Carpets of Gold and Bombs
And that's not all . . .
Fr. Shay Cullen on Carpets of Gold and Bombs
There is not much on television that makes me sit bolt upright. I usually sink lower as the ticker tape streams information across the bottom of the screen carrying a river of tears and tragedy. All human suffering passes before me and sends my spirit in search of peace and prayer.
Wearily, I click of the graphic footages of bleeding bodies and crying children. Out of sight but not out of mind. I have a mental cavern of concern where all the troubles of the world insist on their taking up their abode like irremovable squatters. Someway, like an extended family, they are all related, but the link eluded and I was troubled. The war on terrorism and what lay behind worried me most. However, what had me sitting straight glued to a news report was a moment of truth. The lights went on in my dark cavern and that word of truth was oil!
Oil has enflamed and propelled countless conflicts and fanned the flames of avarice that knows no bounds, counts no cost, respects nothing, not even the loss of thousands of human lives.
By the Caspian Sea in Turkmenistan is the fifth largest reserve of natural gas in the world. Vast untapped reserves are waiting to be pumped by pipeline across central Asia and earn billions of dollars for the company who can deliver it to the lucrative western markets. Here is the billion dollar bonanza lusted after by every oil interest on earth.
Turkmenistan is the last known source of cheap natural gas in a county that is landlocked, isolated, but free from the manipulations of the Middle Eastern oil cartel. Controlling this precious resource and building a pipeline to Pakistan's warm water port was the pipe dream of Unocal, a politically powerful American petroleum conglomerate based in Houston, Texas although they have officially denied this.
Between them was Afghanistan, then ruled by the Taliban and hosting the implacable enemy of the US Osama Bin Laden. They were resisting intense pressure to approve the project and busy oppressing and executing women and allowing their people to starve by blocking UN aid convoys. Overlooking these heinous crimes, the oil tycoons invited representatives of the tyrannical Taliban to Houston in 1997 to discuss the pipeline deal arranged by Unocal advisor Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American. They ignored the fact that the Taliban were protecting and helping Bin Laden who was even then plotting to blow up two American embassies in Africa.
The deal was quashed when Bin Laden was accused of masterminding the attacks on the US targets in Africa and Clinton ordered missile strikes against his bases in Afghanistan. He also barred all relations between American companies and the Taliban. The oil barons hated Clinton for that, fearing their competitors would get the pipeline and so they plotted his downfall.
George W. Bush rose politically with the help of the oil industry. From being the governor of oil rich Texas he slid into the White House by the narrowest of margins. The oil magnates had their indebted and willing champion. For sure, Unocal came to collect and Bush delivered.
US policy towards suspected terrorists thus changed despite intelligence suggesting that there would be an imminent terrorist threat stemming from Afghanistan and using hi-jacked planes in the United States. Surveillance was scaled down, search warrants against the suspected terrorists were not issued and among other glaring refusals to act more decisively. Then the planes hit the World Trade Center.
Bin Laden had committed a horrific crime and made a terrible mistake by playing into the hands of Bush and the oil industry. They had their excuse, world sympathy and support, to invade Afghanistan and get rid of Taliban. They succeeded. The installation of Hamid Karzai was the next step, quickly followed by the appointment of a new US envoy to Afghanistan- who else but Zalmay Khalilzad, the former Unocal advisor to the pipeline projects.
What shook me was the news report announcing that Hamid Karzai and the representatives of Turkmenistan and Pakistan had signed the pipeline deal with Unocal. In the end, the Afghanis got the carpet of bombs and Bush got the carpet of gold. END
