This article sheds light on the unfolding war in Syria, the crisis in the Gulf states and the confrontation between Russia and the US.
The details are emerging of a new secret and quite stupid
Saudi-US deal on Syria and the so-called ISIS. It involves oil and gas
control of the entire region and the weakening of Russia and Iran by
Saudi Arabian flooding the world market with cheap oil. Details were
concluded in the September meeting by US Secretary of State John Kerry
and the Saudi King. The unintended consequence will be to push Russia
even faster to turn east to China and Eurasia.
The Secret Stupid Saudi-US Deal on Syria. Oil Gas Pipeline War
The Kerry-Abdullah Secret Deal
Global Research, March 02, 2018
Boiling Frogs Post 24 October 2014
One of the weirdest anomalies of the recent NATO bombing campaign,
allegedly against the ISIS or IS or ISIL or Daash, depending on your
preference, is the fact that with major war raging in the world’s
richest oil region, the price of crude oil has been dropping,
dramatically so. Since June when ISIS suddenly captured the oil-rich
region of Iraq around Mosul and Kirkuk, the benchmark Brent price of
crude oil dropped some 20% from $112 to about $88. World daily demand
for oil has not dropped by 20% however. China oil demand has not fallen
20% nor has US domestic shale oil stock risen by 21%.
What has happened is that the long-time US ally inside OPEC, the
kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has been flooding the market with deep
discounted oil, triggering a price war within OPEC, with Iran following
suit and panic selling short in oil futures markets. The Saudis are
targeting sales to Asia for the discounts and in particular, its major
Asian customer, China where it is reportedly offering its crude for a
mere $50 to $60 a barrel rather than the earlier price of around
$100. [1] That Saudi financial discounting operation in turn is by all
appearance being coordinated with a US Treasury financial warfare
operation, via its Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, in
cooperation with a handful of inside players on Wall Street who control
oil derivatives trading. The result is a market panic that is gaining
momentum daily. China is quite happy to buy the cheap oil, but her close
allies, Russia and Iran, are being hit severely.
The deal
According to Rashid Abanmy, President of the Riyadh-based Saudi
Arabia Oil Policies and Strategic Expectations Center, the dramatic
price collapse is being deliberately caused by the Saudis, OPEC’s
largest producer. The public reason claimed is to gain new markets in a
global market of weakening oil demand. The real reason, according to
Abanmy, is to put pressure on Iran on her nuclear program, and on Russia
to end her support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria.[2]
When combined with the financial losses of Russian state natural gas
sales to Ukraine and prospects of a US-instigated cutoff of the transit
of Russian gas to the huge EU market this winter as EU stockpiles become
low, the pressure on oil prices hits Moscow doubly. More than 50% of
Russian state revenue comes from its export sales of oil and gas.
The US-Saudi oil price manipulation is aimed at destabilizing several
strong opponents of US globalist policies. Targets include Iran and
Syria, both allies of Russia in opposing a US sole Superpower. The
principal target, however, is Putin’s Russia, the single greatest threat
today to that Superpower hegemony. The strategy is similar to what the
US did with Saudi Arabia in 1986 when they flooded the world with Saudi
oil, collapsing the price to below $10 a barrel and destroying the
economy of then-Soviet ally, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and, ultimately, of
the Soviet economy, paving the way for the fall of the Soviet Union.
Today, the hope is that a collapse of Russian oil revenues, combined
with select pin-prick sanctions designed by the US Treasury’s Office of
Terrorism and Financial Intelligence will dramatically weaken Putin’s
enormous domestic support and create conditions for his ultimate
overthrow. It is doomed to fail for many reasons, not the least, because
Putin’s Russia has taken major strategic steps together with China and
other nations to lessen its dependence on the West. In fact the oil
weapon is accelerating recent Russian moves to focus its economic power
on national interests and lessen dependence on the Dollar system. If the
dollar ceases being the currency of world trade, especially oil trade,
the US Treasury faces financial catastrophe. For this reason, I call the
Kerry-Abdullah oil war a very stupid tactic.
The Kerry-Abdullah secret deal
On September 11, US Secretary of State Kerry met Saudi King Abdullah
at his palace on the Red Sea. The King invited former head of Saudi
intelligence, Prince Bandar to attend. There a deal was hammered out
which saw Saudi support for the Syrian airstrikes against ISIS on
condition Washington backed the Saudis in toppling Assad, a firm ally of
Russia and de facto of Iran and an obstacle to Saudi and UAE plans to
control the emerging EU natural gas market and destroy Russia’s
lucrative EU trade. A report in the Wall Street Journal noted
there had been “months of behind-the-scenes work by the US and Arab
leaders, who agreed on the need to cooperate against Islamic State, but
not how or when. The process gave the Saudis leverage to extract a fresh
US commitment to beef up training for rebels fighting Mr. Assad, whose
demise the Saudis still see as a top priority.” [3]
For the Saudis the war is between two competing age-old vectors of
Islam. Saudi Arabia, home to the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina,
claims de facto supremacy in the Islamic world of Sunni Islam. The Saudi
Sunni form is ultra-conservative Wahhabism, named for an 18th Century
Bedouin Islamic fundamentalist or Salafist named Muhammad ibn Abd
al-Wahha. The Taliban derive from Wahhabism with the aid of
Saudi-financed religious instruction. The Gulf Emirates and Kuwait also
adhere to the Sunni Wahhabism of the Saudis, as does the Emir of Qatar.
Iran on the other hand historically is the heart of the smaller branch
of Islam, the Shi’ite. Iraq’s population is some 61% majority Shi’ite.
Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad is a member of a satellite of the
Shi’ite branch known as Alawite. Some 23% of Turkey is also Alawite
Muslim. To complicate the picture more, across a bridge from Saudi
Arabia sits the tiny island country, Bahrain where as many as 75% of the
population is Shi’ite but the ruling Al-Khalifa family is Sunni and
firmly tied to Saudi Arabia. Moreover, the richest Saudi oil region is
dominated by Shi’ite Muslims who work the oil installations of Ras
Tanura.
An oil and gas pipeline war
These historic fault lines inside Islam which lay dormant, were
brought into a state of open warfare with the launching of the US State
Department and CIA’s Islamic Holy War, otherwise known as the Arab
Spring. Washington neo-conservatives embedded inside the Obama
Administration in a form of “Deep State” secret network, and their
allied media such as the Washington Post, advocated US covert backing of
a pet CIA project known as the Muslim Brotherhood. As I detail in my
most recent book, Amerikas’ Heiliger Krieg, the CIA had cultivated ties to the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood death cult since the early 1950’s.
Now if we map the resources of known natural gas reserves in the
entire Persian Gulf region, the motives of the Saudi-led Qatar and UAE
in financing with billions of dollars the opposition to Assad, including
the Sunni ISIS, becomes clearer. Natural gas has become the favored
“clean energy” source for the 21st Century and the EU is the
world’s largest growth market for gas, a major reason Washington wants
to break the Gazprom-EU supply dependency to weaken Russia and keep
control over the EU via loyal proxies like Qatar.
The world’s largest known natural gas reservoir sits in the middle of
the Persian Gulf straddling part in the territorial waters of Qatar and
part in Iran. The Iranian part is called North Pars. In 2006 China’s
state-owned CNOOC signed an agreement with Iran to develop North Pars
and build LNG infrastructure to bring the gas to China.[4]
The Qatar side of the Persian Gulf, called North Field, contains the
world’s third largest known natural gas reserves behind Russia and Iran.
In July 2011, the governments of Syria, Iran and Iraq signed an
historic gas pipeline energy agreement which went largely unnoticed in
the midst of the NATO-Saudi-Qatari war to remove Assad. The pipeline,
envisioned to cost $10 billion and take three years to complete, would
run from the Iranian Port Assalouyeh near the South Pars gas field in
the Persian Gulf, to Damascus in Syria via Iraq territory. The agreement
would make Syria the center of assembly and production in conjunction
with the reserves of Lebanon. This is a geopolitically strategic space
that geographically opens for the first time, extending from Iran to
Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.[5] As Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar put
it, “The Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline – if it’s ever built – would solidify
a predominantly Shi’ite axis through an economic, steel umbilical
cord.”[6]
Shortly after signing with Iran and Iraq, on August 16, 2011, Bashar
al-Assad’s Syrian Ministry of Oil announced the discovery of a gas well
in the Area of Qarah in the Central Region of Syria near Homs. Gazprom,
with Assad in power, would be a major investor or operator of the new
gas fields in Syria. [7] Iran ultimately plans to extend the pipeline
from Damascus to Lebanon’s Mediterranean port where it would be
delivered to the huge EU market. Syria would buy Iranian gas along with a
current Iraqi agreement to buy Iranian gas from Iran’s part of South
Pars field.[8]
Qatar, today the world’s largest exporter of LNG, largely to Asia,
wants the same EU market that Iran and Syria eye. For that, they would
build pipelines to the Mediterranean. Here is where getting rid of the
pro-Iran Assad is essential. In 2009 Qatar approached Bashar al-Assad to
propose construction of a gas pipeline from Qatar’s north Field through
Syria on to Turkey and to the EU. Assad refused, citing Syria’s long
friendly relations with Russia and Gazprom. That refusal combined with
the Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline agreement in 2011 ignited the
full-scale Saudi and Qatari assault on Assad’s power, financing al Qaeda
terrorists, recruits of Jihadist fanatics willing to kill Alawite and
Shi’ite “infidels” for $100 a month and a Kalishnikov. The Washington
neo-conservative warhawks in and around the Obama White House, along
with their allies in the right-wing Netanyahu government, were cheering
from the bleachers as Syria went up in flames after spring 2011.
Today the US-backed wars in Ukraine and in Syria are but two fronts
in the same strategic war to cripple Russia and China and to rupture any
Eurasian counter-pole to a US-controlled New World Order. In each,
control of energy pipelines, this time primarily of natural gas
pipelines—from Russia to the EU via Ukraine and from Iran and Syria to
the EU via Syria—is the strategic goal. The true aim of the US and
Israel backed ISIS is to give the pretext for bombing Assad’s vital
grain silos and oil refineries to cripple the economy in preparation for
a “Ghaddafi-”style elimination of Russia and China and Iran-ally Bashar
al-Assad.
In a narrow sense, as Washington neo-conservatives see it, who
controls Syria could control the Middle East. And from Syria, gateway to
Asia, he will hold the key to Russia House, as well as that of China
via the Silk Road.
Religious wars have historically been the most savage of all wars and
this one is no exception, especially when trillions of dollars in oil
and gas revenues are at stake. Why is the secret Kerry-Abdullah deal on
Syria reached on September 11 stupid? Because the brilliant tacticians
in Washington and Riyadh and Doha and to an extent in Ankara are unable
to look at the interconnectedness of all the dis-order and destruction
they foment, to look beyond their visions of control of the oil and gas
flows as the basis of their illegitimate power. They are planting the
seeds of their own destruction in the end.
*
William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics in the New World Order. He is a contributing author at BFP and may be contacted through his website at www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net where this article was originally published.
Notes:
[1] M. Rochan, Crude Oil Drops Amid Global Demand Concerns, IB Times, October 11, 2014 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/crude-oil-drops-amid-global-demand-concerns-1469524
[2] Nihan Cabbaroglu, Saudi Arabia to pressure Russia Iran with price of oil, 10 October 2014, Turkish Anadolu Agency, http://www.aa.com.tr/en/economy/402343–saudi-arabia-to-pressure-russia-iran-with-price-of-oil
[3] Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes,
Deal With Saudis Paved Way for Syrian Airstrikes: Talks With Saudi
Arabia Were Linchpin in U.S. Efforts to Get Arab States Into Fight
Against Islamic State, Wall Street Journal, September. 24, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/articles/deal-with-saudis-paved-way-for-syrian-airstrikes-1411605329?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories
[4] POGC, North Pars Gas Field, Pars Oil and Gas Company website, http://www.pogc.ir/NorthParsGasField/tabid/155/Default.aspx
[5] Imad Fawzi Shueibi , War Over Gas–Struggle over the Middle East: Gas Ranks First, 17 April, 2012. http://www.voltairenet.org/article173718.html
[6] Pepe Escobar, Why Qatar Wants to Invade Syria, Asia Times, September 27, 2012, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32576.htm
[7] Ibid.
[8] F. William Engdahl, Syria Turkey Israel and the Greater Middle East Energy War, Global Research, October 11, 2012, http://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-turkey-israel-and-the-greater-middle-east-energy-war/5307902
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