SIT-REP 9-22; Wednesday, September 22, 1999

In this Issue: Chechnya and Yugoslavia -On Oil & Gas and Power; Kosovo

Correction: In my last issue, I referred to China building a super-gun. Jane's Defense Weekly reported in its Sept. 15 issue that the gun has a range of 360 kilometers; its caliber was not specified in the clip I received.

Bill Gertz of the Washington Times and Matt Drudge have "outed" Strobe Talbott's true ideological thinking regarding Globalism and anti-nationalism, and this thinking is at the core of Mr. Clinton's long-term vision which guides his foreign policy. Even the United States is to be dismantled in time, so that we can all be "citizens of the world" -over my dead body. A copy of Drudge's distillation is attached to the website edition of this letter.

Talbott is now engaged in the task of explaining away how the Clinton Administration has done nothing to curb corruption in Russia. Interesting, since money and oil are "fungible," it can be argued that Western aid not only bought Russian acquiescence to the recent Kosovo air war. That aid is now funding Russia's copy-cat air attack on Chechnya, while also allowing Russia to provide subsidized oil and gas, on easy credit terms, to Belgrade now that the air war is over. Hmmm·

Rudyard Kipling, in an 1886 poem entitled "The Public Waste," coined an interesting term for appointees and bureaucrats: "Little Tin Gods on Wheels." The Clinton-era "Third Way" politics of regulatory Globalism (not to be confused with its competitor and anti-thesis, Free Trade) rests on further empowering these little tin gods on a world-wide basis, as this letter will explore with regard to routing oil out of the Caucasus to world markets. Exploration of this theme will continue in further installments, as well.

Australia appears to have planted itself up to its neck in East Timor, KFOR has enmired itself in Kosovo and, now, Russia has been bombing its secessionist province of Chechnya for the last week, with some 80,000 refugees fleeing into neighboring Ingushetia. On Thursday there were reports that Russian ground forces were beginning to occupy strategic heights inside Chechnya, though Russia denies it has re-entered Chechnya just yet.

Then there is the Islam v. Hindu struggle in Kashmir, winding down now that the Hindu Nationalist BJP party of PM Vajpayee appears to have gained strength in India's nation-wide elections, parlaying its handling of that little war into a "wag the dog" coup in the polls.

In the Caucasus struggle (Dagestan, Chechnya, etc.) Orwellian word games were already apparent: journalists are filing reports of an imminent Russian "invasion," though legally, you cannot invade your own territory. Officially, western powers support Russia's actions in defending Dagestan, and even attacking Chechnya, but is this real support or do they expect Russia to "slip on a banana peel?"

What is common to these situations is that they all fall along the boundary line between the Islamic Civilization and the Christian or Hindu world. These clashes do reflect the tensions of the struggle between religion and ideology (faith v. communism) as well as the rivalry among faiths. More on this soon, but readers are directed to Samuel P. Huntington's 1996 opus, "The Clash of Civilizations."

Oil & Gas and Power:

Oil prices are high this autumn, but Iran and Iraq are involved in raising production; Iraq expects to expand exports by about 1 mil barrels per day (bpd) over the next two years, while Iran just announced discovery of a conveniently locate "elephant" field containing 26 billion barrels (bbls --42 gallons) near Ahwaz, at the heart of Iran's fields and export infrastructure. Iran expects to produce about 400,000 bpd from that field within two years or so. Current high prices help US allies shore up their finances, but expanding output will benefit not so friendly independent nations which also love to develop their own weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

What is common to Chechnya and East Timor is the presence of oil; and control of proposed oil shipment routes is the common thread between Chechnya and Kosovo.

About 2400 BC, Sargon of Akkadia hit on the idea of imperialism and the re-routing of world trade, in order to facilitate taxation. The present debate is where will the oil pipelines run, through which oil and gas from the Caspian Sea will flow. The map (Source: The Economist) helps demonstrate the way Moscow is attempting to address that question by smashing Chechnya's Islamic fundamentalist rebels.

Chechnya produces some oil on its own and sits atop the old main pipeline from the Caspian fields of Azerbaijan. Russian bombing raids over the past nine days have been primarily directed against Chechnya's oil infrastructure.

To frame the question properly, there are several competing pipeline routes from the Caspian, each of which will generate transit revenues, not to mention construction and maintenance jobs.

The second part of the question is how will the oil be delivered to European markets. Oil could piped through Georgia and loaded on ships in the Black Sea, then sail through the Dardanelles into the Mediterranean or up the Danube to Central Europe. But a peevish Yugoslav government keeps playing "sphincter" on the Danube route, while the Dardanelles is already crowded. To relieve that pressure, the Turks can build a pipeline from Azerbaijan to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan and a $4 Bil project is approved. That line might be exposed to a threat from the remnants of the Kurdish PKK rebellion, but since the imprisonment of PKK leader Ocalan, that threat has receded.

But it appears the Clinton Administration has embraced a surprising alternate pipeline route that nobody needs and makes sense only in bureaucratic or diplomatic logic: the "Corridor Eight" route from Bulgaria through Macedonia to Vlore, Albania, where it would be loaded back onto ships for distribution at other ports. This outflanks both the Turkish waterway and the Danube occlusion, while endowing three little client states with substantial transit revenues and other infrastructural improvements --plenty for newly empowered, little tin gods to meddle with. The route also screws Turkey, Russia, Yugoslavia, Romania and Germany, not to mention the smaller states along the Danube. Worst, it puts the western terminus in the hands of Albania's lunatic mix of gangsters, Nazis and bandit warlords. The US has already funded the engineering studies and preliminary work on the "Corridor Eight" project, budgeted to cost $826 mil.

The US has also been building influence in Georgia and Armenia, even sending the 6^th Fleet's flagship into the Black Sea to demonstrate our potential military reach. Georgia, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania win at the expense of Turkey.

Russia: Russia straddles the existing routes and oil revenue should help service its massive foreign debt, but since it got entangled with Chechen nationalists in 1994-96, the question of providing security to a long, vulnerable pipeline has stimulated attempts to bypass Russia in favor of other less insecure routes.

Demand for energy has risen and conflicts in the oil patch help stimulate prices as well. Oil has surged from $10 a barrel (bbl -42 gallons) to about $25/bbl since last winter. Despite the problems along the Caucasus route, this has helped Russia's economy to revive somewhat --it appears GDP will increase 2% for the year.

Russia has proposed a cheap new pipeline through Dagestan ($200 mil if they skirt Chechnya or $400 mil if they hug the Caspian coastline) that would outflank Chechnya, but Azerbaijan would rather not depend on Russia anymore.

TURKEY: Alarmed that the US would so blatently screw an old ally in order to endow three small Balkan states with a pipeline, Turkey has moved to advance the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline and we expect to see that built as the principal route.

YUGOSLAVIA: There is an old joke about how the parts of the human body assembled to elect a leader. The heart made its case, the brain its, as did other organs. Then the sphincter proposed itself, which precipitated the others into derisive laughter. Then the sphincter shut up and the body parts began to experience the pains of constipation. In a few days, the sphincter was elected, proving "you don't need brains to run the show when an asshole will do."

The Danube is the low-cost route into Central Europe and the European Union has voted $14 mil to clear the channel and repair bridges in Yugoslavia. Belgrade plays a short-sighted game in keeping the river route closed; it builds US influence while handicapping its neighbors' economies. In many of those countries the people tend towards sympathy to the Serbs, but with economic strains will support governments which seek benefit from sucking up to Mr. Clinton's government.

Oil & Infrastructure:

Oil & gas require an extensive and elaborate fixed infrastructure of derricks, pipelines, refineries, etc. The industry requires strong government and reliable financial commitments to sustain the continuous process of production and transportation. Like Tobacco, Oil returns to its hosts steady revenue flows "at the front end," always nice. Interestingly, WMD programs also require infrastructure, finance and strong, centralized regimes.

Governments of importing nations find oil taxes a convenient way to pay for bloated bureaucracies and profligate social safety net programs, as is the European way --and they embellish the game by encouraging environmental activists to demonize hydrocarbons, thus not minding high energy prices. Producers bear the wide-swings in prices and this causes endemic budgetary problems for the Saudis, Venezuela and others, but consumption taxes are steady and sustained price depressions always tempt importing governments to further raise their tax rates on oil products.

In reminding myself of this, it is easier to understand Saddam's success in maintaining his power base in Iraq; the majority of the country instinctively understands that oil is Iraq's only business and that a strong central government is the only way the country's population can develop into an educated middle class where ethnic and sectarian differences among Arabs and Kurds, Shiites and Sunni are relatively unimportant. Saddam understands his people and his product. This is why he cannot be undermined or uprooted by sanctions and air raids. Half-measures will not do; deal with him or replace him at bayonet point.

Saddam's secular Muslim politics can only be contested by its natural antithesis, militant "Islamist" revolution, which offers the Koranic Law of Sharia to oppose secular law and civic institutions. Nobody wants that. Clintonian neo-imperial "Globalism," which tries to break up nation-states into ethnically clean statelets (as with Yugoslavia, the Soviet Empire and possibly Indonesia, thus far), does not suit itself to the infrastructural imperatives of oil, or to the geopolitical realities of the Gulf, as it stands in a three-way balance of power between the Gulf Arabs, Aryan-Shiite Iran and Iraq.

The Saudis also understand this and understand the need to control religious fundamentalist fervor from becoming a reactive political force, but still have a delicate task in keeping their people involved in developing a civic state. They remain vulnerable to political pressures from those who preach the politics of militant Islam against Israel, the United States, and non-believers in general. Saudi Arabia is also locked in a permanent contest for market share with rivals Iraq, Iran and ex-Soviet Asia, where the political and religious cards are played at the national level, even as the oil revenues flow unequally to all players. This is worth our keeping in mind as the new century unfolds.

Dagestan & Chechnya:

In a report a few weeks ago I mentioned Russia's attack on a Wahabi-dominated district in central Dagestan which coincided with the second rebel incursion from neighboring Chechnya. Why stir up a second hornet's nest when you do not need to, I wondered.

The general principle discussed is sound, but I have gotten better information and a better picture. Most importantly, Osama bin Laden and his followers are Wahabis --it is an ascetic Sunni sect native to Saudi Arabia and the core support for "Islamist" revolution. The Wahabi district is an implant in Dagestan and a threat to that multi-ethnic province's other communities. At the same time, Osama's Jordanian-born lieutenant, " Khattab," is a key player in the Chechen guerrilla army of the Islamist terrorist chief Shamil Basayev.

Russia has inaugurated a NATO-style air war and is positioning the best forces in its newly refurbished army to gain victory in time. Perhaps they can succeed, which will surprise many in the West. But Russia needs some level of cooperation from the Chechen establishment, which is more concerned with oil than with Islam.

One thing is clear: The president of Chechnya, Aslan Maskhadov, is not in control and his weak government has no means of getting Basayev out of the business of widening his Islamist revolution. Nine days of Russian raids against Chechnya's oil-related targets may have a punitive effect, even a stimulus of sorts, but to get the guerrillas under control will take the combined efforts of Russian and Chechen ground forces; unlikely to happen easily unless Basayev suffers substantial casualties in the borderland battles.

Having made this commitment, Russia must win, and to do so, must either come to terms with the government in Grozny against the rebels, or reoccupy the entire province. Moscow has stirred up a patriotic war fever which has bought the corrupted Yeltsin regime some time, but anything less than victory will exhaust that fervor and lead to the final collapse of Yeltsin's credibility.

An aside: when NATO bombed Yugoslavia, every refugee emerging in Macedonia was labeled a victim of ethnic cleansing, though the majority were taking the prudent course of evacuating the target zone. Some 80,000 have fled Chechnya and reports indicate they are simply taking the course which maximizes personal survival.

Kosovo & Yugoslavia:

A whispering campaign began in Washington last week --Kosovo "must" be granted its independence, as there is no other way. This has been officially denied by the Clinton team, but we know this is precisely what they will try to contrive before next November's election.

Carlos Solana, outgoing Secretary General of NATO has tried to pour water on this idea, but he is about to be replaced by George Robertson, blithering lowland Scots cypher of the Clinton-Blair Third Way. Spain, France and most other European Union members have minorities "with issues," as Americans now like to say. But again, Clintonian-Talbott wisdom is that we do not need our nation-states anyway.

France, it appears, is doing its best to obstruct the final ethnic cleansing of Kosovo by sustaining a large Serb community in the northern city of Mitrovica, where an enclave of some 9,000 sustains itself. Elsewhere, as in southern Orahovac, the Serbs have been ghettoized.

Another nasty twist is that under KFOR's dominion, any two Albanians can accuse any remaining Serb of "war crimes" and the targeted person is arrested. (A neighbor's brother has been warned by a priest that if he returns to Vitina, where the family has much valuable property, he will be fingered as a war criminal. A sister has also been warned not to return to her apartment there, which the KLA covets for its own.) Yet though granny-murders and other killings continue, the UN police and KFOR troops have made virtually no arrests.

The Albanians are to have their 5,000 man "Kosovo Protection Corps" but Serbs and other minorities are not allowed a parallel organization and are not being included in that body. Can anybody credibly argue that there is "equal protection before the law," equal rights or anything other than the construction of a racist tyranny in this?

© Copyright 1999 by Benjamin C. Works -- SIRIUS?WWW.SIRI-US.COM

Readers may re-post these reports, with attribution, in part or entirety, "for fair use only."

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1999 19:02:55 ET XXXXX

TALBOTT: NEXT CENTURY, AMERICA WILL NOT EXIST IN CURRENT FORM, 'ALL STATES WILL RECOGNIZE A SINGLE, GLOBAL AUTHORITY'

Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott believes the United States may not exist in its current form in the 21st Century -- because nationhood throughout the world will become obsolete!

Talbott, who is profiled in the NEW YORK TIMES on Monday [for the second time in six months], has defined, shaped and executed the Clinton administration's foreign policy. He has served at the State Department since the first day of the Clinton presidency.

Just before joining the administration, Talbott wrote in TIME magazine -- in an essay titled "The Birth of the Global Nation" -- that he is looking forward to government run by "one global authority."

"Here is one optimist's reason for believing unity will prevail ... within the next hundred years ... nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority," Talbott declared in the July 20, 1992 issue of TIME.

"A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th century -- 'citizen of the world' -- will have assumed real meaning by the end of the 21st."

Talbott continued: "All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary."

Talbott's belief that the United States of America and other nations are "artificial and temporary" continues to cause a rift inside of the State Department, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

"I think we are losing sight that we work for the American taxpayer, not Russia, not Asia," one State Department veteran told the DRUDGE REPORT in Washington. "Mr. Talbott is completely consumed with world order and has alienated many career employees here. [His] attitude borders on obsession."

In recent months, Talbott has come under fire for his stand on Russia. The policy of financial and political engagement with Russia as revelations pour forth of massive money-laundering schemes has made Talbott the target of critics, reports John Broder at the TIMES.

"We have to be calm and steady and have a clear sense of purpose," Talbott tells Monday's NEW YORK TIMES.

"One of my modest suggestions to the world is strategic patience. We have to be calm and steady and have a clear sense of purpose when that dynamic is discouraging, as it is today," Talbott explains.

Global government has proven to be slightly more complicated than one optimist dreamed.

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Filed by Matt Drudge

© Copyright 1999 by Benjamin C. Works -- SIRIUS www.siri-us.com