The Secret Stupid Saudi-US Deal on Syria
William Engdahl | October 24, 2014 3 Comments
The
Kerry-Abdullah Secret Deal & An Oil-Gas
Pipeline War
The
details are emerging of a new secret and quite stupid Saudi-US deal on Syria
and the so-called IS. 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.
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.
# # # #
F. William Engdahl, BFP contributing Author & Analyst
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.
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.
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