Showing posts with label GWOT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GWOT. Show all posts
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Pipelineistan Poker: It All Comes Down To The Top Two 'Players' In A Global "Grand Game" - Pepe Escobar, Asia Times
From May 2009, but more apropos now than ever.
May 12, 2009 3:37 pm
Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, Pipelineistan Goes Af-Pak
Back in March, Pepe Escobar, that itchy, edgy global reporter for one of my favorite on-line publications, Asia Times, began laying out the great, ongoing energy struggle across Eurasia, or what he likes to call Pipelinestan for its web of oil and natural gas pipelines. In his first report, he dealt with the embattled energy corridor (and a key pipeline) that runs from the Caspian Sea to Europe through Georgia and Turkey -- and the Great Game of business, diplomacy, and proxy war between Russia and the U.S. that has gone with it. Now, in the second of what will be periodic "postcards" from the energy heartlands of the planet, he plunges eastward into tumultuous Central and South Asia and the great devolving battleground that, in Washington, now goes by the neologism of Af-Pak (for the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations). There, the skies are filled with planes and unmanned aerial drones, and civilians as well as combatants die every day in increasing numbers as ever more frequent attacks and expanding conflicts make daily headlines, while, in Afghanistan, Washington continues to build new military bases and ready itself to send in reinforcements.
Those are, of course, the front-page stories. Energy, especially in the form of oil and natural gas, fuels everything from civilization to its various discontents and means of destruction, and yet it remains largely on the business pages of our papers. Even in a time of relatively depressed oil and gas prices, energy runs like an undercurrent just beneath global headlines. Under the carnage of war, that is, courses what Escobar likes to call the Liquid War, and just how the energy flows and through which territories controlled by whom does turn out to make -- quite literally -- a world of difference, even if that isn't what captures our attention most of the time.
Today, let Escobar, whose latest book is Obama Does Globalistan, take you deep into the "New Great Game" that will determine the shape of our future planet. Tom
Blue Gold, Turkmen Bashes, and Asian Grids
Pipelineistan in Conflict
By Pepe Escobar
As Barack Obama heads into his second hundred days in office, let's head for the big picture ourselves, the ultimate global plot line, the tumultuous rush towards a new, polycentric world order. In its first hundred days, the Obama presidency introduced us to a brand new acronym, OCO for Overseas Contingency Operations, formerly known as GWOT (as in Global War on Terror). Use either name, or anything else you want, and what you're really talking about is what's happening on the immense energy battlefield that extends from Iran to the Pacific Ocean. It's there that the Liquid War for the control of Eurasia takes place.
Yep, it all comes down to black gold and "blue gold" (natural gas), hydrocarbon wealth beyond compare, and so it's time to trek back to that ever-flowing wonderland -- Pipelineistan. It's time to dust off the acronyms, especially the SCO or Shanghai Cooperative Organization, the Asian response to NATO, and learn a few new ones like IPI and TAPI. Above all, it's time to check out the most recent moves on the giant chessboard of Eurasia, where Washington wants to be a crucial, if not dominant, player.
We've already seen Pipelineistan wars in Kosovo and Georgia, and we've followed Washington's favorite pipeline, the BTC, which was supposed to tilt the flow of energy westward, sending oil coursing past both Iran and Russia. Things didn't quite turn out that way, but we've got to move on, the New Great Game never stops.
Now, it's time to grasp just what the Asian Energy Security Grid is all about, visit a surreal natural gas republic, and understand why that Grid is so deeply implicated in the Af-Pak war....
In Full @ TomDispatch
Travus T.Hipp @ Cabale News Service also has a few commentaries committed to audio at Archive.org on the topic:
[November 03 2009] Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: Facing Up To Reality In Central Asia - The West Is Losing The AfPakistan War... And Losing Badly [Here]
[August 04 2005] Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: A Laymans Guide to the 'Stans: Chapter 1 - 'Themistan' [Here]
[August 01 2005] Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: The 'Stans: Quietly, we are a very big part of it as Uzbekistan drops out of 'The Great American Alliance' [Here]
[March 24 2005] Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: The 'Stans & The U.S. Military Presence In Central Asia [Here]
Labels:
Af-Pak,
Afghanistan,
Caspian,
Central Asia,
China,
Energy Economics,
Energy Security,
GWOT,
NATO,
Natural Gas,
Oil,
Pepe Escobar,
Pipelineistan,
Russia,
SCO,
Turkey,
Turkmenistan,
US Foreign Policy
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Welcome to Crusade 2.0, The Really Really Long War (Foreign Policy In Focus)
"You've been on-duty for a couple of weeks now in an ICBM missile silo's artificial atmosphere... it's disenfranchised environment, and your finger is on the BIG RED BUTTON. Apocalyptic "Christianity" helps steady the nerves when the phone rings with the bad news... It's the "GO" code. It IS 'Gods Will', after all... Hail Mary full of... [Click]"
Islamic extremists have certainly committed crimes. So have extremists of other faiths. But no one, as far as I know, has recommended the deportation of Christians and the strip-searching of people who look like they're from Iowa simply because of the Oklahoma City bombing or the killing of abortion providers.
The question here is whether Islam as a religion poses a threat to Europe or to the United States. Outspoken atheists like Christopher Hitchens have argued that all religions pose a threat to humanity. But the arguments of atheists aside, Islam isn't a threat unless you adopt the crusader mentality. Put simply, intolerance and bigotry lie at the root of Islamophobia - that and a thousand years of protracted conflict and bloodshed...
...In the days after September 11, George W. Bush said "this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile." The crusade language, after a barrage of criticism, quickly disappeared. And now, with the Obama administration, the "war on terrorism" has largely slipped out of the language, replaced by "overseas contingency operations." But however much the language has changed, Washington continues to make the same bone-headed mistakes in the global campaign against al-Qaeda and its supporters.
World BeatIn Full @ Foreign Policy In Focus
FPIF's weekly ezine
by JOHN FEFFER
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Vol. 5, No. 14
The Really Really Long War
Let's imagine that the Cold War was a detour. The entire 20th century, in fact, was a detour. Since conflicts among the 20th-century ideologies (liberalism, communism, fascism) cost humanity so dearly, it's hard to conceive of World War II and the clashes that followed as sideshows. And yet many people have begun to do just that. They view the period we find ourselves in right now - the so-called post-Cold War era - as a return to a much earlier time and a much earlier confrontation. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq aren't discrete battles against a tyrant (Saddam Hussein) or a tyrannical group (the Taliban). They fit together with Turkey's resurgence, the swell of Muslim immigration to Europe, and Israel's settlement policy to form part of a much larger struggle.
Welcome to Crusade 2.0.
For those who see Islam as a civilizational threat, the key dates aren't 1945 or 1989 but rather 1683, 1492, 1099, and 732. The very mention of these watershed years stirs the blood of the modern-day crusader. In 1683, thanks to the intercession of the Polish cavalry, Christian forces beat back Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Vienna, preventing Islam from spreading to Western Europe. In 1492, Christian armies recovered all of Spain from Muslim rulers. In 1099, during the first Crusade, the European army seized Jerusalem. And in 732, Charles Martel led the Franks in a victory over the forces of the Ummayad Caliphate, ensuring that Islam would not spread beyond its conquests in Spain.
Today, many Europeans are enlisting in a modern crusade. They see the threat of 732, with Islamic immigrants coming in from North Africa and bringing their culture and customs - like the mosque and the veil - to secular France and multicultural Switzerland. They see the threat of 1683, with Turkey planning to join and then take over the European Union. And they stand with Israel to protect Jerusalem from the demands of Palestinians and their supporters in the Arab world.
In defense of their crusade, they point to acts of terrorism committed by Islamic fundamentalists (the 2004 Madrid bombings, the 2005 London bombings), occasional acts of violence (the killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, a rash of honor killings), the fatwa against novelist Salman Rushdie, and so on. These incidents, they argue, add up to a pattern: an attempt to destroy the Judeo-Christian world, reestablish the caliphate dismantled by Ataturk in 1924, impose sharia law, and turn the world into a version of Afghanistan under the Taliban...
Labels:
al Qaeda,
al-Qaeda,
Bigotry,
Christian,
Crusades,
Foreign Policy In Focus,
FPIF,
GWOT,
Islamophobia,
Muslim,
Taliban,
War On Terror
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