oil & the War that never ends

[Doug Millison]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/09/26/MN70983.DTL

Energy future rides on U.S. war 
Conflict centered in world's oil patch

Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer 

Paris -- Beyond American determination to hit back
against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks,
beyond the likelihood of longer, drawn-out battles
producing more civilian casualties in the months and
years ahead, the hidden stakes in the war against
terrorism can be summed up in a single word: oil.
[...] "You cannot discuss the violence of this region
outside the context of oil, " says Vakhtang Kolbaya,
deputy chairman of the parliament in the republic of
Georgia. "It's at the heart of the problem." [...] The
combined total of proven and estimated reserves in the
region stands at more than 800 billion barrels of
crude petroleum and its equivalent in natural gas. By
contrast, the combined total of oil reserves in the
Americas and Europe is less than 160 billion barrels,
most of which, energy experts say, will have been
exhausted in the next 25 years. It is inevitable that
the war against terrorism will be seen by many as a
war on behalf of America's Chevron, ExxonMobil and
Arco; France's TotalFinaElf;  British Petroleum; Royal
Dutch Shell and other multinational giants, which have
hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the
region. There is no avoiding such a linkage or the
rising tide of anger it will produce in developing
nations already convinced they are victims of a
conspiratorial collaboration between global capital
and U.S. military might. [...]



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