A Fuel's Errand: With Islam As Cover

Nineteen men board four aircrafts, turn them into missiles and kill about seven thousand people. We are told, within hours, that this is the work of Osama Bin Laden and the Al-Queda network. Within a day we are told the names of some of the nineteen, all with Arabic names, all from the UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. A week or so later, some of the men who the FBI said had piloted the plane turned up alive in their homelands, but that did not detract from the main story.

The main story is this: Islam is in crisis; its radicals have declared war on America, on Christianity, on civilization.

When the police arrested Timothy McVeigh for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, no one talked of Christianity in crisis, even as McVeigh's white supremacists are guided by a Biblical fundamentalism and Aryanist racial theories. What about those headlines: Christianity in Crisis, Christianity Against Civilization.

Crises of capitalism, too, do not get put in these general terms. We only hear about the depredations of this or that stockbroker (Harshad Mehta in India, the boy of Barings in Singapore, Jonathan Lebed in the US), or of this or that business collapse. Several large corporations (Boeing, the airlines, Sisco Systems) fired over a lakh of workers and blamed this catastrophe on terrorism, but even this did not bring forth the headlines of my imagination: Capitalism Against Civilisation, Profits Against People, the Crisis of Capitalism.

So, if capitalism or Christianity do not bear this especial weight, why should Islam? Why is Islam a problem, and why should it come under investigation, when we all know that the events of 9/11 are not really about Islam, but about oil and natural gas?

When the US went to liberate Kuwait in 1990-91, it conducted a massive assault on Iraq to free 2.2 million people, of which only 28% are citizens. Even though justice should not be measured in numbers, one would not be callous to ask why the US went to all this trouble for the al-Sabah family? A fairly straightforward answer was offered by then Vice President George H. Bush (the father of the current president) in 1986. Bush, a Texas oil man like his son, went to Saudi Arabia as oil prices collapsed to tell the oil sheiks about US "domestic interests and thus the interest of national security." Oil is a question of US national security, not just because of its vast appetite or addiction to oil (more than fifty percent of the world's consumption), but also on behalf of the US-based multinationals. Consider that around this time Exxon, Texaco and SoCal (now Unocal) owned a third each of the shares in Saudi oil production, while Gulf and British Petroleum shared the totality of Kuwait's production. US interest in Iraq, today, is about stability of Gulf oil fields, even as the US talks about democracy, rule of law and the need to overthrow their former ally, Saddam Hussein.

In Central Asia, the game is similar. Two weeks after 9/11, Chevron's subsidiary Tengizchevroil finished an oil pipeline from Tengiz oil field in western Kazakhstan to the Russian port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea. This pipeline will feed western Europe with oil from what might end up as the fifth largest oil state in the world (and, crucially, outside OPEC's ambit). The Tengiz pipeline is only one of many that sully the geopolitics of the region. Another one, pressing for the Afghan problem, is the 890-mile pipeline from Dauletabad gas fields in eastern Turkmenistan through Afghanistan into Pakistan. This multi-billion dollar project has two multinationals on the warpath, Unocal from the US, and Bridas from Argentina. Both hired Saudis and Americans to negotiate with the Taliban, who have continuously played one off against the other to increase their own percentage of the margins. Unocal, recently denied Myanmar's oil market, is eager for the project and a US-friendly regime in Afghanistan may help it clinch the deal. Zahir Shah, former King of Afghanistan, has lived in Rome since 1973 as a pensioner of a gulf state whose name he will not reveal; perhaps the investment made in him by the unnamed state will eventually come to fruition if he comes to power alongside the notorious Northern Alliance (whose terror in Kabul in the mid-1990s and assassination of Najibulla offer a harbinger of what is to come).

The oil and natural gas lands are currently governed by regimes more invested in commissions and other such forms of corruption, while the populations in these lands are more and more frustrated with their social and economic conditions. The impoverishment of other languages of social protest leads many young people to adopt the garb of Islam to articulate their alienation. The crisis they face is not of Islam, but of a collapse of alternative frameworks, such as pan-Arabism (now perverted by the Ba'ath in Iraq and by the neoliberalism of the Mubarak regime in Egypt) or of socialism (many of whose members earned the gallows from US-backed regimes, such as in Iraq and Egypt, both once home to vibrant communist parties).

As the US bombs fall, then, they are not, despite Bush's rhetoric, on a mission against Islam; theirs is a fuel's errand. After rubble has been shifted from one valley of Afghanistan to another, the problem will remain - an addiction to oil and natural gas, and the profits it provides the children of the Seven Sisters as opposed to the cultivation of dignity and social well being in the states that are oil rich. This is the crisis we need to address.

(Vijay Prashad is Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT, USA. His book, Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of a Dalit Community  is just out in paperback from Oxford University Press)