Bush, war and desperate struggle for a slice of life
Fidel Castro Ruz

IThe EFE reports that US President George W. Bush arrived today at 15:00 hours, local time. The President’s visit is his first official visit to Croatia since it declared independence from the former Yugoslavia.  The US president arrived from Bucharest, where he attended the NATO summit, in which Croatia and Albania received official invitations to join the Alliance. Croatian authorities announced earlier today that everything was ready for Bush’s visit, which posed the greatest challenge to the country’s security forces that they had faced to date. While these news reached us from the Balkans, in Europe’s south-east, where numerous countries are fighting over the “honour” of being devoured by the empire’s economic and financial system in order to improve their material living conditions, which have nothing in common with those of the underdeveloped world, a news cable issued by the EFE on April 2nd reported the following:
World Bank (WB) President Robert Zoellick called today for coordinated global action to address rising food prices which, coupled to increasingly high energy prices, threaten to destabilize 33 countries around the world. Zoellick referred to this coordinated action as one of the four measures which need to be implemented immediately to secure a sustainable process of globalization and minimize the effects of today’s international financial crisis on the developing world. He called for a global trade agreement at the Doha round of negotiations, which must be arrived at “now or never”. He also called for greater transparency in the raw materials sector in the developing world, with a view to giving greater impetus to growth. His speech, delivered at a hotel in the US capital on the eve of the WB and IMF spring meeting to be held in Washington next week, comes at a moment of great economic uncertainty for the world. To achieve all this, we must confront problems such as skyrocketing basic food prices, which result, among other factors, from energy sector recovery.  Zoellic stressed that basic food prices have gone up by 80 percent since 2005. He pointed out that, last month alone, the rice and wheat prices reached their highest, reported in the last 19 and 28 years, respectively.
The World Bank estimates that 33 countries around the world face potential social or political crises as a result of high food and energy prices, he stated. He pointed out that demographic conditions, a change in people’s diets, energy and biofuel prices and climate change suggest that the high and volatile costs of food will be with us in years to come. In view of this situation, he proposed the creation of what he described as a New Agreement for a Global Food Policy, which ought to focus not only on hunger, malnutrition and access to food products, but also on other factors such as the connections those prices have to energy or climate change. Food policy needs to draw the attention of the top political circles, because no country or group of countries can face these interconnected challenges alone, he concluded. These two institutions, the World Bank and the IMF, are part of the imperialist system. The first news of Bush’s risky trip to Russia came from the very military plane that took him and his vast entourage there, to Sochi, a city on the shores of the Black Sea. Reporters from several western press agencies travelled with him.
An AFP cable dated April 4th reported:
World Bank (WB) President Robert Zoellick called today for coordinated global action to address rising food prices which, coupled to increasingly high energy prices, threaten to destabilize 33 countries around the world. Zoellick referred to this coordinated action as one of the four measures which need to be implemented immediately to secure a sustainable process of globalization and minimize the effects of today’s international financial crisis on the developing world. He called for a global trade agreement at the Doha round of negotiations, which must be arrived at “now or never”. He also called for greater transparency in the raw materials sector in the developing world, with a view to giving greater impetus to growth. His speech, delivered at a hotel in the US capital on the eve of the WB and IMF spring meeting to be held in Washington next week, comes at a moment of great economic uncertainty for the world. To achieve all this, we must confront problems such as skyrocketing basic food prices, which result, among other factors, from energy sector recovery.  Zoellic stressed that basic food prices have gone up by 80 percent since 2005. He pointed out that, last month alone, the rice and wheat prices reached their highest, reported in the last 19 and 28 years, respectively.
The World Bank estimates that 33 countries around the world face potential social or political crises as a result of high food and energy prices, he stated. He pointed out that demographic conditions, a change in people’s diets, energy and biofuel prices and climate change suggest that the high and volatile costs of food will be with us in years to come. In view of this situation, he proposed the creation of what he described as a New Agreement for a Global Food Policy, which ought to focus not only on hunger, malnutrition and access to food products, but also on other factors such as the connections those prices have to energy or climate change. Food policy needs to draw the attention of the top political circles, because no country or group of countries can face these interconnected challenges alone, he concluded. These two institutions, the World Bank and the IMF, are part of the imperialist system. The first news of Bush’s risky trip to Russia came from the very military plane that took him and his vast entourage there, to Sochi, a city on the shores of the Black Sea. Reporters from several western press agencies travelled with him.
An AFP cable dated April 4th reported:
“President George W. Bush told NATO allies that the United States would send more troops to Afghanistan next year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday.  “(…) The president indicated that he expected in 2009 the United States would make a significant additional contribution,” he said.  “Gates said bipartisan support for such a move in the United States was strong enough to allow Bush to make the pledge even though he will no longer be president.” From Moscow, an EFE cable dated April 5th reported: US President George W. Bush arrived today in Sochi, where he will consult his Russian counterpart Vladmir Putin and Dimitri Medvedev, who will become Russia’s head of State next May 7th. The last meeting between Bush and Putin will focus on Washington’s plans to deploy parts for its anti-missiles shield in Eastern Europe, a move which had just met with NATO’s support and to which Russia is resolutely opposed. Tomorrow, Sunday, the Russian and US presidents also plan on signing a document that will set down a strategic framework to guide relations between the two countries under the leadership of their respective successors. The document must be an honest instrument, for there are problems that cannot be ignored, said Serguei Prijodko, foreign policy advisor for the Kremlin chief, as quoted by the Russian agency Interfax. He stressed that significant differences still exist between Moscow and Washington with respect to anti-missile defence systems, on strategic arms reduction plans following the expiration of the START-1 Treaty and the inadmissible nature of militarizing the cosmos. Among these differences, Prijodjo also pointed out the differing stances on NATO’s expansion, particularly into the former Soviet republics of the Ukraine and Georgia. Bush’s visit to Sochi, the last in his tour of Eastern Europe, will last less than 24 hours.
On April 5th, the German agency DPA reported:
Tying lose ends, getting in step with each other, Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin prepare for their meeting at the Sochi spa, next to the Black Sea, with a view to sparing their successors political burdens. It was Bush who chose Putin’s summer residence as the venue for their last meeting: his parents had been delighted with their private visit, in 2003, to this mansion, erected following Stalin’s death. The locality will also host the 2014 Winter Olympics. The two presidents availed themselves of many of their 23 meetings to compliment each other in public. But, beneath such personal sympathies, there are more than enough reasons for political friction. One of them is the United States’ controversial plan to erect an anti-missiles defence system in the Czech Republic and Poland. In Kiev, Bush had cautiously stated he hoped to find common ground in this dispute. The Vice-President of Russia’s Academy for Security, Defence and Order, General Viktor Yessin, affirmed there were reasons for cautious optimism. Different kinds of speculations also surround Bush and Putin’s last meeting: some believe the presidents plan on an agreement to construct a means of transportation that will connect the two countries via Alaska, a project which had already been conceived in the time of the tsars. The media began to speculate on this when the rich governor of Chukotka, Roman Abramovich, ordered the largest tunnel boring drill in the world from the construction company Herrenknecht. A Kremlin spokesperson commented on the rumours surrounding the 42 billion-euro (66 million-dollar) 100-kilometer tunnel.
On April 6th, the French agency AFP reported:
Putin declared that he was prudently optimistic about a definitive agreement and that he felt it was feasible. Bush stated he wants to establish a personal relationship with elected Russian President Dimitri Medvedev that will allow the two of them to work together on common problems. Bush, who participated at the NATO summit in Bucharest on Friday, arrived in Sochi with the support of the Alliance for the US anti-missile shield project. Plans exist to expand the US defence system with a battery of 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and an ultra-modern radar in the Czech Republic, which would be in operations until 2012. Upon his return to the US capital, the EFE reported in a cable dated April 6th: US President George W. Bush returned to Washington today with much pending work in his agenda as regards relations with Russia, as he himself has recognized. The US – Russia meeting closed with the signature of a strategic framework agreement which sets down the major lines that are to guide future bilateral relations in such areas as the struggle against terrorism and the economy.
But the document also clearly reveals the profound differences that persist between Washington and Moscow with respect to the anti-missiles shied that the United States plans on constructing in Eastern Europe, one of the thorniest issues in the bilateral relations of recent months. Putin declared that the devil hides in the small-print. It is important for experts to decide what the guarantee measures will be and how they will be implemented. There is also discussion surrounding matters such as the expansion of NATO towards the east, particularly towards the former Soviet republics of the Ukraine and Georgia. When they met 7 years ago, Bush stated he had looked into Putin’s eyes and had been able to glimpse his soul. The two leaders have maintained a good personal relationship, despite the deterioration of their country’s relations. Now, Bush and Medvedev have got off on a different foot. While at their first meeting the US president welcomed Putin with an embrace, he only shook his successor’s hand. And if he looked into his eyes and glimpsed his soul, he certainly didn’t say so, the cable ironically concluded.

The geopolitics of LNG and gas pipelines
Matein Khalid

$105 CRUDE OIL has changed the politics and pricing of natural gas. Once a trapped asset traded in regional markets, gas is increasingly a liquid global market whose growth rate will dominate the future of the world economy. Power generation, thanks to the combined gas turbine and the new market pricing of CO2 emissions, makes gas the clean fuel of the future. Yet China and India possess only three per cent of global gas reserves, the EU is hostage to the Kremlin’s whims as Russia owns the world’s largest gas reserves, a new Great Game over gas pipelines has gripped the Caspian Sea and the Balkans, gas markets will influence the macroeconomic growth and even international relations of the GCC, gas wars could erupt from the Niger Delta to the Maracaibo Basin. As the fate of Shell’s LNG Sakhalin project in Russia proves, geopolitics will increasingly define the global energy village.
Gazprom is the largest, most powerful gas company in the world. Its former chairman, Dimitri Medvedev, is the President of the Russian Federation and its Siberian gas fields supply no less than one fourth of the EU total gas imports. It is impossible to understand Russian diplomacy and factional politics in the Kremlin outside the opaque prism of Gazprom’s strategic and corporate interests. Gazprom has monopoly rights on Russian gas exports and the domestic pipeline networks and benefited most when the Kremlin moved to destroy Yukos, forced Shell to renegotiate its equity gas in Sakhalin- 2 and demanded market prices on Russian gas from Ukraine. Gazprom is also the kingmaker in the pipeline politics of Central Asia and the Balkans. Gazprom’s capex and strategic choices will determine the future of the international gas market, energy security for the EU, Moscow’s relations with its former Warsaw Pact satrapies, China, Iran and even Arab gas powers such as Algeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. Gazprom is spending hundreds of billions in developing new gas fields in the Siberian permafrost of the Yamal Peninsula and offshore in the Stockman gas field among the icebergs of the Berent Sea in the Arctic.
Economists calculate that if Gazprom fails in Yamal, Shtokman or in its export targets, the world will face an annual gas deficit as high as 100 billion cubic metres. The growth in Russian domestic growth has forced the Kremlin to deregulate Soviet era gas prices, create a gas trading exchange in Moscow, encourage the growth of independent producers like Novatek and seek to achieve netback parity with Europe as early as 2011. Unlike Russia, gas prices in the Gulf will not face any pressure to rise to market prices as governments simply cannot face the political fallout at a time of rising inflation. So the cost of the government subsidies on gasoline has led to some of the most wasteful, excessive domestic consumption rates on the planet. The industrial complexes now rising everywhere from Jubail to Yanbu in Saudi Arabia, Jebel Ali and Ruwais in UAE, from Kharg Island to Sohar in Oman, means gas demand will only surge even if gas exports do not. Qatar gas, in partnership with Exxon, Shell, Oxy and Conoco Philips, has spent $70 billion to create the world’s most ambitions LNG export complex, enabling it to become the world’s third largest gas producer after Russia and Iran once its upstream infrastructure is completed.
Gas has enabled Qatar to reinvest its international image, to become America’s host for its Gulf military command (Centcom), to rival Saudi Arabia and Egypt as a maverick in Arab diplomacy in Lebanon, Iraq and the Israel/ Palestine issue. The Dolphin Project, initiated in Abu Dhabi and Doha, is the most successful pan-GCC energy project, the dawn of a new geopolitical axis in the lower Gulf. Civil war and US sanctions have crippled the gas infrastructure growth of Iran and Iraq, the Gulf is increasingly facing a short gas squeeze as population and industrial demand soars at a time of subsidised prices, rampart inflation, overheated economies and Qatar’s moratorium on new projects. Without a private sector with access to reserves and incentives to boost exploration and production, Gulf governments are doomed to bear colossal subsidies and anemic output growth. If Russia and the Gulf cannot boost export volumes, a gas crisis is inevitable as early as 2010. Indonesia’s Pertamina was forced to cancel its long term LNG contract commitments to its Japanese clients because Jakarta’s domestic demand surged. This could be the template for other gas exporting countries, particularly those where strident “resource nationalism” makes partnerships with Big Oil difficult like Iraq, Kuwait, Algeria and Venezuela. The entire, complex value chain of gas production and pricing across the world almost guarantees a succession of gas shocks in the decade ahead. While I doubt a “gas OPEC” with the Kremlin in the role of a Saudi style swing producer will emerge, a massive hike in gas prices, grossly undervalued relative to North Sea Brent and West Texas sweet sour crude, is inevitable. Governments all over the world who cling to gas subsidies will face a financial hemorrhage and the EU will scramble for secure LNG shipments from the Egyptian Sinai or Algerian gas terminals. Gulf governments, where domestic prices are a mere 10 per cent of LNG export prices, will be forced to abandon the current regime. Yet a secular rise in gas prices will only exacerbate GCC inflation, which has now reached the virulent, galloping stage. The price of gasoline could well become yet another index of political stability in the Middle East.
The LNG industry is dominated by the Seven Sisters, the corporate colossi of Big Oil, with long term fixed rate contracts. LNG is the largest niche in fossil fuel, thanks to the economies of scale made possible by ever bigger liquification plants and LNG tankers. As regasification terminals are built in Europe and America, despite bitter environmentalist politics, suppliers could well create a global spot market for LNG, as happened for crude oil in Rotterdam and Singapore in the 1970’s. The emergence of cargo switching, multitude regas terminals, a spot market and new contract clients will require nothing less than a paradigm shift in Gulf exporters such as Qatar gas and Adgas/ADNOC, whose corporate DNA is LNG.
Gas pipelines are the new pawns, the currency of sovereign power on the chessboard of international politics. The new Great Game in the Central Asia and the Caspian Sea is all about pipeline politics, which has seen surreal moments. Unocal lobbied with Mullah Omer and invited Taleban emissaries to Houston to discuss a Turkmen-Afghan gas pipeline. Azerbaijan, a de facto BP company state, was attacked by Iranian naval warships in disputes over Caspian offshore fields. Gazprom is planning new pipelines to bypass Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. Russia has tried to offset its dependence on gas exports to the EU with high profile deals with Beijing, where gas is a mere three per cent of the energy mix. The Chinese are also involved in oil and gas deals from Sudan to Angola, Kazakhstan to Burma. Gas politics defines the foreign policy of India, its relationships with Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan and Burma. The EU plans a new pipeline Nabucco to bring Azeri Caspian oil to Austrian gas hubs. Future suppliers of gas to Nabucco could be Turkmenistan, Iran, Iraq and Egypt. Nabucco is as much a challenge to Putin as the independence of Kosovo or Chechnya, as Nato membership for Ukraine and Georgia. Gas will define the new Cold War.

—Khaleej Times



The nuclear Jihadist
Amjed Jaaved

YET ANOTHER book, The Nuclear Jihadist, authored by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, has come up on Pakistan’s nuclear programme. The book claims to be an expose of Dr A. Q. Khan’s `criminal’ activities to fabricate a nuclear bomb for Pakistan. But, the underlying message is that Pakistan’s bomb may fall into hands of Osama Bin Laden who may use it against the West. The odds for a nuclear attack, as quoted by the authors, are fifty per cent, according to Harvard professor Graham Allison and former US defence secretary William Perry. Another Harvard professor Matthew Bunn has reportedly said that he would not live either in New York or Washington, because he fears a terrorist attack using atomic weapons (page x). On page 152-153, the authors allege that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence goes to publishers to falsify books such that they flash Dr Khan in a favourable light.
It is unfortunate that the insinuations against Pakistan’s nuclear programme never stop. In their book, Messrs Frantz and Collins have done nothing except putting old wine in new bottle. Earlier, International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) had published a ‘research’ dossier titled ‘Nuclear Black Markets: Pakistan, A. Q. Khan and the Rise of Proliferation Networks’. The title of the dossier suggests that it is exclusively focused on Dr Qadeer. However, it throws light on bomb espionage activities of several other countries, including India. Frantz et al make no reference to the dossier. Why? Because the dossier has some silver linings in favour of Pakistan. The dossier is accompanied with a prefatory statement by Dr John Chipman, Director General of the IISS. This statement gives a fair opinion of Pakistan’s motivation to go nuclear.
Dr Chipman points out, ‘Pakistan’s motivation to acquire nuclear weapons was sparked in large part by competition with India. .. the major boost [to Pakistan’s weapons programme] came in December 1971 after Pakistan’s traumatic defeat by India. Embitterment over the loss of East Pakistan also provided a psychological motivation to Dr A.Q. Khan to offer his services to his home country by stealing enrichment technology from his workplace in the Netherlands. With that boost, it took Pakistan only ten years to reach the point where it could produce a nuclear weapon, despite the withdrawal of nuclear assistance from Western countries’. The dossier could ferret out no Islamic connexion to Pakistani bomb. Despite its pro-India bias, the dossier admits ‘ Khan may have acted largely on his own volition, for his own profit’ (page 2). ‘Khan’s nuclear activities were largely unsupervised by Pakistani governmental authorities and his orders of many more components, than Pakistan’s own enrichment programme required, apparently went undetected’ (p. 66). ‘Most of Khan’s dealings were carried on his own initiative’ (DG, IISS, press statement dated May 2, 2007).
The dossier reflects well on Pakistan’s efforts to tighten its nuclear security and safety controls _ It observes ‘Many of Pakistan’s internal reforms since 2001, and then following Khan’s confession and confinement to house arrest in 2004, have been transparent and appear to have worked well. A robust command-and-control system is now in place to protect Pakistan’s nuclear assets from diversion, theft and accidental misuse. A.Q. Khan and his known cohorts are out of business’. The dossier also notes that ‘A new defence policy was adopted in March 2004. This policy reportedly intended to “further strengthen institutionalization of control of strategic assets”, and “turn all policies and decisions from an invisible secrecy into solid documentary form following recent proliferation scandal” (p. 36).
The dossier realises dangerous implications of the 123 agreement (revised version on anvil) for Pakistan. Extract: ‘Fears that the India-US nuclear cooperation agreement will free up Indian domestic uranium for additional weapons purposes gives Pakistan an additional motivation to continue to produce weapons-grade fissile material of its own. Pakistan has resisted any nonproliferation regimes that it believes would give a ‘perpetual edge’ to India. This is one reason Pakistan has been the country most resistant to negotiating a fissile material cut-off treaty’. Aside from its Pakistan-bashing title, the dossier observes ‘Pakistan was not the only country to evade nuclear export controls to further a covert nuclear weapons programme (page 7). ‘Almost all of the countries that have pursued nuclear weapons programmes obtained at least some of the necessary technologies, tools and materials from suppliers in other countries. Even the United States (which detonated the first nuclear weapon in 1945) utilised refugees and other European scientists for the Manhattan Project and the subsequent development of its nascent nuclear arsenal. The Soviet Union (which first tested an atomic bomb in 1949) acquired its technological foundations through espionage. The United Kingdom (1952) received a technological boost through its involvement in the Manhattan Project. France (1960) discovered the secret solvent for plutonium reprocessing by combing through open-source US literature. China (1964) received extensive technical assistance from the USSR’.
From the dossier, one gets to know that Asher, an Israeli businessman, and Alfred Hempel, an ex Nazi who died in 1989, are co-fathers of India’s ‘indigenous’ bombs. Hempel, a German nuclear entrepreneur, helped India overcome difficulties of heavy-water shortage by organising illicit delivery of a consignment of over 250 tonnes of heavy water to India’s Madras-I reactor, via China, Norway and the USSR. The duo also arranged transfer to India of sensitive nuclear components. One unmistakable conclusion from the dossier is that Pakistan’s motivation to go nuclear was well founded. In view of restrictions on nuclear exports, Pakistan did what other countries did to make its bomb.