Tuesday, October 16, 2012

GreedWar - Syria: An Energy-Based Proxy War in the Making?




Casey Research  By Marin Katusa, Chief Energy Investment Strategist
The Vietnam war wasn't really about Vietnam. Spaniards may have fought in the Spanish Civil War, but the real opponents were elsewhere. US and Soviet machinations in Afghanistan in the late 1970s had little to do with liberating a repressed population.
They were all proxy wars, struggles between superpowers that chose to fight their battles in faraway lands and inflict their collateral damage on other peoples instead of their own.
Each war had a cover. Each time the superpowers of the world got involved - overtly or covertly - to right an arguable wrong. Really though, they were there to fight each other. To weaken each other. To claim moral superiority and political preeminence. And to win the right to use the proxy nation's resources and location to their advantage.
It would be lovely to think such wars are a thing of the past... but another proxy war is rapidly developing.
This one pits the world's biggest oil producer against one of its largest customers. It positions a nation with a stranglehold on European gas supplies against one with newfound gas wealth and dreams of future exports. It involves pipelines and terrorism and sovereignty and religion and contrasting concepts of human rights and political progress.
It is Syria.
In its simplest description, the war in Syria is a civil war, a revolt against a tyrannical dictator who would rather slaughter his own people than relinquish his power.
Of course, it is more than that. Syria is a complicated place and an important player in Middle Eastern and global relations.
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