My name is Ernst Schroeder, and
since I have some Iranian friends from school and review your online magazine
occasionally, I thought I'd pass on the following three page quote from a book I
read a few months ago entitled, "A Century Of
War : Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order",
which was written by William
Engdahl, a German
historianm . This is a book about how oil and politics
have been intertwined for the past 100 years.
I submit the below passage for
direct publishing on your website, as I think the quote will prove to be
significant for anyone of Persian descent.
order from amazon
"In November 1978, President Carter
named the Bilderberg group's George Ball, another member of the Trilateral
Commission, to head a special White House Iran
task force under the National Security Council's Brzezinski. Ball recommended that Washington drop support
for the Shah of Iran and support the fundamentalistic Islamic opposition of
Ayatollah Khomeini. Robert Bowie
from the CIA was one of the lead 'case officers' in the new CIA-led coup against
the man their covert actions had placed into power 25 years
earlier.
Their scheme was based on a detailed
study of the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism, as presented by British
Islamic expert, Dr. Bernard Lewis, then on assignment at Princeton University in the United
States.
Lewis's scheme, which was unveiled at the May 1979 Bilderberg meeting in
Austria, endorsed the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement behind Khomeini, in
order to promote balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and
religious lines. Lewis argued that
the West should encourage autonomous groups such as the Kurds, Armenians,
Lebanese Maronites, Ethiopian Copts, Azerbaijani Turks, and so forth. The chaos would spread in what he termed
an 'Arc of Crisis,' which would spill over into Muslim regions of the Soviet Union.
The coup against the Shah, like that
against Mossadegh in 1953, was run by British and American intelligence, with
the bombastic American, Brzezinski, taking public 'credit' for getting rid of
the 'corrupt' Shah, while the British characteristically remained safely in the
background.
During 1978, negotiations were under
way between the Shah's government and British Petroleum for renewal of the
25-year old extraction agreement.
By October 1978, the talks had collapsed over a British 'offer' which
demanded exclusive rights to Iran's future oil output, while
refusing to guarantee purchase of the oil.
With their dependence on British-controlled export apparently at an end,
Iran appeared on the verge of
independence in its oil sales policy for the first time since 1953, with eager
prospective buyers in Germany, France, Japan and elsewhere. In its lead editorial that September,
Iran's Kayhan International
stated:
In retrospect, the 25-year
partnership with the [British Petroleum] consortium and the 50-year relationship
with British Petroleum which preceded it, have not been satisfactory ones for
Iran ... Looking to the future, NIOC [National Iranian Oil Company] should plan to
handle all operations by itself.
London was blackmailing and putting
enormous economic pressure on the Shah's regime by refusing to buy Iranian oil
production, taking only 3 million or so barrels daily of an agreed minimum of 5
million barrels per day. This
imposed dramatic revenue pressures on Iran, which provided the context in which
religious discontent against the Shah could be fanned by trained agitators
deployed by British and U.S. intelligence. In addition, strikes among oil workers
at this critical juncture crippled Iranian oil production.
As Iran's domestic
economic troubles grew, American 'security' advisers to the Shah's Savak secret
police implemented a policy of ever more brutal repression, in a manner
calculated to maximize popular antipathy to the Shah. At the same time, the Carter
administration cynically began protesting abuses of 'human rights' under the
Shah.
British Petroleum reportedly began
to organize capital flight out of Iran, through its strong influence in
Iran's financial and banking
community. The British Broadcasting
Corporation's Persian-language broadcasts, with dozens of Persian-speaking BBC
'correspondents' sent into even the smallest village, drummed up hysteria
against the Shah. The BBC gave
Ayatollah Khomeini a full propaganda platform inside Iran during this
time. The British government-owned
broadcasting organization refused to give the Shah's government an equal chance
to reply. Repeated personal appeals
from the Shah to the BBC yielded no result. Anglo-American intelligence was
committed to toppling the Shah. The
Shah fled in January, and by February 1979, Khomeini had been flown into
Tehran to
proclaim the establishment of his repressive theocratic state to replace the
Shah's government.
Reflecting on his downfall months
later, shortly before his death, the Shah noted from
exile,
I did not know it then - perhaps I
did not want to know - but it is clear to me now that the Americans wanted me
out. Clearly this is what the human
rights advocates in the State Department wanted ... What was I to make of the
Administration's sudden decision to call former Under Secretary of State George
Ball to the White House as an adviser on Iran? ... Ball was
among those Americans who wanted to abandon me and ultimately my country.
With the fall of the Shah and the
coming to power of the fanatical Khomeini adherents in Iran, chaos was
unleashed. By May 1979, the new
Khomeini regime had singled out the country's nuclear power development plans
and announced cancellation of the entire program for French and German nuclear
reactor construction.
Iran's oil exports to the world were
suddenly cut off, some 3 million barrels per day. Curiously, Saudi Arabian production in
the critical days of January 1979 was also cut by some 2 million barrels per
day. To add to the pressures on
world oil supply, British Petroleum declared force majeure and cancelled major
contracts for oil supply. Prices on
the Rotterdam
spot market, heavily influenced by BP and Royal Cutch Shell as the largest oil
traders, soared in early 1979 as a result.
The second oil shock of the 1970s was fully under
way.
Indications are that the actual
planners of the Iranian Khomeini coup in London
and within the senior ranks of the U.S. liberal establishment decided to
keep President Carter largely ignorant of the policy and its ultimate
objectives. The ensuing energy
crisis in the United
States was a major factor in bringing about
Carter's defeat a year later.
There was never a real shortage in
the world supply of petroleum.
Existing Saudi and Kuwaiti production capacities could at any time have
met the 5-6 million barrels per day temporary shortfall, as a
U.S. congressional investigation by
the General Accounting Office months later confirmed.
Unusually low reserve stocks of oil
held by the Seven Sisters oil multinationals contributed to creating a
devastating world oil price shock, with prices for crude oil soaring from a
level of some $14 per barrel in 1978 towards the astronomical heights of $40 per
barrel for some grades of crude on the spot market. Long gasoline lines across America
contributed to a general sense of panic, and Carter energy secretary and former
CIA director, James R. Schlesinger, did not help calm matters when he told
Congress and the media in February 1979 that the Iranian oil shortfall was
'prospectively more serious' than the 1973 Arab oil embargo.
The Carter administration's
Trilateral Commission foreign policy further ensured that any European effort
from Germany and
France to develop more cooperative
trade, economic and diplomatic relations with their Soviet neighbor, under the
umbrella of d�tente and various Soviet-west European energy agreements, was also
thrown into disarray.
Carter's security adviser, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, and secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, implemented their 'Arc of
Crisis' policy, spreading the instability of the Iranian revolution throughout
the perimeter around the Soviet Union.
Throughout the Islamic perimeter from Pakistan to Iran, U.S. initiatives created instability
or worse."
-- William Engdahl, A Century of
War: Anglo-American Oil Politics
and the New World Order, � 1992, 2004. Pluto Press Ltd. Pages
171-174.
