Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2002, page 51

Special Report

 

Did Israel’s Turkish Pipeline Dreams Drive U.S. Troops to the Caucasus?

 

By Andrew I. Killgore

“Washington’s plans for fighting terrorism…to expand…to Georgia…”

—New York Times editorial, March 4, 2002

If only Rube Goldberg were still alive to transform his intricately complicated mechanical devices for accomplishing the simplest of tasks—such as striking a match—into a fanciful political/economic mechanism for getting Caspian region oil to salt water by the most tortuous route. Although Goldberg, a brilliant engineer, “played it for laughs,” some saw in his contraptions a deeper significance.

The obvious route to transport Caspian oil, which Goldberg’s appreciative audience could readily see, would go south through Iran for a mostly onshore line to terminate at Kharg Island, Iran’s oil shipping port not far offshore in the Persian Gulf. That route is shorter, cheaper and overwhelmingly favored by the oil companies involved in the region. It also is supported by Kazakhstan, where most of the Caspian petroleum seems to be located. Israel, however, is pushing for the tortuous route through Turkey to demonstrate to Ankara that its alliance with Tel Aviv pays very big dividends in Washington.

Goldberg’s mechanism would have to include a surrealistic tableau of the leaders of Turkey and Azerbaijan signing in 2000 an “earnest” document about the Baku (Azerbaijan)-Ceyhan (Turkey) oil pipeline. The agreement then was signed as a witness by then-President Bill Clinton, who had traveled to Istanbul specifically for the occasion. The cast of characters would be incomplete without two successive Israel-leaning U.S. “ambassadors to the Caspian region”—men with no oil expertise—predicting that the region’s oil potential might rival that of Saudi Arabia. Somehow Goldberg would have to intimate that such an exaggeration was designed to distract attention from the embarrassing fact that Azerbaijan itself had little oil for a future Baku-Ceyhan route.

Another portion of Goldberg’s mechanism would have Turkey picking up the $1 billion to $2 billion extra cost of a Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, with his audience able to discern the reality that Israel has manipulated U.S. policy so that, one way or another, the United States rather than Turkey would be paying the extra billions. Yet another element of the contraption would depict Kurdish dissidents in Turkey attacking engineers building Baku-Ceyhan, as well as American military forces recently assigned to formerly Soviet Georgia, through which Baku-Ceyhan would have to run, fighting supposedly al-Qaeda elements there. Victory may be more easily realized than in Afghanistan, however. In a March 8 BBC broadcast viewed in Washington, young men in Tbilisi told the BBC journalist that there were perhaps “two or three” al-Qaeda members in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge.

How Goldberg could depict Azerbaijan’s dearth of oil for Baku-Ceyhan and Kazakhstan’s unwillingness to agree to an undersea Caspian line over to Baku—in part because Russia and Iran would object on environmental as well as other grounds—will have to be left to his genius.

To complete the scenario, appended Goldberg contraptions would demonstrate Israel’s manipulation of Washington, beginning in 1993, to defame Iran, and its successful culmination in the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA), which places U.S. sanctions on any company spending any substantial amounts on Iran’s oil/gas industry—all designed to prevent a Caspian pipeline through Iran.

Only a Rube Goldberg could make the whole thing seem hilarious, yet still allow the viewer to see the truth: a ridiculous and pathetic Uncle Sam again financing an Israeli scheme that hurts American interests.

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

< Prev		Next >