Dances in the Kingdom of Sand

Two days ago, the 90 year old King of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah bin Abdul-al-Aziz, died.

Yesterday, British flags flew at half-mast across the UK in tribute to this ally of our country and today our Prime Minister David Cameron travels to Saudi to greet the new King, the comparatively youthful septuagenarian, Salman. As well as shaking hands warmly with the new absolute ruler of the Arabian peninsular state, Cameron is going to pay tribute to the deceased monarch, who has been repeatedly described as a "reformer" since his passing. It will be all the more of an emotional event for Dave as Abdullah personally awarded him the Saudi equivalent of the Order of Merit for our PM's services to this exceptionally vicious, dictatorial regime.

Abdullah's death comes at the end of a fortnight when, unusually, the desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the fiefdom of the Ibn Saud family for nearly a century, has been in the world headlines for two internal matters. Both more than slightly question Abdullah's allegedly reformist credentials.

Raif Badawi

One was the administration of fifty lashes to a liberal blogger, Raif Badawi, the first of twenty planned weekly instalments to deliver 1,000 blows to his body for the crime of expressing his own views - followed by ten years in jail. This was in spite of a higher court ruling that he was not guilty of apostasy as previously decreed by a local judge. Indeed, many commentators concluded that Badawi was targeted by the regime because of a blog he set up to discuss social and religious issues rather than "insulting Islam", the charge for which he was beaten.

Still worse was the case of Lalia Bint Abdul Muttablib Basim, a Burmese woman accused of abusing and murdering her seven year old step-daughter. She was dragged through the streets, crying out her innocence, before being beheaded in a car park by a state executioner who took a sword to her neck three times before the act was completed. It was the tenth execution in just three weeks, yet by Saudi standards her brutal death was merciful - others are stoned slowly to death or even crucified. Bad enough, but all the more appalling given the random and chaotically brutal nature of the Saudi "justice" system, as evidenced by the terrifying experience of Scottish anaesthetic technician Sandy Mitchell back in 2005 - even his one year old baby son was implicated as a terrorist by the Kingdom's police.

Yet while such barbarities are rightly condemned when carried out by the Islamic State, when they occur in Saudi they pass barely mentioned as our leaders and businesses shake hands with their Jeddah counterparts.

Just yesterday President Obama hailed Abdullah as a man of "conviction" (apparently unaware of the irony of his words) and a great ally of the USA. Similarly, British Premier David Cameron expressed his sadness at the despot's passing and hoped the "long and deep ties" between the UK and the Kingdom of Ibn Saud would continue. He even lauded the dead King for an apparent commitment to peace and a desire to increase understanding between religions. Perhaps he was referring to Saudi Arabia's saturation of Libya and Syria troubled lands with weapons channelled through Abdullah's ally, Qatar. And as for religious understanding, perhaps Dave was thinking of the Saudis' execution of a woman, Amina bint Abdel Halim Nassar, for the crime of witchcraft in 2011.

King Abdullah awards Cameron a medal for "services to Saudi Arabia"

Even more striking are the Saudi links, mostly private but well known, with both al-Qaeda and ISIS. While a former head of British MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, has hinted at the latter, the British radical, Tariq Ali, outlined the first connection in his powerful, wide ranging book, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, back in 2002.

Railing against the state religion of Wahhabism, a highly puritanical form of Sunni Islam, Ali notes that it was originally sponsored by the British to help defeat the Ottoman Turks in the first world war through the ludicrously lionised agency of T.E.Lawrence (of Arabia fame). Then, with the forming of the Kingdom of the Ibn Saud warlord family in 1932, wahhabism was endorsed by their western overlords, Britain and the USA, as an effective form of total political control over what was once a very diverse and tolerant society. Sunni and Shia Muslims who failed to conform to its extreme teachings suffered at its hands, as well as those of other faiths. As time passed, some Saudis used their petrodollars to export their beliefs at the end of gun barrels.

Ali relates:
"During the war against the Soviet Union, Pakistani military intelligence requested the presence of a Saudi prince to lead the jihad in Afghanistan. No volunteers were forthcoming and the Saudi leaders recommended the scion of a rich family, close to the monarchy. Osama bin Laden was dispatched to the Pakistan border and arrived in time to hear President Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski giving open support to the jihad. One of his first actions as a pro-western freedom fighter was a raid on a mixed school, which was burnt to the ground, its headmaster killed and disembowelled. (p.323)"

Many Saudis long for the end of a state that bans all freedom of speech, belief or association - indeed, one where new laws in 2014 declared all forms of dissent to be "terrorist". Gay and lesbian people face flogging, chemical castration and even death. And for Saudi women, not only is their country a place where they are infamously banned from driving - it is also a land where women are electronically tracked so they cannot go abroad without the permission of their male "guardian". Their rulers remain firmly among the most authoritarian in the world and use a wide range of torture, repressive laws and a deeply conservative culture to slow change to a snail's pace. Corruption is rife and ordinary Saudis are completely cut out of the decisions that affect their lives. Consequently, with no prospect of liberal reform, many younger people are turning to the violence of al-Qaeda and ISIS as their compass. Were it not so dangerously tragic, these terrorist organisations' policies of adopting the extremes of the Saudi royals' own deeply conservative wahhabist outlook would verge on the satirical.

So why are our leaders so keen to do business with this regime? Why were they so anxious to overthrow the likes of Saddam, Gaddafi and Assad, all of them secular rulers who eschewed links with the likes of Bin Laden, but happily court the favours of the Ibn Saud dynasty?

British Prince Andrew is a frequent visitor to the Arabian peninsula

There are two key factors - one is the personal links many in the West have with the Saudis, as well as other royal families through the Gulf states. The Queen hosted Abdullah at her castle in Balmoral in 1998 and members of her family have frequently visited Saudi. In 2011, Prince Andrew visited the Bin Laden family in Jeddah at the British taxpayers' expense in spite of significant criticism within the UK. In the USA, the US Bush Presidential dynasty has enjoyed close connections with the Bin Laden family and many other influential Saudis, allegedly to the tune of $1.5 billion. And tens of thousands of westerners in the oil industry and its auxiliary sectors have benefitted personally from earning large tax-free salaries in the kingdom - usually complete with exceptionally low paid servant guest workers from poor east Asian countries like Burma and Indonesia.

Central to this, of course, Saudi Arabia is the third largest oil producer in the world and critical to the supply of energy to Europe and the USA, as well as a major customer of our arms manufacturing companies. The kingdom produces over 9,000,000 barrels of oil every day. In context, that is currently third in the world, just behind the USA and Russia and more than Iran, Iraq and Kuwait combined. And unlike Gadaffi's Libya or Saddam's Iraq, or Iran now, the Saudi Government, nervous of its own people, is happy to work in concert with the West in return for its support.

So our PM goes to the Arabian peninsula to continue a decades-old dance of diplomatic protocol and corporate greed with a corrupt, repressive regime markedly more brutal than other regimes he and his predecessors invested so much in destroying. It is a dance that suits both parties - the Ibn Sauds depend on their western sponsors military backing to stay in power; the western oil companies and their shareholders meantime benefit from extracting huge profits from the Saudi deserts, pillaging the resources of an oppressed people. And the Saudi people, desperate for change but held down by their medieval rulers, know this.

Tariq Ali explains how this is seen by many Saudis through an interview with the exiled Saudi novelist Abdelrahman Munif:
"The presence of oil could have led to real improvements and change, creating the opportunities for a better life and providing everyone with a future. The West is not owed the credit for the riches of the Peninsula and the Gulf. These riches come from within the earth. What happened was that the West discovered these riches and took the lion's share, the larger part, which ought to belong to the people of the region. Our rulers were brought in by the West, which used them as its instruments. We all know the sort of relationship there is currently between the West and these regimes."

As oil-addicted western states continue to "do business as usual" with the Saudi Royals, it seems rather unlikely that, in the future, their subjects will quickly forget our nations' collaboration with this most odious regime. Just as the USA/UK overthrow of Iran's democracy in 1953 for the sake of corporate oil profits ultimately drove dissent into the arms of Ayatollah Khomeini, the West's grasping alliance with the slowly crumbling House of Ibn Saud means there is little hope for progressive social change in the peninsula. Instead, when the current regime has finally sunk in the desert sands, Arabia and the wider world face an uncertain and potentially terrifying future.

Dragonfly In Oil - a study in "humanity"

From the Tar Sands of Canada - this is how we power our way of life, our cars, computers, holidays, homes...

Alberta in Canada once boasted one of the most beautiful wildernesses in the world. But then came the exploitation of the Tar Sands, part of the dirty oil drive which, by the appropriately named process of fracking, has made North America energy independent for the first time. The remains of millennia of decay, the matter of the carbon fuel now extracted and burned to power the world's greatest polluters - the human species - spew into our air and silently, invisibly poison our future. 

But earlier, much earlier in the process of extraction and refining, the spills and detritus of drilling and fracking the oil from the virgin soil have already claimed the most delicate of creatures, in the pursuit of profit and human profligacy happily destroying as mere "collateral damage" the precious, living and vibrant children of nature. Forests have been felled, ground stripped of its topsoil and heated water flushed deep down to force millions of barrels of oil out the ground: coating and trapping the once free and beautiful dragonfly in a shroud of black.

"Let us not, however, flatter ourselves  overmuch on account of our victories over nature. For each such victory, nature takes its revenge on us.”

                  Blake & Engels, quoted in The Rise of the Green Left (Derek Wall)

(with thanks to Calvin "Spiralling" Smith for drawing attention to this)

I Do Not Want Mercy, I Want You To Join Me | Common Dreams

I Do Not Want Mercy, I Want You To Join Me | Common Dreams

Tim DeChristopher, a climate activist who disrupted what was later ruled to be an illegitimate land auction, has today been sent to jail for 2 years in the USA. His crime was to have falsely bid in the auction against oil and gas companies intent on drilling the land and adding to the damage of the environment and atmosphere.

Tim committed no act of violence, damaged no property and harmed no person. But tonight, he is in prison.

More on this travesty from Common Dreams, click here.

Tim DeChristopher

BP: "Beyond Petroleum" and its Broken Promises

 Design by: Ross Robinson

Oil men are hardly known for their humility. Ever since the black stuff began to be exploited on a mass-industrial scale at the turn of the 19th century into the 20th, gradually usurping coal as the carbon fuel of choice, they have blustered and battered their way to economic and political supremacy across the globe. They have happily undermined democratic governments and movements, sponsored corrupt governments of the most odious kind, such as the House of Ibn Saud in the Arabian peninsula, and happily drilled the environment into oblivion. They have worked without regard to the consequences for both people and planet - witness the Ogoni's travails with the Shell oil company and the judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria. In addition, by frustrating anything that threatened this supremacy, such as fuel efficient cars using (potentially) clean energy, the oil industry has shown its moral bankruptcy, just as its profits have soared to record levels.

Of course, with massive funds ploughed into public relations and political lobbying, they have been adept at ensuring that they appear to be on the side of "ordinary people". In the UK, both in 2002 and again now, consumer anger resulting from price rises driven mainly by the oil companies themselves is being deflected onto the Government's fuel duties, rather than on oil companies' soaring profit margins. And likewise, in the USA, any attempts by progressive politicians to restrain the carbon economy, including preventing dangerous exploration such as the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf, have been met with the most outrageous responses likening them to national enemies and traitors. It is little surprise to find that, just weeks after the Gulf disaster, Sarah Palin and her Tea Party allies like Rand Paul were happily dissimulating their way to electoral victory on the back of substantial funding from, among other oil conglomerates, BP, owners of the stricken oil rig.

And there could be no finer example of politics firmly in the pockets of Big Oil than this chillingly bizarre tirade from the 2008 Republican Party Convention.

BP, previously known as British Petroleum, but now in effect a large multinational well above the scope of control of any national government, has a dreadful record on so many counts. For example, in its original guise as the (entirely British owned) Anglo-Persian Oil Company, in 1953, it persuaded then British Premier Winston Churchill and the American Government to sponsor a coup d'etat to overthrow the democratic government of Iran and impose the brutal dictatorship of the Shah. Why? Simply because the elected Premier planned to nationalise the oil industry after nearly fifty years during which Anglo-Persian had been despoiling his country of its biggest asset with barely any payment made to Iran itself.

Later, in the early 2000s, as fears of global warming increased and demands for curbs on the runaway carbon economy grew, BP came up with a new wheeze. Oil would not last forever, they admitted. And so "BP" no longer stood for British Petroleum, but rather "Beyond Petroleum". They were not an oil company at all: no, rather, they were an energy company. And so they announced investment in alternative energy technology development, from carbon capture to solar power and biomass. Why, had we not noticed that even their company logo had always been green coloured - how could we possibly doubt them?

http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/2010/06/bp-beyond-petroleum-or-broken-promise.html

Except that the proportion of investment into new technologies was and remains utterly tiny compared to that for oil and gas, as evidenced in 2008 when new CEO Tony Hayward effectively restated the fundamental commitment to oil. Unsurprisingly, if anything, this commitment has increased. In the face of the growing evidence that we are now around the moment of "Peak Oil", BP and others have sought more and more ways of extracting oil from terrain which previously would have been uneconomic for them to do so. Deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has been joined by similar projects all over the world - among many other places, off the west coast of Africa, off Indonesia, and off the north-west coast of Scotland. Now, just a few days ago, BP have sold a 5% stake in their ownership to Russian oil company, Rosneft, in order to begin drilling in the previously unspoiled Arctic.

Deepwater drilling anywhere is exceedingly dangerous - the weather can overwhelm the most sophisticated of human technology; or, as with the Deepwater Horizon, human error, driven by cost-cutting and profit-seeking, can lead to accidents with devastating consequences. Although technology has improved in recent years, as the Gulf disaster has shown, remedying faults at phenomenal depths is difficult in the extreme. In the Arctic, it may well be impossible.

Yet, clapping their hands in delight at the retreat of the northern iceshelf as global warming grips, the oil companies are relentlessly pursuing projects to extract oil and gas in more difficult and more sensitive environments. Product demand is surging with the rise of the emergent BRIC* economies, and as supplies from our normal sources get tighter (we use around 30 times more oil than we discover each year now), the consequent rise in price makes drilling in such difficult conditions more affordable for profit-maximising companies.

Drilling gets into deeper and deeper water

However, it is no less dangerous to their workers, to local communities or the ecology of the surrounding regions. And of course the ultimate irony is that as ice-melt caused by man-made global warming makes drilling in the Arctic feasible, the response of the so called Beyond Petroleum BP is not to anxiously see this seminal environmental disaster as a spur to urgent investment in alternative, clean technologies. Rather, it is viewed as a golden opportunity to grab a bigger share of the oil market.

We cannot prevent runaway global warming and preserve our human civilisation by depending on the goodwill and foresight of the oil industry. Time and again, they have shown their interest is solely in shareholder profit and managerial bonuses. After some desultory handwringing over disasters like Deepwater Horizon, the Prudhoe Bay spill, the Exxon Valdez disaster  and Amoco Cadiz, they have carried on as before. They have colluded in suppressing protest and human rights, involved us in wars like Iraq, employed mercenaries to attack trade unions and local communities, and used sophisticated political lobbying to ensure they remain unconstrained in their activities. Governments may talk of regulation, but any they enact are normally little more than window dressing - the magnates remain untamed.

Multinationals and the market will not deliver the change we need - as oil becomes scarcer, it will become more and more profitable to sell. Developing renewable energy will not be in the interests of these companies because their sole raison d'etre is to maximise their short to medium term profits. The dictates of capitalism incredibly mean that their objective is not even to ensure their own long term success - few of them have strategic plans stretching beyond the next five or ten years. So for the action we need to curtail the carbon economy and invest seriously in cleaner, renewable energy, we need to turn to governments and politics - new, green politics. Only then, will we ever rid ourselves of our carbon addiction and really get beyond petroleum. 

* BRIC = Brazil, Russia, India and China
"My Well came in big and there ain't a dang thing you gonna do about it!"

Thanks to Ross Robinson for permission to use his imaginative logo at the start of the blog. You can get the tee-shirt (or stickers) here:  http://www.redbubble.com/people/rossman72/t-shirts/5196179-2-beyond-petroleum