Big Trouble in Little South China Sea

Greetings, dear reader, and apologies for the long hiatus. Your faithful marsupial correspondent has been occupied with the tedious business of earning a (marginal) living.

It's been a year since I last wrote about the situation in the South China Sea. That gap was due not to a lack of events, but rather to my perception of utter disinterest in the subject on the part of my fellow Americans. We do have a serious blind spot when it comes to events outside our own borders. None the less, with events continuing apace, the issue of territorial disputes in the South China Sea has even started to appear in the mainstream corporate media. And what a report that is. Do you like the header? "BATTLELAND - Where military intelligence is not a contradiction in terms". News Flash, sweethearts; military intelligence is always a contradiction in terms.

But my objection is not to the silly trappings of the thing, but rather to the slipshod manner in which the facts are presented. It's disturbing to note that this video, which is essentially a Taiwanese propaganda cartoon, actually contains more useful information, (after the first 35 seconds of silliness), than the print report in Time linked above.

  I'm going to include here a graphic that I used in my first post on the South China Sea, about two years ago. The map is a beast, but it's needed to show the relationships.


Map courtesy of Wikimedia

Look in the center, near the top. See that blob of land with the pipeline running north-east up to Hong Kong and Macao? That's Hainan Island, and part of the People's Republic of China, (henceforth the PRC, to distinguish it from Taiwan, which is also has claims in the Spratly Islands).

Now look down and to the right from Hainan. See the Paracel Islands? Those are (mostly) within the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone of the PRC, as measured from Hainan Island. Note, however, that the Paracel Islands are also (mostly) within the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone of Vietnam. The PRC seized the Paracel Islands from Vietnam in a brief campaign during the mid-1970's, and has held them since then. It was here, in the Paracel Islands, that the new Chinese garrison was recently emplaced, as described in the MSM story linked above.

Now look further to the right and down a bit, see Scarborough Reef, just west of the Philippines? That was the location of the confrontation between the PRC and the Philippines in May of this year (2012). See this article in the Asia Times Online for a discussion of that altercation, (and notice how this is treated as a very serious issue by Asians, in sharp contrast to the casually dismissive attitude of US media). Here, however, the situation regarding boundaries is very different, and really quite unambiguous. Scarborough Reef is within, (again just barely), the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone of the Phillipines, but roughly 600 miles from Hainan Island, the nearest point of land claimed by the PRC. So what is the PRC claim based upon? History. The People's Republic of China asserts that Scarborough was historically Chinese, and therefore modern China is entitled to claim it.

OK, for the last hotspot, look down and to the left from Scarborough Reef to the legend "South China Sea". Directly below that is a mass of colored dots, and legends stating "occupied by" followed by the names of the five main disputants, and a legend marking Mischief Reef. That whole area is the Spratly Islands, although it bears repeating that the word "islands" is a highly optimistic label. The Spratlys consist mostly of partly-submerged islets, rocks, and reefs. What few actual islands exist are low coral mounds, never more than 5 or 6 meters, (call it 15-20 feet), above sea level. Most are partly submerged at high tide. Although the Spratly Islands are spread over 170,000 square kilometers of sea, they total less than 10 square kilometers of land.

So, you ask, if they're just a collection of wet rocks and bottom-ripping reefs in the middle of god-forsaken nowhere, why all the fuss? There are three reasons.

First, right of passage. The South China Sea is the second busiest shipping lane on the surface of planet Earth. More than half of the oil which transits the oceans of the world in the hulls of the so-called supertankers, passes through the South China Sea at some point during its journey.

Second, fish. The world's fisheries are being depleted at a frightening rate, with multiple staple food species, such as the blue fin tuna, staggering on the edge of utter collapse. Some of the Asian nations which are party to the disputes in the South China Sea depend heavily upon fishing to feed their growing populations. Any government which cannot feed its people cannot maintain itself in power for long.

Third, oil and gas, the single biggest cause of war and misery in the world today.  In July of 2011, retired US diplomat David Brown penned an interesting article in the Asia Times Online, in which he asserted -

Chinese petroleum geologists are thinking big, however. Luo Donghong, a senior manager of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), predicts that China will confirm reserves of 22 billion barrels of oil in South China Sea deepwater fields by 2020, according to Bloomberg. That's half again the size of Daqing, China's largest onshore oilfield - which is now nearly depleted. CNOOC's Zhang Gongcheng says upwards of 200 trillion cubic meters of natural gas are in the South China Sea seabed as well, the Economist reports.

So, 22 billion barrels of oil, and 200 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. But there's more. There are also enormous deposits of Methane Hydrates, what some have called, "the ice that burns". What the US Department of Energy calls "the gas resource of the future". (And also, potentially, the environmental disaster of the future, but I suppose we can burn that bridge when we come to it. After all, we've never planned ahead for such problems before, why start now?)

While technologies for the extraction of usable energy from methane hydrate deposits have yet to be developed, a PRC report in 2007 estimated that the methane hydrate deposits found in the South China Sea so far could hold as much energy as 10 billion tons of oil. At roughly 6 barrels per ton, (a conservative estimate), that's the equivalent of 60 billion barrels of oil.

George Galloway Goes Off

Greetings, dear reader. Your favorite beady-eyed marsupial is greatly distracted by other considerations at the moment, hence the lack of recent updates, but here is a lovely video of George Galloway going off on a caller last November. While it may, at seven minutes in length, challenge the attention spans of some people, I'm confident that anyone with the patience to still be reading my blog after all this time can handle it.

George gets rather excited, in the manner of talk show hosts the world over, but he has some very good points to make. And his caller is the exact English counterpart of the sort of American who watches Fox news.



Open Salon readers can watch the video here

Sanctions In Trouble

Oh, my, but the world is not cooperating.

China's response to Geithner's arm-twisting visit was not just refusal, but outraged refusal.

Japan is remaining politely equivocal , which means they're not going to play ball either. After all, the Japanese never say flat-out "No", it's just not polite.

South Korea has also refused to go along with US plans for unilateral sanctions against Iranian oil.

Asia in general is not impressed.

And the Russians have flatly refused to play.

Europe might be a different story, and then again, it might not. One could wonder if the sudden downgrade of European credit ratings by S&P over the weekend was not either a threat or a punishment for Europe's reluctance to screw its own fragile economy through soaring oil prices. For that matter, what the fuck is Obama thinking? Doesn't he need an economic recovery in the US if he hopes to get re-elected this Fall?

And what news source has not just the best coverage of the topic, but the only comprehensive coverage, who are the only ones willing to ask the ugly questions? PressTV again, much to my embarrassment and disgust. Not that I have anything against PressTV, just that I'm outraged by the fact that they're the only ones willing to really discuss the issue.




(Open Salon readers can watch the video here .

Persian Gulf Follies

Yesterday, it was reported that Iran has threatened to close the vital Strait of Hormuz if the USA follows through on plans to impose a total embargo upon the Iranian oil industry.

Today, we are informed that our nation's government has responded with counter-threats, and that a representative of the US 5th Fleet, (which is permanently assigned to the Persian Gulf, and based in Bahrain), chimed in with further hawkish saber-rattling.

This raises a number of questions in the tiny marsupial mind of your faithful correspondent. Not least of these would be, why do we have an independent statement by the 5th Fleet? Is the US Navy now a power unto itself? Does the State department no longer handle diplomatic chores for the United States of (corporate) Amerika? A minor point, you may opine, but still one more indicator that we live in a post-democratic nation-state.

On to the substance of the issue.

The painful part about being a student of history, is that one can often see the parallels, and guess what happens next. The hazardous part about being a student of history, is that one can often guess wrong. None the less, let's play the game of historical parallels for a bit, shall we?

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which occurred on December 7th of 1942, roughly seventy years and three weeks ago, should not have been a surprise. The Anglo-Dutch-US consortium which controlled all oil resources in the Pacific at that time had imposed a complete oil embargo on Japan, using the colorful excuse of Japanese expansion in China.

Yes, I use the term "colorful excuse" deliberately. The Rape of Nanking occurred in 1937, and its details were known in western capitals within weeks, at most. So it took the powers-that-be four long years to decide that those naughty Japanese must be punished? Horseshit. In 1937, nobody in the West gave a damn about the Chinese. By 1941, Roosevelt was desperately seeking an excuse to drag the USA into another European war.

And so the device of an oil embargo was decided upon. Japan, then as now, was totally dependent upon oil imports. US economists predicted that the Japanese economy would collapse within six months without oil. And yet, when Japan responded with a military assault upon the colonial possessions of the embargoing powers, we were caught by surprise? Again I say, horseshit. Anyone who knew anything about Japanese culture and history could have predicted that Japan would fight rather than fold. And even a cursory study of Japanese military history would have revealed that the surprise attack was an old favorite tactic.

Now fast-forward 70 years. Granted Iran and Japan are very different nations, with very different cultures and historical traditions. Imperial Japan was territorially expansionist; Iran hasn't invaded a neighbouring country for over 200 years. The Achilles' Heel of Imperial Japan was oil imports, and that of Iran is its oil exports.

And yet, there are parallels. In both cases, the nation being embargoed was perceived to be a threat to the power of the US Navy. In both cases, the nation being embargoed was perceived to be a threat to the colonial practices of the Western Powers. And in both cases, the subtle hand of the Zionists was at work behind the scenes.

Whoa, Possum, you say! That came out of left field; how the fuck do you figure that?

In 1941, the Zionists wanted the USA committed to the European disaster that we now call World War II, both in order to defeat Germany and also to follow through on plans for the creation of Israel.

Here in late 2011, the Zionists want the USA committed to war with Iran, in order to further the interests of Israel, or at least the perceived interests of the ultra-conservative cabal which currently controls Israel's government.

(And this is as good a place as any to gently remind ourselves that there are good people in Israel, and blaming all Israelis for the horrid crimes of the Israeli government would be every bit as unjust as blaming all Americans for the horrid crimes of the US government.)

So, once again, we have an oil embargo being used to provoke an armed conflict. And yet, the world of 2011 is vastly different from that of 1941. Today, we have stern warnings against precipitate action from the Russians and Chinese, both of whom have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, with the veto power granted by that permanent seat.

As horrid as the thought may be, as painfully as my heart cries out in grief for the potential suffering of the common people both in Iran and here in the USA, I am very much afraid that the reactionaries will succeed in provoking a shooting war involving Iran, sometime in 2012.

What the consequences of that war will be, dear reader, that I cannot begin to say. And neither can the criminal psychopaths who control Washington DC and Tel Aviv.



(Open Salon readers can watch the video here)