A good summary of geopolitical events of the past century, as
they relate to the struggle to control oil supplies. Also,
some good information about the involvement of major New York
banks in the international drug trade.
This is the third article in a series.
Here are the earlier parts:
Part 1: http://www.hermes-press.com/oilrulers1.htm
Part 2: http://www.hermes-press.com/oilupdate.htm
About the author: http://www.hermes-press.com/ndl1.html
rkm
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http://www.hermes-press.com/impintro1.htm
[ links & graphics in web version ]
The New U.S.-British Oil Imperialism
By Norman D. Livergood
The American and British ruling circles have been engaged in a
policy of military imperialism for several centuries. The
American revolution was fought to bring the United States
under new, non-British rulers, with the new regime sold to the
public as a democracy . In the twentieth century, these
American ruling elites have revolved around the Rockefeller,
Brown, Harriman, and Morgan family dynasties. The Bush
family, beginning with Prescott Bush, have served as satraps
of the Rockefeller, Brown, and Harriman interests .
As we've seen, in earlier articles on these imperialistic
rulers ( Part 1 ,Part 2 ), the British and American ruling
cabal decided that the energy of choice for the world would be
oil and natural gas (not coal)--just as the drugs of choice
would be alcohol and tobacco.
To overcome the problem of his oil holdings being broken apart
by the U.S. government in 1911, John Rockefeller set out to
control the world's energy reserves. World War I was the
strategy of the world oil cartel (Standard, Shell, British
Petroleum) to take over the colonies of France, Holland, Spain
and Portugal. The engines of war now ran on petroleum-based
products, so ownership of oil could determine who won or lost
a war--therefore who would rule the world. Oil, instead of
gold, became the token of power.
By 1919, the Oil Empire, not based on countries or nations,
but on private corporations, ruled the world.
The Big Three oil cartel, which controlled oil in the Persian
Gulf and southeast Asia areas, wanted to gain control over the
vast oil reserves in the southern part of the Soviet Union.
They financed the fascist regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan
with the hope that they would invade and control Russia. The
Oil Rulers planned to defeat the German, Italian, and Japanese
regimes and take control of the oil reserves in the Soviet
Union. The Rockefeller circle also planned to take control of
Persian Gulf oil from the British-Persian Oil cartel and seize
control of southeast Asian oil from Royal Dutch Shell.
The United States was brought into the second world war when
in July 1941, President Roosevelt signed an embargo to stop
all shipping to Japan. This was said to be in retaliation for
the Japanese invasion of French Indo-China. Roosevelt's U.S.
embargo cut off the Japanese oil supply, which would have
quickly shut down Japan's entire economy. In late November
1941 the Japanese sent a written "war warning" through
diplomatic channels to Washington, demanding that the embargo
be stopped, or else American sites in the Pacific would be
attacked in retaliation. That formal diplomatic warning was
ignored and the U.S. made no reply. Just two weeks later the
Japanese bombed the American embargo ships located in Pearl
Harbor.
In 1939 and '40, the Germans and Italians did not attack
Russia as the Big Three had planned. Instead, German General
Rommel rushed across North Africa to grab the Suez Canal and
control all oil shipping through the canal. Rommel then
planned to drive through to Persia and toss out the British
from the British-Persian oil fields. Meanwhile, after a failed
attack on Russia in 1939, the Japanese swept through
Southeast Asia and seized all the oil holdings of Royal Dutch
Shell. With the defeat of Japan in 1945, most of those Royal
Dutch fields came under the control of Rockefeller's Standard
Oil.
Hitler had planned to capture the oil fields in Romania by
1939 so Germany would have its own supply of oil. This was
accomplished. Then Rommel was to have captured the oil fields
in Persia by 1941, the oil fields in Russia in 1942. Only
then would Hitler have sufficient fuel for prosecuting a war
with the United States. But less than a week after the Pearl
Harbor attack, the Japanese convinced Hitler to declare war
on the United States. Hitler agreed only if the Japanese would
attack Russia, since German troops were now bogged down in
Russia and Hitler would gain strategic advantage if the
Russians had to defend themselves from Japan on their eastern
flank. When the Japanese failed to attack Russia, Hitler was
driven out of Russia and now was without a fuel source. The
Romanian oil fields in Ploesti were insufficient for Germany
to carry on a war on two fronts, and Germany's war effort
began to collapse.
The last major German campaign was the Battle of the Bulge, in
which Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt was to attack the
invading allies with his tanks, then capture the Allied fuel
dumps. This would stop the American and British forces and
obtain the necessary fuel for Germany to continue its war
effort. But General Eisenhower ordered the Allied fuel dumps
burned and Germany was defeated.
At the end of World War II, the British-Persian Oil Company
controlled the vast oil fields in Iran. The Persians had
declared their alignment with Adolf Hitler's Nazi "Aryan Race"
movement and were fully expecting German General Rommel to
come rushing across Africa and "free" them from the British.
They had even proclaimed their alignment with Hitler by
changing the name of their country from Persia to "Aryan," (or
"Iran" in the Farsi language), but the Germans failed to save
them.
To take control of Persian Gulf oil from the British, in 1954
Kermit Roosevelt, nephew of Franklin, led an American CIA coup
to take control of Iran and place in power the American-backed
Shah of Iran. The Shah expelled the British, and Rockefeller's
Standard Oil now had control of the British-Persian petroleum
fields.
In the early 1950s, Occidental Petroleum's Armand Hammer, a
satrap of the Rockefellers, negotiated a deal with Russian
dictator Joseph Stalin to buy his oil--thus effectively
stealing it from the Russian people. Russian oil was then
sold on the world market at a much higher price than Stalin
could get by marketing it himself, because few countries were
willing to buy oil from Stalin.
Occidental Petroleum and Russia built two large pipelines,
from the Russian oil fields down along both sides of the
Caspian Sea, terminating in the old British-Persian--now
Standard Oil--oil fields in Iran. For the next 45 years,
Russia secretly sent its oil out through those pipelines and
Standard Oil sold the oil on the world market at the "West
Texas Crude" price by calling it Iranian oil. For almost fifty
yeas most Americans have been using Russian oil in their cars.
Standard Oil refineries, which produce gasoline from crude
oil, are located at large sea ports like San Francisco,
Houston or Los Angeles, not near any of the large American oil
fields. Most oil from the Persian Gulf is shipped in oil
tankers to those large American refinery-ports.
In 1979, the Standard Oil-backed Shah of Iran was thrown out
by a British-backed coup and the long-time British asset,
Ayatollah Khomeni, put into power. The flow of Russian oil
through Iran suddenly stopped. Other oil pipelines were
constructed through Iraq and Turkey. The Russian oil was now
called OPEC Arabian-Middle Eastern oil and marketed at the
even higher "spot market" price. So in 1979, in America and
Europe, we suddenly experienced gasoline shortages and huge
increases in the price of gasoline. Also in 1979 Standard
Oil-Russian oil interests tried to secure an alternate, short,
safe oil pipeline route from Russia through neighboring
Afghanistan, but this only resulted in a prolonged war and the
project was abandoned.
When the new British-controlled regime in Iran came into
power, the Rockefeller-influenced U.S. government immediately
threatened to seize $7.9 billion of Iranian assets located in
the U.S. On November 4, 1979 Iranian "terrorists" captured
and held hostage 65 Americans. Essentially, Standard Oil was
being blackmailed by the hostage strategy. After lengthy
negotiations, the Rockefeller-created President Jimmy Carter
approved the electronic transfer of 7.9 billion dollars from
U.S. accounts to the Iranian regime on January 20, 1981.
On Wednesday January 27, 1988, as announced in the Wall Street
Journal , Standard Oil merged with British Petroleum. This
actually represents Standard Oil's buyout of British
Petroleum, the name of the newly merged company being
BP-America. The Wall Street Journal did not see fit to
mention worries about the world-wide predatory marketing
practices of a deceptively titled Standard Oil regime.
During the last 13 years, BP-America has merged with, or
controls, all of the old Standard Oil "mini-companies" which
existed before the original breakup by the U.S. government in
1911. The new Standard Oil regime is now known as BP-AMOCO,
and few people in the world realize what has happened. It's
now possible to understand why British Prime Minister Blair
has become the spokesman for the new wars against terrorism
(actually the war for Caspian Sea and Iraq oil).
At the end of WWII, General Douglas MacArthur became the
military Governor of Japan. MacArthur's assistant was Laurence
Rockefeller, one of John D. Rockefeller's four grandsons. As
the second world war was drawing to a close, the U.S. was
preparing for a massive invasion of the Japanese home islands.
The military had stockpiled vast supplies of weapons and
munitions on the island of Okinawa. Some sources claim that
with Vice-governor Laurence Rockefeller's assistance most of
the armaments were sold to the leader of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh,
for something like one U.S. dollar and Ho's "goodwill." One
might wonder why these expensive and critical military
supplies were "given" to the North Vietnamese.
To answer that question we have to go to an almost unknown
study in the 1920's prepared by a man named Herbert Hoover,
later to become President of the United States. The study
showed that one of the world's largest oil fields ran along
the coast of the South China Sea right off French Indo-China,
now known as Vietnam. This was before offshore drilling had
been invented and before a man named George Herbert Walker
Bush was to become the CEO of a world-wide offshore drilling
company.
In 1945, Vietnam was still a colony of the French. Laurence
Rockefeller, it appears, had given the extensive store of
weapons to Ho Chi Minh with the hope that Vietnam would drive
out the French so that Standard Oil would be able to take
over the as yet undeveloped offshore fields. In 1954,
Vietnamese General Giap finally defeated and drove out the
French at Dien Bien Phu with weaponry provided by the U.S.
However, Ho Chi Minh reneged on the deal since he could read
too, and he was well aware of the Hoover resource report and
knew there was a vast supply of oil off the Vietnamese coast.
"In the 1950's a method of undersea oil exploration was
perfected which used small explosions deep in the water and
then recorded the sound echoes bouncing off the various layers
of rock below. The surveyor could then determine the exact
location of the arched salt domes which hold the accumulated
oil beneath them. But if this method were used off the Vietnam
coast on property Standard didn't own or have the rights to,
the Vietnamese, the Chinese, the Japanese and probably even
the French would quickly run to the United Nations and
complain that America was stealing the oil, and that would
shut down the operation.
"In 1964, after Vietnam was divided into North and South, and
the contrived Gulf of Tonkin incident, several U.S. aircraft
carriers were stationed offshore of Vietnam and the 'war' was
started. Every day jet planes would take off from the
carriers, bomb locations in North and South Vietnam, and then
using normal military procedure when returning would dump
their unsafe or unused bombs in the ocean before landing back
on the carriers. Safe ordnance drop zones were designated for
this purpose away from the carriers.
"Even close-up observers would only notice many small
explosions occurring daily in the waters of the South China
Sea and thought it was only part of the 'war.' The U.S. Navy
carriers had begun Operation Linebacker One, and Standard Oil
had begun its ten year oil survey of the seabed off of
Vietnam. And the Vietnamese, Chinese and everybody else
around, including the Americans, were none the wiser. The oil
survey hardly cost Standard Oil a nickel, the U.S. taxpayers
paid for it."
- Marshall Douglas Smith . (2001). Black Gold Hot Gold , Ch. 3
So twenty years later and 57,000 Americans and half a million
Vietnamese dead, Standard Oil had enough data and the war in
Vietnam could end. Nelson Rockefeller's personal assistant,
Henry Kissinger, represented the U.S. at the Vietnam/Paris
Peace talks and won a Nobel Peace Prize in the bargain.
After the dust had settled from the war, Vietnam divided their
offshore coastal area into numerous oil lots and allowed
foreign companies to bid on the lots, with the proviso that
Vietnam got a percentage of the action. Norway's Statoil,
British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, Russia, Germany and
Australia all won bids and began drilling within their areas.
Strange it was that none of them struck oil. However, the
lots which Standard Oil bid for and won proved to have vast
oil reserves. Their extensive undersea seismic research
appears to have paid off.
Unfortunately, Big Oil's greed has not abated a whit.The
American and British rulers have a new imperialistic strategy
by which they hope to gain total control of the world's energy
supplies and the strategic Eurasian land mass . First, they
sell armaments to a regime (for example, Panama, Iraq,
Yugoslavia/Kosovo, Afghan/Pakistan/Taliban Mujaheddin, Saudi
Arabia). Then, they demonize the regime to which they sold
the armaments and declare war on it (e.g. Panama Invasion,
Gulf War, UN Kosovo war, Afghanistan war, Iraq War). After
the war, they station permanent military bases in the country
and use the military bases to control the energy resources in
the surrounding countries. Current U.S. foreign policy is
governed by the doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance": the
U.S. must control military, economic and political
developments everywhere.
"If you want to rule the world, you need to control oil. All
the oil. Anywhere."
- Monopoly , by Michel Collon
This new strategy began with the Panama invasion, next created
the so-called Gulf War, continued with the UN-sanctioned war
in the Balkans, and now expands with the new wars against
terrorism (Afghanistan, the Philippines, Iraq, and beyond).
On January 20, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said
that he was willing to deploy U.S. military forces in "another
15 countries" if that is what it takes to combat terrorism.
The reason the so-called "war against terrorism" began in
Afghanistan is because it is critical to the U.S.-British
rulers' plans to control the Caspian Sea area oil and gas.
The UN-sanctioned war in the Balkans was all about oil and the
pipeline easement for Caspian Sea oil to Western European
markets through Kosovo to the Mediterranean Sea. When
Yugoslavia refused to play ball with the International
Monetary Fund, the U.S. and Germany began a systematic
campaign of destabilization, even using some of the veterans
of Afghanistan in that "war." Yugoslavia was broken up into
compliant statelets, and the former Soviet Union was
contained. The outcome: the de facto U.S. occupation of
Kosovo--where America built its largest military base since
the Vietnam War
The Caspian Sea area has proven oil reserves of fifteen to
twenty-eight billion barrels plus estimated reserves of 40-178
billion, a total of 206 billion barrels--16 percent of the
earth's potential oil reserves (compared to Saudi's 261
billion barrels of oil and America's own 22 billion barrels).
Even at today's low prices, that could add up to $3 trillion
in oil. With the Saudi regime tottering--an aging king about
to die, widespread internal corruption creating calls for
revolutionary overthrow--and a new source of oil and gas in
the Caucasus, the Standard Oil suzerainty is looking to create
a new regime in Saudi Arabia and develop a new center of
operations in Southern Asia--think Iraq.
The huge oil and gas reserves in the Caspian Sea must either
be moved west to European markets or south to Asian markets.
The western route is to move oil from Chechnya, across the
Black Sea and through the Bosporus to the Mediterranean, but
the narrow Bosporus channel is already clogged with oil
tankers from the Black Sea oil fields. An alternate route
would be to move the tankers from the Black Sea, bypassing the
Bosporus, up the Danube River and then through a very short
pipeline across Kosovo to the Mediterranean at Tirana,
Albania. However, that process was stopped by the Chinese who
have supplied and armed the Albanians, as a client state,
since 1949.
The other difficulty with the western route is that Western
Europe is a tough market, characterized by high prices for oil
products, an aging population, and increasing competition from
natural gas. Furthermore, the region is fiercely competitive,
now being serviced by oil from the Middle East, the North Sea,
Scandinavia, and Russia. Western Europe is not a very
attractive market, because substantial infrastructure would
have to be developed to bring that oil from the Caspian to an
already overly-competitive European market.
The only other ways to get Caspian Sea oil and gas to Asian
markets is through China , which is too long a route, or
through Iran, which is politically and economically inimical
to U.S.-Standard Oil objectives.
As soon as the Soviets discovered the vast Caspian Sea oil
fields in the late 1970's, they attempted to take control of
Afghanistan to build a massive north-south pipeline system to
allow the Soviets to send their oil directly through
Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean seaport. The
result was the decades long Soviet-Afghan war. The Standard
Oil-influenced U.S. government saw the danger of a Russian
north-south pipeline and the CIA trained and funded armed
terrorist groups, including Osama bin Laden, who defeated the
Soviets in the late 1980's.
The Russians then tried to control the flow of oil and gas
through its monopoly on pipelines. The Southern Asian
Republics of the former Soviet Union--Turkmenistan,
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan--saw through
this Russian monopolistic ploy and began to consult with
Western companies.
The Standard Oil-influenced U.S. government now plans to
thrust further along the 40th parallel from the Balkans
through these Southern Asian Republics of the former Soviet
Union. The U.S. military has already set up a permanent
operations base in Uzbekistan. The so-called anti-terrorist
strategy is clearly designed to simultaneously consolidate
control over Middle Eastern and South Asian oil, and contain
and neutralize the former Soviet Union. With that strategy,
Afghanistan is exactly where they need to be.
Russia, realizing its weaker position vis-a-vis the United
States, has been making noises as if it fully agreed with the
U.S. incursions in Afghanistan. But Russia has joined the
Shangahi Cooperation Organization (SCO) which includes China,
Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Takijistan and Uzbekistan.
China is using the SCO to try to align Russia economically and
politically towards China and northeast Asia. Russia's
membership in the SCO is an attempt to maintain its
traditional hegemony in Central Asia. The underlying rationale
of the SCO is the control of its members' enormous reserves of
oil and gas.
Despite the misgivings of Russia, China, India, or any other
nation, Afghanistan and Iraq will now become the base of
operations in destabilizing, isolating, and establishing
control over the South Asian regimes and the Middle-East.
[Note that Iran stands between Iraq and Afghanistan and you
can understand why bush included Iran in the "Axis of Evil."]
After the conquest of this area is complete and the permanent
military posts are set up, they will begin construction of a
pipeline through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to
deliver petroleum to the Asian market.
UNOCAL, the spearhead for Standard Oil interests, has been
trying to build the north-south pipeline through Afghanistan
and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean for several decades. In
1998, the California-based UNOCAL, which held 46.5 percent
stakes in Central Asia Gas (CentGas), a consortium that
planned an ambitious gas pipeline across Afghanistan, withdrew
in frustration after several fruitless years. The pipeline was
to stretch 1,271 km from Turkmenistan's Dauletabad fields to
Multan in Pakistan at an estimated cost of $1.9 billion. An
additional $600 million would have brought the pipeline to
energy-hungry India.
In the spring of 2001, Halliburton, Vice President Dick
Cheney's company, signed a major contract with the State Oil
Company of Azerbaijan to develop a 6000-square-meter marine
base to support offshore oil construction in the Caspian Sea.
The base will be used to assist Halliburton's catamaran crane
vessel, the Qurban Abbasov, in upcoming offshore pipe-laying
and subsea activities, according to a statement the company
released May 15, 2001.
UNOCAL cut off its earlier agreement with the Taliban in 1998
when it became clear that the Taliban could not control all of
Afghanistan and provide a stable political environment for a
north-south pipeline construction project. It was likely at
this juncture that a new "war against terrorism" ploy was
conceived by the Standard Oil-influenced U.S. government. The
"war against terrorism" in Afghanistan has come to a hiatus,
with war-lords once again ruling the country, and the Bush
administration has put their own man, Karzai, in power to
control Afghanistan.
Karzai was a top adviser to UNOCAL during the negotiations
with the Taliban to construct a Central Asia Gas (CentGas)
pipeline from Turkmenistan through western Afghanistan to
Pakistan. Karzai is the leader of the southern Afghan Pashtun
Durrani tribe. A member of the mujaheddin that fought the
Soviets during the 1980s, Karzai was a top contact for the
CIA, maintaining close relations with CIA Director William
Casey, Vice President George Bush, and their Pakistani Inter
Service Intelligence (ISI) Service go-between. After the
Soviet Union left Afghanistan, the CIA sponsored the
relocation of Karzai and a number of his brothers to the U.S.
The real motives for the Bush administration's war in
Afghanistan are clear for all to see. The U.S. Ambassador to
Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlain, met with Pakistan's oil minister,
Usman Aminuddin, in January, 2002 to continue plans for the
north-south pipeline, encouraging the construction of
Pakistan's Arabian Sea oil terminus for the pipeline.
President Bush says our military will continue its presence in
Afghanistan, which means that while the U.N. forces serve as a
paramilitary police force, U.S. soldiers will be guarding the
construction of the north-south pipeline.
To assure that the pipeline project will proceed apace, the
Afghani-American Zalmay Khalilzad, a previous member of the
CentGas project, became President Bush's Special National
Security Assistant. Khalilzad has recently been named
presidential Special Envoy for Afghanistan. Khalilzad is a
Pashtun and the son of a former government official under King
Mohammed Zahir Shah. Along with being a consultant to the
RAND Corporation, he was a special liaison between UNOCAL and
the Taliban government. Khalilzad also worked on various risk
analyses for the project under the direction of National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, a former member of the
board of Chevron.
Now that the Afghanistan portion of the "war on terrorism" is
concluded--with permanent U.S. military bases in Uzbekistan
and Afghanistan in place--where next will the Standard
Oil-influenced U.S. government look to gain further control
over oil in the world? Coincidentally, most of those places
are in countries which have been branded as harborers of
terrorists: Iraq, Syria, Iran, and South America, among
others.
Bush Sr.'s Gulf War in 1991 resulted in securing access to the
huge Rumaila oil field of southern Iraq by expanding the
boundaries of Kuwait after the war. This allows Kuwait,
controlled by Standard Oil, to double its prewar oil output.
Iraq, which recently discovered an oil field in its western
desert, is widely regarded as having more oil than Saudi
Arabia once its deposits are developed. Prior to the 2003 U.S.
preemptive invasion of Iraq, Iraq was producing 3 million
barrels a day, funneling most of it to world markets through a
United Nations-monitored program that directed the proceeds to
food and medicine for the Iraqi people. Saddam Hussein was
still exporting his oil to Syria, which was glad to resell
Iraqi oil as if it were Syrian. The United States was one of
Syria's biggest customers, because it liked the low sulfur
content of Iraqi oil, according to Nimrod Raphaeli, publisher
of the Middle East Economic News , a Washington-based
newsletter. Iraq earned $1.5 billion a year from oil
smuggling and oil sales outside UN controls, through Syria,
Turkey, and Jordan, as well as by ship down the Gulf.
Beginning in September of 2001, the Bush regime threatened to
include Iraq in its "war on terrorism." Any incursion into
Iraq had to deal with the reality that American companies,
such as Cheney's Halliburton and G.E. were making billions in
Iraq by selling them goods and services. Also, the difficulty
that the eradication of the Saddam Hussein regime would
seriously compromise America's establishment of bases on the
Arabian peninsula on the pretext of protecting poor Arab
sheikhs against the Iraqi Evil Monster.
Prior to the 2003 Iraq war, Saddan was desperately trying to
ingratiate himself with the Gulf Arab Cooperation Council
(GCC) members: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and
the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to gain support for the lifting
of the U.N. sanctions against it. Russia, Iraq's closest U.N.
Security Council ally and a major beneficiary of contracts to
purchase Iraqi oil and to sell Iraq humanitarian supplies, was
demanding "a comprehensive settlement" of the sanctions issue,
including steps leading to lifting the military embargo
against Iraq. On January 24, 2002, Russian Foreign Minister
Igor Ivanov made a formal statement that Moscow was opposed to
any U.S. military operation against Iraq.
Russia's Lukoil Oil Company and two Russian government
agencies had a 23-year contract to develop Iraq's West Qurna
oil field. By the terms of the contract, Lukoil was to get
one half, Iraq one quarter, and the Russian government
agencies were to get one quarter of the oil field's 667
million tons of crude, potentially a $20 billion deal. Iraq
still owed Russia at least $8 billion from the old cold war
days when Russia armed Iraq, considering it a client state.
Is it any wonder that Russia opposed Bush's war on Iraq?
But because of United Nations sanctions on Iraq, Lukoil had
not pumped a drop from West Qurna since it won drilling rights
in 1997. In 2001, Saddam gave Russia $1.3 billion in oil
contracts under the United Nations oil-for-food program that
allowed Iraq to sell oil to buy supplies to help Iraqi
civilians. In September, 2001, Saddam announced plans to
award Russian companies another $40 billion in contracts as
soon as United Nations sanctions were lifted.
In February, 2002, Russia's foreign minister, Igor S. Ivanov,
said that Russia and Iraq saw eye to eye on questions of
extremism and terrorism and that the American-backed sanctions
against Iraq were counterproductive and should be lifted. He
then emphasized that Russia solidly opposed "spreading or
applying the international antiterror operation to any
arbitrarily chosen state, including Iraq."
The 2003 Standard Oil-Bush junta war against Iraq ended all
the prior Iraqi agreements with nations such as Russia,
Germany, and France. The opposition by these Eurasian nations
to Dubya's preemptive attack on Iraq was understandable--and
Dubya's rush to war with Iraq now makes sense.
Also to be considered in any plans to extend the Standard
Oil/Bush oil imperialism is China's growing interest in
supporting Middle-East nations in their struggle against the
U.S. During Jordanian King Abdallah II's January, 2002 visit
to China, Chinese President Jiang Zemin said that China wanted
stronger ties with Arab countries to help promote peace
between Israel and the Palestinians. Yeah, sure, that's the
reason China wants to put its foot into the Middle East, to
promote peace. China has supplied military weaponry to
Pakistan and may intervene if the Standard Oil/Bush
imperialists continue to expand their empire in the Middle
East.
But the Standard Oil/Bush imperialists don't concern
themselves with the threat of China in the Middle East.
They've seized control of Iraq's oil and now have their eye on
Syria's and Iran's oil as well. We're now in phase two of the
war on terrorism: invading countries that Bush says harbor
terrorists, with the real intent to seize those countries'
energy sources. And since U.S.-British a.k.a. Standard Oil
imperialism now--since 9/11--results in the killing of
American civilians, we can say that the next phase of the war
on terrorism will soon be at a theater near you.
U.S. soldiers are now guarding the north-south pipeline as
it's built in Afghanistan. In the meantime, the hypocrisy of
Bush's "war on terrorism" is apparent for all to see in
Colombia where Bush proposes to spend $98 million to protect
Occidental Petroleum's 480-mile-long pipeline which runs from
Colombia's second-largest oil field to the Caribbean coast.
The $98 million will follow the $1.3 billion the U.S. has
already given to Colombia, ostensibly to fight the "drug
terrorists." In 2001, the Cano Limon pipeline was closed for
266 days, due to holes blasted in it. The Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels have blown holes in the
pipeline for the past fifteen years, resulting in 2.5 million
barrels of spilled oil oozing into Colombia's rivers and
streams, about ten times the amount of the 1989 Exxon Valdez
oil spill in Alaska.
If Bush enters this 38-year old conflict in Colombia which has
resulted in 40,000 deaths in the past decade, he'll be
involving the U.S. in a dead-end power struggle among FARC,
the Cuban-inspired National Liberation Army (ELN), ultra-right
paramilitary groups and the U.S.-supported fascist government.
The excuse for spending U.S. taxpayers' money in Afghanistan
was that Bin Laden was responsible for the September 11th
attacks. Now the only pretext for spending taxpayers' money
in Colombia is to combat the FARC and ELN "terrorists" who
only threaten U.S. oil company resources, not American lives.
Invading Colombia follows the British-U.S. oil imperialism
pattern: going where the oil is. According to the U.S.
Department of Energy, Colombian oil production rose from only
100,000 barrels per day in the early 1980s to approximately
844,000 barrels in early 1999 -- an increase of nearly 750
percent. Colombian oil exports to the United States have also
risen sharply, and today Colombia is this country's seventh
largest supplier of petroleum. Colombia harbors large reserves
of untapped oil and natural gas, possibly as much as 20
billion barrels (and Venezuela has 73 billion barrels in
proven reserves); hence Colombia--and its oil-rich neighbor
countries--become one of many new oil imperialism targets. The
United States imports more oil from Colombia and its
neighbors, Venezuela and Ecuador, than from all of the Persian
Gulf.
A revealing feature of the South American "war on terrorism"
is that, unlike the Taliban and al Qaeda, the Bush
administration is not destroying the numerous South American
drug terrorists. Why? Because the Bush administration and
its plutocratic controllers are at the center of the $1.5
trillion per year in U.S. cash transactions that result from
the international drug trade.
A drug terrorist, like a Carlos Lehder, a Pablo Escobar, an
Amado Fuentes, a Matta Ballesteros or a Hank Rohn, constantly
has something like ten billion dollars of useless illegal
money that he has to put in a cooperative bank or business
venture that will launder it for him. The drug lord is then
more than happy to loan the laundered money at five percent
interest to underwrite the large corporations and crooked
politicians throughout the world.
Wall Street and the Bush administration depend on the South
American drug barons for hundreds of millions of dollars for
corporate income and election campaign finances. For every
million dollars of increased sales or increased revenues that
a company like Enron realized from a buyout, the stock equity
of the one per cent who control Wall Street increases twenty
to thirty times.
In June, 1999, Colombia's president Andres Pastrana arranged
for Richard Grasso, head of the New York Stock Exchange, to
meet with Raúl Reyes, the head of FARC finances, in the
cocaine-producing DMZ of Colombia. The two were caught in an
infamous embrace that saw very little exposure in the media.
Grasso, however, wasn't the only American big-money
representative to cozy up to Colombian drug terrorists.
Several months after Grasso's visit, two wealthy members of
the American Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) captured world
headlines by flying to a FARC redoubt in the Colombian jungles
to palaver with the terrorists' founder, 70-year-old Manuel
Marulanda. After meeting with the communist drug terrorist,
James Kimsey, co-founder and chairman emeritus of America
Online Inc., and Joseph Robert, head of J.E. Robert Company, a
global real estate empire, flew to Bogota to consult with
Colombian president Pastrana. On returning to Washington, the
CFR representatives said they were convinced that Marulanda
and FARC are sincere in their claims of wanting peace and
economic reform.
It may seem hard to believe that U.S. banks and corporations
would be involved in laundering drug money from South American
terrorists. Even the supine media have had to report some of
this criminal behavior. A 1983 ABC News "Close up" on drugs
and money laundering fingered Citibank, Marine Midland, Chase
Manhattan, and most of the 250 banks and branches in Miami.
When Ramon Milian Rodriguez, a top accountant and money
launderer for the Medellin Cartel, testified before a Senate
subcommittee in 1988, he implicated a veritable "Who's Who" in
U.S. finance:
Citibank
Citicorp
Bank of America
First National Bank of Boston
"In every instance," said Rodriguez, "the banks knew who they
were dealing with...." The evidence indicates that Rodriguez
is right; the banks often play dumb, but they know what
they're doing.
A 1998 investigation of Citibank by the U.S. General
Accounting Office (GAO) revealed that Citibank had secretly
transferred between $90 million and $100 million of alleged
drug money for a Mexican client, using many creative methods
to camouflage the movement of the assets.
Oil imperialism rests on our continued dependence on oil,
which not only threatens the future of humanity through
prolonged and bloody conflict, but through another even more
insidious threat--climate change and ecological collapse.
--
http://cyberjournal.org
"Apocalypse Now and the Brave New World"
http://www.cyberjournal.org/cj/rkm/Apocalypse_and_NWO.html
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