A New Millennium for Oil Geopolitics
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around President Putin.) The U.S. removal of the Taliban also gave the world a flood of heroin, as old warlords suppressed by the Taliban were able to resume poppy cultivation. The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlain, in January 2002 met with Usman Aminuddin, Pakistan’s oil minister. The talks were about how to continue plans for a north–south pipeline to Pakistan’s Arabian Sea oil terminal. In May 2002, according to a BBC report, Karzai announced plans to hold talks with Pakistan and Turkmenistan on a $2 billion gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to India. A deal was quietly signed in early January 2003, with no international press fanfare. No sooner had Washington installed Karzai in Kabul than Bush and Cheney began beating the drums of war against Saddam Hussein, Washington’s new Adolf Hitler, replacing Slobodan Milosevic in the gallery of evil tyrants. Washington set out to apply the Bush doctrine, regardless of whether the UN Security Council agreed. And they didn’t.3 ‘YOU’VE GOT TO GO WHERE THE OIL IS’ Washington prepared its military attack on Baghdad in 2002 without UN Security Council backing, in violation of the UN Charter and without the support of most of its major allies, apart from Britain’s Blair, Portugal and Spain, Poland and a few others. Russia, China, France and even Germany openly opposed the U.S. decision to go to war with Iraq. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov issued an official statement that Moscow was opposed to any U.S. military operation against Iraq. Russia’s Lukoil and two Russian government companies had a 23-year contract to develop Iraq’s West Qurna oilfield. China also was against war. Its China National Petroleum Company held a potentially huge oil contract in western Iraq. France too held rights to exploit Iraqi oil under the Saddam regime. All three powers knew that a unilateral U.S. war could end their Iraqi oil dreams for good. China by then was well on its way to replace Japan as the world’s second largest oil importer after the United States. Within ten years, at present growth rates, it would easily become the world’s largest consumer of oil, almost all imported. It had not been able to find enough domestic oil. China knew its very future as an economic power depended on securing its oil. Now the most promising sources were about to be firmly put under American military control. In Beijing, the message was clear and very alarming.
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