The Oil Drum

The U.S. played its "Caspian Chess" with the simple-minded objective of "pipelines through anywhere but Iran and Russia."  Now that we are analyzing the end-game, it's interesting to review some of the forced moves along the way.

1.    Brought the Taliban to power in Afghanistan.  The U.S. let its allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia help the Taliban consolidate power in the late 1990's because it needed a unified Afghan government for the Afghan-Pakistani pipeline scheme.  (The U.S. support for the Taliban, in part because of Unocal's lobbying, is explained in Ahmed Rashid's Taliban and to a lesser extent in the movie Fahrenheit 911.)

2.    Weakened the reformist Khatami government in Iran.  In 1997 the Iranians offered an innovative way of bringing Caspian oil to the market.  The idea was to swap up to 500 kB/d of Kazakh & Azeri oil (sent to Tabriz, Reyy and Isfahan refineries) for an equivalent amount from Iranian oil from the Persian Gulf.  This would have required minimal pipeline construction, since most of the Caspian crude transport would be via barges across the sea.  American companies active in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan were enthused because it offered a way around the trade sanctions (swaping via Iran would be a way of getting Iranian crude while paying the recently independent Soviet republics).  But the U.S. government did not allow American companies (who were major partners in all the major Caspian consortia) to participate in the scheme.  The conservative Islamic Republicans still refer to America's undermining of this initiative as an example of the U.S. hostility to Iran.

3.    Brought Russia and Iran closer together.  Iran and Russia clearly did not see eye to eye after the independence of the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union.  All that changed after the two old powers realized they shared the same interest in stopping U.S. meddling in a region of the world which was historically part of the Iranian (Persian) or Russian empires.  The consequences of a stronger Iran-Russia alliance are still being shaped.

4.    May have been a reason for invasion of Iraq.   Returning to the Chess analogy, the U.S. assets in the Caspian region (e.g. Azerbaijan) were isolated pawns.  There was no way for the U.S., as a naval power, to defend these in case of an attack.  Also, the Caspian Sea policy was authored by the Clinton administration.  Cheney, as a self-proclaimed military strategist and an oil-man, knew that the real prize was not Azerbaijan but Iraq and Iran.