{"id":1517,"date":"2003-10-21T12:33:09","date_gmt":"2003-10-21T16:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2003\/10\/21\/1517.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:43:28","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:43:28","slug":"the-caspian-oil-issue-too-big","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2003\/10\/21\/the-caspian-oil-issue-too-big\/","title":{"rendered":"The Caspian Oil Issue, too big to see"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Yesterday's Guardian<\/I> had a fascinating column<\/a> by Lutz Kleveman<\/a> about the global fight for Caspian Oil, which he refers to as the New Great Game in his recent book of the same name<\/a>.\n\n

The thing is, oil is important. It's hard to keep in mind, with the travesty of our current administration and its disgusting kickbacks, shills, and preferences, that any decent administration would in fact keep its eyes on the oil prize. Does that justify invading Afghanistan? No, but it justifies spending some resources on providing stability to Afghanistan. It wouldn't, for instance, be a terrific boost to the lives of individuals in the region if China were to have her wicked way. Letting Russia or the Turks call the shots is not much better. Yes, it would be best to have local control over local issues, and it is (as I have said and will continue to say) disgusting for our wealthy and supposedly idealistic country to exploit the oil to the detriment of the people of the Caspian region. Still, it would be bad, if not quite as disgusting, to fail to engage in this New Great Game, as there are real consequences to losing it, and, as the man says, you can't win if you don't play.\n\n

What would, perhaps, be the most depressing would be if much of our foreign policy were based on the New Great Game, but because people didn't know that and weren't particularly interested in it, and because the game appears to broadcast media to be too complex to get people to become interested in, that aspect of our foreign policy was under the proverbial radar, and there was no significant oversight. But how likely is that?\n\n

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday’s Guardian had a fascinating column by Lutz Kleveman about the global fight for Caspian Oil, which he refers to as the New Great Game in his recent book of the same name. The thing is, oil is important. It’s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1517"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16852,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517\/revisions\/16852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}