How the East was Nearly Won: Oil As a Weapon of Blackmail

[David Guyatt]

William Engdahl in the below article sets out how, in 2003, the US planned to take control of all the Middle Eastern oil and gas fields and use their stranglehold on them to blackmail China and the EU.

However, in 2014 one plank of the US blackmail plan collapsed when Russia cut a massive 10 year natural gas deal with China valued at $100 billion (HERE). Only the EU branch of the plan remained intact.

Even today, the vast bulk of gas consumed by the EU comes from Russia. If that supply were to be permanently cut and replaced by Qatari gas then the EU would be at the mercy of the US as Engdahl says.

It now seems reasonably clear that Russia's military intervention into the Syrian war upset these grand calculations and eventually forced a re-think in regard to the EU equation.

Connecting the dots...

This assessment is based on two recent agreements, one with Turkey on the TurkStream gas pipeline to Europe - thus ending the dream of the Qatari pipeline.

Qatari energy, I am reliably told, is almost 100% controlled by US oil company, Exxon-Mobil. Add to this the fact that Exxon's Chairman CEO was until the last few weeks, Rex Tillerson - who resigned as CEO & Chariman in exchange for a retirement package worth $180 million - to take up the Secretary of State position in Trump administration.

Interestingly, in early December, Russia concluded a sale of 19.5% holding in the Russian state oil producer Rosneft to Qatar (i.e. Exxon Mobil) with a chunk of that going to the global energy company, Glencore, founded by the crooked Marc Rich. Rich received a controversial presidential pardon from Bill Clinton in 2001, amidst arguments that the pardon was attributable to gifts paid to the Clinton Foundation ($450k) and to Hilary Clinton ($100k).

These three deals clearly seem to signal that an understanding has been reached between the more pragmatic faction of the US business elite and Russia, resulting in that US faction, during the last days of the US election, putting their not inconsiderable weight behind Donald Trump -- dumping Hilary Clinton and her neocon sponsors as a consequence.

THE GREATER MIDDLE EAST PROJECT

20.01.2017


F. William Engdahl

At the time of the Iraq War in 2003, there appeared a project called the "Greater Middle East".

It was a plan of redrawing of the Old World regime's map. This redrawing of the map of the Middle East is part of a strategy to put US military boots on the ground in control of all the major oil and now the natural gas of the Middle East. The purpose was to control the economies of China and the European Union and to directly be able to blackmail those countries.

As Henry Kissinger said back in the 1970s: " If you control the oil, you control entire nations or groups of nations."

Dick Cheney, before he was a Vice President, in 1999 gave a very interesting speech to the institute of Petroleum in London. He outlined the perspective for the next twenty years of how much oil the world will need, how much decline there will be from old oil fields and how many new ones will have to be discovered. And there he said: "One place in the world with the largest reserves of oil is under control of the Middle East nations - Kuwait, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran. The problem is that those oil reserves are controlled by the governments". In other words, he said that we, the United States, have to take away the control over that oil from the governments and put it into private companies hands like BP, Shell and others.

When Cheney became Vice President under George W. Bush, the first thing he was put in charge of was the the Energy Task Force. Under his control, the task force began looking at oil maps of the Middle East in great detail before the Iraq invasion.

So the idea is to control that oil and, because of the growing importance of natural gas for the EU, to control the gas.

Therefore, this is what the Greater Middle East project is all about. It is a plan for redrawing the map, creating a unified Kurdistan as a geopolitical pivot that will allow Washington to control all the surrounding countries and destabilize Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, which play a very crucial role in the whole project.

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