by John Gray
A race for the world's resources is underway that resembles the Great Game
that was played in the decades leading up to the First World War. Now, as
then, the most coveted prize is oil and the risk is that as the contest
heats up it will not always be peaceful. But this is no simple rerun of the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, there are powerful new players
and it is not only oil that is at stake.
It was Rudyard Kipling who brought the idea of the Great Game into the
public mind in Kim, his cloak-and-dagger novel of espionage and imperial
geopolitics in the time of the Raj. Then, the main players were Britain and
Russia and the object of the game was control of central Asia's oil. Now,
Britain hardly matters and India and China, which were subjugated countries
during the last round of the game, have emerged as key players. The struggle
is no longer focused mainly on central Asian oil. It stretches from the
Persian Gulf to Africa, Latin America, even the polar caps, and it is also a
struggle for water and depleting supplies of vital minerals. Above all,
global warming is increasing the scarcity of natural resources. The Great
Game that is afoot today is more intractable and more dangerous than the
last.
The biggest new player in the game is China and it is there that the
emerging pattern is clearest. China's rulers have staked everything on
economic growth. Without improving living standards, there would be
large-scale unrest, which could pose a threat to their power. Moreover,
China is in the middle of the largest and fastest move from the countryside
to the city in history, a process that cannot be stopped.
There is no alternative to continuing growth, but it comes with deadly
side-effects. Overused in industry and agriculture, and under threat from
the retreat of the Himalayan glaciers, water is becoming a non-renewable
resource. Two-thirds of China's cities face shortages, while deserts are
eating up arable land. . . .
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While draught and desertification are intensifying around the world,
corporations are aggressively converting free-flowing water into bottled
profits. The water wars of the twenty-first century may match-or even
surpass-the oil wars of the twentieth. . . .
Using the international water trade and industrial activities such as
damming, mining, and aquafarming as her lens, Shiva exposes the destruction
of the earth and the disenfranchisement of the world's poor as they are
stripped of rights to a precious common good.--Vandana Shiva, "
Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit," South End Press
(February 2002)
Leah C. Wells, "Water Woes: In Iraq,
Water and Oil Do Mix," CounterPunch, May 16, 2003
Lutz Kleveman, "The New Great Game,"
Guardian, October 29, 2003
Daniel Howden and Philip Thornton, "The Pipeline That Will Change the
World," Independent, May 25, 2005
Michel Chossudovsky, "The War on Lebanon and the Battle for Oil
and Water," Centre for Research on Globalization, July 26, 2006
Michel Chossudovsky, "War
and Natural Gas: The Israeli Invasion and Gaza's Offshore Gas
Fields," globalresearch.ca, January 8, 2009
Javier Blas and William Wallis, "U.S. Investor
Buys Sudanese Warlord's Land," Financial Times, January 9, 2009
Pepe Escobar, "Liquid
War: Welcome to Pipelineistan," Asia Times, March 25, 2009
Pepe Escobar, "Pipelineistan
goes Af-Pak," Asia Times, May 14, 2009
Rannie Amiri, "Energy
Hegemony - Israel Eyes Lebanon's Offshore Gas Reserves,"
counterpunch.org, July 2, 2010
Peter Mass, "The Ministry of Oil Defense:
It's not polite to say so, but if Americans understood just how many
trillions their military was really spending on protecting oil, they
wouldn't stand for it," foreignpolicy.com, August 5, 2010
