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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cody andre who wrote (15371)	11/25/1999 5:04:00 AM
From: George Papadopoulos	Respond to of 17770

>The Serbs are ready for Y2K, as far as I can see. The wood embargo will probably not work this time ... LOL I am missing the turkey today<g>

To: cody andre who wrote (15371)	11/25/1999 5:07:00 AM
From: George Papadopoulos	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

The Great Game Isn't Over By Robert D. Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of "The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War," forthcoming in February from Random House. The agreement overseen by President Clinton in Istanbul last week to build an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea westward to the Mediterranean does not mean that the U.S. has established a new security imperium in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The agreement is still one of intent rather than of achievement. Western oil companies--not governments--will pay for the $2.4 billion pipeline, which would carry oil from the Caspian port of Baku, Azerbaijan, westward through Georgia and Turkey, to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, a distance of 1,080 miles. But with only 105,000 barrels flowing daily now from Baku to the Georgian Black Sea Coast, oil companies are not pumping anywhere near the 500,000 barrels daily required to justify the new pipeline. Moreover, the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline route passes through rugged Kurdish terrain in eastern Turkey, where the security threat is considerable and the hydraulics of pumping oil up and down the mountains substantial. A more direct and cheaper route for Caspian oil runs south through Iran to the Persian Gulf. Anyone who has journeyed from the ex-Soviet republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia to Iran knows that Iran is the most developed, pleasant and stable country in the Caspian region. The Islamic revolution, with all its horrors, has done less damage to Iranian society than 74 years of communism have done to the Caucasus and Central Asia. Unlike the former Soviet Union, Iran has little random crime, no alcoholism problem and elaborate, albeit perverse, institutions. Though no one will admit it, the oil companies have been delaying the construction of the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline in the hope that the U.S. will normalize relations with Iran. Given Iran's own democratization and the warming of Israeli-Syrian relations--a process that would help unlock the U.S.-Iran diplomatic track--it is not too farfetched to contemplate an American-Iranian rapprochement in the next decade. Though initial claims regarding the amount of oil in the Caspian region might have been exaggerated, it is likely that the region will constitute another North Sea in terms of oil production early in the next century. Because the Soviet Union lacked the technology to exploit the Caspian's deep-water reserves (below 600 feet), the oil fields have barely been tapped. And this is to say nothing of the natural gas on the eastern shore of the Caspian (where Turkmenistan has the world's fourth-largest reserves) that may also be transported to the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf via a new pipeline network. The West may harbor an unrealistic assumption that once the oil starts flowing, the resulting wealth will stabilize places such as Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakstan. The opposite may be the case. There are no institutions to speak of in these countries. The rulers in Georgia and Azerbaijan are old, and the opposition parties without credibility. As pipeline development makes more money available to these regimes, the incentive to wield power--and thus to gain access to vast wealth to be siphoned off to foreign bank accounts--will increase dramatically. Oil stabilized the Persian Gulf for many decades because those sheikhdoms were less countries than easily controlled city-states steeped in Islamic and nomadic tradition. But the new nations of the Caucasus and Central Asia have dispersed, harder-to-control populations and social structures torn asunder by communism. The more apt model for such places may be Congo-Brazzaville, where oil concessions became a treasure over which murderous factions could fight. To travel through Georgia and Azerbaijan is to encounter pot-holed roads and gangs of militiamen demanding bribes. While the capital cities of Tbilisi and Baku have impressive downtowns, the rest of the countryside through which the pipeline will pass, however beautiful in terms of landscape, is an economic and social wasteland. Ironically, Armenia, where gunmen assassinated Prime Minister Vazgen Sarkisian and seven other government ministers last month, is the most stable country in the Caucasus. To add to the region's woes, Russia is a constant destabilizing element. The Russians have not been able to establish a regional security order--they're even having trouble subduing Chechnya--but they easily can play a spoiler's role, working with assassins and terrorists to deny Western oil companies the minimum security they will need to retain their investments. Iran may well contribute to the chaos in the area in order to sabotage the prospects of the competing pipeline. It's also possible that by the time this pipeline network is built, Russia will have reconstituted itself as a dynamic autocracy, better able to challenge the West in the region. It wouldn't be the first time. From 1918 to 1920, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan were all independent, with Western troops and support, as a chaotic Russia reeled from civil war. Then Lenin reconsolidated the Russian empire, and the Westerners were forced to pull out. Even if Moscow doesn't reconstitute its empire anytime soon, it could easily expand the war in Chechnya south into Georgia. With stability a relative term in this part of the world, it would be imprudent to depend on one pipeline route. The West would benefit from building both.