War against ISIS is becoming more imminent eaders and diplomats from more than 30 countries pledged to use "whatever means necessary" to defeat the 'global threat' of Islamic State ( ISIS ) with France set to join Americal air strikes and Britain, no doubt, waiting til after the Scottish referendum on September 18.
The Paris talks are mostly concerned about containing ISIS and
protecting the oil producing zones of Kurdistan and those towards the
south of Iraq around Basra and near the borders of Kuwait and towards
Saudi Arabia. The terror threat to the West is useful mostly as 'public
diplomacy' in democracies.
ISIS does pose a potential threat to
the region and across its so-called caliphate because most of the lands
it stakes a claim to are in regions with copious supplies of rare earth
and minerals as well as oil that the world economy requires. So in that
real sense it is a 'global threat'.
Public diplomacy requires
that the population is given an simplistic narrative in which there are
evil terrorist ready to attack Britain or France because a war to secure
resources is seen as lacking the necessary heroic uplift that a cosmic
battle between good and evil has.
In the US, statesmen and
advocates of geopolitical strategies are usually more refreshingly more
candid about the importance of strategic control over resources than in
Britain where politicians think it's rather bad form to mention the
grubby reality of oil needs in front on the electorate, that is, the
children.
A surge in oil prices could damage the economies of the
west such Britain's with its fragile and ailing rentier economy easily
affected by the higher cost of oil, not least as it is dependent upon
East Asian manufactured goods being produced cheaply to keep up consumer led recovery through shopping.
The threat to Qatar in particular
is a threat to Britain's supply of liquified natural gas upon which it
depends for 12-15% of its gas imports with the decline of North Sea gas
reserves. Qatar is a vital market for French and British weapons system
and billions of dollars of investment to prop up their ailing rentier
economies.
Britain is one of many global powers with a developed
economy that has an interest in that along with OPEC nations and East
Asian countries such as Japan and China, even though the 'international
core coalition' to defeat ISIS is primarily a US western led alliance.
Maintaining
western influence by making its military capacity useful to Saudi
Arabia and the GCC states is considered vital to fend off the prospect
of China making inroads and muscling in to the lucrative arms market
dominated by US, French and British companies.
The other aim is
to try to bring together the Gulf states again over differences as
regards Libya where Qatar is backing militant Islamists and the UAE,
Saudi Arabia and Egypt which are backing ex-Gaddafi militias. The need
to freeze Iran out of diplomacy is also thought necessary.
One
reason is because the 'Friends of Syria' Group ( i.e the west and its
allies ) want unity between Qatar and Saudi Arabia so as to be able to
overthrow Assad and secure the Turkey-Qatar pipeline. That would thwart
Iran's alternative plan for a Shi'ite pipeline through Iraq and Syria to
the Mediterranean.
Resource wars and struggles for access to far
flung supplies of oil and gas are set to be a recurrent feature of the
21st century. Jihadists, as in Syria, were used as part of a risky
strategy to try to get rid of Assad just as they were in Libya, the
better to try to gain control over oil.
The consequence was
blowback. Wherever the US, France and Britain have considered military
intervention the stakes have been fighting a 'global terror threat'
which is portrayed as such because there is a need to justify
intervening to secure oil supplies whether Boko Haram in Nigeria or
jihadists in Yemen or Egypt.
ISIS has a base in Syria and Iraq but it is,
like Al Qaida, becoming a franchise operation that is set to spread
across the lands claimed as part of the caliphate because in such
regions jihadi-Islamists are leading the disenfranchised poor in a war
to seize oil or menace oil transit zones or vital pipeline routes.
Throughout all these
lands climate change, drought, crop failure , overpopulation, the strain
on water supplies and resource struggles are combining now in a lethal brew
to spawn pyschopathological jihadi-movements that have nothing to lose
in trying to deal crippling blows to the world economy.
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