Pipelineistan's biggest game begins

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/GE26Ag01.html



History may judge it as one of the capital moves of the 21st century's New Great Game: May 25, the day high-quality Caspian light crude started flowing through the Caucasus toward the Mediterranean in Turkey. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (BTC) - conceived by the US as the ultimate Western escape route from dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf - is finally in business.


This is what Pipelineistan is all about: a supreme law unto itself - untouchable by national sovereignty, serious environmental concerns (expressed both in the Caucasus and in Europe), labor legislation, protests against the World Bank, not to mention mountains 2,700 meters high and 1,500 small rivers. BTC took 10 years of hard work and at least US$4 billion - $3 billion of which is in bank loans. BTC is not merely a pipeline: it is a sovereign state.

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The pipeline itself is only 126 centimeters wide, a dizzying steel serpent of no less than 150,000 segments made in Japan, finished in Malaysia and delivered by ship to the Georgian port of Batumi, capital of the separatist micro-republic of Adjaria - which is virtually uncontrolled by Tbilisi.

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BP has invested at least $15 billion in the country (exploration, exploitation, pipeline construction). According to Baku's street wisdom, the man who really rules Azerbaijan is David Woodward, BP's chairman, known as "the viceroy", a walking oil atlas with more than three decades working for the company from Scotland to Abu Dhabi and from Alaska to Siberia. Woodward and BP mercilessly spin that BTC is the cleanest and safest pipeline ever built. Georgian peasants and English non-governmental organizations beg to differ.
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so, how soon will the pipe line be attacked and the flow stopped?