WASHINGTON’S BATTLE OVER SYRIAN FOREIGN POLICY

"Numerous informed American and international analyses of the Syrian crisis warn that the conflict, already a proxy war pitting Turkey and the Arabian peninsula countries against Iran, could become still larger and more dangerous. However, these reports tend to ignore the brute petroleum realities which are likely to determine Assad’s downfall, if they are not directly confronted and rebutted. Syria’s petroleum reserves were estimated in 2010 at 2,500,000,000 barrels. More importantly, Syria is the most obvious land route for any pipelines to export oil and gas from the Persian Gulf, including Iran, to the energy-hungry nations of western Europe. But the Kirkuk–Baniyas crude oil pipeline, from the Kirkuk oil field in Iraq to the Mediterranean, was destroyed by U.S. air strikes in 2003 and never reopened. In 2009 Qatar and Turkey began negotiating a new natural gas pipeline across Saudi Arabia and Syria to Turkey, to link up with the proposed Nabucco pipeline across Turkey from Azerbaijan. A route through Iraq seemed increasingly problematic, however, with the increasing conflicts there. Meanwhile, according to Oilprice.com, Saudi Arabia denied Qatar the use of its territory, leaving a route through southern Iraq and Syria for Qatar to “secure a new source of income. Pipelines are in place already in Turkey to receive the gas. Only Al-Assad is in the way ... The informed website ZeroHedge.com has commented that this considerable investment is “as so often happens in the middle east,… once again all about the natural resources.” Qatar’s North Dome gas field, in the middle of the Persian Gulf, is one with Iran’s South Pars field, and together they constitute the largest gas field in the world. In 2011 Assad rejected an ultimatum from Qatar and instead agreed with Iran and Iraq to build a new Iran-Syria pipeline which would transfer natural gas to the Mediterranean from Iran’s South Pars natural gas field rather than Qatar’s North Dome. (We should recall that similar challenges to American petrodollar hegemony were made by Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, with fatal consequences to them and their regimes) ... One of the great downsides of covert foreign policies is that crucial world-changing decisions are entrusted to gung-ho cowboys with little oversight and still less interest in the long-term consequences of their disruptive actions. We saw this two decades ago when the CIA, overriding the State Department, helped Pakistan’s ISI, in collusion with the Salafist jihadi Hekmatyar, overthrow the relatively moderate Najibullah government in Afghanistan that had been left behind when the Soviets withdrew ... Unless there is a significant change, we can anticipate the same tragedy again in Syria -- with the CIA, in collusion with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, facilitating arms to similar Sunni jihadis."

Zum Artikel von Prof. Peter Dale Scott, erschienen beim Asia-Pacific Journal (17. Juni 2013) »

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