Where there's oil is where to find Dick.

September 2, 2008

Where there is oil and where there is trouble, you can expect to find Dick Cheney - and the US Vice-President arrives today in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, for a brief tour of the Caucasus, taking in Georgia as well as Ukraine, three states in the front line of the West's struggle for Asian energy supplies.

Mr Cheney is a veteran of this conflict and he is back, trying to rally support for a failing strategy. He has been a key supporter of the Caspian region as an alternative supplier of oil and gas to the West. Sandwiched between troublesome Iran to the south and overbearing Russia to the north, the oil and gas reserves of Azerbaijan, Khazakhstan and Turkmenistan were promoted as an energy safe haven, with independent links to the West via pipelines through the Caucasus. That Caucasian lifeline has been shown to be tenuous, its fragility exposed when President Sakashvilli, of Georgia, blundered into South Ossetia last month, guns blazing, to attack Russian separatists.

Today, it seems almost incredible that this chaotic region of gangsters, warring tribes and uncertain borders was trumpeted as an energy umbilical cord to the West, free of Russian influence. The construction by BP of a 1,700-kilometre (1,000-mile) pipeline (the BTC) linking Baku to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan via Tbilisi was a feat of engineering, but it was even more of a political triumph, a two-fingered gesture to Moscow as two former Soviet states - Azerbaijan and Georgia - combined to build an oil export system that bypassed Russia.

Read on.