Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

While the Clinton administration worked feverishly to secure Caspian resources, hosting Azerbaijan’s president at the White House for a two-hour meeting in August 1997 and courting his cooperation, 3it was not until the Bush administration took power that these onetime “pipe dreams” became a reality. In May 2001, Dick Cheney’s energy task force estimated that proven oil reserves in Azerbaijan’s and Kazakhstan’s sectors of the Caspian alone equaled “about 20 billion barrels, a little more than the North Sea and slightly less than the United States.” 4The Cheney group estimated that if the United States could get a major pipeline flowing west from the Caspian Sea—away from Moscow’s control—daily exports from the Caspian to world markets could go as high as 2.6 million barrels per day by 2005, “as the United States works closely with private companies and countries in the region to develop commercially viable export routes.” 5By contrast, in 2005 Iran exported 2.6 million barrels of oil per day, Venezuela 2.2, Kuwait 2.3, Nigeria 2.3, and Iraq 1.3. 6

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, getting at the Caspian region’s oil had proved extremely difficult for Washington. Dating back to the Clinton administration, the United States and its allies envisioned a plan wherein Washington would essentially prop up the repressive regime in Azerbaijan and establish a state-of-the-art oil exploitation operation off the coast of the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, a peninsula that juts into the western Caspian. The oil would then flow through a massive pipeline stretching from Baku to Tbilisi, Georgia, through Turkey to the Mediterranean port city of Ceyhan. From there, the Caspian oil could be easily transported to Western markets. The project would mean an end to Moscow’s de facto monopoly on transporting Caspian oil, while at the same time providing Washington with an unparalleled opportunity to exert its influence in the ex-Soviet territories. When the project began in 1994, some analysts celebrated it as a “new Persian Gulf”; estimates projected as much as 230 billion barrels of oil in the region—eight times the proven U.S. reserves. 7

During the latter years of Clinton’s tenure, however, the project came to be viewed as a white elephant likely to fail. The Caspian countries were governed by corrupt, unstable regimes that remained under Moscow’s sway despite their nominal independence. The pipeline would be extremely costly and vulnerable to sabotage. To top it off, early Western explorations in the Caspian turned up estimates of the sea’s potential resources far more modest than previous projections. 8While the United States remained committed to tapping the Caspian, the program moved forward at a slow pace. That changed when Bush took office and oil executives were welcomed into the White House like cousins at a family reunion. By September 2002, construction on the massive eleven-hundred-mile Caspian pipeline was under way. The BBC described it as a project that U.S. officials favored because it would “weaken Russia’s stranglehold on regional pipeline network and leave Iran on the sidelines.” 9

A potential problem for the project lay in what the White House saw as the dangerous geography of the neighborhood—located not far from Chechnya and Iran. The Bush administration, therefore, made a number of moves that would result in at least one regime change in the region and the deployment of forces from Blackwater and other U.S. war-servicing firms to protect what would be one of Washington’s most ambitious power grabs on former Soviet territory.

In 2003, the Bush administration helped overthrow the government of a longtime U.S. ally, President Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia. Once considered Washington’s closest strategic partner in the region and affectionately referred to as “Shevy-Chevy” by U.S. officials like James Baker, Shevardnadze had fallen fast out of favor with the administration of George W. Bush, as Shevardnadze began increasingly doing business with Moscow after years of U.S. patronage. 10Among his sins: granting new drilling and pipeline concessions to Russian firms and obstructing Washington’s grand Caspian pipeline plan. Soon after those transgressions, he was forced to resign in November 2003 as the so-called Rose Revolution brought to power a more staunchly pro-U.S. regime. The first telephone call the new acting president, Nino Burdzhanadze, made when she took over from Shevardnadze was to oil giant BP to “assure them the pipeline would be OK.” 11Just prior to taking power in Georgia, the new U.S.-backed leader, Mikhail Saakashvili, announced, “All strategic contracts in Georgia, especially the contract for the Caspian pipeline, are a matter of survival for the Georgian state.” 12That regime change resulted in the closure of Russian bases in Georgia and an increase in U.S. military aid to the country. In early 2004, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld deployed private military contractors from the Washington firm Cubic on a three-year $15 million contract to Georgia “to equip and advise the former Soviet republic’s crumbling military, embellishing an eastward expansion that has enraged Moscow,” reported London’s Guardian. “A Georgian security official said the Cubic team would also improve protection of the pipeline that will take Caspian oil from Baku to Turkey through Georgia. Georgia has already expressed its gratitude by agreeing to send 500 troops to Iraq.” 13

The Bush administration knew that the controversial pipeline would need to be protected in each country it passed through. While Washington increased its military aid to Georgia, it faced a decade-long U.S. Congressional ban on military assistance to Azerbaijan, where the oil would be extracted. In 1992, Congress banned such aid because of Azerbaijan’s bloody ethnic and territorial conflict with Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabak region. But on January 25, 2002, President Bush “waived” that section of the Congressional Act, thereby allowing U.S. military aid to Azerbaijan to resume. The White House said the waiver was “necessary to support United States efforts to counter international terrorism [and] to support the operational readiness of United States Armed Forces or coalition partners to counter international terrorism” 14—in other words, to protect oil interests. In the fall of 2003, the administration officially launched a project it called “Caspian Guard,” under which the United States would significantly bolster the military capabilities of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. 15Similar to the U.S. plan in Georgia, the $135 million program would create a network of commando and special operations forces that would protect the lucrative oil and gas exploitation being plotted out by transnational oil corporations and patrol the massive pipeline project that would allow an easy flow of the hydrocarbon resources of the Caspian to Western markets.

But oil and gas were only part of the story. While the Caspian’s resources were undoubtedly viewed by Washington as a major prize to be secured, Azerbaijan’s geographic proximity to the center of the administration’s broader attempt at conquest of the Middle East was also incredibly valuable. With open talk of the possibility of a U.S. attack on Iran and several reports detailing military planning for such operations as part of the “war on terror,” many of Tehran’s neighbors, particularly those directly on its border such as Azerbaijan, were very resistant to the overt presence of U.S. forces on their soil. Iran had made clear that it would retaliate against any state that supported the United States in an attack. As the Caspian Guard program got under way in 2004, “the Azerbaijani parliament adopted a law prohibiting the stationing of foreign troops on the country’s territory, a move widely believed to be a gesture towards Moscow and Tehran, which both oppose any strengthening of military ties between Azerbaijan and the US,” reported the EurasiaNet news service. 16But despite the overtures to Washington’s foes, the reality was that Azerbaijan was on the receiving end of a massive new pipeline of U.S. military assistance.