John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CRAIG MURRAY IN RUSSIA INSIDER
"Venezuela Has by Far the Largest Oil Reserves in the World - No More Explanation Needed [for America’s interference]’
The first part of that statement is only technically correct.
When you speak of Venezuela's total reserves, you include vast amounts of very heavy crude - stuff from the Orinoco Belt. Poorer in quality and more costly to upgrade and refine, a little like Alberta's tar sands.
Counting only conventional crudes, Venezuela certainly does not have the world's largest reserves. Very heavy crudes are far more costly to produce and they are not even usable by all refiners who make petroleum products.
As compared to the light crudes from, say, Saudi Arabia where all they have to do almost is punch a hole in the ground and high-quality crude comes flowing (over time, as producing reservoirs age, this becoming less true, but it is their history). The low production costs of Saudi crude are a big part of what makes Saudi Arabia so fabulously wealthy.
Just as with wines, not all crude oils are equal. They vary in heaviness (the ratio of carbon to hydrogen molecules), in sulphur content, and in other qualities. The more of the undesirable qualities your oil has, the less is its value and the higher its cost of production.
As to the second part of the author’s statement, about explanations for American interference, I think it important not to be blinded by the common view of an American resource grab. That’s what the popular view of the Iraq invasion very much was, and it was largely wrong. The very bloody invasion of Iraq – a million dead eventually - was about removing someone Israel hated so it could feel better about its neighborhood, but saying that would hardly be a way to sell war to the public.
More important for Washington's establishment is not losing control of Latin America as a kind of gigantic plantation system, one where progressive or left groups gain no foothold, where generalissimos and lords rule vast estates, and where the Pentagon and CIA always have lots of good friends at golf and country clubs.
It also helps in keeping foreigners away, as opposed to countries like Cuba or Venezuela who establish relationships with countries Washington might regard almost as enemies. There is a whole new vocabulary of negative words used by Washington to characterize Russia and China and others, making them sound just short of being out-and-out enemies in a war.
The vocabulary represents the same kind of Middle Ages scholastic thinking and categorizing as a term like “enemy combatant,” which allowed the United States to hold suspects as prisoners for long periods of time without legal charges.
America does not really like competition in any field, so it has categorized its serious competitors with highly-charged negative terms, making it sound as though they are guilty of something. Lèse-majesté is the actual underlying concern.
What Latin America has represented to America, over decades and decades, is a set of huge plantations owned and operated by friendly and cooperative right-wing wealth and governments, governments beholden to America.
Remember, America long had a dark operation called The School of the Americas (it has been renamed since publicity in the past gave the School a bad reputation) run by the United States Army to train selected people from Latin American states in methods of torture and control and killing. Year after year of classes trained and sent off to do the Lord’s good work, like missionaries from hell.
In America's renewed drive for global dominance (“full-spectrum dominance” is their charming expression for it), the old way of regarding Latin America becomes important again. Latin America definitely has been slipping away from the old order in spots. Coups aren’t always needed. In Latin America’s most important country, Brazil, they not long ago got rid of the leftish woman president with a world-view, Dilma Rousseff, using trumped-up charges, compliant courts, and impeachment.
So, in the contemporary American drive for dominance, we hear talk once again of the Monroe Doctrine as though it were Holy Scripture, instead of a self-serving declaration by a second-rate American President and lifelong slave holder nearly two hundred years ago concerning other people’s countries and who may do what with them.
Of course, the reason why America is assaulting Venezuela, in a sense, doesn't really matter.
What matters is that they are trying to run someone else's country from two thousand miles away, right down to telling the people just who their president should be, even if he has not been elected.
Sickening arrogance, and especially coming from leaders who get miffed when anyone from another country so much as buys a few pissy little ads on Facebook during an American election.
But that’s how it is in the capital of empire. There is no effort to understand anyone else, only to direct them.
