Re: SC26

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=WIL20061007&articleId=3408

The Emerging Russian Giant Plays its Cards Strategically

.......................The ‘Cheney strategy’ has been a US foreign policy based on securing direct global energy control, control by the Big Four US or US-tied private oil giants-- ChevronTexaco or ExxonMobil, BP or Royal Dutch Shell. Above all, it has aimed at CONTROL OF ALL THE WORLD'S MAJOR OIL REGIONS, along with the control of MAJOR NATURAL GAS FIELDS. That control has moved in tandem with a growing bid by the United States for total military primacy over the one potential threat to its global ambitions—Russia. Cheney is perhaps the ideal person to weave the US military and energy policies together into a coherent strategy of dominance. During the early 1990’s under father Bush, Cheney was also Secretary of Defense.

The Cheney-Bush administration has been dominated by a coalition of interests between Big Oil and the top industries of the American military-industrial complex. These private corporate interests exercise their power through control of the government policy of the United States. An aggressive militaristic agenda has been essential to it. It is epitomized by Cheney’s former company, Halliburton Inc., at one and the same time the world’s largest energy and geophysical services company, and the world’s largest constructor of military bases.

To comprehend the policy it’s important to look at how Cheney, as Halliburton CEO, viewed the problem of future oil supply on the eve of his becoming Vice President.

‘Where the Prize Ultimately Lies’: Cheney’s 1999 London speech

Back in September 1999, a full year before the US elections which made him the most powerful Vice President in history, Cheney gave a revealing speech before his oil industry peers at the London Institute of Petroleum.. In a global review of the outlook for Big Oil, Cheney made the following comment:

"By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the national oil companies are obviously controlling about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world‘s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies. Even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow. It is true that technology, privatisation and the opening up of a number of countries have created many new opportunities in areas around the world for various oil companies, but looking back to the early 1990‘s, expectations were that significant amounts of the world‘s new resources would come from such areas as the former Soviet Union and from China. Of course that didn‘t turn out quite as expected. Instead it turned out to be deep water successes that yielded the bonanza of the 1990‘s."

( Cheney knew big energy problems were on the horizen. Thier solution, create " false pretext events and wars to thrust US influence into the regions of rich oil and natural gas reserves )

The Cheney remarks are worth a careful reading. He posits a conservative rise in global demand for oil by the end of the present decade, i.e. in about 4 years. He estimates the world will need to find an added 50 million barrels of daily output. Total daily oil production at present hovers around the level of some 83 million barrels oil equivalent. This means that to avert catastrophic shortages and the resultant devastating impact on global economic growth, by Cheney’s 1999 estimate, the world must find new oil production equal to more than 50% of the 1999 daily global output, and that, by about 2010. That is the equivalent of five new oil regions equal to today’s Saudi Arabian size. That is a whopping amount of new oil.

Given that it can take up to seven years or more to bring a new major oilfield into full production, that’s also not much time if a horrendous energy crunch and sky-high oil and gas prices are to be averted. Cheney’s estimate was also based on an overly conservative estimate of future oil import demand in China and India, today the two fastest growing oil consumers on the planet........................

Cheney’s remark that ‘Oil remains fundamentally a government business,’ and not private, takes on a new significance when we do a fast forward to September 2000, in the heat of the 2000 Bush-Cheney election campaign. That month Cheney, along with Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and many others who went on to join the new Bush Administration, issued a policy report titled, ‘Re-building America’s Defenses.’ The paper was issued by an entity named PROJECT FOR THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY (PNAC).


Cheney’s PNAC group called on the new US President-to-be to find a suitable pretext ( lies about WMD, and implied Sadam connections to Al Queda ) to declare war on Iraq, in order to occupy it and take direct control over the second largest oil reserves in the Middle East................

Iran is number four in world oil reserves. This will be the motivation behind a military strike by the US, if one occurs. PNAC's ambitions go even further than this:
.................................................For obvious military and political reasons, Washington could not admit openly that its strategic focus, since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, had been the dismemberment or de-construction of Russia, and gaining EFFECTIVE CONTROL of its huge oil and gas resources, the ‘ultimate prize.’................................