The American Prospect tells Ted Rall, Mike Moore, John Pilger, et al., to shut up already about their stupid Caspian oil conspiracy fantasies.
That’s right. The American Prospect. God bless ’em…
Afghanistan itself has very small reserves of natural gas and virtually no oil. The country’s only importance, at least in theory, is that it could serve as a transit point for energy from neighboring countries.
Yet oddly enough, this isn’t the first time that conspiracy theorists have sought to portray Afghanistan as the energy linchpin of Western civilization. Back in 1980, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan when the Cold War was raging, the Carter administration and the press argued that the occupation had dramatically altered the world balance of power. To take but one example, Newsweek said at the time that control of Afghanistan had ‘put the Russians within 350 miles of the Arabian Sea, the oil lifeline of the West and Japan. Soviet warplanes based in Afghanistan could cut the lifeline at will.’
This was pure rubbish. Seven years earlier, when detente was near its zenith, The Wall Street Journal ran a rare story on Afghanistan headlined, ‘Do the Russians Covet Afghanistan? If So, It’s Hard to Figure Why.’ Reporter Peter Kann, later the Journal’s chairman and publisher, wrote that ‘great power strategists tend to think of Afghanistan as a kind of fulcrum upon which the world balance of power tips. But from close up, Afghanistan tends to look less like a fulcrum or a domino or a stepping-stone than like a vast expanse of desert waste with a few fly-ridden bazaars, a fair number of feuding tribes and a lot of miserably poor people.’
That’s pretty much what Afghanistan looks like today, yet to the conspiracy theorists the country is every bit as important as Newsweek claimed two decades back. To understand the fallacy of their argument requires a bit of background on the Caspian and a trip back in time to the early 1990s, when the Caspian’s potential importance as a source of global energy was first recognized.
Go on, click over. Let TAP show you the light.
TAP: Defenders of all that is good and fair and just.
(Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to cry).
It’s okay, Jeff, it always seems a little confusing at first. Just go with it. If you want, you can come over to Ed Bagley’s house with me. We’re having granola. And tofu. Cooked in a solar oven. Made of recycled materials. By aboriginies.
Ha! I knew Begley was made by aboriginies…! (They did quite a nice job, though—you can rarely see his strings. Or his electrical outlets).
It’s Ed BEGLEY, Jr. But I didn’t know his dad—one of the original 12 Angry Men—was an aboriginal. Has Tim Blair heard about this?
Sometimes a good wacko theory needs to ferment a while before it’s ready. A couple of examples on the enviro front are the “hole in the ozone,” first proposed in the 70s as a result of SST airplanes; and the global warming theory, which lurched off the table in the early 80s after they got tired of talking about the “coming ice age.” Both took many long years to age, like fine wine…or at least sauerkraut…before they were ready for mass consumption.
However, looks like the mythical Afghan pipeline is finally going to be taken from the back of the fridge and flushed down the garbage disposal.
I mean, if even TAP can’t buy into it any more….
Now–what’s next?
The famous “cars that run on water”…?
Didn’t one of the recent Bond movies hinge on a pipeline through Afghanistan? It was, oh… “Yesterday Never Dies Twice Because the World is Gold” or something.
The Antarctic ozone hole, interestingly, was first doscovered during the International Geophysical Year in 1957, well before CFCs were in widespread use. Which suggests that maybe your refrigerator has nothing to do with it.
I’ve always figured to most interesting part of being President porbably came two weeks or so after inaguration, when you finally got all the papers signed and shook hands with all the new Assistant Deputy Undersecretaries of Various Stuff. That’s when the the outgoing National Security Advisor takes you down to the White House basement and shows you the frozen aliens and the perpetual motion machines and Bigfoot’s signed confession for the JFK asssasination. I always figured the outgoing President maybe got to take a 200 mpg carburetor with him.