the oil industry with the consent of the government.

What is taking place in Nigeria, taking into account its much bigger size, is similar to what happens in Equatorial Guinea: “Since 1970, $350 billion in oil revenue has flowed to Nigeria, yet 75% of Nigerians live on less than $1 a day. (…) Nigerian governments have negotiated joint ventures with multinational companies for unregulated oil production since 1958. Over 50 years of exploitation in the Niger Delta has resulted in systematic human rights abuses and environmental devastation.”

Against this the MEND has declared its aims: reparations for environmental damage and also control of the Delta’s natural riches. It has also made public its means: “Leave our land while you can or die in it. Our aim is to totally destroy the capacity of the Nigerian government to export oil.”

In recent years, its achievements have been made known. The government, heeding a request by the big oil companies, sent the army to violently repress the Delta people protests, which resulted in thousands of dead, tortured and prisoners.

Popular resistance, however, kept up the struggle and the MEND was created. It has forced cuts in oil production from almost two and half million barrels per day to less than one and a half.

Unlike what is taking place in Equatorial Guinea, the Nigerian government does not despise the MEND. This is not a gift from the government –it maintains its military actions against the guerrillas- but the MEND, through its resistance, has placed itself in a position that deserves its enemy’s respect. Nowadays, both camps are holding conversations.

Meanwhile, Obiang represses the opposition parties that he so despises. At the same time, the only opposition leader with a seat in parliament, made public a communiqué after the attack against the president’s palace in Malabo that took place last February, the 17th, 2009, which was disingenuously attributed to the MEND by the government.

The party “congratulates the State Security and Armed Forces for their quick and efficient response and declares its support and solidarity with them.” It also reiterates once again “that (the party) rejects all movements aimed to achieve power through violence.”

While the Equatorial Guinea parliament unanimously declares the MEND “a terrorist group made up of mercenaries with evil intentions and recommends maximum repression,” Nigeria president has offer the MEND an amnesty. This offer is supported by many, including Nobel prize winner Wole Soyinka.

Equatorial Guinea politicians, both in power and in opposition, might do well to pay attention to what Soyinka’s said about Nigerian politicians: “In tandem with his predecessor Olusegun, President Umaru Yar’Adua must be made to recognize that he shoulders a moral and political responsibility for failure to make a decisive breakthrough in the quest to terminate hostilities in the Delta region. Much of the toll of death and destruction could, and would have been avoided if only these two rulers had lived up to their charge.

These words, of course, are also relevant to those in Europe and North America who “accompany Obiang in his efforts to improve democracy in Equatorial Guinea” and to those who claim to support the opposition camp in its political activity.

Economically, “meltdown” is a metaphor for painful lay-offs and lending freezes. But the global “meltdown” is not figurative for warming literally melts the earth: normally frozen tundra oozes, prehistoric glaciers and ice caps turn from hard and fixed to liquid, and thus dangerously mobile. Thawed tundra releases methane held over millennium, a greenhouse gas 20X more potent than carbon dioxide. Thus buoyed, I stumble on this headline, “Obama Administration Approves First Roadless Logging Contract In Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.”

Of course, “roadless logging” makes no sense: old growth forests are old and pristine because they don’t have roads. Wild, isolated forests we call Nature: roadways (our government at work) transform placid trees into timber that, like mining and ranching, costs far more than users pay.

Logging Roads, the Rivers of Commerce

On California’s North Coast, we know about logged forests, location, and locomotion. If an intrepid logger, Jerome Ford, hadn’t gone hunting for a Gold Rush shipwreck in 1851, these coastal ranges wouldn’t have built baby San Francisco. Coming overland, Ford failed at salvage (winter storms really wrecked the ship), but he marched through treasures worth hundreds of shipwrecks: huge stands of redwood and fir and cedar. What clinched Ford’s destiny – and Mendocino’s, founded two years later with his wood mill – were big trees near rivers that flowed seaward. Get resources to shipping lanes, and viola! the stuff that dreams are made of: building materials sold by the foot.

Logging roads are the transport rivers, spurring industrial “clear-cutting” (to the ground) with high, deferred costs: ecosystem disturbances, massive slides and erosion that spoil streams with sludge. The price we pay for timber extends beyond watersheds; the former Ft. Bragg mill became a toxic dump. One difference: 1850’s logging was slow, dangerous and backbreaking, with laborious handsaws and oxen. Now, machines piggybacked on roads mow down forests, and western wastelands are more visible by air than Russia by Alaskan blowhards.

Disturbing the Environmental Peace

Of late, equally clear-cut is widespread environmental grumbling, if not bafflement because candidate Barack Obama campaigned against logging roadless national forests, favored by Bush and Co. This week’s news comes after tepid G-8 non-accords that ignore deforestation and dismiss the greenhouse gas emergency. These follow earlier mishaps, the refusal to strengthen NAFTA environmental standards or the mishmash of half-measures called the House Energy bill, so watered down it may well worsen global warming. Though bright spots appear (yeah, the Grand Canyon avoids more uranium mining), the Tongass surprise reinforces qualms Interior Secretary Ken Salazar simply extends his post’s historical role – orchestrating more logging, mining and grazing rights by private industries on public lands.

For many, backpedaling defines Obama’s lukewarm environmentalism, though the administration counters when appearing in unpopular lawsuits, it favors central planning over separate judicial decisions. Okay, but why bypass hard-won spotted owl habitat (under review), energy efficiency standards or hazardous-waste burning? Why isn’t Obama’s EPA reversing unhealthy Bush-era mercury pollution levels from coal power plants, or western Colorado’s picturesque Roan Plateau leased for oil and gas drilling? That development plan was challenged by then Colorado senator, named Salazar, as “the unsound product” of an anti-conservation administration. Further, this White House isn’t fighting the destructive dumping of leftover tailings into mountain steams by Eastern strip miners.

These leadership defaults spread overseas as well. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon sharply criticized the G-8 finale, “The time for delays and half-measures is over. The policies they have stated so far are not enough [and] we must work according to the science. This is politically and morally imperative.” Despite participant spin (“historic agreement” said Britain, “clear step forward” echoed Germany), science-based environmentalists moaned, “A massive opportunity has been missed here,” “a disgusting abdication of leadership and responsibility,” even the august NY Times complained, “things fell apart.” When, we ask, were they ever “together”?

Can Business Save Us From Business?

The Washington Post’s provocative Anne Applebaum agrees (“The Summit of Green Futility,” July 14), slamming the absence of short-term emissions targets, accommodation for developing countries, or agreed on baseline targets. She voices widespread doubts nationalistic politicians or bureaucrats, great public relations from Oscar-blessed documentaries, even well-meaning citizen conservation, will do enough. Item: low oil prices are torpedoing alternative energy development, like T. Boone Pickens’ postponed major wind farm project. Alarmed, Applebaum looks to bold entrepreneurs for permanent solutions, especially low priced, sustainable energy: “The first solar power billionaire,” she foresees, “will have many, many imitators.”

What, you reply, today’s capitalism can save us from predatory tycoons that in 150 years did so much damage? Only by leveling the playing field with fossil fuel taxes, to offset the true costs for dirty energy. Only by adding in the buried costs of burning oil (mammoth defense budgets, imperialistic invasions, huge medical costs for breathing ailments, plus clean-up) will we spur competitively-priced, innovative clean energy. If dirty oil had to pay its whole way, we’d quickly fund wind, thermal, and solar projects. “If you care about the planet,” she concludes, “save the jet fuel, cancel the conferences and focus on creating the economic conditions for energy entrepreneurship.”

So many questions, so few “known knowns” – and reader input invited. What affluent nation will sacrifice massive treasure to resolve a planetary crisis – that will help foreigners, competitors, even foes and poor people? Easier to fund invasions here and to Mars. Do not our fear-based, tribal, national divisions inherently block breakthrough co-operation beyond summits or the United Nations? Do we trust today’s profit-driven capitalism to deliver us from the evils of, well, yesterday’s profit-driven capitalism? Can science and technology, those wondrous, double-edged swords, pull our collective chestnuts out of the fire, that is, our rising global furnace? Stay tuned: we’re in for a bumpy road.

This triumph of “democracy” has “made in USA” written all over it. In 200, Moscow laid out two alternate pipelines, bypassing Ukraine and Poland — the North Stream under the Baltic Sea into Germany, and the South Stream under the Black Sea into Bulgaria and on to Europe. The government in Sofia, though a member of the EU and NATO, nonetheless signed energy agreements with Moscow in 2008. This and the gas crisis between Ukraine and Russia in January 2009 made regime change in Bulgaria essential, and the services of the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy — they helped overthrow the Bulgarian government in 1990 — were clearly made excellent use of. Just a week after elections marred by vote buying (despite or due to the NED?), Bulgaria’s new PM cancelled the Russian deal.

Borisov went to Ankara a week later to sign on to the EU Nabucco pipeline. Democrat Richard Morningstar, US special envoy for Eurasian energy, and Republican Senator Richard Lugar (note the bipartisanship) joined him in Ankara on 13 July for the signing ceremony. If all goes according to plan, the Nabucco project will upstage South Stream, bringing gas from the Caspian region and Middle East to Central and Western European markets, with possible suppliers Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran and Iraq.

Senator Lugar said — with a straight face — the Nabucco agreement signed in Turkey “is a signal to the rest of the world that partner governments will not acquiesce to manipulation of energy supplies for political ends. It also has the potential to build new avenues for peaceful cooperation.” Obama served up more such tripe during his “Moscow speech” on 7 July: “In 2009, a great power does not show strength by dominating or demonising other countries. The days when empires could treat sovereign states as pieces on a chess board are over.”

However, Azerbaijan may have problems providing enough gas to make Nabucco feasible, as it initialed a deal in June with Russia’s Gazprom for gas from the Shah Deniz field — the same field Nabucco needs for its pipeline. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev is caught in this competition between Russia and the West, with a bottom line — who will pay the highest price? Even if Nabucco strikes a deal to buy Azeri gas at the price already agreed with Gazprom, according to F William Engdahl, there just ain’t enough to go around. And there are problems with all the other potential suppliers as well.

Senator Lugar told the Senate — again, with a straight face: “Ideally, in the way of the world, the natural gas — and maybe in due course oil supplies — coming out of a united Iraq might provide this kind of capital, which would be a miraculous happening and a wonderful ending to a very tragic period in their history.” If, of course, Iraq acquiesces to its US-client status. Even so, Iraqi gas to Turkey would pass through Kurdish areas, a hotbed of separatism against both Turkey and the current Iraqi government. The other main source of gas would be Iran.

For all the Obama hype, his advisers are really playing the same geopolitical game as Cheney and Bush. It is a clash of “civilisation”, with the US the so-called civiliser and everyone else the to-be-civilised. But Iran and Russia are not as easy to “dominate or demonise”, to borrow a bit of Obama-speak, as certain other countries. It will take an invasion of Iran to change Washington’s dynamic with that country. And all the hot air coming from Washington will not dissipate the Russian cloud of suspicion caused by the missile bases and NATO’s vow to swallow Ukraine and Georgia.

The degree of “civilisation” in the latter two countries is far from clear at present. The Georgian opposition continues to call for Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s resignation in the wake of his disastrous war against Russia last summer. Counting on Georgia in its present mess as a key link in the Nabucco pipeline project is quite a gamble.

In Ukraine opinion polls reveal something quite remarkable. “If we were to fantasise, and pretend that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would run for the post of Ukrainian president, then according to opinion poll results he would win right off,” says Alexei Lyashenko, an analyst at Kiev’s Research & Branding (R&B) polling institute. “His only serious competitor would be Russian President Dmitri Medvedev.” This is not new according to Lyashenko. Putin’s rating was over 50 per cent even during the 2004 “Orange Revolution”. Opinion poll results published in May indicate that 58 per cent of Ukrainians have a positive attitude toward Putin, and 56 per cent approve of Medvedev. The pro-Russian head of the opposition Party of Regions Viktor Yanukovych currently enjoys a 30 per cent approval rating, and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko 15 per cent. A shade more than five per cent of Ukrainians would vote for the anti-Russian President Viktor Yushchenko in the upcoming elections in January of 2010. According to Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) President Valeri Khmelko, “The main reason why Medvedev and Putin score so high is the endless conflicts and score-settling in Ukrainian politics, which make the Russian politicians look good.” “The Ukrainian preference for Russian state-controlled television and the desire for strong leadership in the times of crisis also play a role,” said R&B’s Lyashenko.

A KIIS poll found that 25 per cent want full unification with Russia, and 68 per cent want an EU-style border-free regime with Russia, with Russia and Ukraine being “independent but friendly states” without a visa regime or custom controls. Polls consistently show more than half of Ukrainians are opposed to joining NATO, for which a referendum must be held in any case. “Over 90 per cent of people in Ukraine have a positive attitude toward Russia, and it has become even better over the past year,” KIIS President Valeri Khmelko noted. Nor do Ukrainians have much sympathy for Yushchenko’s friend Saakashvili. According to Lyashenko, 45 per cent have a negative opinion of Saakashvili, and only 11 percent have a positive one.

Washington is still officially supporting NATO membership for both Ukraine and Georgia, as Vice President Joe Biden travels to Georgia and Ukraine this week. “Our efforts to reset relations with Russia will not come at the expense of any other countries,” Biden’s national security adviser, Tony Blinken, said. “Our hope is these leaders will live up to the promise of the revolution and make the hard choices to work together,” Blinken said, referring to Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. He said the Obama administration — like the Ukrainian people, we might add — was concerned about the “political paralysis” in Kiev. Concerning NATO, he said it was up to Ukraine and Georgia to decide whether they wanted to join the alliance. Given US reliance on Russia for transit of its troops and arms to Afghanistan, Blinken’s less than ringing rhetoric — and Obama’s virtual silence — suggests that this will not happen any time soon.

Yes, it’s clear now that Obama must have winked at Putin at the Moscow summit when the subject of Ukraine, Georgia and NATO came up. That was the only way he could get his troops through Russia to the killing fields in Afghanistan. But the Nabucco pipeline success surely irks Russia, as do continued NATO “exercises” in the Black Sea and the close ties between NATO and all the Black Sea countries — except Russia. And Poland has boldly announced its first missiles are expected this year.

Faced with these games, Moscow will have to be sure not to “blink” first, avoiding any diplomatic faux pas which could provide fuel for Washington hawks. In any case, Obama’s senior Russian adviser Michael McFaul’s derisive “We don’t need the Russians” prior to Obama’s Russian summit is simply not true. Washington’s Bulgarian-Ukrainian-Caucasus intrigues could easily unravel — in the twinkling of an eye.

Behind the crocodile tears the news of Bongo’s death saw police and troop reinforcements hitting the streets of Gabon—France’s private Eden in Africa—as the old crocodile’s teethy security apparatus clicked into lockdown. Who are the white secret service agents behind Bongo (See the ancient photo of Gabon’s then new President, Albert-Bernard Bongo, circa 1965.) And then there’s Halliburton, nuclear weapons, secret societies… Who was Omar Bongo really?

In September 2003 the National Geographic unveiled the first in a series of feature stories about the world’s ‘least spoiled’ and ‘most threatened’ tropical forests. The ‘Saving Africa’s Eden’ series showcased elephants walking on white sand beaches, silverback gorillas in lush greenery, and hippos surfing in the salty sea. Omar Bongo—“a self-possessed man with a wide mustache and a warm smile”—was the African hero who created thirteen new national parks literally overnight.

The National Geographic series followed the adventures of the requisite modern day white-skinned Tarzan personified by American biologist J. Michael Fay—the ‘man who walked across the continent of Africa’—and photos showed Fay trekking through the equatorial jungle, crisscrossing savannahs and, later, surveying the wilderness with the charismatic black-skinned then U.S. Secretary of State—fresh out of a helicopter for a photo op—General Colin Powell.¹

It was all so captivating that I got the idea I had to go there. And so I did. Intrigued by the stories in National Geographic—which I recognized as the propaganda of the corporate empire² –in late 2004 I took a ‘vacation’ from the beauty and bloodshed in the big Congo (Kinshasa) and hitchhiked across the (not-so) little Congo (Brazzaville) for a visit to ‘paradise.’³

From Libreville I flew to Gamba, in the south of Gabon, took a boat to Sette Cama, and spent Christmas 2004 with my base camp on a bluff some 50 feet above the ocean in Loango National Park, the jewel of Gabon’s largest new protected area, the 1,132,000 hectare ‘Gamba Protected Area Complex.’ It is also the heartland of Shell, Halliburton and Schlumberger operations in Gabon.⁴

“Blue seas, white sand, elephants, whales, sea turtles, monkeys, bush pigs, unbelievable scenery,” biologist Fay was quoted to say. “Gabon has it all. It has everything that everyone ever dreams about in paradise, as far as I’m concerned.”

J. Michael Fay was right, I said to myself, many times, surrounded by beauty and wildness, warm (90 degree) mists on the ocean and elephants on the beaches, soaring ospreys and chimpanzees falling out of trees, and the peace of the deserted shores of one of the most fantastic enduring wild places on earth.

But J. Michael Fay skipped the dirty details. Fay didn’t mention the poverty and suffering of black Gabonese villagers whose mud-hut and malaria suffering stands in sharp juxtaposition to the swimming pools and golf courses for highly paid white expatriates, sport fisherman or adventure tourists. Or that the Gamba Complex is a private zone controlled by Shell Oil, with checkpoints and guards, where pipelines, oil barges, well-heads and huge toxic flames burning off natural gas are more visible than the elephants. And the medical waste, dumped at sea, that litters the ‘pristine’ beach: one day I picked 48 syringes with 2 inch needles out of the white sand where I was walking barefoot. J. Michael Fay became a personal adviser to Omar Bongo, but he didn’t tell us about the terror Gabonese people live and die with.

“It [‘Saving Africa’s Eden’] is unbelievable,” Marc Ona Essangui told me, in Libreville. It was just like another film about Africa.” In April 2009, Marc Ona received the Goldman Environmental Prize for his selfless grass roots struggle to exposing corruption and human rights violations and protect Gabon’s environment, and he was threatened, arrested and illegally detained by the Bongo government.

“They announced that setting up these new Gabon parks would bring one million tourists a year, but even Kenya couldn’t do that. The pictures in National Geographic suggested that it’s easy to encounter these animals, but it’s not. It would take many days. Even though the whole world may perceive that conservation is proceeding in Gabon, this is not the reality.”

“Why did Bongo create [gazette] these thirteen new reserves? Because of scandals that took place in the past few years, like the financial scandal with FIBA Bank and the fraudulent presidential elections here, and to create tension and play off the United States against France. Bongo needed to find some way to repair relations with the United States.”

Welcome to Gabon, a small otherwise unheard of Banana Republic in equatorial Africa. Hippos in the surf… gorillas in the mist… the adventures of the great white Tarzan, National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence, J. Michael Fay, “the crazed American, the wild child who footed his way across all those nearly impassable forests and swamps, who sat half-naked atop the Inselbergs, who brought back photos and tales of a Gabon that Omar Bongo himself hadn’t known existed.”⁵

Now he’s bushwhacking through tropical lianas and serpent filled trees with machete… now’s he wading through leech-filled crocodile swamps… his trusty negro porters and trackers at hand… now he’s being gored by an elephant… Welcome to the state-of-the-art cartography and explorer-conqueror genre: Fay’s private helicopter almost daily dropping supplies in the jungle to the tune of hundreds of thousands of U.S. taxpayer dollars and mom & pop conservation donations…

The coup des grace on all this propaganda was the portrait of Omar Bongo—the altruistic African President more interested in saving the environment than selling it off for the glitter of gold or the bling bang of diamonds or for parquet floors and plywood. President Omar Bongo was portrayed as the intent listener, the wise philosophical leader, the humanitarian negotiator. He was not—according to the spin-doctors of the propaganda system—your usual African dictator who packs people’s severed heads in his refrigerator (Idi Amin) and later has his ears cut off (Samuel Doe).

The National Geographic photos of Eden unveiled were splashed all over cyberspace. Films were made and speeches given to capitalize on the momentum of public interest. Maps and guides were mass produced, DVDs and coffee table picture books, interactive features—even “classroom companion African resources” to properly influence the kiddies. The travel agencies jumped on board. Everyone was echoing the mantra: “Could Gabon be the next ecotourism destination?”

The National Geographic series was a sort of public relations pitch for the big money conservation non-government organizations—Bi(g) NGOs or BINGOs—who get all the funding: corporate entities like World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, Fauna and Flora International, and the Wildlife Conservation Society. But the series also introduced and paved the way for the Congo Basin Forest Partnership (CBFP), a predatory USAID⁶ initiative involving some seven African countries, U.S. logging companies, NASA, the Pentagon and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, launched under President George W. Bush.⁷ In 2002, Walter Kansteiner, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, paid a six-day visit to President Omar Bongo to negotiate the CBFP, and “Saving Africa’s Eden” whitewashed the Kansteiner story as falsely as they did the Bongo regime.

National Geographic was selling ecotourism and wildlife protection as a panacea to ‘save’ Africa’s idyllic gardens of Eden. But it was all a smokescreen, a blanket of propaganda draped over the primitive realities of the country of Gabon. The script was written by big business masquerading as conservation: the Wildlife Conservation Society wrote Colin Powell’s speeches, delivered in Johannesburg. Kansteiner was described as a humanitarianism possessed with the need for democracy, health care and peace, but the Kansteiner family profits by exploiting Africa as ruthlessly as King Leopold. Trading in columbium tantalite (coltan) out of the bloody Kivu provinces of D.R. Congo, Kansteiner is also a director of Moto Gold, a company that sprouted out of the genocide in the DRC’s bloody Ituri districts.⁸

Today the blanket of propaganda is being draped over the casket of Albert-Bernard Bongo, the elfish little man who for forty-one years ran the country of Gabon as a private enterprise for himself, his family, his foreign backers and protectors. Articles that mildly illuminate the corruption of the Bongo government merely serve to distance Western governments and cover for multinational corporations and state sponsored terrorism by blaming everything on Bongo.⁹

This was not my first visit to Gabon. In 1997 I was focused on the murder of Ken Saro Wiwa and the petroleum genocide in the Niger River Delta.¹⁰ I wanted a visa for Nigeria, and I passed through every country around or near Nigeria trying to get one. But the country was closed under dictator Sani Abacha—the butcher—and I was too frightened to enter Nigeria without a visa.¹¹

Ghana was an Anglo-American stronghold, but the others I passed through were all Francophone dictatorships: Burkina Faso, Niger, Togo, Cameroon—and Gabon. It was a wake-up call to the structural violence that enslaves Africa and enriches the West and its comprador class agents like Omar Bongo.¹² (Of course, U.S. President Obama’s recent criticisms of corruption and cronyism in Africa are extremely hypocritical, at the very least.)

In Libreville, I met Thierry (not his real name). Thierry quietly told me he had worked in human rights until he became a very outspoken critic of the government. He was on the run, living ‘underground’ and existing by moving, one day to the next, through networks of friends. He was an intellectual, and he described a climate of terror in Gabon involving extra-judicial executions, disappearances, torture, all run by Bongo’s intelligence operatives and the Deuxieme Bureau, also known as the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE), the French secret service.

The most egregious repression occurred in 1990, Thierry said, when civilians were massacred during the ‘pro-democracy’ protests in Port Gentil. The true human rights situation is hidden, he said, even after numerous letters were sent to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

“President Bongo knows everything that goes on in Gabon,” said Thierry. “Everything. Nothing happens that he does not know about. And there are very sophisticated forms of terror, like torture, disappearing, ritual killings, using plain-clothes operatives, in designer blue jeans or NIKE tracksuits. Bongo knows all about it—he is involved—and they have killed a lot of people with no one knowing about it. People just suddenly disappear or turn up dead.”¹³

A white woman named Catherine who worked in language translations confirmed the 1990 massacres. “There are a lot of things you can do in the United States that you cannot do here,” Catherine told me, acerbically, “and one is to be politically curious. You just don’t go around asking these kinds of questions here. You would never get away with it, but even if there was an attempt to investigate the massacres it would be blocked.”

I also met a white expatriate consulting in the oil sector. He had just come from Port Harcourt, Nigeria, but he shuffled around between Cameron, Nigeria, Gabon and Angola. “Foreigners who work in Gabon work in wood or in oil,” he said. He confirmed that killings were routine before the mid-1990’s, and that massacres occurred in Port Gentil just as Thierry had said. He said that the stories about protestors being arrested and tortured were true. “It was not just a few people killed,” he insisted. “It was a lot of people. Protestors were taken out over the ocean in oil company helicopters and pushed out, alive or dead. It’s more than just a rumor.”

Togolese and Nigerian refugees in Benin, human rights activists in Cameroon, all have described these terrorist tactics involving petroleum sector helicopters. One Togolese refugee explained that in Togo they didn’t just push people out, they hang them from helicopters and fly low over the ‘jungle communities’ to instill them with terror.¹⁴

“Bongo used to just kill anyone he wanted, openly, before 1990,” a local Gabonese man, Maconi, told me in Libreville. Maconi’s family is involved in the timber sector in Gabon, and his mother is French and he moves within the French community. “Bongo would just kill them without trying to keep it quiet. Now [2004] it is different, it is subtle, quiet, you don’t see it, but it hasn’t stopped.”¹⁵

PARISTROIKA

From the very beginning, circa 1865, Gabon was the focal point from which France projected its military and economic power across the continent, serving as an intelligence-gathering base much as Burkina Faso has historically served that role for Israel and the Congo (Zaire) has for the USA.

In fact, France forced Gabon’s independence movement to accept France’s full economic control as a pre-condition for ‘independence’.

Gabon’s first President Leon M’ba—and his early one-party dictatorship—set the stage for the Bongo regime both through sheer corruption and the Gabonese state’s nefarious military and intelligence alliance with the French. A rapid intervention by French Foreign Legion commandoes secured M’ba’s presidency after an attempted coup d’etat in 1964: M’ba was said to be a close friend of Charles De Gaulle. Many of Mba and Bongo’s French supporters considered Gabon their private domain and were threatened by Gabon’s ‘independence’ after decades of French colonial occupation. When M’ba died of illness, Bongo took the reins and with the help of France he consolidated absolute power: one of the fledgling President’s first actions was to immediately dissolve all political parties and replace them with the ‘Democratic Party of Gabon.’

Charles de Gaulle and his ‘Monsieur Afrique,’ Jacques Foccart directly installed Bongo in 1967. Bongo was the choice of a powerful group of Frenchmen—the Clan des Gabonais—composed of key members of the French government and influential Gabonese in alliance with strategically placed French nationals who controlled the economy of Gabon.¹⁶ Foccart maintained French control in the former colonies through the Reseau Foccart, an intricate ‘network’ who collaborated with the French military and major French economic interests to guarantee access to strategic minerals. Former French ambassador and close M’ba adviser Maurice Delauney was a central figure in the Foccart network and the man who handpicked Bongo as Mba’s successor.¹⁷ French mercenaries and legionnaires like Bob Denard were (and remain) members of the Clan des Gabonais, using Gabon as home base for intelligence, covert operations and terrorism from Sao Tomé to Madagascar.¹⁸ French soldiers operate within the Gabonese military and French pilots in the Air Force; elite Mirage and Jaguar aircraft from the French air force are based on the military side of the Leon Mba airport in Libreville.

Petroleum exploration in Gabon was begun in the early 1930s by the French national oil company and Gabon was the first African country to host French oil giant Elf in the 1960s, from where Elf operated as a state within a state, serving as a base for French military and espionage activities, and for many decades Libreville remained the French nerve center of covert operations in central and southern Africa.¹⁹

Shell Oil entered Gabon in 1960 (Nigeria in 1958). Other oil companies in Gabon today include: AGIP (Italy), Amerada Hess (USA), AMOCO (US), BP (British Petroleum), Occidental Petroleum (USA), Energy Africa Gabon (South Africa), Pan African Energy, Marathon Oil (USA), Exxon/Mobil (and subsidiary Esso Exploration West Africa), Broken Hill Petroleum and Tullow Oil, a U.K.-based profiteer also involved in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in eastern Congo and Uganda.²⁰ The French oil conglomerate Total acquired Belgium’s PetroFina in 1999 and Elf-Acquitaine in 2000, creating one of the world’s nastiest multinational oil companies.

For almost 50 years, France’s entire international security policy—its classified nuclear weapons strike force (le force de frappe atomique) and atomic reactor complex —revolved around access to uranium from Gabon and Niger. Uranium in Gabon was discovered in 1956 and exploitation began through the Compagnie des Mines d’Uranium de Franceville (COMUF), a consortium involving multinationals like Total and AREVA, in 1958.²¹ COMUF is 68.4% owned by French multinational COGEMA, which is also one of Canada’s largest uranium producers; COGEMA is partnered with the U.S. Department of Energy in the production of nuclear fuel for the U.S. weapons complex. The infamous U.S. multinational Union Carbide, responsible for crimes against humanity in Bhopal, India, was heavily involved in another catastrophe: uranium mining in Gabon. A hospital near the remote Mounana uranium mine has documented the long history of under five children living and dying with disfigured bodies, gynecological tumors, blood and skin diseases, cancers and leukemias, or the epidemics of radiation poisoning that quietly obliterated so many adult miners over 38 years of operations.²² It is the same, ugly story in Niger, only uglier, due to higher populations of Tuareg and Toubou nomads; National Geographic writers who have whitewashed Gabon hide the same ugly imperial realities of uranium.²³ ,²⁴

Also involved in uranium in Gabon are: Motapa Diamonds (U.S.A.); Mineral Services International (Cape Town, Vancouver, London, Gaborone and Libreville); Pitchstone Exploration (Canada, U.S.A.) and CAMECO (U.S.A., Canada)—a DeBeers connected company also tied to the Washington D.C. law firm Winston & Strong.²⁵ ,²⁶ ,²⁷

Manganese is essential for superalloys essential to the western aerospace and defense complex: Gabon is the second largest producer behind South Africa and manganese is Gabon’s third largest export earner. U.S. Steel owned 44% of Gabon’s manganese producer, the Compagnie Miniere de l’Ogooue (COMILOG), which U.S. Steel set up with France in 1953; U.S. Steel reportedly sold out in the 1960’s, but 60% of COMILOG was controlled by French and U.S. interests until 1996 when Eramet Group (France) bought 57%, leaving the Gabon government with 27% and ‘other private parties’ (read: U.S. & French businessmen) with 16%. ¹⁷ COMILOG has a capital value of over $80 billion and its profits soared from US$ 4.2 million in 2003 to US$ 183 million in 2004; about one-third of COMILOGs production is used by Eramet’s manganese plants in France, Norway and USA (two-thirds goes to China, India and Ukraine).

COMILOG also controls the TransGabonese Railway—crucial to the massive devastation of rainforest logging. (Due to heavy metals emissions, Eramet Marietta is under fire in Ohio and West Virginia for epidemics of disease.²⁸ ) Repression in the logging sector in Gabon is widespread: foreign companies penetrate rural areas, dividing and conquering forest people with cash and conflict, bringing alcohol, hunting, prostitution, traffic in endangered species, and direct paramilitary violence. The entire western NGO (e.g. BINGOs like WWF, WCS, Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, the Great Apes Survival Project, Jane Goodal Institute) narrative on the ‘bushmeat trade’ ignores the role of state repression backed by western institutions and the private profits and white supremacy of the BINGOs. ²⁹

Directors of the mighty French nuclear conglomerate AREVA also serve on the boards of Lloyd’s of London, Goldman Sacs (USA), Power Companies of Canada, Euro Disney, Total Oil and others. AREVA’s connections to the Belgian establishment include intelligence insider Viscount Etienne Davignon, a man deeply tied to the depopulation of the Congo (DRC) through his long-time directorship of Belgium’s Societé Generale—one of the DRC’s longest and most lasting enemies and the copperbelt giant Union Miniére. Davignon is also an affiliate of Donald Rumsfeld and George Schultz through Gilead Sciences, a U.S. pharmaceutical (read: biowarfare) firm, and he is a director of Kissinger Associates.³⁰ Davignon was Belgian Minister of State during the ‘independence’ transition (1960) and the installation of Colonel Joseph Mobutu. A 2001 Belgian parliamentary enquiry explored Davignon’s role in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, but the enquiry was a political tool from the start and, naturally, exonerated Belgian officials of all but ‘moral responsibility’ in the assassination.³¹

Successive government’s of Japan have also supported the corruption and terror in Gabon through mining and oil and direct financing provided by Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to the Bongo regime.³² Mitsubishi holds four major petroleum concessions, one in partnership with Tullow Oil, but Gabon was also critical to Japan’s nasty atomic reactor industries.

The stranglehold of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) economic austerity plans led to civil unrest as labor taxed, wages were cut, education and public health sectors, never much to begin with, were gutted. By the late 1980’s Bongo was overseeing a massively oppressive regime predicated on state terror backed by France and, more poignantly, multinational corporations.

With the fall of the Berlin wall and the Soviet Perestroika the veneers of stability in Gabon gave way to deep, festering wounds of decades of state oppression: students, onshore oil workers, civil servants and the general public took to the streets in pro-democracy protests. It was the same story in Burma, South Korea, Indonesia and China, but only Tiananmen Square made the news: China is considered an ‘enemy state’ of Western predatory capitalism, while the others are client states.³³ It was the same story in Port Gentil and Libreville, Gabon as in Colonel Joseph Mobutu’s Zaire, General Gnassingbe Eyadema’s Togo, Paul Biya’s Cameroon, and General Ibrahim Babangida’s Nigeria: all Western client states which saw massive repression of civil society, with student massacres, 1989-1991. This state orchestrated terrorism occurred at Jos and Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and in Lubumbashi, Zaire (May 11-12, 1990), and massacres were covered up by the West and its propaganda system; subsequent student-government clashes in Zaire occurred in Kisangani, Mbuji-May, Bukavu, Kinshasa and Mbanza-Ngungu during the communications blackouts, and were never known to the world in any details.³⁴ Meanwhile, Dennis Sassou-Nguesso and Omar Bongo collaborated with Mobutu to prevent all news of the Lubumbashi massacre from leaking out. And then, a few weeks later, Bongo had the same problem: corpses needing to be disappeared.

The violence in Gabon reached a local peak in March, April and May of 1990. Pressured to declare the ‘end of one party rule,’ Bongo and his one-party state set about to neutralize all significant opposition. The people protested fearlessly. The state terror apparatus clicked into action after foreign oil sector executives (e.g. Shell Gabon’s director André-Dieudonne Barre) complained.³⁵

On May 21, 1990, France sent in several hundred elite paratroopers. Dubbed ‘Operation Requin’ (Shark), the rapid intervention forces of the French Foreign Legion 2nd Paratroopers Regiment (REP: 2eme Regiment Etranger des Parachutistes)—the elite of the world’s elite soldiers—were sent to support the French Foreign Legion Infantry Regiment (REI: 2eme Regiment Etrangere d’Infanterie) troops permanently based in Gabon. The REP was known to attach U.S. covert operatives on missions and is described as “some of the most skilled and dangerous soldiers on earth.”³⁶

From May 21-30 some 500 French troops were dispatched to the luxury oil city of Port Gentil. Bongo, furious, arrogant and absolute, declared a ‘state of siege’ throughout the coastal province of Ogooue-Maritime, the only significant population center in the country. Quite literally overnight, key opposition leaders were assassinated or disappeared. But the French troops collected all French nationals at the Elf Corporation compound in Port Gentil and together with the Presidential Guard they battled with ‘rebel forces’ [read: civilian protestors]. The Presidential Guard was ‘credited’ with the killing and not the French troops —it is always black Africans who are credited with massacres in partnership with foreign troops.³⁵

While reporting that “several people had been shot in the unrest”—official reports today suggest only five dead³⁷ —international media also reported that the Presidential guard crushed civilian barricades “deploying tanks, automatic weapons and grenades” and, in the last days, finally “began to round up demonstrators” amidst “continued intermittent gunfire.”³⁵ But people in Gabon report that at least 500 to 600 civilians (some say 2000), many of them students, were massacred on the streets of Port Gentil—from May 21 to May 31, 1990—by the orders of President Omar Bongo.³⁸

The appearance of tolerance for any ‘opposition’ in the country was provided by a faux opposition connected to Bongo’s and France’s multinational corporate competition: any true opposition was bought off by Bongo and/or compromised by their participation in secret societies (like the Freemasons).³⁹ The intelligence networks and terror apparatus targeted anyone unable to be silenced by bribery or blackmail. The long arm of Omar Bongo’s assassinations squads even reached outside Gabon: in 1996 one opponent of Bongo was assassinated in France on the orders of Libreville.⁴⁰

All so-called ‘elections’ that have occurred in Gabon (Cameroon, Togo, Nigeria, post-1994 Rwanda, etc.) are demonstration elections meant to legitimize nasty dictatorships serving western capital.⁴¹ Of course, President Omar Bongo Ondimba always won—in 1993, 1998 and, most recently, 2005—and Bongo’s foreign patrons characteristically whitewashed elections violence.

Meanwhile, Bongo visited the White House, and its counterparts in France, England, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Canada, Germany, China and Saudi Arabia.

Military relations between the U.S., Canada, France, England and Israel on the one hand, and the dictators like Bongo on the other, continued throughout their decades long tenures, no matter their brutalities: under the Clinton Administration, for example, the Pentagon sent U.S. covert forces to train General Eyadema and Paul Biya’s elite killers under a new program, the Africa Crises Response Force (‘Force’ was later changed to ‘Initiative’ to soften it, transforming ACRF to ACRI); troops also trained at the Pentagon’s Special Operations School at Fort Hurlburt, Florida.⁴²

Bongo meddled in weapons and money-laundering: one of Bongo’s private arms dealers, Frenchman René Cardona, fell out with Bongo and was imprisoned in Gabon in 1996: a corruption investigation in France found that Cardona’s son paid 300 million CFA francs into Bongo’s personal account to buy his father’s freedom.⁴³

Gabon grew to become an unprecedented example of the success of the national security client state, where the offshore petroleum industry was designed to operate as an independent state, with its own private communications, transport, and supply chain infrastructure thus making offshore oil operations immune to onshore civil strikes or public protests. The oil operations grew to become islands of stability staffed by foreign expatriate labor and management, supplied by independent shipping and aviation, protected by elite networks of the foreign and domestic security apparatus.

DIALING FOR DICTATORS

For some forty-one years the Elf-ish Albert-Bernard Bongo ruled Gabon. Was Bongo the international humanitarian and peacemaker that the propaganda system has universally portrayed him as? Why do so many people know so little about the realities of life and death in Gabon?

In his widely lauded 2004 book, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Howard W. French, the former New York Times bureau Chief for Africa from circa 1993-1998, had only this to say of Gabon: “It has long been said that even tinier, oil-rich Gabon next door [to Congo-Brazzaville] was the world’s leader in per capita champagne consumption.”⁴⁴

However, back in 1995, Howard W. French reported that Bongo and friends patronized lavish prostitution scandals run by Europeans; one Italian fashion designer who ended up in a French court admitted to personally furnishing Bongo with French call-girls charging $15,000 a visit in exchange for $600,000 tailoring contracts.⁴⁵ French also reported: “the French engineered a partly successful boycott of an international investors conference in Gabon this year because it was organized by an ex-American Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Herman Cohen.”

What the New York Times forgot to add was that Herman Cohen, who worked in the George H.W. Bush administration, was a lobbyist whose firm Cohen & Woods (C&W) was paid $300,000 to present Gabon as a “politically stable and economically successful country” and to “generate awareness of President Bongo and his national and international accomplishments,” including the “very concrete process of democratization and democratic reforms.”⁴⁶

C&W also whitewashed the crimes of another blood-drenched client near Gabon, the government of Eduardo Dos Santos in diamond and oil-studded Angola. While C&W were peddling influence for Bongo and Dos Santos, the U.S. State Department was flagging human right in Gabon for extra-judicial killings, torture, corruption and election rigging; Angola was far more grim.⁴⁷ It was the tip of the iceberg on the brutal dictatorships and plunder of the oily Gulf of Guinea.

It was Herman Cohen and James Woods that convinced African countries to participate in the Pentagon’s ACRF, the precursor to the current Africa Contingency Operations Training Program (ACOTA), two programs training killers under a ‘peacekeeping’ smokescreen: Gabon has participated in both. C&W were also pimping for Military Professional Resources Inc., the private military company out of Virginia; MPRI and LOGICON, another Pentagon contractor, advanced the ACRF/ACOTA cause, and benefited from it.⁴⁸ One of the primary architects of ACRF was Susan Rice, Barrack Obama’s foreign policy adviser and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. since January 2009.⁴⁹

Over the past two decades the Bongo regime has been publicly whitewashed by public relations agencies connected to power in Europe, Japan and to both political parities in the USA. These included Cohen & Woods, Cassidy Associates, Powell Tate, and Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson & Hand in the USA, and UK-based Shandwick Public Affairs.⁵⁰ PR firms also sanitized the French language markets with customized propaganda. Cassidy & Associates spent between $20-30 million lobbying Congress between 1998 and 2009. In 2000 and 2001, Gabon also hired the public relations firm Manatt, Phelps and Phillips.

The son of Jacques Foccart’s affiliate Mahmoud Bourgi, French lawyer Robert Bourgi is considered Foccart’s francafrique successor. As an example of media censorship and postcolonial control, his brother Albert Bourgi is the editor of Jeune Afrique, Francophone Africa’s popular news publication coming out of Paris since 1964, but a disinformation front billed as the ‘number one Pan-African magazine.’ Robert Bourgi was one of former President Joseph Mobutu’s most intimate security advisers and an intimate adviser and lawyer to Omar Bongo.⁵¹ On September 27, 2007 at the Palais de l’Elysée, French President Nicolas Sarkozy honored Robert Bourgi with the Medal of the Knight’s Insignia in the National Order of the Legion of the French Republic; Bongo’s daughter was also in attendance.⁵² According to Robert Bourgi, Omar Bongo had President Sarkozy’s overseas-aid minister Jean-Marie Bockel removed due to a ‘bold’ speech denouncing patronage and corruption. ⁵¹

Gabon also maintained a three-year-old relationship with Jacqueline Wilson, the ex-spouse of senior U.S. diplomat and Gabon Ambassador Joe Wilson, who received tens of thousands of dollars for special projects and reports to President Omar Bongo’s daughter, Pascaline Mferri Bongo.

In another well-publicized case, lobbyist Jack Abramoff was the supposed mover-and-shaker behind the 2003 meeting between Bongo and George W. Bush—a meeting where President Bongo pledged support for the Pentagon’s “war on terror” and signed an “open skies agreement” between the two countries. Abramoff, who was also a Washington lobbyist for President Joseph Mobutu in Zaire (DRC), sought $9 million for his services for the Maryland public relations firm GrassRoots Interactive.⁵³ Abramoff also reportedly worked with Bongo through David Safavian, a former business partner, former White House budget official and a registered agent in Washington for President Bongo, and also through another of Bongo’s paid influence peddlers in Washington named Joe Slavik, a mysterious insider who is apparently also very close to Bongo’s eldest daughter, Pascaline Bongo who also served as her father’s principal secretary, and is reportedly a director for several large French firms operating in Gabon, including Total Gabon.⁵³ President Omar Bongo left the White House and later attended a lavish dinner organized by the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA), the public relations wing of the world’s most negligent and destructive corporations in Africa, as everywhere; later still he showed up in Houston as a guest at the Baker Institute. The CCA chairman at the time was diamond magnate and Democratic Party financier Maurice Tempelsman, the United States’ equivalent of France’s ‘dirty tricks’ operative Jacques Foccart.

Tempelsman’s role in interventions in Africa and his networks of organized crime involved in diamonds and cobalt are legendary, but wholly hidden by the bling bling of the propaganda system. One of Tempelsman’s stellar roles was serving as a broker for the Oppenheimer and De Beers diamond cartel—another friend of the Bongo regime. Given the blood diamond wealth in the nearby countries—Angola, Namibia, the two Congos—there is no chance De Beers would overlook Gabon.

Years of prospecting in Gabon by the De Beers cartel led to the development of a cartographic minerals database based on 13,513 sq. kms of terrestrial surveys and 36,580 km of airborne magnetic surveys. One company affiliated with De Beers in Gabon is the Canada-based SearchGold Corporation, which is licensed to exploit 7,865 sq. kms of concession in partnership with the U.K. company Zambezi Gold and its Luxembourg subsidiary Arc Mining and Investment.⁵⁴ Also mining Gabon is Cluff Mining, a shareholder in Banro Mining Corporation—the Canadian powerhouse that is plundering and depopulating eastern Congo; Anglo-American Corp., the Oppenheimer/DeBeers conglomerate, is a majority shareholder in Cluff.

“Gabon was the only one of France’s former African colonies to vote to become a French department, or administrative district, on the eve of independence in 1960, a request that President Charles de Gaulle turned down,” Howard W. French wrote. “Since independence, however, as the extent of the Gabon’s oil, forest and mineral wealth has become known, France has fought ferociously to keep the influence of other Western powers in the country to a minimum.”⁵⁵

Seven French soldiers died recently when a French army AS 532 Cougar helicopter crashed into the sea off Gabon during joint military exercises.⁵⁶ While the propaganda system is always advertising withdrawals of French troops from bases in Africa, the French contingents in Gabon will certainly remain.⁵⁷

BONGO THE PEACEMAKER

While France was consolidating its control over Gabon it was also arming neighboring regimes: Omar Bongo was their African kingpin.

Under the cover of ‘humanitarian’ flights, the Bongo government shipped weapons from Libreville to the Biafran war in Nigeria 1967-1970, and Bongo imported Biafran rebels connected to secessionist leader Emeka Ojukwu to luxurious lives in Gabon. France also supported the Biafra struggle, where a U.S./NATO/U.S.S.R. blockade led to some 500,000 to 2,000,000 deaths from starvation, disease and war. Shell-British Petroleum and the French state company Société Anonyme Française des Recherches et d’Exploitation de Pétrole (SAFRAP; now Elf Petroleum Nigeria Ltd.), were centrally involved in the bloodshed and exploitation.⁵⁸

From 1970-1975 France provided over 300 Panhard armored cars to Mobutu in Zaire: this is a footnote in the long history of French arms transfers to dictatorships that served their interests in Africa.⁵⁹ President Richard M. Nixon met with Bongo on August 2, 1973. At the time, the SDECE (Service de Documentation Exterieure et Contre-Espionage) and CIA were collaborating against the MPLA (Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola) government in Angola by training and arming UNITA and FNLA guerrillas.⁶⁰ Elf Acquitaine backed both the MPLA government and UNITA rebels: Bongo was certainly involved in French interventions.⁶¹ In 1975, the SDECE hired the infamous Congo mercenary Bob Denard and twenty French mercenaries, all paid by the CIA station out of Zaire —Maurice Tempelsman’s gang Lawrence Devlin, Mark Garsin and others—for covert operations in Angola; the SDECE and CIA also worked with Bureau of State Security (BOSS) agents out of South Africa at the height of the Apartheid struggle.⁵⁹ Omar Bongo was clearly aware of Washington’s covert terrorist operations in support of UNITA from the 1970’s to 1990’s. Bongo’s government allowed individuals in Gabon to back UNITA rebels in the brutal civil war in Angola, and in 1990’s Gabon was caught red-handed violating United Nations sanctions against UNITA.⁶²

When Ian Smith’s white supremacist government needed support against the imperialist forces seeking to put a black face on power in Rhodesia, it was Omar Bongo who helped Smith bust the international sanctions by routing through Libreville aircraft ferrying contraband to and from Rhodesia and Europe; networks of organized crime worked through Switzerland and Lichtenstein, and Bongo’s officials in Gabon issued false certificates of origin and other fabricated documentation, while also taking their cut in profits.⁶³

Bongo also maintained relations with Harvard University’s Liberian warlord Charles Taylor; Bongo was known to receive Taylor at his presidential mansion and certainly benefited from the blood diamond cartels Taylor was involved with.⁶⁴ ,⁶⁵

The Bongo government was complicit with the successive Nguema dictatorships (1968-1979, 1979-present) and their campaigns of terror and depopulation in Equatorial Guinea (E.G.). Under Bongo’s rule, Gabon violated the territorial sovereignty of E.G. through military occupation of southern E.G. islands and military incursions in the southwest near Rio Muni, all in search of oil and profits.⁶⁶

Before his ascendancy to President by coup d’etat in 1979, Teodoro Obiang Nguema personally ran the notorious Black Beach prison in E.G.: his regime is today considered one of the most corrupt, ethnocentric, oppressive and undemocratic states in the world. U.S. corporate backing of the Obiang regime involved corruption and profiteering that was exposed in the U.S. Rigg’s bank investigations in 2004. U.S. companies—Exxon-Mobil, Amerada Hess, Chevron-Texaco, Marathon Oil and others—paid for scholarships for children of the country’s leaders to attend elite schools like Pepperdine University (CA), formed business ventures with government officials, hired companies linked to Obiang and rented property from government officials and their relatives.⁶⁷ Petroleum-connected U.S. officials like Condoleeza Rice have called Obiang a ‘good friend’ of the U.S., while Obiang has for years paid Cassidy & Associates some $120,000 a month to whitewash the regime. While the arrogance of oil wealth caused a small rift between the two dictators, Bongo’s importance to E.G. can be measured by Nguema’s decree of three days of national mourning after Bongo’s death.

Albert-Bernard Bongo is the son-in-law of Dennis Sassou-Nguesso, another dictator who has reigned for two decades, with a gap from1992-1997, sustained with millions of Elf petrol dollars: Sassou-Nguesso’s elite Cobra militia were also trained by French advisers and, like Mobutu, Sassou-Nguesso relied on Israeli security and intelligence for protection. Omar Bongo backed bloodshed in the recent Congo-Brazzaville war (1997-2000) by offloading planeloads of weapons and shipping them across the border to Sassou Nguesso’s home village of Oyo.⁶⁸ Bongo’s government was also accused of airlifting Rwandan and Moroccan mercenaries into Congo-Brazzaville, even as Bongo was preparing to lead negotiations between Sassou-Nguesso and Congo-Brazzaville’s more openly U.S.-backed President Pascal Lissouba, and after a ceasefire had been declared in July 1997.⁶⁹ All sides were involved in ethnic cleansing. The French military, the Elysée Palace and Elf Aquitaine all actively supported Sassou-Nguesso, who fought his way back to power on October 25, 1997 with the assistance of Chadian troops backed by French logistical support.⁷⁰

After France, Bongo maintained his closest alliance with Joseph Mobutu’s CIA client state in Zaire.

On the morning of March 3, 1977, U.S. President Jimmy Carter had a conversation with French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing. Later in the afternoon President Carter met with Omar Bongo; also in attendance were Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, Assistant for National Security Affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Robert Bongo, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, Gabonese Republic and nephew of President Bongo.⁷¹ Less than 10 days after Bongo met with Carter the U.S. and Belgium shipped weapons to Shaba (Katanga), Zaire, and on March 16 Secretary of State Vance appeared before the U.S. Congress to justify the intervention as critical to protect the flow of Shaba’s copper from Zaire, but it was the cobalt of the copperbelt veins, stockpiled by the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency and essential to the western permanent warfare enterprise, that the national security apparatus was concerned about.⁷² , ⁷³ ,⁷⁴ Bongo met with Carter again on October 17, 1977, and he thus played a definitive role in backing the western terror apparatus in Zaire, in sharp contradistinction to the propaganda system’s salutations as ‘peacemaker’ on the continent.

In June 2002, Robert Bongo was appointed as a United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary General in the DRC.⁷⁵ Brzezinski is a high level adviser to the International Crises Group, a flak organization promoting peace through war in Sudan, Uganda and Congo, and was advising Barack Obama in 2008. As National Security Advisor under Carter, Brzezinski reportedly commissioned the March 17, 1978 document Presidential Review Memorandum/NSC 46; entitled Black Africa and the U.S. Black Movement, the classified ‘Secret’ document advocated for clandestine U.S. support to (Apartheid) South Africa and called for a special covert U.S. program to “perpetuate divisions in the black movement; to neutralize the most active groups of leftist radical orientation and diminish their influence among blacks; and to stimulate dissension and hostility between organizations representing different social strata of the community…”⁷⁶ ,⁷⁷

“For 20 years President Bongo has led his country in an era of stability and progress,” said President Ronald Reagan during an October 2, 1987 meeting with Bongo in Washington. “Under his leadership, Gabon has consistently encouraged the peaceful settlement of regional disputes, siding with reason, dialogue, and moderation over bloodshed, war, and terror.”

Reagan pledged to increase U.S. investment in Gabon—and it happened—and Gabon’s financial programs were subsequently restructured in keeping with western ‘shock doctrine’ economics of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) arranged with and for Bongo’s elite clique. The U.S. media called the deal ‘U.S. Aid to Gabon.’ Meanwhile, SAPs shattered the social fabric and further ruined hundreds of millions of ordinary people’s lives from Gabon to Bolivia to South Korea.⁷⁸

The strategic and corporate alliance with Bongo thrived under every U.S. president who sat during Bongo’s reign—Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, G.H.W Bush, Clinton, G.W. Bush—and the imperial relations and structural violence were perpetually whitewashed by the western propaganda system.

Gabon provided military logistical support to the Laurent Kabila government during the second phase of war in DRC (1998), but later and/or simultaneously Bongo backed Jean-Pierre Bemba and his Movement for the Liberation of Congo. Bemba was another Mobutist warlord who was close to Congo-Brazzaville’s Dennis Sassou-Nguesso. Until his death, Bongo was sending $US 20,000 a month to Bemba’s legal fund, along with Sassou-Nguesso, Moamar Gadhafi and a fourth (unidentified) African President (for a total of $US 80,000 a month).”⁷⁹

“Bongo even financed small politicians with no hope,” says one Congolese businessman, “he gave money to everyone, that’s how he maintained access. In DRC, for example, he even gave money to Alou Bonioma Kalokola—a lawyer who has lived his entire life as a hustler. Bonioma was married to [Dennis] Sassou-Nguesso’s step-daughter, and Sassou-Nguesso’s wife is from DRC. Alou knew he would get money from Bongo so he ran for president [in the 2006 elections].”⁸⁰

THE KING OF BLING

Bongo was connected to the Corsican mafia through the French ministers and shady businessmen, including Michel Tomi and son Jean-Baptiste, and Robert Feliciaggi (assassinated in a professional hit in Corsica, March 10, 2006), his son Jean-Jerome and brother Charles. Alleged to run French money-laundering schemes through casinos, lotteries and betting shops in Togo, Benin, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Congo-Brazzaville and Gabon, Jean-Jerome is close to Sassou-Nguesso, and Charles’ business supplies the Presidential Guard of diamond and petroleum magnate Jose Eduardo Dos Santos in Angola; the brothers held the second biggest bank accounts —after Elf-Aquitaine—at France’s now defunct FIBA bank, the conduit for Gabon and Angola’s plundered oil wealth.⁸¹

Gabon’s wealth was also siphoned off through the BGFI Bank, Gabon’s biggest investment bank. Created in Libreville in April 1971, the Bank was born out of a partnership between private Gabonese investors and the Banque de Paris, under the name Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas Gabon. In view of the majority share of capital held by private Gabonese, the Bank took the name of Banque Gabonaise et Française Internationale (BGFI) in April 1996. To reap the plunder of nearby dictatorships, BGFI opened major branches in Equatorial Guinea (2001) and Congo-Brazzaville (2004). BGFI directors include Jean Ping (once married to Bongo’s daughter) and Christian Bongo; director Yves Abouab is also an executive with the Banque Belgolaise in Paris. Christian Bongo is also a director of the Banque Gabonaise de Development.

Jean Ping is one of the most powerful members of Bongo’s clan des Gabonaise, and an unapologetic agent for western capitalism’s enterprise of plunder and depopulation in Africa. Ping has played a pivotal role, for example, in furthering the ‘new humanitarian’ [read: same old imperialist] policy doctrine of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’.

Corsican Michel Tomi operates through Groupe Kabi in Gabon, involved in private airlines, communications and gaming, and winning lucrative construction contracts from the Bongo government.⁸² An adviser to Omar Bongo in the 1990’s, Corsican Andre Tarallo was boss of Elf-Corsica from 1987-1988, and he funded the anti-Marxist guerrilla movement FLEC in neighboring Angola in the 1980’s.⁸³ Tarallo managed Elf’s Africa interests for more than 30 years, and he ended up in a French jail (2004) over the Elf petroleum bribery scandals, where he testified about payoffs to Bongo, Sassou-Nguesso and Teodoro Obiang Nguema.⁸⁴ ,⁸⁵ Another member of the ‘Clan Corsican’ at Bongo’s disposal was former French Minister Charles Pasqua, one of Jacques Chirac’s former aides, described as a mafia godfather.⁸⁶

Omar Bongo, Charles Pasqua, Jean-Christophe Mitterand and other officials were involved in Angolagate, the French arms-for-oil scandal involving shady arms merchants, oil executives, intelligence operatives and others in France and Africa. In 1999, the U.S Congress flagged Bongo’s huge accounts at Citibank in a money-laundering probe.⁴⁶ Omar Bongo and friends have also bankrolled French politicians: Former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing accused former President Chirac of receiving party financing from Omar Bongo in a 1981 campaign.⁸⁷

Gabon received $850,000 dollars in foreign military financing from the Pentagon from 2005 to 2008, with $1,597,000 in International Military Education & Training funds from 2001-2007, and with 192 Gabonese military trained in the US IMET program from 1950-2007; ninety of these Gabonese soldiers were trained in the U.S. between 2000 and 2007.⁸⁸ ,⁴⁸

Through the Pentagon’s Gulf of Guinea Initiative, Gabon is involved with the US Navy’s Maritime Partnership Program and the Africa Partnership Station, programs that militarize the Gulf of Guinea to assure and secure U.S. control of oil infrastructure, shipping lanes, offshore sea-bed mining, illegal fishing, toxic dumping and other corporate piracy. Gabon also provides the Pentagon with air naval base access for Cooperative Security Locations (CSLs) and Forward Operating Locations (FOLs). All of these programs are conduits for U.S. covert operations and facilitate the involvement of private military companies and transnational corporations in resource plunder and depopulation.⁸⁹

THE CALCULATED IMPOSITION OF IGNORANCE

Gamba town is the urban centre of the wild Gamba Protected Area Complex, an enclave of white, gated western privilege surrounded by dense forests, impenetrable swamps and deep estuaries where you might see an elephant swimming across open water or ambling across a grassy field. This is Shell country in Gabon, and the only way in is on an expensive Air Gabon flight.

“If I have to describe Gamba to someone,” confided one French expatriate in “Shell’s Best Kept Secret,” a blurb in a Royal/Dutch Shell public relations brochure, “I always say it is a Club-Med in the middle of the jungle. You have the freedom and opportunity to do things you thought you’d only ever dream of and all with an amazing backdrop of jungle and unspoilt beaches and lots of wildlife right on your doorstep! … We are quite a sporty bunch in Gamba. We have our own 18 hole golf course, there is the Yenzi Boat club a sailing club, tennis, football, tae-kwon-do, yoga, fitness, swimming, aerobics & step classes, volleyball, badminton, squash, hockey, rugby and much, much more…not to mention that every so often you can take part in our triathlon!”⁹⁰

In October 2004, paramilitary police in Gamba killed two locals who protested against Shell’s injustices. A survey of local attitudes revealed a climate of fear seething beneath the surface. Locals reported routine oil spills where Shell and contractors Halliburton and Schlumberger have for years and years burned off oil spills as a form of remediation.⁹¹

With a certain arrogance that comes with white society beliefs about entitlement, French expatriates have considered Gabon their private property since the colonial era, and Gamba is one of their hideaway playgrounds.⁹² One French expatriate in Gamba, Louis Rigon, runs a high-end sport fishing and ‘ecotourism’ business, with private luxury camps and powerboats in the bush.⁹³ He also provides a logistic base for oil exploration when companies like Transworld Exploration Gabon—a Houston Texas oil company—arrive in Gamba (2006) for seismic testing in Loango National Park. It is families with names like Louis Rigon and Pierre Goods—a Transworld director based in Port-Nice, Gabon—who float their 4-WD safari land rovers from Sette Cama, across the estuary on a barge, off-load in Loango National Park, and casually joy-ride some 50 kilometers down the pristine beach—as they did when I was there. This is their version of ‘ecotourism’—another buzzword and the cutting edge of the white, western, corporate invasion of wilderness.

Oil exploration in the Loango wilderness was not the only reality I found incongruent with the slick propaganda about “Saving Africa’s Eden.” The western diamond firm Southern Era was prospecting in the newly designated Lope Reserve—J. Michael Fay’s newly ‘discovered’ Eden in northeastern Gabon—and all the BINGO conservation groups involved in the Congo Basin Forest Partnership knew this. None had said a word.

Southern Era began prospecting in Gabon in 1999 and when the CBFP came along—and Bongo created the new parks—they were issued permits for the Lope region from the Bongo regime. Southern Era is a fully owned subsidiary of Mwana Africa—another secretive mining company involved in the blood-drenched mining operations in eastern Congo (also Angola and Botswana’s blood diamond areas)—connected to the U.S., U.K. and South Africa.⁹⁴

Tracking elephants in the Loango reserve turned up the remains of a research camp in the savannah. My local guide and WWF-paid ranger Robert (not his real name) took me to the place where the Smithsonian Institute set up a massive animal and plant collection operation; teams of researchers descended on the Loango wilderness and began catching, counting, cataloging, categorizing, and collecting species and genetic material. Claiming a universal benefit to all humanity—and to the people of Gabon, of course—the Smithsonian’s Gabon Biodiversity Monitoring and Research Program involves U.S. universities and scores of western researchers and tens of millions of dollars in funds; it is also backed by Shell Oil Corporation. These funds cycle to and from western economies bringing little benefit to Gabonese people like Robert, and nothing of benefit to the average Gabonese citizen. Smithsonian scientists reported that they have ‘recorded’ over 2019 species of trees and thousands of species of birds, reptiles, snakes and amphibians, but they didn’t merely ‘record’ these species, they collected them.⁹⁵ “Voucher specimens were injected with formaline (5%), then preserved in 70% ethanol, and will be housed in several scientific institutions.” ⁹⁵

“They paid us 6000 CFA (US $12) per day to collect birds, snakes, lizards,” says Robert, “They killed them and packed them up in jars and boxes. We worked hard, setting traps and checking nets, all day and night sometimes. It wasn’t much money.”

Robert was hired because he knew how to catch birds, where to hang nets, where bat species might be found, the habitat of rare snakes—you know, simple stuff, like where a rodent will hide—but based on years of painstaking study and intimate knowledge of the local environment for which Robert has dedicated his heart and soul all his life. Robert didn’t know anything about genetic engineering, cloning, or intellectual property rights, and that’s why it was easy for the Smithsonian to come in to Gabon and steal Robert’s intellectual property and pay him approximately one dollar and fifteen cents (sic) an hour.

Robert was hired as a grunt for an exclusive western program that offers the perfect example how white supremacy operates in Africa: lucrative contracts, travel perks, capital equipment budgets, romantic interludes in paradise for whites; hard labor, theft of expertise, downward mobility, obtuse explanations for blacks. It’s all about access. People like Robert will always be collecting dead birds, while someone else will be flying in and out of Gabon, presenting papers at conferences, getting PhDs, ostensibly saving the earth, murdering wilderness as fast as they are murdering the truth.

“Under Bongo life is hard,” Robert told me. “Many people are malnourished, many people are poor. There is no work. It’s terrible.”

The Smithsonian proceeded with the support of President Omar Bongo, the Pentagon, U.S. State Department, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, NASA and other predatory agencies. Massive physical, economic and intellectual (property) thefts are underway, and it occurs on the backs of eager, willing, hopeful, yet unfreedomed Africans.⁹⁶

The markets in Gamba are muddy, dirty, run-down sites of suffering where a scattering of local people peddle bush-meat, manioc, cassava, little packets of salt and sugar, some traditional foods and forest products, bananas and mangos, and whatever manufactured commodities they can get their hands on and resell at a small profit. In the enclave of Sette Cama, a few miles across the estuary and down the beach, the people live by small-scale fishing and farming cassava. But for a few crumbs splashed their way—where the (mostly white) benefactors reconcile their entitlement and privilege behind assumptions that their pitiful charity is further evidence of their goodness and morality—the local people do not benefit from the itineraries and budgets of foreign eco-tourists. Misery is endemic.

Gabon has been a major oil producer since 1962. Historically, oil revenues accounted for approximately 60% of the government’s budget, more than 40% of GDP, and 75% of export earnings. Despite half a century of production from Sub-Saharan Africa’s third largest oil reserves, the majority of Gabon’s citizen’s exist in a Hobbesian nightmare where life is nasty, brutish and short.

In a country of approximately 1 million people, only about eight percent (80,000) have access to any kind of running water or electricity. Adding insult to injury, in 1992, the French corporation Lyonnaise des Eaux took control of the state-owned Societé d’Electricté et d’Eaux du Gabon (SEEG): Bongo signed on with the U.S. International Finance Corporation and IFC/Japan to privatize Gabon’s water and electricity sectors, leading “one of the first privatizations of electricity and water services in sub-Saharan Africa,” over a decade ago.⁹⁷

In 2003, another beltway Maryland (U.S.A) company—Decision Analysis Partners (DAP)—won a lucrative contract ostensibly to map out the eco-tourism infrastructure for five of Bongo’s newly gazetted Gabon parks. But DAP’s deep ties to the Pentagon and intelligence networks suggest that there is, as usual, some hidden military agenda.⁹⁸

There are no accurate census figures for Gabon because the Bongo government benefited by inflating population statistics to maximize the regime’s profits skimming off the so-called ‘development aid’ business sector. Infant mortality is very high in Gabon due to malaria, malnourishment, diarrhea and starvation. Malaria, the principal cause of hospitalization, is of epidemic proportions: 40 per cent of children aged 0 to 5 years and 71 per cent of all pregnant women suffer from the disease. Some 64 percent of all households are in communities where waste is disposed of untreated.⁹⁹

There are separate schools in Gamba for white expatriate children, and for black African children: Shell and Elf back the expatriate schools.¹⁰⁰ The housing and levels of health and community development are also unequal. Whites hire blacks as maids, nanny’s and housekeepers, and blacks are used for the most grueling and dangerous physical labor. The educational books that are produced in France and sent to Gabon are different for African children than the books for French children of the same ages and developmental levels. “Less content, less substance,” said one French woman. “It is the calculated imposition of ignorance and it’s happening throughout French speaking Africa.”¹⁰¹

Companies like Shell, Elf and Total are deeply tied into dictating public policy through their control of advertising, schools, arts venues, TV news and wildlife programming—both in Gabon and the USA, Europe and Japan—and funding for all of these: their corporate logos are branded everywhere.

Education is also privatized: Shell is partnered with WWF and the Ministry of Education through the Shell program L’Ecole Que J’Aime (The School I Like). Further, the basic commodities (and luxury goods) available to expatriates connected to the oil industry are denied to poor Gabonese, and the black slave sector couldn’t afford them if they were, and there are stores (pools, clubs, etc.) where most blacks are not allowed.

This is Apartheid. It is also environmental racism.

“It’s family living in an African Paradise,” wrote expatriate Louise Tasker in a Royal/Dutch Shell magazine for expatriates, “Apart from wildlife and beaches, Gamba offers children a chance to really enjoy childhood rather than grow up too fast… Flights in Gabon are very expensive, so you may not have as many visitors as you’d like.”¹⁰²

Just as there is Apartheid on the ground, you won’t see the average Gabonese flying on Air Gabon: it is an airline for people of the privileged classes—and the black people allowed to join the club.
All air travel in Gabon was for more than 45 years controlled by the so-called “government-owned” national airline whose financial interests were also held by Air France,¹⁰³ and whose directors included Omar Bongo’s relative Robert Bongo. Journalists in Gabon were jailed and whole publication runs confiscated in March 1997 after they reported that Air Gabon was involved in ivory smuggling.¹⁰⁴ In another international scandal, Air Gabon—the airline of the elite in Gabon, tied to petroleum companies and run by the most powerful people in Gabon and France—went belly up in 2005.

Amongst the greatest causes of sickness in Gabon and its neighboring countries are unregulated corporate mining and pollution from extractive industries: gas flaring, uranium and manganese mining, all contribute to toxic environments. Gas-flaring by Royal/Dutch Shell, alone, in Africa, alone, is a leading cause of global warming.¹⁰ Yet, looking at the fancy public relations of the Shell Oil Foundation, we find that the corporate perpetrators of violence and destruction are blaming the victims for their own suffering. “More than half the world’s population uses open fires or traditional biomass-burning stoves to cook in their homes,” reads the disingenuous propaganda, where Shell wields a World Health Organization statistic. “There is also growing evidence that this pollution contributes to global warming.”¹⁰⁵

Does the World Health Organization challenge Shell, Elf, Total or Mobil for the massive and devastating carbon footprint of gas flaring? No. Of course, next to Shell’s support for dictatorships where petroleum flows are insured through rape, torture, and murder—the case of the Niger River Delta offering the most thoroughly documented example—Shell’s gas-flaring is perhaps one of the less troublesome aspects of petroleum operations in Africa.¹⁰⁶ Meanwhile. In 1999, Shell flared some 25.6 million standard cubic feet of gas per day, in the Gamba complex Rabi concession alone—and this in a year where Shell—as supposed evidence of their benevolence—reported ‘reductions’ in their flaring footprint from 30 mmscf/d in 1998.¹⁰⁷ On this basis, and given the past six decades of their operations, Shell’s contribution to global climate mayhem is unimaginable.

The evidence that multinational corporations and their government, academic, scientific and ‘philanthropic’ partners are decimating cultures and landscapes is overwhelming.¹⁰⁸ What is underwhelming is the extent to which the general public—U.S., Canadian, European, Australian and Japanese citizens, ostensibly concerned about human rights and the environment, for example—are unable to recognize and name these rich-man poor-man relationships for what they are: genocide.¹⁰⁹ An agent of predatory western capitalism, Omar Bongo played a major role in that, too. Gabon offers a perfect example of how the propaganda system covers for the western terrorist apparatus, always maximizing profits for the white-based economies of permanent warfare, depopulation and elite control.

On the cutting edge of this massive project of conquest over people and places of color are white people like J. Michael Fay, with their mega-transects and mega-flyovers,¹¹⁰ and their Pentagon connections, and the agendas they serve, even as they deny that they are in any ways involved, while peddling the new, old white power projects of conservation and humanitarian intervention in Africa. Meanwhile, the Hollywood dimension of modern day genocide involves such reality TV productions as Survivor Gabon—Earth’s Last Eden.¹¹¹

“I’d be more than happy to meet a couple of cute girls on the island,” says Survivor’s arrogant tarzan-stud Marcus Lehman, who thinks the ‘remote Gabon coast’ is an island. “It is Earth’s last Eden, so I’ll be Adam, she can be Eve, and see what goes on.”

Such is the nature of white supremacy, with all its attendant obliviousness, and assumptions of innocence, and power relations, and subliminal sexuality, and this is the true face of the globalization of terror.¹¹² The history of Gabon is the history of slavery, alive and well in Africa’s gardens of Eden.

1. See: David Quammen, “Saving Africa’s Eden,” National Geographic, September 2003; J. Michael Fay, “Gabon’s Loango National Park: In the Land of the Surfing Hippos,” National Geographic, August 2004; Quammen, “Views of the Continent,” National Geographic, September 2005; and J. Michael Fay, “Ivory Wars: Last Stand in Zakouma,” National Geographic, March 2007.
   [2] E.g., Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic, Univ. of Chicago, 1993.
2. E.g., Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic, Univ. of Chicago, 1993.
3. The Gabon mission was partly funded with a small grant from the Rainforest Foundation U.K.
4. Halliburton has been subcontracting to Shell in Gabon for many, many years.
5. Quammen is one of the Outside magazine editorial gang (David Quammen, Donovan Webster, Jon Kracauer, Randy Wayne White) who guided Outside when it went astray of any substantive reportage in the late 1980’s, becoming a corporate travel and beauty rag, and who now unquestionably serve the Empire in producing whitewashed features about Africa for National Geographic, IMAX cinema productions, Vanity Fair, Smithsonian, New York Times Magazine, and other white institutions; their reportage has been directly funded by big corporate entities. See, e.g.: David Quammen, “Saving Africa’s Eden,” National Geographic, September 2003; Quammen, “Tracing the Human Footprint,” National Geographic, September 2005; Donovan Webster, “Journey to the Heart of the Sahara,” National Geographic, March 1999; “USADF Hosts Writer & Editor Donovan Webster as Part of Distinguished Lecturer Series: Talk Focuses on Water Projects Funded in Niger by USADF.”
6. United States Agency for International Development—another Pentagon-intelligence conduit.
7. CBFP involves too many agencies, countries, corporations and NGOs to list here.
8. keith harmon snow, “Merchant’s of Death: Exposing Corporate-Financed Holocaust in Central Africa: White-Collar War Crimes, Black African Fall Guys,” Black Star News, December 4, 2008.
9. E.g., “Omar Bongo,” The Economist, 6/18/09.
10. Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas, Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil, Verso, 2003.
11. The nature of the west’s partnership with, and disposal of, General Abacha is unappreciated and opaque.
12. An excellent writing on the nature of race relations and control is: Frances Nesbitt Njubi, “Migration, Identity and The Politics of African Intellectuals in the North,” Paper Prepared for CODESRIA’s 10TH General Assembly on “Africa in the New Millennium”, Kampala, Uganda, 8-12 December 2002.
13. Private interview, “Thierry,” Libreville, Gabon, 1997.
14. keith harmon snow, personal interviews with UNHCR officials and Ogoni refugees in Cotonou, Benin, 1997. See also keith harmon snow (pseudonym Zak Harmon), “No Safe Haven: Even in refugee camps, Nigeria’s Ogonis Face Abuse and Intimidation,” Toward Freedom, Vol. 46, No. 6, November 1997.
15. Private interview, Maconi, Libreville, Gabon, December 29, 2004.
16. See: Nicolas Shaxon, “Gabon: Omar Bongo; Franco-African Secret Society,” The East African, June 22, 2009; “French Secret Services: African Debate,” Africa Confidential, date uncertain; James F. Barnes, Gabon: Beyond the Colonial Legacy, 1992; “Gabon: Oil, Money, Paristroika,” Africa Confidential, Vol. 31, No. 12, June 15, 1990.
17. James F. Barnes, Gabon: Beyond the Colonial Legacy, 1992.
18. See: Aidan Hartley, “Paradise Lost,” Africa Report, March-April 1990.
19. “French Secret Services: African Debate,” Africa Confidential, date uncertain.
20. Tullow Oil. See: keith harmon snow, “The War That Did Not Make the Headlines: Over Five Million Dead in Congo,” Dissident Voice, January 31, 2008; and keith harmon snow, “The Rwanda Genocide Fabrications: Human Rights Watch, Alison Des Forges, and Disinformation on Central Africa,” Dissident Voice, April 13, 2009.
21. COMUF publication on Gabon’s uranium mining in the author’s possession.
22. See: “Gabon: AREVA sets up its observatory of health at Mounana,” Gaboneco, April 4, 2009.
23. See, e.g., “Desert residents pay high price for lucrative uranium mining [Niger],” UN Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN), March 30, 2009; and “Niger Uranium: Blessing or Curse?” IRIN, October 10, 2007.
24. Donovan Webster, “Journey to the Heart of the Sahara,” National Geographic, March 1999.
25. See: Motapa Diamonds web site.
26. Pitchstone Exploration Ltd.
27. See: CAMECO and Wise Uranium.
28. Ohio Citizen Action, “Eramet Marietta Inc.”
29. The Jane Goodall Institute, for example, has directly backed war in eastern Congo. See the KING KONG series at All Things Pass.
30. Of course Henry Kissinger ran covert wars in Zaire and Angola, and other places, and has been for years affiliated with the International Rescue Committee, an intelligence and propaganda front agency that is all over the Congo and Sudan today. See: Eric Thomas Chester, Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee, and the CIA, M.E. Sharpe, 1995.
31. On Davignon see David Gibbs, The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Mines, Money, and U.S. Policy in the Congo Crisis, University of Chicago, 1991: p: 177; Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba, Verso, 2001: p. 24; Parliamentary Committee of Enquiry in Charge of Determining the Exact Circumstances of the Assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the Possible Involvement of Belgian Politicians, Belgium, final report released Nov. 16, 2001; and a discussion of the politics of the commission in Mark Gibney et al, ed., The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past, University of Penn., 2008. See also the BBC whitewash “Belgian Link in Lumumba Death,” BBC, November 16, 2001.
32. “Gabon: Oil, Money, Paristroika,” Africa Confidential, Vol. 31, No. 12, June 15, 1990.
33. On ‘enemy’ versus ‘client’ states see Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon, 1988; Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, South End, 1979; William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military & CIA Interventions Since WW-II, Common Courage, 1995.
34. There were “estimates of at least 100 killed” in Lubumbashi (e.g., “Zaire: Mobutu Takes to the Water,” Africa Confidential, Vol. 31, No. 12, June 15, 1990, pp. 1-3), but DRC experts attest to more than 2000 casualties as the murderous Division Spéciale Présidentielle massacred throughout the night on a campus with a student body of 7000 resident and 3000 external students. By the time the U.S.-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights issued its 1990 report, the U.S. had “confirmed that one person had died” at Lubumbashi (see Zaire: Repression As Policy, Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, 1990).
35. “Gabon: Opposition Leader’s Death Unleashes Riots,” Africa Research Bulletin, June 15, 1990.
36. Howard R. Simpson, The Paratroopers of the French Foreign Legion: From Vietnam to Bosnia, Brassey’s, 1997.
37. E.g., Nicolas Shaxon, “Gabon: Omar Bongo; Franco-African Secret Society,” East African, June 22, 2009.
38. Interviews in Gabon, keith harmon snow, 1997, 2004.
39. See, e.g., Nicolas Shaxon, “Gabon: Omar Bongo; Franco-African Secret Society,” The East African, June 22, 2009; and Shaxson, Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil, Palgrave, 2007: p. 75-78.
40. Africa Research Bulletin, Vol. 45, No. 3, March 2008, p: 17479.
41. On ‘demonstration elections’ see: Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon, 1988; Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, South End, 1979.
42. “Africa-US,” Africa Research Bulletin, July 1-31, 1997, p: 12770. On ACRI, see Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen, 1999, p. 251-257.
43. Africa Confidential, Vol. 48, No. 14, July 6, 2007.
44. Howard W. French, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Knopf, 2004: p. 72.
45. Howard W. French, “Prostitution Trial Upsets France-Gabon Ties,” New York Times, April 23, 1995.
46. Ken Silverstein, “Good Press for Dictators,” The American Prospect, April 8, 2001.
47. Ken Silverstein, “Good Press for Dictators,” The American Prospect, April 8, 2001.
48. Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen, 1999, p. 251-253.
49. Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen, 1999, p. 356-358.
50. Silverstein reported that in 2001 the U.K. firm bought out Powell Tate and Cassidy & Associates. Ken Silverstein, “Good Press for Dictators,” The American Prospect, April 8, 2001.
51. “They Came to Bury Him Not to Praise Him,” The Economist, June 18, 2009.
52. “Robert Bourgi, l’héritier des secrets de la Françafrique,” Le Monde, March 26, 2009.
53. Philip Shenon, “Lobbyist Sought $9 Million to Set Bush Meeting,” New York Times, Nov. 10, 2005.
54. “Searchgold options two Au properties in Gabon,” Searchgold News Release, September 5, 2007.
55. Howard W. French, “Prostitution Trial Upsets France-Gabon Ties,” New York Times, April 23, 1995.
56. Africa Research Bulletin, Vol. 46, No. 1, January 1-31, 2009, p. 17839.
57. Africa Research Bulletin, Vol. 45, No. 3, March 2008, p. 17479.
58. Biafra-Nigeria, 1967-1969, Political Affairs, Confidential U.S. State Dept. files, ISBN 0-88692-756-0.
59. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story, Replica Books, 1978: p. 176-192.
60. União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA) and Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola (FNLA).
61. Toby Shelley, Oil: Politics, Poverty & the Planet, Zed Books, 2005.
62. See: “Report of the Panel of Experts on Violations of Security Council Sanctions Against UNITA,” UN Doc S2000/203, 10 March 2000. See also Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law, 2002.
63. James Mukuwire, “Omar Bongo Rescued Ian Smith,” Zimbabwe Times, June 11, 2009.
64. Charles Taylor has the distinction of having attended Harvard University; being arrested in Boston (MA) for international warrants relating to embezzlement of funds in Liberia; being held in a Charlestown (MA) prison; and being ‘broken out’ with no trace or trail of his having been there.
65. See: keith harmon snow and Rick Hines, “Blood Diamond: Doublethink & Deception Over Those Worthless Little Rocks of Desire,” Z Magazine, June & July 2007.
66. Max Liniger-Gourmaz, Small is Not Always Beautiful: The Story of Equatorial Guinea, 1988.
67. Justin Blum, “U.S. Firms Entwined in Equatorial Guinea Deals,” Washington Post, September 7, 2004.
68. Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen, 1999.
69. “Congo: Truce Broken,” Africa Research Bulletin, July 1-31, 1997, p.12760.
70. See, e.g., Guy Robert, “France’s African Policy in Transition: Disengagement and Redeployment,” Paper prepared for presentation at the African Studies Interdisciplinary Seminar, Center for African Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Il, March 3, 2000.
71. Daily Diary of Jimmy Carter, March 3, 1977.
72. Bernard Gwertzman, “Vance Says Invaders in Zaire Threaten Vital Copper Mining; Calls Situation ‘Dangerous’,” New York Times, March 17, 1977: p. 61.
73. On western interventions in Shaba (Katanga) during the Ford/Carter years see: Antonio Tanca, Foreign Armed Intervention in Internal Conflict, Martinus Nijhoff, 1990; and William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since WW-II, Common Courage, 1986.
74. See, e.g., Defense National Stockpile Center, Gecamines (DRC) Cobalt; Rae Weston, Strategic Minerals: A World Survey, Croom Helm, 1984.
75. Decisions of the Seventy-Sixth Ordinary Session of the OAU Council of Ministers / Eleventh Ordinary Session of the AEC, 28 June to 6 July 2002, Durban, South Africa, CM/Dec. 661-670.
76. “US-Africa: Genuine Leak or Disinformation?” Africa Confidential, 1984.
77. Of course, the African American community had long (since the 1960’s) been under attack in the U.S. through domestic COINTELLPRO terrorist operations. See, e.g., Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party an the American Indian Movement, South End, 1988.
78. “Reagan Promises to Boost U.S. Aid to Gabon,” Washington Post, August 2, 1978.
79. Personal communication, businessman, Democratic Republic of Congo, June 2009.
80. Personal communication, businessman, Democratic Republic of Congo, June 2009.
81. “France/Africa: Professional Risks,” Africa Confidential, Vol. 47. No. 6, March 3, 2006.
82. See: AG Pertners.
83. Frente para a Libertação do Enclave de Cabinda, FLEC.
84. “President Bongo Loses Court Case Against Ex-Official at Oil Group Elf,” African Oil Journal, December 26, 2007; and Toby Shelley, Oil: Politics, Poverty & the Planet, Zed Books, 2005.
85. Sophie Coignard & Marie-Théres Guichard, French Connections: Networks of Influence, Algora, 2000.
86. “France/Africa: Professional Risks,” Africa Confidential, Vol 47. No. 6, March 3, 2006.
87. “They Came to Bury Him Not to Praise Him,” The Economist, June 18, 2009.
88. Historical Facts Book, U.S. Department of Defense, December 30, 2007.
89. Wayne Madsen, “AFRICOM: The Recolonization of Africa by Uncle Sam,” Wayne Madsen Report, January 3, 2008; see also Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen, 1999, p. 251-253.
90. Jet Hoeve and Sue Garrone, “Shell’s Best Kept Secret,” Destinations, a Royal/Dutch Shell public relations expatriate magazine, Issue 39, Vol. 11, No. 2, June 2006, p. 8; see also Yenzi Boat Club.
91. Private interviews, Gamba Complex, December 2004.
92. See: “Les Anciens de Gamba.”
93. Rigon also operates in Madagascar and Senegal.
94. keith harmon snow, “Merchant’s of Death: Exposing Corporate Financed Holocaust in Africa,” September 2008,; see also: http://www.southernera.com/ and http://www.mwanaafrica.com/ .
95. Gabon Biodiversity Program, Publication No. 20, February 2003, http://nationalzoo.si.edu/ConservationAndScience/MAB/documents/GabonBriefingPaper6.pdf.
96. Nobel economist Amartya Sen describes “unfreedoms” in his book Development as Freedom (Sen, 1999).
97. “Lyonnaise to Manage SEEG,” Africa Intelligence, December 10, 1992.
98. “decision/analysis partners Awarded National Park Transportation Development Study for Gabon,” PR Newswire, September 14, 2004; and DAP.
99. Draft Country Programme Document for Gabon (2007-2011), United Nations Development Program, May 1, 2006.
100. Kees Cline, Tracey Cripps and Terry Boyle, “Schooling in Camp Yenzi, Gabon,” Destinations, a Royal/Dutch Shell public relations expatriate magazine, Issue 39, Vol. 11, No. 2, June 2006, p. 7.
101. Interview in Libreville: Elaine Muerat (Responsable Librairie), SOGAPRESSE, Libreville, Gabon.
102. Louise Tasker, “Family Living in an African Paradise,” Destinations, a Royal/Dutch Shell “OUTPOST” public relations document, Issue 39, Vol. 11, No. 2 June 2006, p. 13.
103. Flight International, March 29, 1986.
104. Committee to Protect Journalists, Country Report: Gabon, December 31, 1998.
105. “Breathing Space,” Shell Foundation web site.
106. Royal/Dutch Shell’s involvement in crimes against humanity and genocide in Nigeria is incontrovertible.
107. Royal /Dutch Shell statistics, 1998, 1999.
108. See, for example: Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas, Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil, Verso, 2003; Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon, Harper Collins, 1995; Max Liniger-Gourmaz, Small is Not Always Beautiful: The Story of Equatorial Guinea, 1988; and Bruno Manser Fonds.
109. See: Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, City Lights, 2001.
110. See: David Quammen, “Views of the Continent,” National Geographic, September 2005; and J. Michael Fay, “Ivory Wars: Last Stand in Zakouma,” National Geographic, March 2007.
111. “CBS reveals the castaways of ‘Survivor: Gabon—Earth’s Last Eden’,” Reality TV staff, 8/27/08.
112. See: keith harmon snow, “Towards an Anthropology of White Man in Africa: A Call to Explore the Militarized White Project of Dark Continentalism,” Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, December, 2007.

Internal and External Correlation of Forces

The correlation of forces between capitalists and workers in the energy sector in Latin America varies greatly: In Venezuela, the Chavez government, with the backing of the oil workers union, has extended public ownership and distributed oil revenues to the popular classes through food subsidies, universal health and public education programs. At the other extreme in Colombia under President Uribe, private foreign oil companies are increasingly in control, profits are repatriated to the imperial countries or taken out of the country by the domestic elite, government revenues subsidize the oligarchy and government-backed death squads and the military to assassinate and threaten trade union and community leaders.

Between these two poles of the nationalist left and the neo-fascist right, several other variants exist: Social democrat, social liberal and neo-liberal.

Bolivia and Ecuador, under Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, represent the social democratic approach, proposing ‘partnerships’ between ‘state’ and foreign capitalist oil companies, which share the profits from exploitation of crude petroleum. The foreign companies still control most or all of the refining and trading and the social democratic government have yet to establish their own ‘marketing systems.’

The ‘social liberal’ policies are found in Brazil and Argentina where the major oil companies are ‘state’ only in name only, as they are traded on the stock markets in Latin America and Wall Street. State revenue is distributed in an unequal proportion, the bulk used to subsidize the agro-mineral sector and minority share to fund social programs – including basic anti-poverty programs.

The neo-liberal policies are found in Mexico and Peru where former publicly owned oil companies and energy resources have been handed over to foreign oil and energy companies. In Mexico only the militancy of the electrical workers union(SME) has prevented the government from privatizing this strategic industry. Under the neo-liberal regimes the oil and energy revenues have been distributed almost exclusively among the foreign and domestic ruling class and only a minimum’ trickles down’ to the workers, peasants and Indian communities in the form of subsistence “poverty programs.” Neo-liberal regimes disinvest and plunder the public enterprises, decreasing their share of production and leaving them with debts, obsolete technology and declining capacity to fulfill overseas obligations.

The Impact of the Economic Boom and Global Recession (2003-2009)

The performance and ownership of the energy sector is influenced by the internal class struggle, the condition of the world economy and the rise and decline of US imperialism. The crisis of neo-liberalism and the popular rebellions between 1999-2005 ended the principal phase of large-scale privatization in many countries of Latin America. The overthrow of the governments of de la Rua in Argentina, Sanchez de Losado in Bolivia and Noboa and Gutierrez in Ecuador, the defeat of the golpistas in Venezuela (April 2002) and the bosses lockout (December 2002-February 2003) led the radical mass movements to set a new agenda: The re-nationalization of the energy sector: petroleum, the electrical sector, mining and other strategic sectors.

The popular rebellions however, with the exception of Venezuela, did not lead to worker-peasant governments. Instead, center-left middle class-led alliances with the popular classes led to some partial reforms. In Bolivia, Evo Morales increased the role of the state in partnership with 42 foreign-owned oil and gas companies. Kirchner set up a state company but refused to re-nationalize YPF/Repsol in Argentina. In Ecuador, Correa increased taxes on petroleum companies, but the foreign multinational companies still produce 57% of the oil. In Brazil, Lula refused to re-nationalize the privatized enterprises – and the majority of shares in Petrobras have remained in the hands of private investors.

The major struggle against the energy and mining companies’ exploitation in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Chile were led by the Indian movements and in some cases were supported by petroleum workers and peasant organizations. The reason is clear: The energy companies were not merely exploiting labor, they were destroying their economies and living conditions through massive contamination of the environmentand seizure of their traditional.

In Brazil, Lula’s large-scale, long-term promotion of huge multi-national sugar plantations and refineries producing ethanol displaced thousands of small farmers and Indian communities and intensified the exploitation of the rural workers. The rural landless workers’ movement (MST) and other rural social movements, allied with Lula, engaged in defensive struggles. However, without urban allies, they were unable to defeat the combination of Lula and agro-business.

Urban Workers and Trade Unions

The major driving force in the popular rebellions against neo-liberalism varies in different countries and at different times.

In Ecuador, the oil, mining and factory workers joined the mass peasant movements to overthrow Noboa at the beginning of the decade. In Argentina, the unemployed workers and the middle class led the struggle to overthrow De la Rua. In Venezuela, the petroleum workers split with a minority supporting the bosses’ lockout and the majority took control and operated the wells in support of President Chavez. Throughout the decade, however, the energy sector workers have been organized and militant in defense of their economic sector, opposing privatization and protecting their living standards through mass struggle. But their presence in the popular rebellions has been scarce. In many cases the leadership of the energy trade unions has supported the center-left regimes in order to secure wage concessions and job protection. In the best of cases, the energy trade unions have engaged in solidarity demonstrations with the mass struggle of the peasants, Indians and unemployed.

Paradoxically, the strong and militant organization of the energy unions has led to economic gains and sectoral reforms, which have led to highly segregated islands of affluence among a mass of urban and rural poor. The past decade has witnessed the decline of the energy workers as a vanguard in the popular rebellions: Other classes have taken their place. This has created a strategic danger because in the course of large-scale privatizations of the energy sector, the workers will fail to secure the support of the rest of the working class and peasants.

While oil exploitation in the Amazon creates ‘jobs for oil workers,’ it destroys the livelihood of the Indigenous communities and sets off a deadly conflict between the oil companies and their workers against the mass of artisans, small farmers and Indigenous communities dependent on farming, fishing, and handicrafts in proximity to the petroleum and mining operations.

The World Recession and the Energy Sector

The world crisis cannot be resolved by strikes and protests alone. Even re-nationalization cannot, in itself, create the basis for a national recovery. The only alternative facing the energy sector workers is an internal ‘cultural-political revolution’ in which they rethink their basic strategy and move beyond sectoral struggles.

The current prolonged deep recession can only be confronted at the national-political level – by a turn to forming a broad-mass political alliance with the popular classes with a strategy for taking state power. In the face of the collapse of capitalism, the trade union struggle is no longer effective. The trade unions can only succeed by taking a decisive turn toward anti-capitalist movements – a turn toward an explicit embrace of socialism.

Today the entire capitalist class has seized control of the state, specifically the state treasury, to finance their survival and recovery at the expense of the workers, peasants, Indians and the urban poor. As the crisis deepens, mass urban and rural rebellion will once again break the bonds of bourgeois hegemony. The question will arise: Will the energy workers be part of a socialist solution or part of the capitalist problem? Will the energy workers return to become part of the vanguard or remain part of the rearguard? What is absolutely clear is that the energy workers occupy a strategic position in the world capitalist system – without petroleum nothing moves, without electricity the bankers cannot count their profits and the investors cannot read their dividend payments.

Never has the capitalist system in its entirety demonstrated today in real life that it is a failed system – neither producing goods and services, nor providing credit and finance, nor employing labor.

Karl Marx’s famous phrase comes to mind: “A specter is haunting the capitalist class: The coming of the socialist revolution.”

In Client State: Japan in the American Embrace, Gavan McCormack demonstrates how Japan’s apparent nationalist turn owes much to the need to conceal the country’s increasing subordination to American imperial designs. However, a closer examination of the driving forces behind the US Empire in the 21st century suggests that both countries may be serving a quite different agenda.

Rightly described as a “masterful” analysis by fellow Japan expert Chalmers Johnson, McCormack’s 2007 book expertly documents how Japan’s postwar “peace constitution” has been steadily attenuated to the point of meaninglessness, as Tokyo has consistently bowed to pressure from Washington to become more active in its support of US hegemony, culminating in a “merger” of their military forces in the wake of 9/11.

McCormack claims that this is “an agenda heavily in the American, rather than the Japanese national interest.” But in what sense could the extremely costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now being expanded into Pakistan under the “antiwar” commander-in-chief Obama, be said to be in “the American interest”?

These illegal wars of aggression have been costly to America not only in terms of the trillions of dollars added to its ballooning national debt, but also in terms of the incalculable loss of credibility that it has suffered in the eyes of world opinion, appalled by the shameless lies about WMDs, the lurid scenes of torture in Abu Ghraib, and the massive casualties inflicted by high-tech weaponry on innocent civilians, whose lives are casually dismissed as “collateral damage” in the never-ending pursuit of the elusive Bin Laden.

The so-called War on Terror may be extremely profitable for weapons manufacturers, private military corporations, and the venal pro-war pundits they fund, but who else does it benefit?

Big Oil, says the antiwar left. But the “no blood for oil” adherents too may be misinformed, according to one leading analyst of the Iraq war. “Contrary to the view of most American progressives that oil, and specifically the interests of Big Oil, is the primary mover, there is no evidence that the major US oil corporations pressured Congress or promoted the war in Iraq or the current confrontation with Iran,” James Petras argues in The Power of Israel in the United States. “To the contrary: there is plenty of evidence that they are very uneasy about the losses that may result from an Israeli attack on Iran.”

And as for the American people, or at least those lucky enough to hold their jobs in the coming Wall Street-induced depression, they will be paying dearly in greatly increased taxes for their government’s folly for the foreseeable future.

Considering all this, it is difficult not to concur with the conclusion of a policy paper published by the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) that the War on Terror has been “for the most part, extremely damaging to US interests.”

The 2003 paper, “Clean Break or Dirty War?” by Irmep, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that studies US-Middle East policy formulation, shows how policies originally prepared for Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 by a study group which included the likes of Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser under the title “A Clean Break: A Strategy for Securing the Realm” came to shape US foreign policy under the Bush administration.

“A Clean Break” (ACB) advocated getting rid of Saddam Hussein, and the destabilisation or overthrow of the governments of Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Saudi Arabia for Israel to be truly safe. Many of the same themes were repeated in the Project for the New American Century’s 2000 document “Rebuilding America’s Defences,” which, after the “catastrophic and catalysing event” of 9/11, became the official US policy of “preemptive war” in the US National Security Strategy of 2002, authored by PNAC signatory Paul Wolfowitz.

As the IRmep paper explains, “…no set of policies ever come to fruition without an active and vocal distribution and implementation network.” This small but influential neocon network,” it is argued, “have achieved amazing success at seasoning and baking ACB policy agenda items into a tenuous mold as ‘vital interests’ of the United States itself.”

The IRmep paper damningly concludes: “Many US actions are simply so inexplicable that consideration of their chief benefactor, Israel, is the only reasonable explanation. And as Americans dismiss Arab government charges that Israel is attacking them by proxy across the region, the evidence shows that the Arabs are correct. ‘A Clean Break’ is, at heart, an Israeli proclamation of ‘Dirty War.’”

The spies who love US

Indeed, Americans recently got an inkling of just how corrupted their political system has been by Israeli interests, or at least they would have if the mainstream media had given the latest twist in the AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) spy scandal the serious attention it deserved. For those who haven’t been following the story on Antiwar.com, where Justin Raimondo, Grant F. Smith, Philip Giraldi and others have written extensively about it, here’s what happened.

Jeff Stein, who writes for Congressional Quarterly, reported in April that two former national security officials had read transcripts of National Security Agency wiretaps in which Democrat Congresswoman Jane Harman was overheard talking to a “suspected Israeli agent” who wanted her to lobby the Justice Department on behalf of two former AIPAC officials under indictment for violating the 1917 Espionage Act. The two lobbyists, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, were charged with passing on classified information about Iran to the press and the Israeli embassy, which they had received from Colonel Lawrence Franklin, who had been a top Iran analyst in Douglas Feith’s office at the Pentagon before Franklin pled guilty to espionage in 2005. In return for Harman’s assistance, the Israeli operative promised to pressure House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to give Harman the chair of the House Intelligence Committee by threatening to withhold the political contributions of Haim Saban if she didn’t.

It was not a threat to be taken lightly, as Saban, the billionaire Israeli-American media mogul, had been the largest overall contributor to the Democratic National Committee during the 2001-2002 cycle, when, according to Matthew Yglesias, “the party leadership was backing the Iraq War.”

In case there are some outraged Democrats who might protest that Saban’s support for the party was probably not just about Iraq, that he more than likely also approved of the Democrats’ liberal domestic policies, Saban’s own words should disabuse them of that notion. On September 5, 2004 he told the New York Times, “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.”

Considering that this self-confessed monomaniac used to spend hours on the phone with Ariel Sharon, the so-called “man of peace” who in a saner world would have been hauled to the Hague for war crimes, Saban’s influence over the Democrats should be cause for concern, to say the least.

Now that the Iraqi “threat” to Israel has been effectively neutralized by the American invasion and seemingly endless occupation (America’s West Bank?), Saban’s current paramount concern appears to be the “existential danger” that Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons now pose to Israel, a state which already has hundreds of nuclear weapons — the only one in the Middle East which does. Yet Israel is also the only one which is not under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the only one which has not acceded to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Despite these facts, Saban’s recent acquisition of Univision, the largest Spanish-language broadcaster in the US, as part of a wider AIPAC outreach strategy to the growing Hispanic community, is probably intended to convince its 3.7 million viewers of the urgent need to spill more American blood, much of it Hispanic, in curbing the Iranian “threat.”

Lest anyone dismiss Haim Saban as an isolated ideologue attempting to use his wealth — he’s the 102nd richest person in America — to remake US foreign policy in the image of the Likud party, consider that close to 60 percent of Democratic Party funding (compared to 35 percent for the Republican Party) comes from mainly hardline pro-Israeli Jews, unrepresentative of American Jews in general, who tend to be antiwar unless Israel is directly involved.

Rosen, another PNAC signatory, even had the chutzpah to lead the witch-hunt that prevented Charles Freeman from becoming chairman of the National Intelligence Council, practically smearing the respected diplomat as an “anti-Semite” for his failure to confuse American interests with Israel’s. In that key position, Freeman would have been responsible for supplying the President with sound intelligence about genuine threats facing America, as opposed to the fake intelligence that led to the Iraq war, some of which made its way to the White House from Ariel Sharon’s office via Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon, as recounted in Julian Borger’s 2003 Guardian article, “The Spies Who Pushed For War.”

You’d think Rosen would have kept a lower profile at least until his own trial was over, which was ultimately quashed in early May, apparently due to White House pressure. But perhaps he was confident in the knowledge that in Washington Israel’s security is “sacrosanct,” as Obama assured his AIPAC sponsors, whereas America’s security seems to be for sale to the highest bidder, at least as long as most Americans are kept in the dark about the costs of their “special relationship” with Israel.

Dying for a lie

While US taxpayers had subsidised Israel to the tune of at least $108 billion up to 2006 (currently $3 billion a year) the Japanese too have paid dearly for their subordination to a US Empire prone to fight Israel’s wars.

“The seriously ill Japanese economy takes every possible step to prop up the equally ailing US economy, pouring Japanese savings into the black hole of American illiquidity in order to subsidize the US global empire, fund its debt, and finance its over-consumption,” writes McCormack. “Japan has become the sine qua non of Washington’s global, superpower strategy and status.”

Japan’s commitment to the War on Terror has brought added costs. One estimate puts the cost of Japan’s post-9/11 “rear support” at $90 billion. Tokyo promised another $5 billion for rebuilding an Iraq that had been destroyed by lies.

But Japan’s treasure is no longer sufficient to satisfy Washington’s demands of its “client state.”

Richard Armitage, yet another PNAC signatory, once told an Australian audience that an “alliance” meant that “Australian sons and daughters…would be willing to die to help defend the United States. That’s what an alliance means.” As long as the Israel lobby maintains its stranglehold over US foreign policy, that also means being willing to die to defend Israel against its neighbours, who increasingly see its drive for regional hegemony as a real threat to their existence. And as long as Japan remains in the American embrace, it won’t be long before Japanese parents will be expected to make a similar sacrifice.

Now if only there were a powerful Japan lobby in Washington — let’s call it AJPAC — things might be a lot different.

Nigeria’s environmental degradation is a by-product of the moral and political rot that flows from neocolonialism. It is the physical manifestation of the total surrender of national sovereignty to foreigners — like Shell oil — by those native classes that rule the land for the benefit of foreigners. To put one’s country’s resources at the disposal of foreigners is the ultimate corruption — which leads to every other conceivable crime.

It is a false dichotomy to separate the corruption of Nigeria’s governments — military or civilian — from the predatory presence of Big Oil. The two are locked in the deepest embrace. The foreign corporations pay the regime to maintain peace — and the regime reciprocates by imposing on the people a “peace of the dead.” There are other sources of corruption in the developing world, other contradictions between people and their governments, but the dominance of economic resources by foreigners exacerbates every other division in society. The competition to get into the foreigners’ money flow becomes the Great Game of national political life. The bigger the money flow, the greater the imperative to keep the people in check. The police and army serve as paid thugs for the foreigners’ protection. The national debasement is total. Nigeria’s most important city, Lagos, is also one of the most expensive in the world — yet 70 percent of Nigerians subsist on a dollar or less a day. There is no greater corruption imaginable.

In court, Shell oil will seek to present itself as an innocent party — even a victim of African brutality and corruption. Shell is more properly compared to a businessman who hires a hit man to kill a union organizer. The businessman and the hit man are both guilty of capital murder. The greater onus is on the businessman, whose money made the crime possible.

In the Niger Delta, Ogoni rebels have cut Nigeria’s oil production in half, putting the squeeze on US-based Chevron Oil (where, incidentally, Condoleezza Rice used to work). According to Amnesty International, hundreds of civilians have been killed in the fighting. The Nigerian government has declared the entire delta a military zone. No doubt, great crimes are being committed at the behest of Big Oil. Before he was put to death, Ken Saro-Wiwa predicted it would come to this.

* This article was a Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

Armenia

Mickey Z: This April, President Barack Obama broke campaign promise #511, namely to explicitly acknowledge the Armenian genocide as U.S. President. What happened on his recent visit to Turkey? What are the ramifications of his breaking this promise?

David Boyajian: President Obama visited Turkey from April 6 to 7, where he did not use the word “genocide” when referring to the 1.5 million murders committed by the Turkish Ottoman Empire against its Armenian citizens from 1915-1923. As a candidate, Obama had promised several times to do so. His statement in Turkey that he had “not changed his views”–implying he still believes it was genocide–was still a clear breach of his promise to use the “G word.” It was a case study in verbal gymnastics and political duplicity and should be studied in political science courses. Obama’s broken promise obviously eroded his credibility. The same holds true for Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who, as senators, supported the Armenian genocide resolution. They’ve since fallen disgracefully silent. Dr. Samantha Power should also be embarrassed. She’s the National Security Council’s genocide expert and a Pulitzer Prize winning author. As a campaign advisor to Obama, she made a video telling Armenian Americans that as president, Obama would definitely acknowledge their genocide. “Take my word for it,” she said.

Appeasement of a genocide-denying country such as Turkey is bad policy because its message is that genocides can be committed without consequence. Appeasement also erodes U.S. credibility on human rights and its stated desire to be a leader in genocide prevention. Unlike what lobbyists for Turkey would have us believe, Armenian genocide affirmation by America would not harm U.S. national interests. Turkey depends on the U.S. for weapons systems, support for billions in loans from the International Monetary Fund, security guarantees through NATO, advocacy for Turkish membership in the European Union, and more. Some 20 countries, including Canada, France, and Switzerland, as well as the parliaments of the EU and the Council of Europe, have acknowledged the Armenian genocide. None has ever experienced much more than a Turkish temper tantrum in retaliation.

MZ: Two days prior to Armenian Genocide Remembrance day — which annually falls on April 24 –Turkey and Armenia announced that they had agreed to a “roadmap” to normalize relations. What was the significance of this timing? What does the “roadmap” contain?

DB: Behind the scenes, the U.S. State Department had long been twisting Armenia’s arm to agree to a so-called “roadmap” with Turkey before President Obama issued what has become a customary “April 24 statement” by U.S. presidents marking Armenian genocide memorial day. The “roadmap,” announced on April 22, provided political cover for Obama to not use the “G word” on April 24. That is, since there was now supposedly a roadmap for normalization of relations — no matter how vague and hurriedly slapped together — Obama could say that he did not want to upset Turkey and the touted-as-highly-delicate Turkish-Armenian negotiations by using the “G word.” Notice that Obama did not consult with Armenian-Americans or Armenia about this. So much for promises and moral principles. It’s disgraceful that Obama, simply to help Turkey save face, not only broke his promise, but showed blatant disregard for the activists — not just Armenians — who labored so hard for many years for the cause of recognizing all genocides.

Armenia has always said that it was ready to normalize relations with Turkey — which would include Turkey’s re-opening its border with Armenia-without pre-conditions. Suddenly, however, Armenia has had pre-conditions imposed on it in this “roadmap.” According to the Turkish press, the “roadmap” allegedly contains pre-conditions such as: Armenia’s agreeing to a joint commission to examine the veracity of the Armenian genocide — yes, you heard right, Armenia’s formal recognition of current Turkish boundaries — which contain the Armenian homeland, and, possibly, Armenia’s accepting Turkish mediation in the conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijan over the disputed Armenian region of Karabagh — which is absurd since Azerbaijan and Turkey are allies. It appears that Armenia’s president, whose electoral legitimacy is in question, has been worn down in these negotiations by Turkey, the West, and possibly even Russia. And because the Armenian president is grappling with his legitimacy, he is not heeding the cautions being voiced by the people of his own nation about the “roadmap.”

MZ: The U.S. administration and mainstream media would have us believe that Turkey is seeking to “reconcile” with Armenia. Is “reconciliation” really a possibility, or have we misunderstood what’s going on?

DB: The word “reconciliation” in relation to Armenian-Turkish relations is largely an invention of U.S. policymakers, their emissaries, and the mainstream media who take their cues from them. What the U.S. and Europe would like to see is a more stable Caucasus — that is, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia — with open borders. Open borders, you see, would facilitate laying more oil and gas pipelines that would originate in the Caspian Sea region and proceed west to Turkey and then to energy-hungry Europe and Israel. The U.S. and Europe don’t want to put it quite that crudely — no pun intended — so they try to depict Armenia and Turkey as possibly “reconciling” and thus resolving all their differences. Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 out of sympathy with its ally Azerbaijan, which was in a war with the Armenians of Karabagh, a historically Armenian-populated autonomous area within Azerbaijan that Stalin handed to Azerbaijan. Turkey has also been infuriated that Armenia and Armenians worldwide have been demanding that Turkey acknowledge the genocide it committed against Armenians.

Turkey has to acknowledge the genocide or there will never be peace between it and Armenia. And although the Armenian government has not put forth any claims for reparations arising out of the genocide, or for territory, many Armenians do have these goals. They cite the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920, which provided for Armenian sovereignty over Armenian lands upon which Turkey committed the genocide, and which have since been incorporated into what is now eastern Turkey.

MZ: The countries of the Caucasus are Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Most Americans, including the mainstream media, could not find these small countries on a map. Why are Russia and the U.S. — the latter being thousands of miles from the region — so interested in these three small countries?

DB: The Caucasus is truly Ground Zero in Cold War II, the ongoing conflict between the U.S. and Russia. The U.S. — along with Europe and the NATO military alliance — regard Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan as middlemen between the West and the gas and oil-rich regions around the Caspian Sea. The West has already laid gas and oil pipelines from Azerbaijan through Georgia and then on to Turkey and the west. The U.S. wanted those and future pipelines to bypass Russia and Iran because those two countries could shut such pipelines to pressure the U.S. and others. The only possible pipelines routes, therefore, are through Georgia or Armenia. But Turkey shut its border with Armenia in 1993, and Azerbaijan closed its border with Armenia even earlier due to the conflict between it and the de-facto Armenian region of Karabagh. That left Georgia as the only place for these Western pipelines. After the Russian-Georgian was last year, however, opening an alternative route has become more urgent. That largely explains the West’s renewed interest in Armenia. Conversely, Russia sees the Caucasus as within its traditional sphere of influence, and regards U.S. and European interest in the region as hostile acts.

Simultaneously, NATO has been pushing into the region. Georgia, Azerbaijan, and to some extent even the ex-Soviet republics on the other side of the Caspian Sea, are on the path to joining NATO. Russia was already upset that, following the Cold War, NATO had absorbed the former Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe. NATO is now attempting, in effect, to do the same thing on Russia’s southern border. Russia fears that it will eventually be virtually surrounded by NATO. As a result, we have Cold War II: The U.S. and NATO are trying to push into the Caucasus and Central Asia, while Russia is trying to keep them out.

MZ: Why is Israel interested in the Caucasus, and what role is that country playing? Why are Israel and the pro-Israel lobby dead set against recognition of the Armenian genocide by the U.S. Congress?

DB: Israel is interested in getting some of the oil and gas that flow out of the Caspian Sea region. That is, from countries such as Azerbaijan, oil and gas flow west through Georgia, and then on to Turkey and other countries, possibly including Israel. After all, the U.S. and Turkey, which are important players in these pipelines, are obviously also very friendly with Israel. Israel also welcomes all non-Arab supplies of energy since they would make its Western allies less dependent on Arab oil and gas. And Israel has long had what it calls its Periphery Policy. Historically, Israel has not had good relations with its Arab neighbors. Therefore, to serve as counterweights, Israel befriends those countries further away, especially Muslim countries that aren’t necessarily sympathetic to Israel’s Arab neighbors or Palestinians. Azerbaijan, the only Muslim nation in the Caucasus, and some Muslim nations to the east, such as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, are such countries. Fortuitously for Israel, they also possess significant deposits of gas and oil.

For decades, Israel and Turkey have had very good relations, mainly because they have a common ally, the U.S., and common adversaries, namely Arab nations. In the 1990’s, Israel and Turkey signed a number of military, economic, and political agreements that solidified their relationship. Even before that, but particularly after that, Turkey felt that it did not have sufficient lobbying muscle in Washington. So the Turks asked Israel to convince some of the pro-Israel lobby — the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and others — to serve as advocates for Turkey. The Jewish lobby groups agreed. So these groups, as part of their deal with Turkey, deny or call into question the Armenian genocide and work to prevent U.S. acknowledgement of that genocide. These groups won’t tolerate anyone questioning of the Holocaust, and yet hypocritically work against acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide. Interestingly, for the last 2 years, Armenian Americans have exposed the ADL’s hypocrisy. In Massachusetts, for example, fourteen cities severed ties with an anti-bias program sponsored by the ADL because of the latter’s hypocritical and anti-Armenian stance (see NoPlaceForDenial.com). Armenians are determined to challenge genocide denial whenever it occurs.

MZ: Is there a problem with the way the mainstream media has been covering Armenian issues?

DB: Yes. The mainstream media have several problems. First, they know very little about the Caucasus or Armenians. Reporters tend, therefore, to copy each other and repeat clichés and falsehoods — such as that Armenia and Turkey are on the verge of a historic “reconciliation.” Media also tend to accept at face value the propaganda issued by Western governments whose interest in the Caucasus is — let’s be frank — not “reconciliation,” democracy, or human rights, but rather self-interested economic, political, and military political penetration of the Caucasus.

Turkey has about 30 times more people and territory, and 50 times more Gross Domestic Product, than Armenia. The power differential is enormous. Turkey has infinitely more allies in Western media, governments, think tanks, and multi-national corporations-and knows how to use them. Commentators who have a vested interest in touting Turkey for their own political and even financial reasons have particularly come out of the woodwork to deride legitimate Armenian demands. But we rarely hear commentators speak of how a small country that has been the victim of genocide, that has had most of its territory stripped from it, and that has been blockaded by the denier of that genocide — Turkey — is being threatened by that very same unrepentant denier. Mainstream media largely fail to appreciate the foregoing facts. Hopefully, Mickey, this interview will help the media and your readers understand the issues and the region a bit better.

As anybody who has paid the least bit of attention to the nature of the US economy over the past century, its very foundations rest on the production of war and materials for war. Also apparent to those of us who have been paying attention is that the Democrats are just as responsible for this reality as the Republicans are. Just because George Bush and his administration were personally reprehensible and their arrogance and disregard for principles most Americans hold dear was as obvious as the nose on Pinocchio’s wooden face doesn’t mean that the policies of the Democrats are substantially different.

Consequently, the antiwar movement would be foolish to think they have a government of allies in Washington, DC now. There may be a more personable bunch of folks ruling the country now, but the odds of those folks pulling out of Afghanistan or Iraq now instead of later without a major push from the American people insisting that they do so are about as poor as they were under the Bush administration. The time for the antiwar movement to demand that the Obama administration end the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is now, before its political ego becomes entangled in a military exercise that is ill-advised, poorly done, and just plain wrong.

Walking through New York’s financial district carrying signs expressing a hope that the trillion dollar war economy will go against its profit margin because it is morally wrong to profit from death is not a bad thing. It might feel good and even change some minds, but it won’t change the bottom line. And it is the bottom line that must be changed. Understanding this fact requires the antiwar movement to be united and specific. The demands are simple: Bring all of the troops back from Iraq and Afghanistan now. Not in 2010, or 2011 or 2012, but now. Both of these operations have gone on long enough, no matter what the generals tell Obama or the American people. Since the Pentagon hasn’t been able to accomplish what it wanted despite being militarily engaged for close to a decade in both countries, it’s high time that we insist that our timetable be put into effect.

Fortunately, a coalition has formed around this simple demand. The National Assembly to End the Wars and the ANSWER coalition have joined forces and are holding protests in at least three major US cities on March 21, 2009. Washington, DC, Los Angeles and San Francisco will be the sites of these protests. In addition to calling on the Obama administration and Congress to remove the troops from Afghanistan and Iraq now, the protests also address the issue of US support for the violent occupation of Palestine by Israel–another important issue that the UFPJ prefers not to highlight in their public calls to join their protest.

Unless and until the issue of Palestine is addressed in an honest and just way that does not merely echo the desires of the Israeli expansionists, things in the Middle East will remain volatile and dangerous. According to most public opinion polls, the majority of Americans understand this yet Washington continues to support Tel Aviv no matter what it does–murderous attacks on Gaza or illegal settlements in the West Bank, it doesn’t seem to matter. The US money and weaponry continues to flow. Additionally, in the wake of recent election results in Israel, the threat of an Israeli attack on Iran (with at least tacit US support) grows stronger. Unless the US government is put on notice that this is beyond the pale, the current relative calm in the Middle East and South Asia will become a thing of distant memory.

It is not my intention to disregard or disrespect UFPJ’s march on April 4th in New York. Indeed, if one can attend that protest and one of the protests on March 21st, please do. However, if one has to choose, the intentions of the March 21st protests are certainly more immediate and, if the world without war that UFPJ envisions is to ever occur, essential to that vision. After all, in order to move beyond the war economy, doesn’t it make sense that we must end the wars/military occupations currently taking place? If we don’t get this message out there, those who want to expand the war in Afghanistan and ultimately bring it into Pakistan on a much greater scale will assume they have the approval of the US public. The job of the antiwar movement is to let them know that this is not the case. March 21st, 2009 is the first national manifestation of this in the Obama era.

President Truman had shepherded the creation of Israel in 1947 not because the American establishment saw it as a strategic asset; this much is clear. “No one,” writes Cheryl Rubenberg, “not even the Israelis themselves, argues that the United States supported the creation of the Jewish state for reasons of security or national interest.”¹ Domestic politics, in an election year, was the primary force behind President Truman’s decision to support the creation of Israel. In addition, the damage to US interests due to the creation of Israel – although massive – was not immediate. This was expected to unfold slowly: and its first blows would be borne by the British who were still the paramount power in the region.

Nevertheless, soon after he had helped to create Israel, President Truman moved decisively to appear to distance the United States from the new state. Instead of committing American troops to protect Israel, when it fought against five Arab armies, he imposed an even-handed arms embargo on both sides in the conflict. Had Israel been dismantled [at birth], President Truman would have urged steps to protect the Jewish colonists in Palestine, but he would have accepted a premature end to the Zionist state as fait accompli. Zionist pressures failed to persuade President Truman to lift the arms embargo. Ironically, military deliveries from Czechoslovakia may have saved the day for Israel.

Once Israel had defeated the armies of Arab proto-states and expelled the Palestinians to emerge as an exclusively Jewish colonial-settler state in 1949, these brute facts would work in its favor. Led by the United States, the Western powers would recognize Israel, aware that they would have to defend this liability. At the same time, the humiliation of defeat had given an impetus to Arab nationalists across the region, who directed their anger against Israel and its Western sponsors.

This placed Israel in a strong position to accelerate its transformation into a strategic asset. In tandem with the Jewish lobby in the United States, Israel sought to maximize the assistance it could receive from the West through policies that stoked Arab nationalism; and as Israel’s military superiority grew this emboldened it to increase its aggressive posture towards the Arabs. Israel had the power to set in motion a vicious circle that would soon create the Arab threat against which it would defend the West. As a result, at various points during the 1950s, France, the United States, and Britain began to regard Israel as a strategic asset.

America’s embrace of Israel did not begin in 1967. Israel’s victory in the June War only accelerated a process that had been underway since its creation – even before its creation. Indeed, the Zionists had decided in 1939 to pursue the United States as their new mother country; they knew that they could use the very large and influential population of American Jews to win official US backing for their goals.

This paid off handsomely in 1948; but thereafter, the United States sought to contain the damage that would flow from the creation of Israel. However, these efforts would be self-defeating; the die had been cast. Israel – not the United States – was in the driver’s seat; and Israel would seek to maximize the negative fallout from its creation. As Israel succeeded in augmenting – within limits – the Arab threat to itself and the United States, the Jewish lobby would regain confidence; it would re-organize to reinforce Israel’s claim that it was now a strategic asset.

We have here another vicious circle – virtuous, for Israel. The Jewish lobby would gain strength as the Arab-cum-Soviet threat to the Middle East grew. When Israel scaled back the Arab threat in 1967, the Jewish lobby would step in to spend the political capital the Jewish state had garnered in the United States. The Israeli capture of Jerusalem in 1967 also energized the Christian Zionists, who, with encouragement from Jewish Zionists, would organize, enter into Republican politics, and soon become a major ally of the Jewish lobby. The sky was now the limit for Israel and the Zionists in the United States. The special relationship would become more special under every new presidency.

Several writers on the American left have pooh-poohed the charge that the Jewish lobby has been a leading force shaping America’s Middle East policy. They argue that the United States has supported Israel because of the convergence of their interests in the region.² Oil, primarily Saudi Arabian oil, they maintain correctly, is “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”³ Incorrectly, however, they insist that this is what has driven US policy towards the Middle East.

A priori, this is an odd position to maintain, since Britain – up until 1948 – had managed quite well to maintain complete control over Middle Eastern oil, a dominance the United States could not sustain ‘despite’ the ‘strategic support’ of Israel. Successively, they argue, Western control over oil came under threat from Arab nationalism and militant Islamism. Israel has demonstrated its strategic value by holding in check and, later, defeating, the Arab nationalist challenge. Since then, Israel has fought the Islamist challenge to US hegemony over the region.

It may be useful to examine Noam Chomsky’s analysis of this relationship, since he enjoys iconic status amongst both liberal and leftists in the United States. Chomsky frames his analysis of ‘causal factors’ behind the special relationship as essentially a choice between “domestic pressure groups” and “US strategic interests.” He finds two limitations in the argument that the “American Jewish community” is the chief protagonist of the special relationship between Israel and the United States.

First, “it underestimates the scope of the “support for Israel,” and second, it overestimates the role of political pressure groups in decision-making.” Chomsky points out that the Israel lobby is “far broader” than the American Jewish community; it embraces liberal opinion, labor leaders, Christian fundamentalists, conservative hawks, and “fervent cold warriors of all stripes.”⁴ While this broader definition of the Israel lobby is appropriate, and this is what most users of the term have in mind, Chomsky thinks that the presence of this “far broader” support for Israel diminishes the role that American Jews play in this lobby.

Two hidden assumptions underpin Chomsky’s claim that a broader Israel lobby shifts the locus of lobbying to non-Jewish groups. First, he fails to account for the strong overlap – barring the Christian fundamentalists – between the American Jewish community and the other domestic pressure groups he enumerates. In the United States, this overlap has existed since the early decades of the twentieth century, and increased considerably in the post-War period. It is scarcely to be doubted that Jews hold – and deservedly so – a disproportionate share of the leadership positions in corporations, the labor movement, and those professions that shape public discourse. Starting in the 1980s, the ascendancy of Jewish neoconservatives – together with their think tanks – gave American Jews an equally influential voice in conservative circles. Certainly, the weight of Jewish neoconservative opinion during the early years of President Bush – both inside and outside his administration – has been second to that of none. The substantial Jewish presence in the leadership circles of the other pressure groups undermines Chomsky’s contention that the pro-Israeli group is “far broader” than the American Jewish community.

There is a second problem with Chomsky’s argument. Implicitly, he assumes that the different pro-Israeli groups have existed, acted and evolved independently of each other; alternatively, the impact of the lobbying efforts of these groups is merely additive. This ignores the galvanizing role that Jewish organizations have played in mobilizing Gentile opinion behind the Zionist project. The activism of the American Jews – as individuals and groups – has operated at several levels. Certainly, the leaders of the Zionist movement have directed a large part of their energies to lobbying at the highest levels of official decision-making. At the same time, they have created, and they orchestrate, a layered network of Zionist organizations who have worked very hard to create support for their aims in the broader American civil society.

American Jews have worked through several channels to influence civil society. As growing numbers of American Jews embraced Zionist goals during the 1940s, as their commitment to Zionism deepened, this forced the largest Jewish organizations to embrace Zionist goals. In addition, since their earliest days, the Zionists have created the organizations, allies, networks and ideas that would translate into media, congressional and presidential support for the Zionist project. In addition, since Jewish Americans made up a growing fraction of the activists and leaders in various branches of civil society – the labor, civil rights and feminist movements – it was natural that the major organs of civil society came to embrace Zionist aims. It makes little sense, then, to maintain that the pro-Israeli positions of mainstream American organizations had emerged independently of the activism of the American Jewish community.

Does our contention fail in the case of the Christian Evangelicals because of the absence of Jews in their ranks? In this case, the movement has received the strongest impetus from the in-gathering of Jews that has proceeded in Israel since the late nineteenth century. The dispensationalist stream within Protestant Christians in the United States – who believe that the in-gathering of Jews in Israel will precede the Second Coming – has been energized by every Zionist success on the ground. They have viewed these successes – the launching of Zionism, the Balfour Declaration, the creation of Israel, the capture of Jerusalem, ‘Judea’ and ‘Samaria’ in 1967 – as so many confirmations of their dispensationalist eschatology. The movement expanded with every Zionist victory. At the same time, it would be utterly naïve to rule out direct relations between the Zionists and the leaders of the evangelical movement. The Zionists have rarely shrunk from accepting support even when it has come from groups with unedifying beliefs.

Noam Chomsky raises a second objection against the ability of the Jewish lobby to influence policy on its own steam. “No pressure group,” he maintains, “will dominate access to public opinion or maintain consistent influence over policy-making unless its aims are close to those of elite elements with real power [emphases added].”⁵ One problem with this argument is easily stated. It pits the Jewish lobby as one “pressure group” – amongst many – arrayed against all the others that hold the real power. This equation of the Jewish lobby with a narrowly defined “pressure group” is misleading. We have argued – a position that is well supported by the evidence – that Jewish protagonists of Zionism have worked through many different channels to influence public opinion, the composition of political classes, and political decisions. They work through the organs that shape public opinion to determine what Americans know about Israel, how they think about Israel, and what they can say about it. This is no little Cuban lobby, Polish lobby or Korean lobby. Once we recognize the scale of financial resources the Jewish lobby commands, the array of political forces it can mobilize, and the tools it commands to direct public opinion on the Middle East, we would shrink from calling it a lobby.

Chomsky quickly proceeds to undermine his own argument about “elite elements with real power.” He explains that the “[elite] elements are not uniform in interests or (in the case of shared interests) in tactical judgments; and on some issues, such as this one [policy towards Israel], they have often been divided.”⁶ Yet, despite the differences in their interests, their tactics, and their divisions, Chomsky maintains that these “elite elements” have “real power.” Oddly, these “divided” elites – whoever they are – exercise the power of veto over the multi-faceted Jewish lobby with its deep pockets, hierarchical organizations, and influence over key organs of civil society, campaign contributions, popular votes, etc.

Chomsky’s argument shifts again – a second time in the same paragraph – away from “elite elements” to “America’s changing conceptions of its political-strategic interests” in the Middle East.⁶ This suggests a new theory of the chief determinant of US policy towards Israel. At the heart of these “political-strategic interests” is the oil wealth of the Middle East – and the twin threats to American control over this oil wealth from Arab nationalists and the Soviets. Presumably, Israel protects these “political-strategic interests” by holding the Arabs and the Soviets at bay. Chomsky conveniently forgets that the Arab nationalist threat to US interests in the Middle East was – in large part – the product of Israel’s insertion into the region, its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and its aggressive posture towards Arabs since its creation. It is unnecessary to account for the Soviet threat, since they entered the region on the back of Arab nationalist discontent. Indeed, had Israel never been created, it is more than likely that all the states in the Middle East – just like Turkey and Pakistan – would have remained firmly within the Western sphere of influence.

In another attempt to convince his readers that oil has driven US policy towards the Middle East, Chomsky claims that the United States was “committed to win and keep this prize [Saudi oil].” Presumably, the United States could not keep this “prize” without help from Israel.

This argument fails because it ignores history. Starting in 1933, American oil corporations – who later merged to form Aramco – gained exclusive rights to explore, produce and market Saudi oil. Saudi Arabia first acquired a 25 percent ownership stake in Aramco in 1973. Had there emerged an Arab nationalist threat to US control over Saudi oil in the 1950s – in the absence of Israel – the United States could have handled it by establishing one or more military bases in Saudi Arabia or, preferably, in one of the Emirates, since American military presence in Saudi Arabia might inflame Islamic sentiments. Far from helping entrench American control of Saudi oil, Israel, by radicalizing Arab nationalism, gave Saudi Arabia the excuse to first gain a 25 percent stake in Aramco and then nationalize it in 1988.

Chomsky claims that the United States was committed to winning and keeping the “stupendous” oil prize. This claim is not supported by the results that America’s Middle Eastern policy has produced on the ground over the years. If the United States was indeed committed to this goal, it would have pursued a Middle East policy that could be expected to maximize – with the lowest risks of failure – the access of US oil corporations to exploration, production and distribution rights over oil in this region. This is not the case.

In creating, aiding and arming Israel, the United States has followed a policy that could easily have been foreseen to produce, as it did produce, exactly the opposite effects. It gave a boost to Arab nationalism, radicalized it, and led within a few years to the Arab nationalist takeover of three of the four key states in the Arab world. In turn, this contributed to the nationalization of oil wealth even in those Arab countries that remained clients of the United States, not to speak of countries that were taken over by Arab nationalists , who excluded the US oil corporations from this industry altogether. In addition, America’s Middle Eastern policy converted the Middle East into a leading arena of wars. It also became a source of deep tensions between the US and the Soviets, since US partisanship of Israel forced the Arab nationalist regimes to ally themselves with the Soviet Union. In the October War of 1973, the United States provoked the Arab nations – because of its decision to re-supply the Israeli army during the war – to impose a costly oil embargo against the United States. In opposition to the pleadings of its oil corporations, the United States has also prevented them from doing business with three oil-producing nations in the Middle East – Iran, Iraq and Libya.⁷

If oil had been driving America’s Middle East policy, we should have seen the fingerprints of the oil lobby all over this policy. In recent decades, according to Mearsheimer and Walt, the oil lobby has directed its efforts “almost entirely on their commercial interests rather than on broader aspects of foreign policy.” They focus most of their lobbying efforts on getting the best deals on tax policies, government regulations, drilling rights, etc. Even the AIPAC bears witness to this. In the early 1980s, Morris J. Amitay, former executive director of AIPAC, noted, “We rarely see them [oil corporations] lobbying on foreign policy issues…In a sense, we have the field to ourselves.”⁸

Why does it matter whether it is oil or the Jewish lobby that determines US policy towards Israel and the Middle East?

The answer to this question has important consequences. It will determine who is in charge, and, therefore, who should be targeted by people who oppose Israel’s war mongering and its destruction of Palestinian society. If US policy is driven by America’s strategic interests – and Israel is a strategic US asset – opposing this policy will not be easy. If Israel keeps the oil flowing, keeps it cheap, and keeps down the Arabs and Islamists – all this for a few billion dollars a year – that is a bargain. In this case, opponents of this policy face an uphill task. Sure, they can document the immoral consequences of this policy – as Noam Chomsky and others do. Such moral arguments, however, will not cut much ice. What are the chances that Americans can be persuaded to sacrifice their “stupendous prize” because it kills a few tens of thousands of Arabs?

On the other hand, if the Jewish lobby drives US policy towards the Middle East, there is some room for optimism. Most importantly, the opponents of this policy have to dethrone the reigning paradigm, which claims that Israel is a strategic asset. In addition, it is necessary to focus attention on each element of the real costs – economic, political and moral – that Israel imposes on the United States. Winning these intellectual arguments will be half the battle won; this will persuade growing numbers of Americans to oppose a policy because it hurts them. Simultaneously, those who seek justice for the Palestinians must organize to oppose the power of the Israel lobby and take actions that force Israel to bear the moral, economic and political consequences of its destructive policies in the Middle East.

1. “Virtually every professional in the foreign affairs bureaucracy, including the secretaries of state and war (later, defense) and the joint chiefs of staff, opposed the creation of Israel from the standpoint of US national interests (Rubenberg: 1986, 9-10).”
2. For criticisms of Chomsky, see James Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2006): 168-81; and Jeff Blankfort, “Damage control: Noam Chomsky and the Israeli-Palestine conflict.”
3. This assessment comes from a 1945 report of the State Department (Chomsky: 1999, 17).
4. Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: 13.
5. Noam Chomsky, Fateful triangle: 17.
6. Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: 17.
7. Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006): 143.
8. Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby: 145.

The interview I conducted with its chief executive, Jeroen van der Veer, broadcast on The Guardian’s website yesterday, contains what appears to be an interesting admission. I asked him whether Shell had now stopped producing ads extolling its investments in renewable energy. Mr van der Veer does not express himself clearly at this point, but he seems to admit that his company’s previous advertising was not honest. “If we are very big in oil and gas and we are so far relatively small in alternative energies, if you then every day only make adverts about your alternative energies and not about 90% of your other activities I don’t think that — then I say transparency, honesty to the market, that’s nonsense.” So, I asked, Shell did not intend to return to that kind of advertising? “Probably not,” he told me. “I’m very much keep your feet on the ground, tell them who you are and explain why you are who you are.”

But since the interview was filmed, Shell’s messianic tendencies appear to have resurfaced. In December the company ran a series of ads in The Guardian suggesting again that it had come to save the world. “Tackling climate change and providing fuel for a growing population seems like an impossible problem, but at Shell we try to think creatively,” one of these advertisements boasts³. It features a diagram of a human brain, divided into sections labeled “fuel from algae,” “fuel from straw,” “fuel from woodchips,” “hydrogen fuels,” “windfarm,” “gas to liquids” and “coal gasification.” This suggests progress of a kind, in that the company is acknowledging that it sometimes dabbles in fossil fuels, but its core business — oil — and its massive investments in tar sands are missing from the corporate mind. Could Shell be having a senior moment?

The confusion deepens when you watch its latest publicity film. It’s called “Clearing the Air,” and it does just the opposite. It is supposed to tell an inspirational tale of discovery, but the script and the acting are so gobsmackingly bad that it inspires you only to rip your clothes off and run screaming down the street. The lasting impression it leaves is that Shell’s staff is chaotic and incompetent. Perhaps the clean-cut corporate clones featured in the ads of 2006 put people off.

Mr. van der Veer is neither an incompetent nor an automaton. He is charming, friendly and smart. But he refused to answer some of the questions I had prepared.

Reading Shell’s reports and publicity material, I kept stumbling on an absence. In 2000, the company boasted that it would be investing $1 billion dollars in renewable energy between 2001 and 2005. But since then it appears to have produced no figures for its renewables budget. The company now claims that “we’re investing significantly in wind energy”, but it doesn’t say what significantly means. Of the ten wind farms listed on its website, only one appears to be in the planning or development stage: the others are already in operation. Where is the evidence of new money? When Shell pulled out of Britain’s biggest windfarm, the London Array, last year, did this represent the end of its major investments?

I asked Mr. van der Veer a simple question — fifteen times. (Only a few of these attempts feature in the edited film). “What is the value of your annual investments in renewable energy?” He waffled, changed the subject, admitted that he knew the figure, then flatly refused to reveal it. Nor could he give me a convincing explanation of why he wouldn’t tell me, claiming only that, “those figures are misused and people say it is too small” and it “is not the right message to give to the people.” It strikes me that there is only one likely reason for these evasions: that Shell’s spending on renewables has fallen sharply from the figure it announced in 2000. It’s a fair guess that the current investment would look microscopic by comparison to its spending on the Canadian tar sands, and would make a mockery of its new round of advertising. I challenge Shell — for the 16th time — to prove me wrong.

Nor would Mr. van der Veer give me a straight answer to another straight question: “is there any investment you would not make on ethical grounds?” I asked this six times. He was unable to furnish me with an example. It’s not hard to see why. As well as exploiting the tar sands, which means destroying forest and wetlands, polluting great quantities of water and producing more CO2 than conventional petroleum, Shell is still flaring gas in Nigeria, at great cost to both local people and the global climate. It has been fiercely criticized for its secret negotiations with the Iraqi government, which led last year to the first major access for a western company to Iraq’s gas reserves⁴. It is prospecting for oil in some of the Arctic’s most sensitive habitats. All this makes my question difficult to answer. Aside from the greenwash, it is not easy to spot the practical difference between this civilized, progressive company and the Neanderthals at Exxon.

Like all oil companies, Shell simply follows the opportunities. Shut out of the richest fields by state companies, struggling to extract the dregs from its declining reserves, it has been turning to ever more difficult oil, some of which lies beneath rare and fragile ecosystems. When the price of oil was high, it announced massive investments in the tar sands. Now that the price has dropped again, it has canceled further spending⁵. It has even less of an incentive to invest in renewables. Shell does what the market demands.

I don’t blame Shell or van der Veer for this: they are discharging their duty to their shareholders. I do blame them for creating the impression that the company has a different agenda, and I blame governments for allowing them to drift into whatever fields they find profitable, regardless of the consequences for people or the environment.

On this issue Jeroen van der Veer and I agree. Oil companies, he says, should not seek to determine a country’s energy mix: that is for the government to decide. Saving the biosphere, in other words, cannot be left to goodwill and greenwash: the humanity of pleasant men like van der Veer will always be swept aside by the imperative to maximize returns. Good people in these circumstances do terrible things. Companies like Shell will pour big money into alternative energy only when more lucrative or immediate opportunities are blocked. Where is the government that is brave enough to block them?

1. The three examples I have in my files are: Shell, 30th May 2006. “The world wants more energy, the planet wants less pollution.” Page 10, Financial Times; Shell, 29th April 2006. “One energy company is going further to make hydrogen a reality.” New Scientist; Shell, 22nd May 2006. “How can we produce more energy but lower carbon emissions?” Page 23, New Statesman.
2. ASA, 7th November 2007. Adjudication: Shell Europe Oil Products Ltd; ASA, 13th August 2008. Adjudication: Shell International Ltd.
3. Shell, 20th December 2008. “In the New Energy Future, if it doesn’t exist we’ll need to invent it.” Page 21, The Guardian.
4. eg Terry Macalister, 24th September 2008. “Shell’s $4bn Iraq breakthrough could boost Britain’s natural gas supplies.” The Guardian.
5. Kristen Hays, 13th December 2008. “Petroleum companies delay expansion, new projects.” Houston Chronicle.

The Pentagon pushes hard for a large increase in troops for Afghanistan. Barack Obama has been calling for the same since well before the November election. Listen to the drumbeats telling us that the security of the United States and the Free World necessitates increased action in this place called Afghanistan. As urgent as Iraq 2003, it is. Why? What is there about this backward, reactionary, woman-hating, failed state that warrants hundreds of deaths of American and NATO soldiers? That justifies tens of thousands of Afghan deaths since the first US bombing attacks in October 2001?

In early December, reports the Washington Post, “standing at Kandahar Air Field in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said the United States is making a ’sustained commitment’ to that country, one that will last ’some protracted period of time’.” The story goes on to discuss $300 million in construction projects at this one base to house additional American forces, erecting guard stations and towers and perimeter fencing around the barracks area, putting in vehicle inspection areas, administration offices, cold-storage warehouse, a new power plant, electrical and water distribution systems, communications lines, housing for 1,500 personnel who sustain the systems, maintenance shops, warehouses¹ … America’s wealth bleeds out endlessly.

Back in April Maj. Gen. David Rodriguez, commander of the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, when asked how long it would take to create “lasting stability” in Afghanistan, replied: “In some way, shape or form … I think it’s a generation.”² “Stability”, it should be noted, is a code word used regularly by the United States since at least the 1950s to mean that the regime in power is willing and able to behave the way Washington would like it to behave. It is remarkable, and scary, to read the US military writing about how it goes around the world bringing “stability” to (often ungrateful) people. This past October the Army published a manual called “Stability Operations.” It discusses numerous American interventions all over the world since the 1890s, one example after another of bringing “stability” to benighted peoples. One can picture the young American service members reading it, or having it fed to them in lectures, full of pride to be a member of such an altruistic fighting force.

For those members of the US military in Afghanistan the most enlightening lesson they could receive is that their government’s plans for that land of sadness have little or nothing to do with the welfare of the Afghan people. In the late 1970s through much of the 1980s, the country had a government that was relatively progressive, with full rights for women; even a Pentagon report of the time testified to the actuality of women’s rights in the country.³ And what happened to that government? The United States was instrumental in overthrowing it. It was replaced by the Taliban.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, US oil companies have been vying with Russia, Iran and other energy interests for the massive, untapped oil and natural gas reserves in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. The building and protection of oil and gas pipelines in Afghanistan, to continue farther to Pakistan, India, and elsewhere, has been a key objective of US policy since before the 2001 American invasion and occupation of the country, although the subsequent turmoil there has presented serious obstacles to such plans. A planned Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline has strong support from Washington because, amongst other reasons, the US is eager to block a competing pipeline that would bring gas to Pakistan and India from Iran.⁴ But security for such projects remains daunting, and that’s where the US and NATO forces come in to play.

In the late 1990s, the American oil company, Unocal, met with Taliban officials in Texas to discuss the pipelines.⁵ Zalmay Khalilzad, later chosen to be the US ambassador to Afghanistan, worked for Unocal;⁶ Hamid Karzai, later chosen by Washington to be the Afghan president, also reportedly worked for Unocal, although the company denies this. Unocal’s talks with the Taliban, conducted with the full knowledge of the Clinton administration, and undeterred by the extreme repression of Taliban society, continued as late as 2000 or 2001.

As for NATO, it has no reason to be fighting in Afghanistan. Indeed, NATO has no legitimate reason for existence at all. Their biggest fear is that “failure” in Afghanistan would make this thought more present in the world’s mind. If NATO hadn’t begun to intervene outside of Europe it would have highlighted its uselessness and lack of mission. “Out of area or out of business” it was said.

In June, the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives published a report saying Taliban and insurgent activity against the US-NATO presence in Kandahar province puts the feasibility of the pipeline project in doubt. The report says southern regions in Afghanistan, including Kandahar, would have to be cleared of insurgent activity and land mines in two years to meet construction and investment schedules.

“Nobody is going to start putting pipe in the ground unless they are satisfied that there is some reasonable insurance that the workers for the pipeline are going to be safe,” said Howard Brown, the Canadian representative for the Asian Development Bank, the major funding agency for the pipeline.⁷

If Americans were asked what they think their country is doing in Afghanistan, their answers would likely be one variation or another of “fighting terrorism”, with some kind of connection to 9-11. But what does that mean? Of the tens of thousands of Afghans killed by American/NATO bombs over the course of seven years, how many can it be said had any kind of linkage to any kind of anti-American terrorist act, other than in Afghanistan itself during this period? Not one, as far as we know. The so-called “terrorist training camps” in Afghanistan were set up largely by the Taliban to provide fighters for their civil conflict with the Northern Alliance (minimally less religious fanatics and misogynists than the Taliban, but represented in the present Afghan government). As everyone knows, none of the alleged 9-11 hijackers was an Afghan; 15 of the 19 were from Saudi Arabia; and most of the planning for the attacks appears to have been carried out in Germany and the United States. So, of course, bomb Afghanistan. And keep bombing Afghanistan. And bomb Pakistan. Especially wedding parties (at least six so far).

Israel and Palestine, again, forever

Nothing changes. Including what I have to say on the matter. To prove my point, I’m repeating part of what I wrote in this report in July 2006 …

There are times when I think this tired old world has gone on a few years too long. What’s happening in the Middle East is so depressing. Most discussions of the everlasting Israel-Palestine conflict are variations on the child’s eternal defense for misbehavior — “He started it!” Within two minutes of discussing/arguing the latest manifestation of the conflict the participants are back to 1967, then 1948, then biblical times. Instead of getting entangled in who started the current mess, I’d prefer to express what I see as two essential underlying facts of life which remain from one conflict to the next:

1) Israel’s existence is not at stake and hasn’t been so for decades, if it ever was, regardless of the many de rigueur militant statements by Middle East leaders over the years. If Israel would learn to deal with its neighbors in a non-expansionist, non-military, humane, and respectful manner, engage in full prisoner exchanges, and sincerely strive for a viable two-state (if not one-state) solution, even those who are opposed to the idea of a state based on a particular religion could accept the state of Israel, and the question of its right to exist would scarcely arise in people’s minds. But as it is, Israel still uses the issue as a justification for its behavior, as Jews all over the world use the Holocaust and conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

2) In a conflict between a thousand-pound gorilla and a mouse, it’s the gorilla who has to make concessions in order for the two sides to progress to the next level. What can the Palestinians offer in the way of concession? Israel would reply to that question: “No violent attacks of any kind.” But that would leave the status quo ante bellum — a life of unmitigated misery for the occupied, captive Palestinian people, confined to the world’s largest open air concentration camp.

It is a wanton act of collective punishment that is depriving the Palestinians of food, electricity, water, money, access to the outside world … and sleep. Israel has been sending jets flying over Gaza at night triggering sonic booms, traumatizing children. “I want nobody to sleep at night in Gaza,” declared Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert,⁸ words suitable for Israel’s tombstone.

Israel has created its worst enemies — they helped create Hamas as a counterweight to Fatah in Palestine, and their occupation of Lebanon created Hezbollah. The current terrible bombings can be expected to keep the process going. Since its very beginning, Israel has been almost continually engaged in fighting wars and taking other people’s lands. Did not any better way ever occur to the idealistic Zionist pioneers?

The question that may never go away: Who really is Barack Obama?

In his autobiography, Dreams From My Fathers, Barack Obama writes of taking a job at some point after graduating from Columbia University in 1983. He describes his employer as “a consulting house to multinational corporations” in New York City, and his functions as a “research assistant” and “financial writer”.

The odd part of Obama’s story is that he doesn’t mention the name of his employer. However, a New York Times story of 2007 identifies the company as Business International Corporation.⁹ Equally odd is that the Times did not remind its readers that the newspaper itself had disclosed in 1977 that Business International had provided cover for four CIA employees in various countries between 1955 and 1960.¹⁰

The British journal, Lobster Magazine — which, despite its incongruous name, is a venerable international publication on intelligence matters — has reported that Business International was active in the 1980s promoting the candidacy of Washington-favored candidates in Australia and Fiji.¹¹ In 1987, the CIA overthrew the Fiji government after but one month in office because of its policy of maintaining the island as a nuclear-free zone, meaning that American nuclear-powered or nuclear-weapons-carrying ships could not make port calls.¹² After the Fiji coup, the candidate supported by Business International, who was much more amenable to Washington’s nuclear desires, was reinstated to power — R.S.K. Mara was Prime Minister or President of Fiji from 1970 to 2000, except for the one-month break in 1987.

In his book, not only doesn’t Obama mention his employer’s name; he fails to say when he worked there, or why he left the job. There may well be no significance to these omissions, but inasmuch as Business International has a long association with the world of intelligence, covert actions, and attempts to penetrate the radical left — including Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)¹³ — it’s valid to wonder if the inscrutable Mr. Obama is concealing something about his own association with this world.

On socialist Cuba’s 50th anniversary, January 1, 2009: Notes on the beginning of its unforgivable revolution.

The existence of a revolutionary socialist government with growing ties to the Soviet Union only 90 miles away, insisted the United States government, was a situation which no self-respecting superpower should tolerate, and in 1961 it undertook an invasion of Cuba.

But less than 50 miles from the Soviet Union sat Pakistan, a close ally of the United States, a member since 1955 of the South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), the US-created anti-communist alliance. On the very border of the Soviet Union was Iran, an even closer ally of the United States, with its relentless electronic listening posts, aerial surveillance, and infiltration into Russian territory by American agents. And alongside Iran, also bordering the Soviet Union, was Turkey, a member of the Russians’ mortal enemy, NATO, since 1951.

In 1962 during the “Cuban Missile Crisis”, Washington, seemingly in a state of near-panic, informed the world that the Russians were installing “offensive” missiles in Cuba. The US promptly instituted a “quarantine” of the island — a powerful show of naval and marine forces in the Caribbean would stop and search all vessels heading towards Cuba; any found to contain military cargo would be forced to turn back.

The United States, however, had missiles and bomber bases already in place in Turkey and other missiles in Western Europe pointed toward the Soviet Union. Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev later wrote:

The Americans had surrounded our country with military bases and threatened us with nuclear weapons, and now they would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you; we’d be doing nothing more than giving them a little of their own medicine. … After all, the United States had no moral or legal quarrel with us. We hadn’t given the Cubans anything more than the Americans were giving to their allies. We had the same rights and opportunities as the Americans. Our conduct in the international arena was governed by the same rules and limits as the Americans.¹⁴

Lest anyone misunderstand, as Khrushchev apparently did, the rules under which Washington was operating, Time magazine was quick to explain. “On the part of the Communists,” the magazine declared, “this equating [referring to Khrushchev's offer to mutually remove missiles and bombers from Cuba and Turkey] had obvious tactical motives. On the part of neutralists and pacifists [who welcomed Khrushchev's offer] it betrayed intellectual and moral confusion.” The confusion lay, it seems, in not seeing clearly who were the good guys and who were the bad guys, for “The purpose of the U.S. bases [in Turkey] was not to blackmail Russia but to strengthen the defense system of NATO, which had been created as a safeguard against Russian aggression. As a member of NATO, Turkey welcomed the bases as a contribution to her own defense.” Cuba, which had been invaded only the year before, could have, it seems, no such concern. Time continued its sermon, which undoubtedly spoke for most Americans:

“Beyond these differences between the two cases, there is an enormous moral difference between U.S. and Russian objectives … To equate U.S. and Russian bases is in effect to equate U.S. and Russian purposes … The U.S. bases, such as those in Turkey, have helped keep the peace since World War II, while the Russian bases in Cuba threatened to upset the peace. The Russian bases were intended to further conquest and domination, while U.S. bases were erected to preserve freedom. The difference should have been obvious to all.”¹⁵

Equally obvious was the right of the United States to maintain a military base on Cuban soil — Guantanamo Naval Base by name, a vestige of colonialism staring down the throats of the Cuban people, which the US, to this day, refuses to vacate despite the vehement protest of the Castro government.

In the American lexicon, in addition to good and bad bases and missiles, there are good and bad revolutions. The American and French Revolutions were good. The Cuban Revolution is bad. It must be bad because so many people have left Cuba as a result of it.

But at least 100,000 people left the British colonies in America during and after the American Revolution. These Tories could not abide by the political and social changes, both actual and feared, particularly that change which attends all revolutions worthy of the name — Those looked down upon as inferiors no longer know their place. (Or as the US Secretary of State put it after the Russian Revolution: The Bolsheviks sought “to make the ignorant and incapable mass of humanity dominant in the earth.”¹⁶)

The Tories fled to Nova Scotia and Britain carrying tales of the godless, dissolute, barbaric American revolutionaries. Those who remained and refused to take an oath of allegiance to the new state governments were denied virtually all civil liberties. Many were jailed, murdered, or forced into exile. After the American Civil War, thousands more fled to South America and other points, again disturbed by the social upheaval. How much more is such an exodus to be expected following the Cuban Revolution? — a true social revolution, giving rise to changes much more profound than anything in the American experience. How many more would have left the United States if 90 miles away lay the world’s wealthiest nation welcoming their residence and promising all manner of benefits and rewards?

1. Washington Post, December 25, 2008.
2. Reuters, April 29, 2008.
3. U.S. Department of the Army, Afghanistan, A Country Study (1986), pp.121, 128, 130, 134, 136, 223, 232-3.
4. Globe & Mail (Toronto), June 19, 2008.
5. BBC News, December 4, 1997, “Taleban [sic] in Texas for talks on gas pipeline.”
6. Washington Post, November 23, 2001.
7. United Press International, July 17, 2008.
8. Associated Press, July 3, 2006.
9. New York Times, October 30, 2007.
10. New York Times, December 27, 1977, p.40.
11. Lobster Magazine, Hull, UK, #14, November 1987.
12. William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, pp.199-200.
13. Carl Oglesby, Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement (2008), passim.
14. Khrushchev Remembers (1971) pp.494, 496.
15. Time magazine, November 2, 1962.
16. Cited by William Appleman Williams, “American Intervention in Russia: 1917-20″, in David Horowitz, ed., “Containment and Revolution” (1967). Written in a letter to President Woodrow Wilson by Secretary of State Robert Lansing, uncle of John Foster and Allen Dulles.

Obama, who has enthused about refocusing the War on Terror back on Afghanistan, is likely to accede to the admiral’s request. There are at present under NATO command approximately 31,000 non-U.S. troops within the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) fighting the Taliban and other “insurgents” in Afghanistan. (80% of these are from from the UK, Germany, France, Canada, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Australia, and Turkey.) Popular opinion in most of those countries runs high against continued deployment; in Australia it is of course sold as an obligation of NATO membership.

Add to these the redoubled U.S. force and we’ll have a have a robust occupation army of 93,000 foreigners. With the exception of Albania and Azerbaijan, which have sent only small contingents, all participating nations are historically Christian, encouraging the Afghan perception that their Muslim nation is under infidel attack. In the 1980s, the Mujahadeen encouraged by the Reagan administration viewed the Soviet-backed secular regime as an assault on their religion and way of life; Soviet troops peaking at over 100,000 in 1987, with the advantage of supply lines from the immediately neighboring USSR, and including numerous ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks who could speak local languages and had some understanding of local culture, could not repress the rag-tag CIA-supplied guerrillas and secure control of the country.

Nor, as Michael Beardon warned in his prescient article in Foreign Affairs in November 2001, entitled “Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires,” could an honor roll of would-be conquerers from Alexander the Great in the third century BCE to the British in the nineteenth century defeat the hardy, fiercely independent Afghan tribesmen.

Beardon citing Louis Dupree, the premier historian of Afghanistan, attributed the “British disaster” of 1878-81 to four “mistakes”: the occupation of Afghan territory by foreign troops, the placing of an unpopular ruler in power, harsh acts committed against local enemies, and paltry subsidies paid to local allies. “The United States would be wise to consider them today,” he concluded. Again, Beardon was writing just as the U.S. was beginning its adventure in Afghanistan, and when the war in Iraq based on lies was still a twinkle in Dick Cheney’s eye.

Does Obama, often described as lacking knowledge of foreign affairs, and praised (by all the wrong people) for reaching out to (all the wrong) “experienced” foreign policy wonks, really believe that he can succeed in Afghanistan where so many others have failed?

Here perhaps we find the audacity of sheer historical ignorance. The audacity of hope that “Yes, we can”–with a center-right Democratic administration, better than a far-right Republican administration–sufficiently stabilize Afghanistan to achieve the primary U.S. (imperialist) objectives in the region.

Obama seems to believe that the U.S. can defeat those resisting the foreign presence and its local allies, stabilize the thoroughly corrupt Northern Alliance warlord regime with Hamid Karzai as its symbolic head, and stem the flow of Taliban back and forth across the Pakistan border. Most importantly, it can finally get that oil pipeline done–the one that’s to run from the Caspian Sea through Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, Pakistan and India to the Indian Ocean bypassing Russia and unfriendly Iran. The deal was signed in December 2002 but construction has been stymied by the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. That pipeline is, I believe, the big prize.

The war on Iraq has been in my opinion less “a war for oil” actually promoted by Big Oil than a war engineered by neoconservative ideologues to reconfigure Southwest Asia for long-term U.S. and Israeli geopolitical advantage. But it’s, in fact, been disastrous for the interests of U.S. imperialism, and bitterly divided the ruling class. It’s produced the highly unusual situation where one faction of that class has bet its money on an African-American named Barack Hussein Osama (accused of “socialism” by his right wing critics) to rectify the situation. While I don’t expect a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq under what will in fact be a center-right administration, the focus will be on the competition for control over Central Asian oil and gas. That means a degree of control over Afghanistan that has eluded Washington since the invasion of 2001.

In the view of the faction of hawks Obama represents, the Iraq War has been a colossal distraction from the Afghan War. The problem isn’t just that Bush diverted troops to Iraq “before we got bin Laden” or wiped out all the remnants of al-Qaeda, a group notoriously difficult to quantify or even define. The problem is that he used 9-11 for one purpose rather than another. He used the toppling of the Taliban to seque into Iraq rather than to rigorously pursue the agenda for U.S. hegemony over Central Asia centering around control of Caspian Sea oil and gas.

Obama presumably wants to go back in in force and do Afghanistan properly. That doesn’t necessarily mean wiping out the Taliban mentality that (say) requires women to wear burqas (that mentality is, after all, pre-Taliban and not so different from the mentality prevalent in societies such as Saudi Arabia whose governments are pro-U.S.). The U.S. and ISAF don’t need to produce a social revolution to maintain permanent bases (encircling China) or to construct and protect a pipeline providing privileged access to oil and natural gas. All they need to do is maintaining a puppet regime with minimal authority and establish a sufficient level of stability to attain such objectives.

But even that is proving a highly difficult undertaking. Thus Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, British ambassador to Afghanistan, reportedly told the duputy French ambassador to Kabul François Fitou in September 2008, “The foreign forces are ensuring the survival of a regime which would collapse without them … They are slowing down and complicating an eventual exit from the crisis, which will probably be dramatic… In the short term we should dissuade the American presidential candidates from getting more bogged down in Afghanistan … The American strategy is doomed to fail.” These are observations by a top diplomat of the nation most deeply invested alongside the U.S. in the Afghan War. He proposed replacing president Karzai with “an acceptable dictator.” The top British military commander in Afghanistan agrees; Brig. Mark Carleton-Smith stated in October, “We’re not going to win this war.”

Karzai himself has repeatedly protested the high civilian casualty rate as a result of U.S. bombing; has called for negotations with the Taliban for an end to the insurgency, even (over U.S. objections) agreeing to insure Mullah Omar a safe-conduct should he agree to participate in talks in the country; and (although this has attracted little press attention) called for a firm deadline for foreign troops’ withdrawal. “This war has gone on for seven years;” he observed in a statement last month, “the Afghans don’t understand any more how come a little force like the Taliban can continue to exist, can continue to flourish, can continue to launch attacks.”

While the supposedly sovereign leader of Afghanistan–this puppet who seems to chafe at his puppet role–is talking like this, Obama and what will soon be his generals are planning a drastic increase in foreign forces with no deadline for their withdrawal. (By the way: Afghanistan is scheduled to hold a presidential election in October 2009, and Afghan-American neocon politician Zalmay Khalilzad, one-time UNOCAL executive, Afghan kingmaker in 2002, former ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the UN, may well be a candidate.)

Obama wants to “finish the job” in Afghanistan, a real war for oil in the guise of “the war on terror.” The unfinished job’s been easy so far, requiring only 629 U.S. troops’ lives (up 154 so far this year from 117 in 2007, 98 in 2006), and an additional 410 lives of allied troops. But the blood and treasure spilt in Afghanistan was a key factor in the collapse of the once-mighty Soviet Union. As Obama orders his troops into that graveyard, how will the empire, reeling from crises unprecedented in many decades, respond? As the candidate of change and hope becomes the commander in chief of an escalating expanding war, how will his antiwar supporters rethink their politics?

If you ask, it always produces the same response: “global oil resources are adequate for the foreseeable future.”¹ It knows this, it says, because of the assessments made by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its World Energy Outlook reports. In the 2007 report, the IEA does appear to support the government’s view. “World oil resources,” it states, “are judged to be sufficient to meet the projected growth in demand to 2030″²; though it says nothing about what happens at that point, or whether they will continue to be sufficient after 2030. But this, as far as Whitehall is concerned, is the end of the matter. Like most of the rich world’s governments, the United Kingdom treats the IEA’s projections as gospel. Earlier this year, I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the UK’s Department for Business, asking what contingency plans the government has made for global supplies of oil peaking by 2020. The answer was as follows: “the Government does not feel the need to hold contingency plans specifically for the eventuality of crude oil supplies peaking between now and 2020.”³

So the IEA had better bloody well be right. In the report on peak oil commissioned by the US Department of Energy, the oil analyst Robert L.Hirsch concluded that, “without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political costs” of world oil supplies peaking “will be unprecedented.”⁴ He went on to explain what “timely mitigation” meant. Even a worldwide emergency response “10 years before world oil peaking”, he wrote, would leave “a liquid fuels shortfall roughly a decade after the time that oil would have peaked.”⁵ To avoid global economic collapse, we need to begin “a mitigation crash program 20 years before peaking.”⁶ If Hirsch is right and if oil supplies peak before 2028, we’re in deep doodah.

So burn this into your mind: between 2007 and 2008 the IEA radically changed its assessment. Until this year’s report, the agency mocked people who said that oil supplies might peak. In the foreword to a book it published in 2005, its executive director, Claude Mandil, dismissed those who warned of this event as “doomsayers”. “The IEA has long maintained that none of this is a cause for concern,” he wrote. “Hydrocarbon resources around the world are abundant and will easily fuel the world through its transition to a sustainable energy future.”⁷ In its 2007 World Energy Outlook, the IEA predicted a rate of decline in output from the world’s existing oilfields of 3.7% a year.⁸ This, it said, presented a short-term challenge, with the possibility of a temporary supply crunch in 2015, but with sufficient investment any shortfall could be covered. But the new report, published last month, carried a very different message: a projected rate of decline of 6.7%, which means a much greater gap to fill.⁹

More importantly, in the 2008 report the IEA suggests for the first time that world petroleum supplies might hit the buffers. “Although global oil production in total is not expected to peak before 2030, production of conventional oil … is projected to level off towards the end of the projection period.”¹⁰ These bland words reveal a major shift. Never before has one of the IEA’s energy outlooks forecast the peaking or plateauing of the world’s conventional oil production (which is what we mean when we talk about peak oil).

But that is as specific as the report gets. Does it or doesn’t it mean that we have time to prepare? What does “towards the end of the projection period” mean? The agency has never produced a more precise forecast — until now. For the first time, in the interview I conducted with its chief economist Fatih Birol, it has given us a date. And it should scare the pants off anyone who understands the implications.

Fatih Birol, the lead author of the new energy outlook, is a small, shrewd, unflustered man with thick grey hair and Alistair Darling eyebrows. He explained to me that the agency’s new projections were based on a major study it had undertaken into decline rates in the world’s 800 largest oil fields. So what were its previous figures based on? “It was mainly an assumption, a global assumption about the world’s oil fields. This year, we looked at it country by country, field by field and we looked at it also onshore and offshore. It was very very detailed. Last year it was an assumption, and this year it’s a finding of our study.” I told him that it seemed extraordinary to me that the IEA hadn’t done this work before, but had based its assessment on educated guesswork. “In fact nobody had done this research,” he told me. “This is the first publicly available data.”¹¹

So was it not irresponsible to publish a decline rate of 3.7% in 2007, when there was no proper research supporting it? “No, our previous decline assumptions have always mentioned that these are assumptions to the best of our knowledge – and we also said that the declines [could be] higher than what we have assumed.”

Then I asked him a question for which I didn’t expect a straight answer: could he give me a precise date by which he expects conventional oil supplies to stop growing?

“In terms of non-OPEC [countries outside the big oil producers' cartel]“, he replied, “we are expecting that in three, four years’ time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline. … In terms of the global picture, assuming that OPEC will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well, which is of course not good news from a global oil supply point of view.”

Around 2020. That casts the issue in quite a different light. Mr Birol’s date, if correct, gives us about 11 years to prepare. If the Hirsch report is right, we have already missed the boat. Birol says we need a “global energy revolution” to avoid an oil crunch, including (disastrously for the environment) a massive global drive to exploit unconventional oils, such as the Canadian tar sands. But nothing on this scale has yet happened, and Hirsch suggests that even if it began today, the necessary investments and infrastructure changes could not be made in time. Fatih Birol told me “I think time is not on our side here.”

When I pressed him on the shift in the agency’s position, he argued that the IEA has been saying something like this all along. “We said in the past that one day we will run out of oil. We never said that we will have hundreds of years of oil … but what we have said is that this year, compared to past years, we have seen that the decline rates are significantly higher than what we have seen before. But our line that we are on an unsustainable energy path has not changed”.

This of course is face-saving nonsense. There is a vast difference between a decline rate of 3.7% and a rate of 6.7%. There is an even bigger difference between suggesting that the world is following an unsustainable energy path – a statement almost everyone can subscribe to – and revealing that conventional oil supplies are likely to plateau around 2020. If this is what the IEA meant in the past, it wasn’t expressing itself very clearly.

So what do we do? We could take to the hills, or we could hope and pray that Hirsch is wrong about the 20-year lead time, and begin a global crash programme today of fuel efficiency and electrification. In either case, the British government had better start drawing up some contingency plans.

1. Eg DECC Press Office, 28th October 2008. Statement e-mailed to Duncan Clark at the Guardian newspaper (UK).
2. International Energy Agency, 2007. World Energy Outlook 2007, page 43. IEA, Paris.
3. BERR, 8th April 2008. Response to FoI request, Ref 08/0091.
4. Robert L. Hirsch, Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling, February 2005. Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management. US Department of Energy, page 4.
5. ibid, page 59.
6. ibid, page 65.
7. International Energy Agency, 2005. Resources to Reserves: Oil and Gas Technologies for the Energy Markets of the Future, page 3. IEA, Paris.
8. International Energy Agency, 2007, ibid, page 84.
9. International Energy Agency, 2008. World Energy Outlook 2008, page 43. IEA, Paris.
10. ibid, p103.
11. This interview is broadcast on the Guardian’s (UK) website, December 15, 2008.

The assembly of Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Susan Rice and Joe Biden is a kettle of hawks with a proven track record of support for the Iraq war, intervention, neoliberal economic policies and a world-view consistent with the foreign policy arch that stretches from George HW Bush’s time in office to the present.

– Jeremy Scahill on Obama’s proposed new national security team, 1 Dec. ’08 Guardian UK

Dear Senator Obama:

I’m concerned that you’ve yet to show a grasp of Middle East realities. Nor have you provided a broad critique of US policy in that region beyond your early opposition to the invasion of Iraq. This lapse is dispiriting to we who had hoped your “change” mantra meant you intended to reverse the neo-con drive for global hegemony.

If you do grasp Middle Eastern realities, your choices of advisors and cabinet members suggest that you are aligning yourself with that imperial drive. This is also seen in your determination to expand the US debacle in Afghanistan. Perhaps you fear that opposing the militarism that corrupts us would antagonize the power structure that even now you have begun to lead…or that leads you. Who, one might ask, is co-opting whom?

Your words are ever eloquent, ever civil. You seem to be averse to lying. But you are now enmeshed in a power structure that habitually lies, that knows no other way to speak. It cloaks the reasons the US military occupies Iraq and Afghanistan and keeps the entire Middle East under the gun.

You’ve surely noticed that much of the world’s oil supply is in the Middle East beneath Islamic lands – hence the power structure’s persistent linking of Muslims with “terrorists” (a word invariably left undefined). Your nationalist advisors have by now taught you that US “interests” (also invariably undefined) relate primarily to OIL. “Interests” is code for the US cornering oil reserves and guaranteeing pipelines and shipping lanes – not only for their own sake, but to control the world economy.

Such control, of course, also serves to bring cheap oil home where so many here think it belongs. Thanks to the perpetual greed of US oil and automobile companies, the US is morbidly addicted to oil. Consumer self-indulgence reinforces such addiction. If we haven’t done so already, we will soon pass “peak oil.” Unless the industrial world drastically reduces our over-consumption and switches to renewable energy, it may well tank within the lifetime of your children. Your predecessor failed to understand – or care – that our children will have to live in the toxic and depleted world we bequeath them.

Therefore, with future generations in mind, let me propose several Middle East-related priorities for your presidency:
~ eliminate US dependence on foreign oil (and on coal and nuclear, the other dirty sources of energy). Push energy conservation – the cleanest and most efficient “fuel” of all.
~ comply with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and international law; abolish US nuclear weapons and do so hand in hand with working to abolish nuclear weapons throughout the Middle East…and beyond. While you’re at it, sign the treaty abolishing cluster bombs.
~ repeal the Patriot Acts; abolish torture and extraordinary rendition. As per your promise, immediately close Guantanamo while providing reparation, habeas corpus and other civilian due process to its inmates.
~ outlaw Blackwater-type mercenaries; prosecute US war crimes and do so all the way up the chain of command.

Palestine/Israel

Besides Afghanistan and Iraq, there are other theaters of the Middle East Oil War. Here I’ll only touch on two – Israel and Iran.

Mr Obama, you seem all too comfortable with the pro-Israel tilt in US foreign policy. In your campaign you echoed the boilerplate of US politicians fearful of the make-or-break Israel lobby. Despite the pro-Israel hawks who have your ear, I hope that as Presdent you’ll feel more empowered than you did as a candidate to support the Palestinians whose land the Israelis systematically confiscate.

Years ago I observed that Israel, like its (then) ally white South Africa, was an apartheid settler state. Since that era Israel has kept expanding its illegal settlements and consolidating its apartheid. You hardly acknowledge the Palestinian people and their struggle for justice and against apartheid.

Year after year the US keeps pouring billions of dollars of military aid into Israel. In effect Israel has become the largest military base in the Middle East. It’s a strategic enclave (or “green zone”) artificially wedged into the Islamic world, destabilizing that region and keeping the pot boiling. Israel has one of the most powerful and aggressive military machines on the planet. Its neighbors see that machine as an existential threat.

As long as Israel maintains apartheid, retains its nuclear arsenal, and flouts UN resolutions and international law, you must cut off the military aid that pours oil on the fires of Israel’s intransigence. Otherwise there is little chance of reining in Israel’s expansionism or of achieving an enduring peace in the Middle East.

Iran

I’m no expert on the complex and remarkable land of Iran. Most US policy makers, politicians, generals and citizens know even less about Iran. For example, how many know that this proud nation – unlike certain others – hasn’t invaded another country in centuries?

The 1979 Islamic Revolution deposing the Shah was a pivotal year in US-Iran relations. It began three decades of scant diplomacy between the two nations. But Iranians also recall 1953, an equally pivotal year. That’s when the CIA – trashing international law and Iran’s sovereignty – toppled the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, replacing him with the despotic Shah.

Few here seem to realize that the current President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – despite all the fuss about him – is neither Iran’s most powerful leader nor its commander-in-chief. Such ignorance of a country with one of the world’s largest reserves of oil and gas can get us – and you – into a heap of trouble.

Cheney-Bush have virulently opposed the development of Iran’s nuclear energy. Their menacing words and bellicose actions embody the hubris and double standard of one nation dictating what another nation’s policies should be. After all, the US is the world’s prime developer and major exporter of nuclear technology. This includes deploying and exporting weaponry hardened with toxic and radioactive depleted uranium. The US is the world’s only perpetrator of nuclear holocaust. Since 1945 this bully has continually practiced nuclear blackmail (“All options are on the table.”).

Here many ask: with its vast oil reserves, why does Iran seek to develop nuclear power? Besides prestige, self-defense and deterrence may well be factors. But Iran knows its oil will eventually peter out. Iran seeks to develop nuclear energy in part because it dares not keep all of its energy eggs in one basket. Few here realize that due to US-championed sanctions, Iran’s oil refining capability is stunted – thus forcing Iran even now to import gasoline.

In September a group of peace and justice activists met with Iranian leaders in New York for the opening of the current United Nations session. President Ahmadinejad told us that Iran spends three times as much on developing renewable energy as on nuclear energy. I hope this could be true not only for Iran but for the US.

How Must the US Treat Iran?

With respect.

End the sanctions. Stop the demonizing. Stop the menacing. Pull back the destroyers and the cruise missiles. Stop violating Iran’s sovereignty with clandestine and provocative infiltrations of US Special Forces.

Keep your promise to negotiate. And again, work to abolish nuclear weapons both at home and in the world at large. That just might abort any Iranian drive to join the nuclear club.

Given the current financial collapse and given your predecessor’s eight-year credibility collapse, the days of the US imperium are numbered. So, dismantle the military bases in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. Slash the military budget that squanders the hundreds of billions needed to rebuild our country.

Mr. President-elect, rejoin the community of nations. Restore our honor.