F. William Engdahl - Myths, Lies and Oil Wars

edition.engdahl WiesbadenCopyright 2012 by F. William Engdahl

The rights of F. William Engdahl to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Laws of the United States of America and the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the publisher and author.

Library of Congress cataloging in Publication Data applied forEdited by Margot L. White

Cover design:
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Published by edition.engdahlWiesbaden, Germany
www.williamengdahl.com

ISBN 978-3-9813263-6-9Printed in USA

To George L. Mehren invaluable friend, honest critic and intellectual architect of the concept behind this book and to Vladimir Kutcherov, friend and teacher whose passion for scientific truth guided me in this writing.

CONTENTS

We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population.This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples ofAsia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment.Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationshipswhich will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and worldbenefaction

We should dispense with the aspiration to "be liked" or to be regarded as therepository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop puttingourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain fromoffering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vagueandunreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going tohave to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered byidealistic slogans, the better.

George F. Kennan, US State Department, Policy Planning Study 23 (PPS23), Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1948From Spice Wars to Oil Wars

In the words of George Santayana, Those who cannot remember the pastare condemned to repeat it. The history of the last century is unique in significant respects, but in terms of manifesting fundamental features ofhuman behavior and actions, it is anything but unique.

In September 2001 after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers and the attack on the Pentagon, President George W. Bush declareda US War on Terrorism, calling it a new crusade, a war of good versus evil: Youre either with us or against us. His choice of words was revealing as it evoked for the rest of the world especially the nations of the oil-rich,predominantly Arab Middle East more than two centuries of EuropeanHoly Crusades against the Muslim peoples of the Middle East. The historical comparison by Bush was revealing, so much so that Bush was quickly advised to drop the word crusade from his rhetoric.

Almost eight centuries before the dramatic events of September 2001,the Arab/North African world had been at the center of world geopolitical conflict. Arab traders across North Africa and what is today called by theWest the Middle East had secured a tightly-controlled monopoly on the most valuable commodity of that day the spices from Asia.

The clever Arab tradesmen kept the origins of their spicescinnamon,pepper, nutmeg and other spicesa de facto military secret of the highest strategic importance. They went to extraordinary lengths to perpetuate amyth of great scarcity in order to maintain monopoly control of the remotesources of the much desired spices and, thereby, to attain colossal profit margins of as much as 4000% on their trade.

Venice, then a City State on the Adriatic Sea, had close ties to the Orient. As a result of its trade ties to Arab spice merchants, as well, Venice rose to a position of unprecedented wealth and power in the 13th Century.Venice became the mightiest naval empire of Europe based on dominating and controlling the European import of oriental spices traded by theArabs.

When Venice was threatened by an Arab cutoff of those spices, the City State launched one of historys most brutal and grandiose looting operations the religious crusade of 1204, a naked imperial conquestmasquerading as a Holy War.

The Arabs had successfully controlled the supplies of exotic spices from Indonesia and India, the worlds most treasured commodities, by inventingmythical tales of their extraordinarily remote sources, as well as of their extreme scarcity. For the Europeans, the Arab traders invented fabuloustales of the extreme dangers involved in securing the allegedly rare and scarce spices. And they used military means to defend their secret sourcesfrom European traders that is, until a suspicious Venice discovered thesources and set about to capture the riches for herself. Thus opened a blackchapter in history known as the Holy Crusades of the Tenth and EleventhCenturies. Those religious wars were, in reality, spice wars.

Venice recruited mercenary armies from France and elsewhere, promising them a share of the conquered loot albeit a minor share. Venice madecertain it took the lions share of the loot. Carrying the Sword and Cross,financed and provided with countless ships by Venice, the crusader armies launched what became almost two centuries of wars and slaughter Christianitys own version of Jihad.

The Spice Wars were dressed up in religious robes and disguised asHoly Wars of Christians against Islamic infidels. In reality they were warsof conquest and control over the worlds most valuable commodities of thedaythe spices of the Orient. Tens of thousands of soldiers of Christrecruited for a Holy War often found themselves diverted from the alleged goal of recapturing the Holy Lands from the Muslim infidels, and insteadsent to grab more worldly treasures for their Venetian sponsors.

The greatest Crusade, begun in 1204, did not even target Arab lands,but rather the then-Christian city of Constantinople (now Istanbul), the metropolis at the crossroads of east-west trade in spices. The Crusaderssacked and occupied Constantinople, the fabulously wealthy Capitol of the Eastern Christian Byzantine Empire. It was the time of the Great Schismwithin Christendom between the Eastern Orthodox and Western Latinchurches. Marching with the Cross, the Venetian Crusaders swords would cut down the Orthodox Christians as readily as the Muslim infidels.

Oil wars and politics

In the 1890s a German engineer named Rudolf Diesel transformed world politics and the world economy by inventing an internal combustion engine that was up to 500% more efficient than traditional coal-powered steam engines used in naval ships. Within two decades, the petroleum-fueledmotorization of the worlds major navies and armies had begun the mostprofound transformation of world power since the invention of the steamengine two centuries earlier.

As with the bloody history of the highly valued spices of the Orient centuries before, the history of oil would be written in blood, fought over inwars, cloaked in deception and permeated by desperate attempts to hide the secrets of its origins.

To secure an apparent monopoly on world oil and with it, the greatestconcentration of political power the world had ever seen, a tiny group of companiesBritish and Americanbacked secretly by their respectivegovernments, created one of the greatest myths of modern science. Theyinvented myths: 1) that oil was a scarce and rapidly depleting energyresource; 2) that it had been somehow created from transformed biologicaldetritus several hundred million years ago; 3) in a process described inwestern geology textbooks if at all only vaguely, but as if it were infallible, scientific fact.