OPINION - Players may change - but not the agenda
business-times.asia1.com.sg January 14, 2003 By G Panicker
ALL the major conflicts besetting the world now have something to do with oil or energy. Saddam Hussein sits on an oil pool. And Iraq is next to Saudi Arabia, which is on another huge oil pool.
Oil is a strategic commodity and it has been a source of political and military conflict for nearly nine decades. And the dynamics of world politics since World War II has mainly been about who gets to control these resources. Today, the US says it wants to pre-empt Saddam's attempt to build a nuclear bomb - but Washington certainly has one eye on Iraq's oil. So have all the others in the United Nations Security Council.
In North Korea, Kim Jong Il is flashing his nuclear teeth. That poor nation is ostensibly mounting a nuclear power programme which Washington insists is a bomb project in disguise. It is another episode in an ongoing crisis.
In Venezuela, people are banging pots and pans to get their president, Hugo Chavez, out of power. The leftist paratrooper is pitted against striking executives of the country's powerful oil company, PDVSA, which he now wants to split. Mr Chavez portrays the strike as a class struggle against the poor by the middle classes and the rich. Venezuela's economy, almost entirely dependent on oil, has suffered some serious damage from the six-week shutdown.
In the Ivory Coast, French troops are keeping the peace in their old colony affected by civil war, involving rebels arguably backed by Liberia. The Gulf of Guinea floats in oil in a volatile continent with a long history of wars over its resources. The former Spanish colony, Equatorial Guinea, has now emerged as a major oil supplier to the West. This is boosting the Ivory Coast's own hopes of becoming an oil producer. Over in Chechnya, the Russians are fighting rebels who want to break away. Chechnya's capital, Grozny, is an important refining and pipeline centre. And, for some, the Afghan war was a two-in-one US assault to secure potential routes for the central Asian petroleum resources as well as to punish the Sept 11 attackers.
Nearer home, peace has hopefully come to Aceh, Indonesia's oil- and gas-rich province. Sadly though, barring a few exceptions in the Gulf countries, oil has not sharply changed the people's lives. Nigeria has received some US$300 billion from oil exports in the past 25 years but the World Bank still classifies the country - wracked by ethnic troubles - as a low-income country. Indonesia is in the same league. Algeria, caught up in a civil war, is even poorer.
The flow of oil wealth has obviated the need for other revenues, making people in power less accountable. It also has ignited the spirit of nationalism. There have always been calls for less reliance on oil, particularly when prices went wild. But the US administrations, dominated by oilmen and those with links to multinational companies, have not made a serious effort to wean the American economy from oil dependence. The national energy policy unveiled by the Bush administration two years ago had its primary focus on the Gulf, the region it sees as volatile.
Nor did the US have any objections to the belief systems prevalent in these regions until the twin towers of the World Trade Center fell. It dealt merrily with Osama bin Laden in the Afghan war against the Russian 'infidels' and interceded against Iraq after helping Iraq against Iran. Every one of those political manoeuvres was underpinned by the logic of keeping oil supplies flowing. So now - once again - US troops are in the Gulf, this time to get Saddam out of Baghdad, his seat of power for three decades. There are conflicting messages on what the US wants from Iraq. Regime change or disarmament - it would mean the same to Saddam.
Venezuela and North Korea have thrown a spanner in the American war-planning works. To prevent an Iraqi cut-off from roiling the markets, the US appealed to the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries for more oil. Opec was happy to do its bidding with oil prices at a two-year high and agreed to make good the shortfall from Venezuela. But Arabs do not want a war in their backyard, which is being seen as a US attempt to reshape the oil-rich region. Perhaps, as a sop, some effort is being made to convince Saddam that the game is up and that he should leave quietly.
But the fact remains that a resolution of Saddam's fate by abdication, by coup or by war will not end the oil game but will merely open another chapter about controlling that country's resources.
The writer is a journalist with BT's Foreign Desk