Saint Michael Traveler

 ”A Century Of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order“, by William Engdahl, a German historian is about how oil and politics have been intertwined for the past 100 years.

Excerpt from the book:
“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 fundamentalist 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. 

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.”

We should not forget our role in reshaping the Middle Eastern landscape over the last 75 years.