Oil, Russia, U.S., China (And Yes, Zbiggy!)

The 'sphere is all over the place on this Georgia/Russia thing and at least one AP report in which reporters were escorted by Russian military through the capital of South Ossetia that supposedly was brutally attacked by the Georgian found little evidence of destruction or civilian casualties (Russia claimed 2,000 killed).
So, while the U.S. has been messing around and may have encouraged Georgia to go too far, the whole thing is really about energy resources.
A poster at Daily Kos found this great story from the Asian Times three years ago that sort of ignores all the ethnic politics of the last two centures or so and just lays it all out from the pipeline's viewpoint. It's really long, but worth every word.
And it boggles my mind. I haven't read anything this good since Tim Weiner's book on the CIA last year. The interconnectedness of everyone — George Soros and Dick Cheney? — just sucks the air out of the room.
Here's a taste:


Pipelines and US-Azeri ties

The Baku-Ceyhan pipeline was originally proclaimed by BP and others as the project of the century. Former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was a consultant to BP during the Bill Clinton era, urging Washington to back the project. In fact, it was Brzezinski who went to Baku in 1995, unofficially, on behalf of Clinton, to meet with then-Azeri president Haidar Aliyev, to negotiate new independent Baku pipeline routes, including what became the BTC pipeline.

Brzezinski also sits on the board of an impressive, if little-known, US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce (USACC). The chairman of USACC in Washington is Tim Cejka, president of ExxonMobil Exploration. Other USACC board members include Henry Kissinger and James Baker III, the man who in 2003 personally went to Tbilisi to tell Eduard Shevardnadze that Washington wanted him to step aside in favor of the US-trained Georgian president Mikhail Shaakashvili. Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to George H W Bush, also sits on the board of USACC. And Cheney was a former board member before he became vice president. A more high-powered Washington team of geopolitical fixers would be hard to imagine. This group of prominent individuals certainly would not give a minute of their time unless an area was of utmost geopolitical strategic importance to the US or to certain powerful interests there.