Energy industries go to war for access to black gold Published on Monday, January 28, 2002

Kansas State Collegian

I love seeing Americans with those invisible subconscious patriotic blindfolds on, blocking out all signs of the truth. Quietly reassuring themselves that no resident, Republican or Democrat, could ever be guilty of wrongdoing.

The proof is abundant, yet Americans fail to pay any attention. A majority of Americans base their opinions on 25-second soundbytes or 2-minute speeches more scripted than a Tarantino movie.

When you have the son of a former oil tycoon as your president, and the former chief executive officer of the largest oil services company in the world as your vice president, you have problems. People of Planet Earth must play the role of the watch dog, not the lap dog, on the executive office. I don't care if they're from the right or the left, or whether we're at war or peace.

With the exception of some geologists, political scientists and historians, few Americans realize that Afghanistan sits in the way of the largest untapped oil reserves on the planet: an estimated $4 trillion in black gold was discovered only 20 years ago in and around the Caspian Sea basin.

There are several routes to retrieve this oil. It stretches through Iran, as well as former Soviet republics Azerbajian, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, all of which were bought into by the oil industry years before and months after Sept. 11. Several U.S. companies including Halliburton, Exxon, Enron, and Unocal (76) have financial interests in this route.

But the only pipeline the U.S. would have direct access to would have to be extracted and shuttled through Turkmenistan to the east through both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Until Sept. 11, this option was anything but politically feasible.

It remains a mystery why most Americans are not yet familiar with Unocal (76), the Texas-based oil exploration and services corporation.

In 1997, it was Unocal who flew top Taliban diplomats to Texas to discuss the possibilities of building multiple sets of pipelines through the already war-torn Afghanistan.

In 1998, John Maresca, a former Bush-appointed ambassador to Cyprus, testified before Congress on behalf of his new employer -- Unocal.

He spoke of the possibilities the Caspian region held -- the capability of producing around 200 billion barrels of oil. But the construction of such a pipeline could not begin "until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, leaders and our company."

Also formerly on Unocal's payroll is the newly-appointed prime minister of Afghanistan Hamed Karzai. He might be a very qualified and intelligent man, but reading his profile, one cannot help but notice his connections with big oil, and Karzai also was considered a valuable asset to the United States throughout the Soviet/Afghan war (1979-1989).

Zalmay Khalilzad, who was a top senior Bush administration member, also was a former contracted employee of Unocal, and was said by the Washington Post to have played a role in the failed 1997 Taliban oil negotiations. Recently, Bush appointed him to act as the U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan, the medium between our two governments.

Look closer at our current National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who babysits Bush on most of his visits with world leaders. Rice was on the board of directors at Chevron from 1991 to 2001. You know, the company that just merged with Texaco?

Rice also has an extensive knowledge of U.S-Soviet relations, in particular the former Soviet republics that contain all that Texas Tea.

And then there's Vice President Dick Cheney. After Iraq destroyed Kuwait's infrastructure, it was Halliburton that was contracted to rebuild. When the U.S. military destroyed much of the former Yugoslavia with massive bombing campaigns, once again Halliburton inked a nine-figure contract to help reconstruct.

With a presence in 120 countries, Halliburton also has become one of the nation's largest defense contractors, contracted to set up roads and buses for U.S. military operations worldwide.

The former Nixon staffer, White House chief of staff for Ford and secretary of defense for Bush Sr. has made speeches in 1997 and 1998 about the Caspian region.

"I can't think of a better time when we've had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. It's almost as if the possibilities arose overnight," remarked Cheney.

As of 2000, both Unocal and Halliburton had made multi-million dollar investments to build offshore oil facilities in Azerbajian, which borders the Caspian to the West.

Prior to the 2000 election, both Cheney and his wife Lynne were on the board of Texas-based defense contractor Lockheed Martin, which in recent months received the largest defense contract in American history.

That's right, billions of our tax dollars paving the way to make Bush's and Cheney's friends even richer. Like many historians have said, some truth is always the first casualty of war.