American troops found amongst Georgian dead

The Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, 1,090 miles (1,750km) long, and designed to carry 1 millions barrels of oil a day from the Caucasus to the Mediterranean when it reaches full capacity (scheduled for 2009), has been built by a consortium of Western oil companies led by BP, which also includes the American oil giant Halliburton, closely linked with US vice-president Dick Cheney and other senior figures in the Bush administration. Its building was begun in 1998; planning for it has been going in for much longer. Not by chance, the pipeline, after winding through Azerbaijan, Georgia and eastern Turkey, arrives at the Ceyhan Maritime Export Terminal on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, right next to the major American airbase at Incirlik. The fact that the project has cost more than $4bn -- 75 percent of which has come from bank loans underwritten by western governments, and 25 percent from governments directly -- is itself a sign of both the scale of profits that the Western companies hope to make from it, and its importance to Western governments. In future, it also has the potential to link up with gas pipelines running across the Caspian from Kazakhstan.

When the pipeline is fully operational, which is expected to take another five years, it will be capable of carrying 1 percent of the world’s daily oil requirements. It has been designed to enable Western companies to access the major oil reserves of the Caspian Sea without having to deal with either Russia, which Western governments regard as a strategic rival, or Iran, which is regarded as an enemy. The oil reserves of the Caspian Sea are regarded as a useful alternative source of oil to the Muslim Middle East, which is regarded as unreliable because of the widespread hatred of America among the region’s people. It also provides an alternative to the existing pipeline owned by the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which leads from Baku to Novorossiysk in Georgia, which is regarded as being too much under Russian control.

Such is America’s determination to gain control over Caspian oil that it was a major factor in the West’s intervention in Kosova, where the US has built Camp Bandsteel, one of its largest permanent military bases. Before the bombing of Yugoslavia, supposedly to save the Muslims of Kosova from the Serbs, the Washington Post insisted in an editorial that “With the Middle East increasingly fragile, we will need bases and fly-over rights in the Balkans to protect Caspian Sea oil.” (The US intervention in Kosova is often cited as proof that it is not anti-Muslim, and in fact has acted in the past to save Muslims from attack by their enemies.)

The West’s military interventions in the Middle East are also determined largely by their interest in the region’s oil. It is now well-established that the US had been willing to support the Taliban if they had agreed to build an oil pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan; it is not a coincidence that Bush’s special envoy to Afghanistan, appointed after the invasion in late 2001, was Zalmay Khalilzad, a former consultant to the American oil company Unocol, who had actually been involved in planning the Afghan pipeline and negotiating with the Taliban about it from 1995 to 1997.

McCain’s call to NATO-ize the war is not only frightening, it’s also delusional: both NATO and US forces are already stretched beyond the breaking point, even by Joint Chief of Staff chairman Michael Millen’s own recent assessment.

But McCain’s brain remains undeterred by reality, a fact that became painfully clear today in Des Moines when he also demanded, “The US should immediately convene an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council to call on Russia to reverse course.”

The problem with McCain’s bold demand about going to the UN is that Russia already tried doing exactly what McCain called for–and got rejected by McCain’s neocon pals in the Bush Administration. Early this morning, Russia convened an emergency session of the UN Security Council, calling on both sides to immediately cease hostilities, return to the negotiating table and renounce the use of force–but the last part about renouncing the use of force is exactly what Georgia’s president Mikhail Saakashvili refuses to do.