During the Cold War, the United States was prepared to ally itself with any government that was anti-communist, which meant getting into bed with a lot of brutal and corrupt despots who cared not a fig for democracy or human rights. It was a long and ignoble list: Mobutu in the Congo, Pinochet in Chile, Diem in South Vietnam, Somoza in Nicaragua, the Shah of Iran, Lon Nol in Cambodia, Suharto in Indonesia, Nimeiri in Sudan and many others. Most of these tyrants are dead and gone, or like Pinochet, the target of international legal campaigns to make them answerable for their misdeeds.
But these days, even as some of those particular chickens are coming home to roost, the Bush administration’s war against terrorism and its quest for energy security are producing a similar phenomenon in its foreign policy, and one that down the road could have serious consequences in the Middle East. These two strands of US policy are closely entwined since the primary US targets in both instances are mostly located in the same regions: Central Asia and the subcontinent, the Middle East, and increasingly Latin America. But keep an eye on West and Central Africa as well.
That region, especially around the Gulf of Guinea, is on the cusp of an oil bonanza, which will make it a potential source of energy for the oil-guzzling Americans and especially for an administration so intimately linked to Big Oil. From the coast of Nigeria, the region’s oil giant, all the way to Angola, another key producer, offshore exploration along the Atlantic seaboard is yielding major oil strikes that have turned the region into one of the hottest exploration zones for international oilmen.
And just to show how times have really not changed when it comes to US policies, throughout the Cold War, Washington was the principal backer of Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan rebel leader, against the Marxist government in Luanda. Savimbi controlled Angola’s diamond fields, Luanda the oilfields. Savimbi is dead now and his forces have made peace with Luanda, but it may not be too fanciful to reflect that Savimbi’s death knell was sounded when Angola’s oilfields began to expand at a fast rate a couple of years ago, spearheaded by none other than the Chevron Corporation, now the country’s leading producer.
The governments of the region are all authoritarian with a brazen line in official corruption that has been fattened by oil exports. The oil companies ­ US and European ­ have, it is alleged, gone along with this and, it is also said, in some cases have helped these despots stay in power.
As US politics become increasingly dominated by the country’s growing dependence on imported oil, the tiny state of Equatorial Guinea, which until independence in 1968 was the sleepy colonial outpost of Fernando Po, Spain’s only possession in sub-Saharan Africa, is emerging as the next big hotspot on the world’s energy map. Straddling a slice of territory between Gabon and Cameroon, this little-known country was penniless until a couple of years ago when oil was discovered. With a population of some 500,000, about that of a medium-sized European city, it has been ruled for 23 years by an oldtime thug named Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, whom even some US officials admit had turned his country into a dungeon.
Despite this, he is being courted by the Bush administration, encouraged by the oil majors, and is having his image reshaped as a champion of democracy and human rights even as he throws more of his countrymen into prison for speaking against him. ExxonMobil, Chevron, Marathon and others have invested some $5 billion in Equatorial Guinea, which in the next few years is expected to become the third-biggest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa after Nigeria and Angola.
In 1996, the situation in Equatorial Guinea was very different. Washington closed the US Embassy in Malabo, the capital, when the Obiang regime threatened to kill the then-ambassador, John Bennett, for condemning its abysmal human rights record. Now the Bush administration has quietly authorized the reopening of the embassy.
This cynical and politically expedient process of rehabilitating such regimes was induced to a large extent by the events of Sept. 11, but it also dovetails with US efforts to secure alternative sources of energy. It is taking the Americans back into other oil-producing countries like Algeria, whose military-backed regime was shunned by Washington for years but which, by dint of the fact it has been fighting Islamic extremists for the last decade has now become an ally in Bush’s war.
The Algiers regime, run by a posse of generals who have shown no interest at all in democracy, is no more likeable now than it was a few years ago, but it is more useful from the US point of view. Sudan, although a more modest producer, also seems to be undergoing rehabilitation by the Americans.
It is the same in Central Asia, where the totalitarian regimes that rose to power after the collapse of the Soviet Union are now valuable assets in the campaign against the elusive Osama bin Laden. They also possess vast oil and gas reserves or straddle planned pipeline routes from the Caspian to the West and East.
In Latin America, another key source of oil for the US, the Americans are on the threshold of widening their operations against Colombia’s cocaine cartels ­ Plan Colombia, initiated by the Clinton administration ­ to embrace the leftist FARC guerrillas, who control much of the drug trade but also threaten oilfields and pipelines, all in the name of the war against terrorism.
Since just about every side in Colombia’s 40-year-old civil war ­ the state, the leftist insurgents and the murderous right-wing paramilitaries ­ is deeply involved in the drug trade, many see this becoming another Vietnam, where the Americans went in to prop up a corrupt and inept regime to hold back the communist hordes and wound up suffering the worst military defeat in their history.
Speculation that the Bush administration may have had a hand in the short-lived April coup that toppled left-leaning President Hugo Chavez in Colombia’s neighbor, Venezuela, the world’s fourth-largest oil producer, has done little to assuage the unease about the way Washington’s thinking is going. Chavez had cut oil exports to support the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and since most of Venezuela’s exports go to the US, Washington was not happy.
How things will develop remains to be seen. But with Bush in a mood of robust unilateralism, and clearly determined to find alternative sources of energy than the increasingly troublesome Gulf ­ an effort curtailed by the US Senate’s refusal to allow him to drill in the Alaska wilderness and thus boost shrinking domestic oil production ­ increasing investment in Russia’s resurgent oil industry as well as booting out Saddam Hussein to install a pro-American government in Baghdad could have a whole new resonance.

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