Summary Excerpts &Comments On Engdahl's "Emerging Russian Giant Plays I

And as Canadians we are supposed to believe we are fighting to avenge the deaths of Canadians who died in 9-11, to keep the terrorists from our door, to push back the never ending hoardes of Taliban with no mention of how they are and have been backed by governments that use them for their globalist and regional machinations, and that we should keep on fighting because Canadian government and military officals and Harmit Karzai and his foreign minister continue to appear in our media compelling us to do so without any debate about context and reality of the geopolitical plottings going on and the deep implications thereof for survival of humanity and the impact on the planet. ---- Support for Canada's Afghan force up after Karzai: poll Fri Oct 6, 2006 10:52 AM EDT http://tinyurl.com/lsb9q OTTAWA (Reuters) - Public support for Canada's mission in Afghanistan has risen in the wake of pep talks by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a poll showed on Friday. Support rose to 57 percent in late September from 51 percent in early September and 47 percent in late July, according to the Ipsos Reid survey for CanWest News and Global television. During a visit to Ottawa on September 22, Karzai had said Canadian soldiers were dying in order to prevent Afghanistan from slipping back into the dark ages and to block terrorist attacks around the world. ---------------- Nor are we told in the mainstream media about the recent Military Commissions Act 2006 which suspends habeus corpus and redefines torture and reinterprets the Geneva Conventions among other egregious violations. Nor are we seeing any debate in the main stream media about the neoconservative, corporatist ongoing juggernaut trampling ahead under the aegis of the SPP and its multiple working groups and three amigos summits toward North American Union all under the radar screen of public scrutiny. When the globalist and corporatist elite of the New World Order sign the North American Union into being - whose laws do we suppose will dominate? We have already been bullied into passing parts of the Patriot Act that we protested vigorously, and we should be vigilant for it may only be a matter of time before we see the template of the latest Miliatary Commissions Act 2006, Bill HR 6166, here in Canada. And if not we are already locked in by virtue of our military integration with US military structures and procedures. The draconian and barbaric practices the Bush admin has been accused of with oprobrium from around the world have now passed into law. This same law also is also said by experts to threaten free speech of activists and anyone who opposes the adminstration. Nor have we begun to discuss, as a citizenry, the implications or nature of the North American Forum on Integration, the plans for a North American Parliament, the proposed North American Court, the NAFTA supercorridors, the cross border regions, the Amero to replace the dollar as we move towards a customs union, harmonization of our regulations, legislation, and creation of new bi-lateral and tri- lateral working groups, agreements, etc doing work that many in the Canadian Parliament and US Congress are not even aware of in some instances - something which some constitutional experts have suggested is indeed unconstitutional Hello !! Can we pull out heads out of the sand in time ? janet m eaton, PhD, Academic, global activist, systemic change agent --------------------------- F. William Engdahl O begins his examination of emerging Russian strategies to gain influence as a global power in response to the US end game of de- constructing Russia as follows: The September 2006 summit in Paris between Russia’s Vladimir Putin, French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, underscored the re-emerging of Russia as a major global power. The new Russia is gaining in influence through a series of strategic moves revolving around its geo political assets in energy—most notably its oil and natural gas. It’s doing so by shrewdly taking advantage of the strategic follies and major political blunders of Washington. The new Russia also realizes that if it does not act decisively, it soon will be encircled and trumped by a military rival, USA, for which it has little defenses left. The battle, largely unspoken, is the highest stakes battle in world politics today. Iran and Syria are seen by Washington strategists as mere steps to this great Russian End Game..... Russia has begun to play its strategic energy cards extremely carefully, from nuclear reactors in Iran to military sales to Venezuela and other Latin American states, to strategic market cooperation deals in natural gas with Algeria. At the same time, the Bush Administration has dug itself deeper into a geopolitical morass, through a foreign policy agenda which has reckless disregard for its allies as well as its foes. That reckless policy has been associated with former Halliburton CEO, Dick Cheney, more than any other figure in Washington.... In his - Where the Prize Ultimately Lies- : 1999 London speech Cheney revealingly commented that the oil -prize- of the Middle East was in national or government hands, not open to exploitation by the private market, and thus, hard for Cheney’s Halliburton and his friends in ExxonMobil or Chevron or Shell or BP to get their hands on. Engdahl goes on to posit that : The De-construction of Russia: [was] The -ultimate prize- noting that for obvious military and political reasons, Washington could not admit openly that its strategic focus, since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, had been the dismemberment or de- construction of Russia, and gaining effective control of its huge oil and gas resources, the -ultimate prize-. And he notes that in the mid-1990’s Washington began a deliberate process of bringing one after the other former satellite Soviet state into not just the European Union, but into the Washington-dominated NATO. By 2004 Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia all had been admitted into NATO, and the Republic of Georgia was being groomed to join. This surprising spread of NATO, to the alarm of some in western Europe, as well as to Russia, had been part of the strategy advocated by Cheney’s friends at the Project for the New American Century, in their ‘Rebuilding Americas Defenses report and even before. Already in 1996, PNAC member and Cheney crony, Bruce Jackson, then a top executive with US defense giant, LockheedMartin, was head of the US Committee to Expand NATO, later renamed the US Committee on Nato, a very powerful Washington lobby group. The real significance of the Yukos Affair A brief review of the spectacular October 2003 arrest of Russia’s billionaire ‘oligarch’ Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and state seizure of his giant Yukos oil group, is essential to understand Russian energy geopolitics. By the end of 2004 it was clear in Moscow that a new Cold War, this one over strategic energy control and unilateral nuclear primacy, was fully underway. It was also clear from the unmistakeable pattern of Washington actions since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, that End Game for USA policy vis-à-vis Eurasia was not China, not Iraq, and not Iran. The geopolitical ‘End Game’ for Washington was the complete de-construction of Russia, the one state in Eurasia capable of organizing an effective combination of alliances using its vast oil and gas resources. That, of course, could never be openly declared. After 2003 Putin and Russian foreign policy, especially energy policy, reverted to their basic response to the -Heartland- geopolitics of Sir Halford Mackinder, politics which had been the basis of Soviet Cold War strategy since 1946. Engdahl then clarifies the importance of Mackinders Heartland and Brzezinskis Chess Game It’s essential to understand the historic background to the term geopolitics. In 1904, an academic British geographer named Halford Mackinder made an address before the Royal Geographic Society in London which was to change history. In his speech, titled, The Geographical Pivot of History, Mackinder sought to define the relation between a nation’s or region’s geography—its topography, relation to the sea or land, its limate—with its politics and position in the world. He posited two classes of powers: sea powers including Britain and the United States as well as Japan; and he posited the large land powers of Eurasia, which, with development of the railroad, were able to unite large land masses free from dependency on the seas. He cites a revealing New York Council on Foreign Relations Foreign Affairs article by Brzezinski from September/October 1997: "Eurasia is home to most of the world's politically assertive and dynamic states. All the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia. ..... Collectively, Eurasia's potential power overshadows even America's. Engdahls goes on to discuss: [] Russian energy geopolitics In terms of the overall standard of living, mortality and economic prosperity, Russia today is not a world class power. In terms of energy, it is a colossus. Russia has more than 130,000 oil wells and some 2000 oil and gas deposits explored of which at least 900 are not in use. Oil reserves have been estimated at 150 billion barrels, similar perhaps to Iraq. Engdahl discusses the importance of several Moscow initiatives: : a) Baltic Pipeline System: As it became clear in Moscow that Washington would find a way to bring the Baltic republics into NATO ...this project, known as the Baltic Pipeline System (BPS), greatly lessens export dependency on Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. The Baltic is Russia’s main oil export route b) North European Gas Pipeline (NEGP) In March 2006, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was named chairman of a Russian-German consortium building a natural gas pipeline going some 1,200 km under the Baltic Sea. Majority shareholder in this North European Gas Pipeline (NEGP) project, with 51%, is the Russian state-controlled Gazprom, the world’s largest natural gas company....Chancellor Angela Merkel has been forced to swallow hard and accept the project. Germany’s industry is simply dependent on the Russian energy import. Russia is by far the largest supplier of natural gas to Germany. c) East Siberia-Pacific Ocean Pipeline (ESPO) In April 2006 the Putin government announced the first stage of construction of the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean Pipeline (ESPO), a vast oil pipeline from Taishet in the Irkutsk Region near Lake Baikal in East Siberia, to Perevoznaya Bay on Russias Pacific Ocean coast, to be built at a cost of more than $11.5 billion. Transneft, the Russian state-owned pipeline company will build it- to l pump up to 1.6 million barrels/day from Siberia to the Russian Far East and from there on to the energy-hungry Asia-Pacific, mainly to China. [] Sakhalin: Russia reins in Big Oil: The clear Russian government moves against ExxonMobil and Shell have been interpreted in the industry as an atttempt by the Putin government to regain control of Russian oil and gas resources it gave away during the Yeltsin era. It would cohere with Putins emerging energy strategy..... In late September 2006 a seemingly minor dispute exploded and resulted in the revocation of the environmental permit for Royal Dutch Shells Sakhalin II Liquified Natural Gas project, which had been due to deliver LNG to Japan, South Korea and other customers by 2008. ...... At the same time, the Putin government announced environmental requirements had also not been met by ExxonMobil for their De Kastri oil terminal built on Sakhalin as part of its Sakhalin I oil and gas development project. Sakhalin I contains an estimated 8 billion barrels of oil and vast volumes of gas, making the field a rare Super-Giant oil find, in geologists’ terminology. [] Russia-Turkey Blue Stream gas project In November 2005 Russias Gazprom completed the final stage of its 1,213 kilometer $3.2 billion Blue Stream gas pipeline. The project brings gas from its gas fields in Krasnodar, then by underwater pipelines across the Black Sea to the Durusu Terminal near Samsun inon the Turkish Black Sea coast. From there the pipeline supplies Russian gas to Ankara. When it reaches full capacity in 2010 it will carry an estimated 16 billion cubic meters gas a year.... Gazprom is now discussing transit of Russian gas to the countries of South Europe and East Mediterranean, including based on new contracts and new volumes of gas.... [] US plans for -Nuclear Primacy- about US plans for full specturm dominance ‘Today, for the first time in almost 50 years, the United States stands on the verge of attaining nuclear primacy. .. Engdahl notes also that one of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s priority projects has been the multi-billion dollar construction of a US missile defense. It has been sold to American voters as a defense against possible terror attacks. In reality, as has been openly recognized in Moscow and Beijing, it is aimed at the only two real nuclear powers, Russia and China. Moscows military status: Moscow has not been entirely passive in the face of this growing reality. In his May 2003 State of the Nation Address, Vladimir Putin spoke of strengthening and modernizing Russia’s nuclear deterrent by creating new types of weapons, including for Russia’s strategic forces, which will ‘ensure the defense capability of Russia and its allies in the long term.’ Engdahl concludes: Today, with little fanfare, the US is building up its influence and military presence in the Middle East ....Why? Oil is certainly a large part of the answer. But in geopolitical terms, it is also to the Eurasian land power, Russia from access to the seas - just as Mackinder argued had to be done. [And] the push for a US ‘nuclear primacy’ over Russia is the factor in world politics today which has the most potential for bringing the world into a nuclear conflagration by miscalculation. The basic argument of the Mackinder’s geopolitics is still relevant: The great geographical realities remain: land power versus sea power, heartland versus rimland, centre versus periphery... This Russia understands every bit as Washington. fyi-janet ========== http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=WIL20061007&articleId=3408 The Emerging Russian Giant Plays its Cards Strategically by F. William Engdahl October 7, 2006 ----snip--- F. William Engdahl is a Global Research Contributing Editor and author of the book, ‘A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,’ Pluto Press Ltd. He has completed a soon-to- be published book on GMO titled, ‘Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Political Agenda Behind GMO’. He may be contacted through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net. See also on Engdahl's website: US outflanked in Eurasia energy politics By F. William Engdahl, (Also published in Asia Times Online) http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net./Geopolitics___Eurasia/Ouflanked/ouflanked.html America`s Geopolitical Nightmare and Eurasian Strategic Energy Arrangements By F. William Engdahl, (Previously published in GlobalResearch) http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net./Geopolitics___Eurasia/Nightmare/nightmare.html ------- End of forwarded message -------

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