Washington might bomb Iran to stop gas cartel

On April 30, a high-ranking Pentagon official was reported as saying that the United States was planning to attack Iran if the latter does not curtail its nuclear program and stop arming Iraqi Shias.

Experts say the true goal behind the alleged plans is to stop Gazprom establishing itself in the region and the efforts of Tehran and Moscow to set up a gas cartel.

The same day, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in New Delhi that India was prepared to sign an agreement on the construction of a gas pipeline from Iran to India via Pakistan. The Pakistani prime minister expressed support for the project. The Russian gas monopoly has supported the project and proposed investing in it for a share in the consortium.

Igor Tomberg, a senior research fellow at the Center for Energy Studies of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations at the Russian Academy of Sciences, said Russia might propose building a kind of a Nord Stream pipeline along the Arabian Sea bed, bypassing unstable Pakistan.

The United States, which has its own plans for Iran's gas, is categorically against the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline.

Another headache is the proposed gas cartel, whose charter may be approved this summer at the Moscow meeting of the energy ministers of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF).

Iran is also trying to involve Gazprom in its projects. In late April, the concern agreed with the National Iranian Oil Company to set up a joint venture for the development of three license areas of the South Pars gas deposit.

Taken together, this is of major importance for global power generation, which will increasingly depend on gas in the 21st century, said Konstantin Simonov, head of Russia's National Energy Security Fund.

This is forcing Washington to take unusual steps. On April 30, the second conference of the World Congress of Azerbaijanis (WCA) was held in Baku with the assistance of Azerbaijan's State Committee for the Diaspora. The WCA was set up in the Untied States in 1997 to fight for the independence of southern Azerbaijan, i.e., the northern provinces of Iran populated by Azeris. Congress participants actually presented territorial claims to Iran.

In 2006, military analyst Ralph Peters published an article, "Blood borders. How a better Middle East would look," in which he writes that in a better Middle East "Iran, a state with madcap boundaries, would lose a great deal of territory to Unified Azerbaijan."

That the White House supports the idea became clear when it actually divided Iraq into Sunnite, Shiite and Kurdish pseudo-states in 2007. The United States views Azerbaijan as a key ally in the South Caucasus and a potential NATO member, as well as one of the four bridgeheads for a possible attack on Iran.

Source: RBC Daily (What the Russian papers say, Russian Information Agency Novosti) - May 04, 2008