War in Ukraine Could Be the Mother of All Energy Wars: But the Media Still Misses the Context

By Charlotte Dennett

 

 

As never before, the connection between war and big power rivalry over oil and gas in Ukraine—and beyond—has become disturbingly tangible to average citizens, when it was once known only to world leaders, their militaries and spies, and their wealthy backers. Henry Kissinger, protégé of Nelson Rockefeller, once said, “you control the oil, you control the world.”

Now, in the United States, where the oil connection has been routinely suppressed for a century on grounds of national security, the mainstream media have no choice but to report “breaking news” that all too often has an energy component to it. But the facts relayed are facts in isolation, devoid of context.

We’ve all heard about the sinking of Russia’s flagship Moskva in the Black Sea, apparently downed by two Ukrainian Neptune missiles. This was the same vessel that warned Ukrainian soldiers to surrender their positions on tiny Snake Island, to which one of them replied: “Russian warship. Go Fuck yourself!” The Western press turned him and his fellow Ukrainians as heroic matyrs for valiantly resisting—but ultimately succumbing to—the onslaught of Russian bombs. 

Only days later, the world learned that they had survived, having been taken captive and were later freed in a prisoner exchange. What the world did not know was that Snake Island (also known as Serpents Island) sits atop huge gas deposits in the Black Sea and has become “the bone of contention between Romania, Ukraine and Russia,” according to Le Monde, and “one of the key points in the war that Moscow is waging against Kyiv.”

The Russians seized Snake Island on Day One of their invasion of Ukraine. The same day, the U.S. leveled its first economic target against the $11 billion dollar Russian-owned pipeline, Nord Stream 2 linking Russia to Germany. N2 had recently been completed despite numerous efforts by the U.S. since 2017 to prevent this from happening, arguing it would make Europe even more dependent on Russia for its energy supplies—and would cost Ukraine billions in lost transit fees earned on aging Russian pipelines crisscrossing the country.

 

N2 was intended to supply additional cheap Russian natural gas to Germany and to markets throughout Europe, where gas reserves are at an all-time low and prices are skyrocketing. But once Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz caved to U.S. pressure, announcing that he had suspended its operation.

 

By now, the pipeline is no longer news to most people, but the ramifications of its suspension could have far reaching consequences, as 27 European countries, heavily dependent on Russian energy, are considering what was once unthinkable: joining the U.S. in banning imports of Russian oil products.

Putin, a master player in the Great Game, is hitting back by threatening “unfriendly countries” with having to pay for Russian natural gas in rubles, striking a blow to the almighty American petrodollar.

President Biden, for his part, has warned Americans that they would have to make a sacrifice with higher gas prices in order to support the besieged people of Ukraine. Now, to the dismay of climate activists, he has opened the country’s strategic reserves for only the third time, this time to pump out one million gallons a day in order to lower gasoline prices.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is desperately seeking replacement supplies of natural gas for its frightened European allies that rely on Russia for 40% of its energy needs. The Russian invasion turned out to be a boon for suppliers of fracked natural gas, which have been sending massive supplies of LNG by tanker to European ports. But there are insufficient LNG terminals to take in all the shipped American gas, forcing Biden to desperately seek additional supplies from his enemies—Venezuela and Iran—as well as greater oil output from Saudi Arabia, in return for more U.S. military assistance to its catastrophic oil and pipeline war in Yemen.

 

Finally, let’s not forget the folly of Russian tanks, stalled along a long stretch of road, possibly if media reports are to be believed, because they ran out of gas! Quite ironic, given that Russia has plenty of oil, unlike Germany in World War I and World War II, which lost both wars because it had not secured enough oil to fuel its military. The sight of black smoke billowing out of bombed fuel depots in Ukraine serves as a daily reminder of the importance of oil to its largest consumers: military machines.

 

So oil—and now natural gas—keep bubbling up as key factors in the war in Ukraine as it enters its second month. However, most Ukrainians dodging bombs and artillery—and arguably most global citizens—are still asking: “What’s this war all about?”

Even with the oil and gas issues noted above, the mainstream media continue to miss an important historical and geopolitical context behind the war which could give additional reasons for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, beyond references to “Great Russian Chauvinism”—once warned of by Lenin and adopted by Putin—to reclaim the glories of Mother Russia and re-establish the Soviet Union. Putin’s power is, after all, based on Russia’s enormous reserves of natural gas, prompting the Brookings Institution to comment as far back as 2002, “Russia is to natural gas what Saudi Arabia is to oil.”

 

In my comments below, I will suggest that the war in Ukraine may become known as the Mother of all Energy Wars if the U.S. chooses to escalate by sending American troops into the fray, risking nuclear war. Keep in mind that the tactics it has used so far, sending arms into Ukraine, money to support jihadist-like mercenaries and beefing up sanctions against Russia, come from an earlier playbook used most notably to undermine the pro-Russian regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Not surprisingly Putin and Assad are retaliating by sending pro-Assad mercenaries to fight in Ukraine.

Why Context Is Important

In the early 2000s, fellow investigative journalist Kristina Borjesson asked me to write an essay about how the media had covered the Iraq war for the paperback edition of her award-winning book, Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press. Kristina knew of my angst over the usual one-sided, pro-U.S. coverage of both the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. I had suspected all along that both wars were related to oil. That’s because, if you’ve lived and reported in the Middle East as I had, the oil connection to conflict is a no-brainer. But you would never know it if you followed the mainstream media in the U.S. So proving the oil connection required deeper digging.

In the course of writing the essay, I came across a statement made by a world-renowned forensic neuropathologist about the importance of context in criminal investigations: “Facts in isolation,” said Jan Leesma in an interview with CNN, “lead to all sorts of questions,” whereas “facts put in a contextual light enable the investigator to narrow down the causes.”

My essay would end up with the title “The War on Terror and the Great Game for Oil: How the Media Missed the Context.” Years later, I would incorporate my findings and expand on them in a book which has just come out in paperback titled Follow the Pipelines: Uncovering the Mystery of a Lost Spy and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil.

 

Except as otherwise indicated, the sources for this article are all extensively footnoted in the book.

Historical Context: “Getting the Oil at All Costs”

Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, made a historic decision in 1911 when he decided to convert the British Navy’s reliance on coal (of which it had plenty) for its fuel to oil (of which it had none). He feared, rightly, that the British Empire would have to fight over a “sea of troubles” to find oil. Getting the oil of Iraq became a “first-class war aim” for the British during World War I. Once accomplished, distributing Iraqi oil by pipeline to the port of Haifa on the Mediterranean Sea became a factor in the 1917 Balfour Declaration that favored a home for displaced European Jews in Palestine.

During World War II, protecting the oil of Saudi Arabia was yet another first-class war aim—this time for the Americans. I know because my father, Daniel Dennett, America’s first master spy in the Middle East, was tasked with this job as the head of counter-intelligence (X-2) for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and later the Central Intelligence Group (CIG, immediate precursor to the CIA). He died in a mysterious plane crash in March 1947 following a top-secret mission to Saudi Arabia.

 

I was an infant then, but 27 years later, when I left my job with the Beirut Daily Star in 1975 and returned to the U.S. after dodging a sniper’s bullet on the eve of the Lebanese civil war, I began to investigate the circumstances surrounding his death. I found a steamer trunk in the family attic filled with his letters and reports that revealed his last mission was to determine—and protect—the best route for the planned Trans-Arabian pipeline.

TAPLINE would carry desperately needed post-war Saudi oil to a terminal point on the eastern Mediterranean. From there it would be shipped to ports in Europe, where it would play a major role in turning Europe’s dependence away from largely Communist-controlled coal unions to “free-market” oil, aiding to the reconstruction of Europe under the Marshall Plan. The Cold War was about to begin.

 

The terminal point, once favored to be Haifa, Palestine, ended up (as my father recommended, due to instability in Palestine) next door, in Lebanon.

TAPLINE was, on reflection, just as big a deal back then as the construction of the Nord Stream Pipeline is today, as both projects were intimately wound up in the Great Game for Oil between the world’s biggest Petro Powers: the U.S. and Russia.

“Pipeline for U.S. Adds to Middle East Issues; Oil Concessions Raise Questions Involving Position of Russia”

This was the headline accompanying an article I discovered appearing in The New York Times on March 2, 1947, two weeks before the plane crash that killed my father.

The gist of this article was that this $100-million project, running across “the territories of four Middle Eastern countries,” was the source of significant consternation and resentment among America’s wartime allies. Why? Because it heralded the emergence of a major new power—the U.S.—in the Middle East, a region which had previously been dominated by the French and British. It also alarmed another rising world power: the Soviet Union, which Izvestia predicted (rightly as it turned out) would augur in an “American system of worldwide military bases.”

The Times article gave credence to this concern: “Protection of that investment,” wrote Clifton Daniel, soon to be son-in law of President Harry Truman, “and the military and economic security that it represented will become one of the prime objectives of American foreign policy in the area, which has already become a pivot of world politics and one of the main focal points of rivalry between East and West.” [Emphases added.]

 

This single sentence aligned with a declassified statement made by my father as he headed to Lebanon in 1944, reporting on his expected duties: “We must protect the [Saudi] oil at all costs,” he said in his otherwise heavily redacted five-page Analysis of Work.

Equally intriguing in the Times article was a map. It revealed not only the projected route of TAPLINE across the Arabian desert to a terminal point in Lebanon but the routes of two earlier pipelines built in the 1930s, one carrying the oil of Iraq to British-controlled Palestine and the other carrying Iraqi oil to French-controlled Lebanon.

These pivotal finds early in my investigation—my father’s last report, the New York Times piece, and the declassified Analysis of Work (obtained after I sued the CIA in an FOIA lawsuit) introduced me to “pipeline politics,” and how they could rapidly descend into all-out war if pipeline proponents did not get their way.

As monopoly chronicler Matt Stoller recently wrote regarding Nord Stream 2, “Pipelines ship energy. They also organize power.” And, if necessary, they can bring about regime change.

My father’s last report revealed that TAPLINE executive William Lenahan was frustrated by a highly nationalistic, anti-Zionist Syria refusing to let the pipeline cross through Syrian territory to terminate in Palestine.

 

The end result? The CIA, in its first-ever coup, in 1949, succeeded in removing Syrian President Shukri al-Quwatli and replacing him with a police officer who gave approval for TAPLINE to transit through Syria.

 

Ernest Latham, an American diplomat posted to Saudi Arabia at the time, commented that TAPLINE had assumed the role of “one of the great arteries of Empire, the American Empire in the Middle East I mean. Because that’s in fact what it was.”

And how would it be protected? Not by American troops stationed along its route as was the usual MO, as I reveal below about Afghanistan and Iraq, but by a whole nation created not only to be a refuge for European victims of the Holocaust, but also as the supreme military outpost of the American Empire in the Middle East: Israel.

Bush’s Oil Wars

Applying a post-9/11 contextual analysis of the War on Terror, I discovered how the Great Game for Oil had turned deadly, not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but in Syria as well. As with TAPLINE, the military protection of pipelines figured largely in these conflicts.

Some examples:

*The U. S war in Afghanistan, according to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher, was to “stabilize Afghanistan” and to link South and Central Asia “so the energy [from the Caspian Sea] can flow south.” How? through a planned Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline. U.S. and Canadian soldiers were sent into Afghanistan to protect the pipeline route. The pipeline, owned by Unocal (now Chevron), never reached completion due to continued instability in Afghanistan.

 

Financial institutions are loathe to support pipeline construction in areas of conflict. But discussions have resumed now that the U.S. has exited its troops from Afghanistan, with assurances from the Taliban that they will protect the pipeline.

 

*The U.S. war in Iraq was designed to turn Israel into a major energy corridor along the Eastern Mediterranean, beginning with the planned rebuilding of the Iraq Petroleum Company’s Kirkuk-to-Haifa pipeline that had been built in the 1930s but was closed during the 1948 Israeli war for independence. The plans were to overthrow Saddam Hussein and replace him with an Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, who favored the pipeline and created the Iraq WMD myth.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/04/20/war-in-ukraine-could-be-the-mother-of-all-energy-wars-but-the-media-still-misses-the-context/

 

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Note from double crossed:

A while after the beginning of the "war", Challabi was "tainted" by the CIA on false charges of fake currency dealing AND for "divulging sensitive information" to Iran (telling their codes had been broken by US intelligence —the Iranians knew that anyway but played along). In fact I believe the CIA was grooming him to become palatable in the eyes of the Shiite Iraqis so he could be elected to the Iraqi parliament and secretly carry on working for the US. The interesting factor here is that Challabi was tainted "TWICE" in order to reinforce his "liberation" from the exposed CIA clutches. To me it was a cheap trick. Sure, one needs more than one destructive aspect for a destructive attempt to be really successful. Striking from two directions at once, or in quick succession, is the way extinction works... Challabi's CIA's past was thus erased... 

 

GusNote: Challabi died... We are bravely told: Chalabi died on 3 November 2015, four days after his 70th birthday, having apparently suffered a heart attack at his home in Kadhimiya, Baghdad. Iraqi Press speculated at the time of his death that it came about as a result of being poisoned due to his ongoing efforts to expose regime corruption.

 

challabi

 

 Gus still holds the conquest of the HEARTLAND (destroy Russia and China) as the main US objective, because of all the resources, including OIL.....

The NATO-EU alliance is pursuing a policy of war escalation. This is also served by the propaganda with its blatant accusations against Russian warfare. This deepens the “enmity” against Russia and risks an even bigger war. This hate propaganda contributes to the brutalisation of the war. Ultimately, it also shatters coexistence in our societies. “Ghosts” are being awakened that the NATO-EU alliance will no longer be able to control.

Every war involves human sacrifice, human suffering, and enormous destruction. Every day that a war ends earlier is a gain for humanity. The ideal would be a world without war. Today, no one needs to explain all this. Nevertheless, not all warfare is the same. To cite two extreme examples: The Swiss Sonderbund Warin 1847, a year before the founding of the Swiss federal state, was different from the war of extermination waged by Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union (1941–1945) – and not only because of the difference in duration of the two wars. While the former war deliberately did not aim at humiliating the “enemy”, inflicting as many casualties as possible or even “annihilating” it altogether and destroying the “enemy’s” country in a “total war”, the latter did exactly that.

International Humanitarian Law

Since the mid-19th century, especially Switzerland and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have worked to create a “law in war” (ius in bello). In 1864, the first Geneva Convention “for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field” was adopted by twelve states in Geneva. This was followed by three further conventions (Geneva Conventions) until 1949 and various additional protocols in the decades that followed. All agreements and treaties together form today’s International Humanitarian Law.Its aim is to protect those not directly involved in the fighting, especially the wounded, prisoners and civilians, cultural property, and civilian infrastructure in war.
  Unfortunately, in no war, not even in any war after 1949, has International Humanitarian Law been fully respected. Why is this so?

Different war strategies ...

One reason is the respective military strategies. The military strategy of the USA, for example, deliberately aims at destroying the civilian infrastructure of the “enemy” right at the beginning of a war. Civilian casualties are not only accepted but sought. According to all that is known and what can be read in official Russian documents – including on the current war – this is different for Russian warfare. Accessible Russian briefings emphasise respect for International Humanitarian Law at every report and give many indications of how Russian troops are trying to ensure this as well. This cannot be seriously verified at present. But even independent experts such as the Swiss Jacques Baud conclude that “the Russian army is trying [...] to keep civilian casualties as low as possible”.1

... and hate propaganda

Another reason is the way warfare is emotionally charged by the politicians, by the command posts and by the media of the warring parties. There is no warfare without emotions and “enemy image”. But the target of the emotions and the enemy images can be very different. Warfare that is based on hatred and contempt for the “enemy”, that knows only “good” and “evil” and hypocritically imagines itself to be on the side of the “good guys” is the worst quagmire for a brutalisation of war. The “enemy” is demonised and dehumanised, he becomes “inhuman”, a “subhuman”, “vermin”.

Western and Russian media

Anyone who has compared the accessible German-language mainstream media in Germany, Austria and Switzerland with those from Russia in recent weeks and months, especially since 24 February, but also in the weeks before, must have noticed that the former have used and continue to use hate slogans almost daily. This propaganda aims at demonisation and dehumanisation. Unchecked, atrocities are attributed to the “enemy”, corresponding image material is presented in large formats. These “reports” are not only intended to put pressure on political decision makers to continue and escalate the (hybrid) war against Russia2 – especially at the expense of the people in Ukraine. This also includes the fervour with which German politicians like Annalena Baerbock have abandoned the deliberate basic line of former German foreign policy of not supplying weapons to war zones and now even want to supply heavy weapons.
  The “reports” of our media also aim at a mass public, at all of us and our emotions. The intellect is to be switched off; blind hatred is to be generated. The methods of hate propaganda have been described and analysed precisely for more than 100 years. And yet they still work for very many people today.
  I cannot judge for sure what is true and what is not true in the German-language Russian media accessible to me – but they do not show the hate propaganda that has become intolerable in our media.

An assault on coexistence

This hate propaganda in our media not only destroys all bridges to the “enemy” Russia. It is also an assault on coexistence in our countries – with devastating after-effects. For this propaganda destroys interpersonal trust and does violence to the social nature of human beings. We will feel the consequences.
  In her article “Roadmap in times of war” (Current Concerns No. 8 of 12 April 2022), Karin Leukefeld asked the question: “What is to be done?”. She wrote of a “courageous heart” and listed self-evident things: “Look closely and do not let yourself be misled. Question the media reports that try to tell us what is happening in Ukraine, what Russia is allegedly planning; seek other sources. Talk to family, friends, neighbours and colleagues about what you have found out about what is happening in Ukraine, but also about other theatres of war and injustices. Refuse to become an enemy and hold on to the friendship with Russia and its people that has been worked on for decades.”
  The hate propaganda of our media is designed to prevent just that. It is meant to prevent us from living our humanity. It is meant to turn thinking and compassionate individuals into bowed mass people with violent affects who inwardly obey hate propaganda. It is meant to lead us to war. Yes, there is something fascist about it.
  The Germans who participated in the Second World War remember not only the victims and the destruction of the war, but also the mental disruption of an entire people through National Socialist hate propaganda. Once again, sorcerer’s apprentices are at work.  •

1 Die europäischen Länder – und allen voran die Schweiz – sollten versuchen, die Wogen zu glätten, anstatt Öl ins Feuer zu giessen” (The European countries – above all Switzerland – should try to smooth the waters instead of pouring oil on the fire); interview with Jacques Baud in Zeitgeschehen im Fokus No 6 of 5 April 2022; https://zeitgeschehen-im-fokus.ch/de/newspaper-ausgabe/nr-6-vom-5-april-2022.html#article_1332
2 Thus, the internet page www.german-foreign-policy.com (https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/en/news/detail/8891) reported on 6 April 2022, after a first approach between the Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in Istanbul, the British government had warned of a too early armistice. First Ukraine would have to be in “the strongest military position”.

 

 

 

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https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2022/no-9-26-april-2022/sorcerers-apprentices.html

 

 

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SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171

 

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https://southfront.press/dirty-secrets-of-kiev-regime/

 

DIRTY SECRETS OF KIEV’S NAZI REGIME

 

THIS IS "RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA" THAT COULD BE TELLING THE TRUTH.... AMERICA HATES THE TRUTH....

https://southfront.press/southfront-org-blocked-by-u-s-controlled-global-internet-supervisor/

 

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On his personal Telegram account, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky posted a short video (see at the foot of this page) of his visit to troops in Bakhmut in the company of his chief of staff.

He is seen there with “white führer” Andriy Biletsky, military leader of the Ukrainian “integral nationalists”. According to the latter, Ukraine’s mission is "to spur the white races of the world towards a final crusade...against the Semite-led Untermenschen [sub-humans]".

“Integral nationalism” is an ideology devised by the Ukrainian Dmytro Dontsov (1883-1973), modeled on the tenets of French national Charles Maurras, and rooted in the hatred of Jews and Russians. Serving at first as a Reich secret agent, in the course of World War II Dontsov became one of the main planners of the final solution of the Jewish and Gypsy questions, exploiting his managerial position at the Reinhard Heydrich Institute in Prague. He was not tried at Nuremberg, but was picked up and groomed by the CIA. Contrary to what his Wikipedia entry falsely indicates, he did not die in Canada, but in the U.S. location of South River, New Jersey.

After founding the Azov regiment and suffering a defeat at Mariupol, Andriy Biletsky set up a mechanized infantry unit, the 3rd assault brigade - currently the main Ukrainian unit engaged in the Battle of Bakhmut.

Russia claims to be carrying out a special military intervention in Ukraine with a view to achieving its denazification. However, it lined up the private military company Wagner against the neo-Nazis of the Azov Regiment in Mariupol, then against the 3rd Assault Brigade in Bakhmut. Yet, the Wagner group, owned by Yevgeny Prigojine, was commanded by a Russian admirer of the Third Reich, Dmitri Outkin. The Kremlin has just eliminated him on the heels of an internal clash which was characterized by the Western media as an attempted coup.

Andriy Biletsky made it mandatory for all his men to read and study the writings of Dmytro Dontsov. In addition, he reveres Dontsov’s henchman, Stepan Bandera, who massacred more than 1.5 million Ukrainians during World War II. Bandera was also not tried at Nuremberg but was roped in by the CIA, and tasked with directing the Ukrainian broadcasts of Radio Free Europe from Munich during the Cold War.

"By placing a man of Jewish origin [Volodymyr Zelensky], from a Jewish background, at the helm of Ukraine, Western leaders wanted to cover up the anti-human essence that lies at the foundation of the Ukrainian state of today (…) And this makes the whole situation extremely disgusting, in that an ethnic Jew is whitewashing the glorification of Nazism and those who orchestrated the Jewish genocide in Ukraine, which caused the death of one and a half million people,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the meeting of the Pobiéda Committee last week.

https://www.voltairenet.org/article219657.html

 

 

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