The Economic Motive for America’s Current Wars

by Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org

Russia has long been the chief seller of energy — mainly gas and oil — in the world’s largest energy-market: the EU, or Europe. This means that U.S.-based energy companies, such as Exxon and Halliburton, aren’t the ones who dominate in supplying oil, gas, pipelines, and other energy-supplying needs, to the consumers and businesses in the world’s largest energy-market: Europe.
Around half of Russia’s gas and oil into the EU is transported there via pipelines that traverse Ukraine, and this is a major reason why the Obama Administration (which was in service to the owners of the U.S.-based international corporations and even to the Koch brothers who heavily fund the Republican Party against Obama’s Democratic Party) started, by no later than 2011, its preparations for a coup in Ukraine, which occurred in February 2014, to overthrow the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who, as had been planned and expected by the U.S. government, turned down the EU’s offer of membership because the highly uneconomic arrangement that the EU was offering would have cost Ukraine an estimated $160 billion.
The U.S. government knew he’d turn it down, which is why, when he did say no, on 21 November 2013, the Obama regime had everything prepared to launch, that day, the ‘anti-corruption’ demonstrations on the Maidan Square in Kiev, starting the execution of the Obama Administration’s coup-plan. (Though it was an ‘anti-corruption’ and ‘pro-democracy’ ‘revolution’, to overthrow the democratically elected President of Ukraine, one of the key demands by the U.S. and the EU had been the release, from a Ukrainian prison, of America’s preferred leader of Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko, who had been convicted on corruption-charges — and this demand was, of course, a violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and taken by Ukraine’s government to be an insult, which was yet another reason why Yanukovych had to reject the deal.)
The EU nations weren’t eager to take that $160B burden onto themselves, it was laid entirely upon Ukraine, take-it-or-leave-it, and Ukraine rejected it — and so rejected the rest of the U.S. team’s offer. But Obama’s agent who handled Ukraine continued to run into resistance from the EU, because EU leaders weren’t as fascist as today’s U.S. leaders are. On 4 February 2014, in a phone call to the U.S. Ambassador in Kiev, Obama’s agent on Ukraine said “F—k the EU!” about Europe’s concerns, and to impose atop the post-coup government “Yats” or Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who would do what the U.S. government wanted and would ignore the needs of either Ukrainians or Europeans. “Yats” received the appointment 18 days later, and, immediately, accepted the EU’s uneconomic offer; so, Ukrainians were doomed. (And Crimea, which had voted 75% for Yanukovych, broke off from Ukraine, and so too did Donbass, which had voted 90% for Yanukovych.)
But those pipelines still ran through Ukraine, and the Ukrainian government received from Russia the transport-fees, and Ukraine already was $3 billion behind on its payments to Russia for its own gas-supplies from Russia. Russia, in any case, has been trying to rearrange its pipelines so as to supply Europe without depending so heavily upon Ukraine for transport.
NATO pretended that it had other reasons for seeking to bring Ukraine into the U.S. alliance, not missile-bases there against Russia, and mentioned the pipelines-issue as if it were only an aside and said that NATO wasn’t even an alliance against Russia.
However, Obama also had come into office in 2009 hoping to overthrow Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, because, ever since at least 1949, the U.S.-Saudi oil company Aramco was trying to be allowed to build through Syria pipelines for Saudi oil and Qatari gas into the EU so as to grab that energy-market away from Russia.
Consequently, “What’s Behind Lower Gas-Prices and the Bombings of Syria and of Southeastern Ukraine” is a U.S.-regime effort to grab market-share in the world’s largest energy-market.
The Sauds’ main boots-on-the-ground inside Syria to replace Assad with a fundamentalist-Sunni ruler like themselves has been Al Qaeda, which provides the leadership for numerous jihadist organizations — all of them likewise fundamentalist Sunnis — that are trying to overthrow Assad. And the U.S. regime has been protecting Al Qaeda there.

In order for the U.S. regime to make its public accept the burdens of empire, paying the taxes and shedding some blood and organizing others — such as jihadists in the Middle East, and nazis or racist-fascists in Ukraine — to serve as the boots-on-the-ground to carry out such operations, the propaganda-line is that the U.S. government wants those foreign governments to be more democratic and less corrupt, and wants to protect their populations from being subjected to barrel bombs and sarin gas attacks, etc., as if the U.S. itself doesn’t do even worse to the populations in foreign countries it invades.
(Furthermore, the Assad government is doing — whatever it’s doing — to jihadist gangs inside its own country, gangs that are supported by the U.S. and other foreign governments trying to conquer Syria; whereas, the U.S. is strictly a foreign invader there and elsewhere; so, any analogy between Assad’s methods, and the methods that are employed by the U.S. government, would be fundamentally false, inapplicable.)
However, of course, any online newsmedium that fails to link through to its source on each and every challengeable point, is, on that point, no better than the traditional ones are. Only the online newsmedia that are punctilious about supplying the public with clickable access to their sources, are different from the print and broadcast media in this crucial regard. Presumably, the online newsmedia that publish the present news-report will be the ones whose owners want their audience to have access to the information that’s contained and linked-to herein.
Those will reasonably be considered the trustworthy newsmedia, because the media that don’t publish it have received it but are continuing to hide this information from the public. A reader can web-search this article’s headline in order to find which newsmedia are honest. This is a method to determine which newsmedia are honest, and which are not. Very few newsmedia in the U.S. have published any of the facts that are documented here. The reason isn’t that these facts are less well-established than others; it’s that these facts are too damning and contradict the standard storyline.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

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