When George Bush went to India, it seemed to be an event of no great import, other than a means of agreeing a lucrative deal for his new found buddies, not in big oil anymore but in nuclear energy.
Because it was an event that came and went, I felt our analysis had not gone quite far enough. As I researched over the last few days I have felt my skin crawl. The implications are far reaching and will affect generations to come.
What hit me most was that deeply involved in the deal was the careful preparation of international alliances to support military action in Iran. Without our noticing it, George Bush was setting the stage for a meeting taking place in Berlin this weekend that is a part of a drive to war. Almost incidental to that, it has laid some of the foundations for the shape of the political, military and industrial world for the next fifty years.
All this has taken place without our oversight or consent.
As the White House insider once famously said, we work in our reality whilst they have been creating the one that will be there tomorrow.
THE CHANGED WORLD THAT WAS MARKED BY MANGOS AS A DESSERT AT DINNER
This account begins with an enjoyable dinner at which everyone present, including George Bush himself, was in excellent good humour on the evening of his historic agreement with India on nuclear technology.
Global Security gives us a Reuters Report telling us who was present:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Just over an hour after the White House's surprise pledge to help India develop its civilian nuclear power sector, the head of General Electric, the American company that could benefit most from the policy change, sat down for a celebratory dinner. The host was President George W. Bush; a few feet away was India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and his top aides.
GE Chief Executive Jeff Immelt, a contributor to Bush's presidential campaigns, had a coveted seat at the president's table. Bush's announcement on nuclear trade with India -- followed by a formal dinner in the State dining room -- was not just a victory for Singh. For GE, the only U.S.-owned company still in the nuclear business, it marked a possible turning point in a years-long push to re-enter the Indian nuclear power market, which it was forced to leave in 1974 when India conducted its first nuclear test.
While this group was enjoying the special Indian delicacies selected for the meal, our blogs slowly began to react to the news.
"Mangos for US Nuclear Technology" was the first outraged reaction, followed by the slightly more thoughtful questioning as to why another international treaty was torn up by this administration for a country that had refused, with North Korea and China, to sign the Non-Proliferation Agreement.
Some began to question how this would be interpreted by Iran, who had signed the agreement all those years ago but who now feared US high level bombing for refusing inspections from which India had just been given special exemption for their military nuclear plants.
Mangos won the day and the blogs quickly turned away from the story leaving it to the enjoyment of those like New America Media to quote comments such as:
Whatever Indians might think of the India-U nuclear agreement, non-resident Indians are salivating over one other outcome of the Bush visit to India - opening up import of Indian mangos to the US. Long having to make do with Mexican and Filipino mangoes, non-resident Indians can hardly wait to savor the taste of traditional mango varieties like Kesar and Alphonsos, reports the Times of India.
Only a few, like the Huffington Post, grumpily muttered:
With one simple move yesterday, the President blew a hole in the nuclear rules that the entire world has been playing by for over a generation.
Instead of patiently working to ensure an agreement that would safeguard the security interests of the United States - and the rest of the world, for that matter - it appears that the President caved to Indian demands on virtually every significant nonproliferation issue simply so that he would have an agreement to announce on his current trip to the subcontinent.
Had the role of the head of General Electric, Jeff Immelt, been noticed, then the blogs would have become even more outspoken in their disgust. The story might have ended with loud exclamations about the power of the lobbyist and the control over the body politic by our corporates, who could manipulate the President of the United States into such a tawdry deal of street market trading.
"In the short term, it's really business as usual. ... But if things unfold the way it looks they may, then clearly it is a significant opportunity for us," Peter Wells, general manager of marketing for GE Energy's nuclear business is quoted as saying.
Of course, GE Energy alone might not have had the weight to get this deal through. No worries. Also rubbing their hands with delight at that state dinner, the same source tells us, were also the Bush invited Lockheed Martin Corp. chief Bob Stevens and Boeing Co.'s new chief executive, James McNerney. Bush had cleared the way for the two defense contractors to compete for a potential $9 billion market selling combat planes to India. GE makes jet engines for Lockheed and Boeing.
Said GE spokesman, Peter O'Toole "tying GE's attending a State Dinner to a political contribution is misleading. We support officials in both parties and have done so for years."
Certainly GE had not found it easy to lobby the White House. Well, not that easy. Global Security tells us that their spokesman explained:
"GE held a series of meetings at the departments of State, Commerce and Energy, but Wells said the company did not explicitly lobby the White House to change longstanding policy.
"It maybe sounds a little subtle, but we try not to tell the U.S. government what we think their foreign policy should be," Wells said."
For many of our progressive friends, that would have been the final evidence of what had triggered the whole event and the story would have been put to rest with the greed of Bush and his cronies being identified as the hand holding the smoking gun. A greed that led to the world's largest democracy weakening a decades-old prohibition against atomic arms.
They would have been wrong. The campaign contributions were no more than thousand dollar bills slipped into the breast pocket of George Bush's dinner jacket. Even the benefits to the US economy were no more than the icing on the cake. Don't underestimate what it takes to get a move of this enormous size to occur. Combined, these reasons alone did not appear enough to change the nature of our world for the next fifty years.
There had to be more, and there was.
The Daily Times of Pakistan suggests some of the reasons why those who doubted that such a deal might be brokered with India had misread the situation:
.... analysts would have done better if they had factored in four developments, two each on both sides. On India's side, the decision by New Delhi to join the US-European camp on the issue of Iran was very significant given India's traditionally good relations with Iran; equally, if not more important, was the removal of Mani Shankar Aiyar as petroleum minister. Mr Aiyar by all accounts was one of the most efficient cabinet members. Under his charge, India had drawn out a medium- to long-term map of a regional energy grid. He was also one of the most vocal proponents of the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline. His removal, coupled with policy change on Iran, should have indicated the extent of India's determination (and desperation) to clinch the nuclear deal.
Ah! Iran! Now that seems a powerful motivator for George Bush. Could there be more of this sort?
To find an answer as to what really powered this move, we need to have a look at France - yes, the high principled France that, through the eloquent speech of the suave de Villepin, won our admiration when opposing the United States in the United Nations Security Council over the Iraq invasion .
Without an abundance of clean natural resources, France is the most nuclear-dependent country in the world. 59 reactors produce nearly 80 percent of its electricity. Not surprisingly, it has a highly developed technology in this field. Control of it has been carefully managed by the French government through the state-owned electricity utility, Electricite de France and nuclear group Areva,
Angela Charlton, an Associated Press writer, picks up the story:
CHALON-SUR-SAONE, France (AP) -- At a factory nestled among Burgundy vineyards, workers shape, bore, polish and test pieces needed to put together a nuclear reactor. At each work station, technical charts are pasted next to a map of the country buying the product.
A reactor core marked for the Salem plant in New Jersey is propped on its side, 16.5 feet wide and resembling a chunk of an enormous railroad tunnel. Nearby, workers prepare to broach holes into a plate for 15,000 cooling tubes for a reactor in Ling'ao, China.
Twenty years after the Chernobyl nuclear plant coughed a cloud of radiation over much of Europe and scared consumers and governments away from atomic power for a generation, a new crop of leaders, from North America to Europe to Asia, is thinking nuclear.
One country has done perhaps the most to push back the pendulum: France.
As the only European country that continued making new nuclear plants after Chernobyl, France has up-to-date expertise that it's keen to export. And the market is ballooning.
Oil threatens to become unaffordable, gas pipelines run through zones of political uncertainty and coal-fired power plants clog lungs and may overheat the Earth. With energy worries topping the world's agenda, even a few environmental activists are reconsidering nuclear power, persuaded by improved safety and the fear that fossil fuels pose even greater dangers to the planet.
China and India are embracing nuclear energy to support breakneck growth. The United States and Russia are reviving long-dormant nuclear plans, overriding concerns about proliferation of the potentially deadly technology.
So France wants a piece of the cake, or rather a very big piece of a very big cake.
It was that which made President Chirac journey to India in February, just before George Bush.
It had been a long time in the arranging, as Dr. Subhash Kapila of the South Asia Analysis Group tells us:
The French President's visit to India (February 19-21, 2006) needs to be viewed as a historic and landmark visit in the history of strategic relations between France and India. It marks the cementing of a mature strategic partnership that was initiated by President Chirac and the BJP Government in 1998......President Chirac has displayed an abiding interest in India. He first visited India in 1976 as the French Prime Minister. This is his third visit to India-- the second as President.
France evinced a growing political and strategic interest in India after President Chirac's visit in January 1998. This was months before India's defining moment of nuclear weapons tests in May 1998. France had recognised the full measure of India's power potential and embarked thereafter on political, strategic and military exchanges at high levels.
With the coming of the Congress Government in mid 2004, there was a discernible disinterest in furthering the France-India strategic partnership. No justifiable reasons existed, either strategically or politically, other than political pique....
.....Fortunately, the threads were picked up in September 2005 when India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in light of the fast changing global strategic scenario, thought it prudent to stop at Paris, enroute to USA, and re-affirm India's strategic partnership with France.
The result was the signing of a deal that was remarkably like the United States deal that followed shortly afterwards.
There was one difficulty, and it was one that France needed US support to overcome.
A Bloomberg report on the Shundahai Network blog in February revealed:
French President Jacques Chirac said he'd lobby for an end to a ban on nuclear-technology exports to India, seeking an edge for France-based companies such as Areva SA in winning contracts.
What happened to enable France to persuade George Bush to back that country in wanting the long-standing Non-Proliferation deals to be destroyed?
Certainly, there was no doubt about Chirac's delight when the US/India deal was signed shortly afterwards. As Outlook India reported:
A landmark nuclear energy deal today between India and the United States won immediate backing from French President Jacques Chirac, who said it would boost efforts to combat both climate change and the spread of nuclear weapons.
France and India also signed an agreement on civilian nuclear cooperation during Chirac's visit there last month, where he vaunted the merits of French nuclear power technology.
Chirac also commented:
``France supports India in this affair for two reasons,'' Chirac said today. As its economy expands, India should be able to meet its needs ``without being strangled by an energy problem'' and ``without polluting the rest of the world.''
So at that dinner party, there were some very happy US industrialists, some very happy Indian politicians and a very relaxed and happy George Bush.
I do not know if and when Chirac telephoned Bush to express his own pleasure but I suspect he did. Yet nothing comes free. So what had he offered Bush in return?
We know that the Daily Times of Pakistan told us that "the issue of Iran was very significant given India's traditionally good relations with Iran" Yet, the ending of these relations will be India's gift to the United States, not one given by France.
We do know that there was some vague French/Indian deal in the agreement between them that spoke in words eerily similar to those used around the White House to the effect that:
Chirac and Singh also agreed there is a ``growing need to coordinate and intensify'' cooperation to fight terrorism. ``Linkages with illicit trafficking in drugs, small arms and narcotics and weapons of mass destruction have enhanced the destructive potential and lethal reach of terrorism,'' the two leaders said in a joint statement.
This doesn't sound much of an exchange for US support of France. I can only speculate like you.
I was prompted to give more thought to the problem on seeing this photograph yesterday, when Condoleezza Rice stopped off briefly in Paris for a quick word with Chirac before they both went on to the six nation discussion in Berlin to try and get the agreement on a UN Security Council resolution on Iran:
So let us summarize the elements that went into this deal which still awaits the approval of Congress and acceptance by many in the GOP.
India gets recognised as a major international nuclear power with possibly a seat on the Security Council. France gets the irritating treaty torn up that was blocking its valuable nuclear energy exports to India. George Bush gets campaign donations, his own nuclear and military corporations once more selling to India, an ending of India's support for Iran and, question mark, a deal with Chirac over Iran that is good enough for Condi Rice to let him kiss her hand.
Now the pattern of this intricate web becomes clear. The whole exercise is not actually about India at all. At its heart is the determination to go to war with Iran and everything is peripheral to this one objective as the last throw of the dice of the President who wants history to judge him.
It will judge him, because this deal has set the scene for the next hundred years for the grandchildren of our children. Within it is not just the shaping of the world in geopolitical terms but also in how and what will produce the energy on which it will be built.
If the way it has come about is convoluted, the implications are more so and they are enormous. This is much greater than the mangos that we have been happily allowed to contemplate as being our dimly perveived reality.
To spell out fully the details of the changed world that has occurred, with barely the briefest of acknowledgement on our blogs, needs an article of its very own.
FOOTNOTE
Some of you may be surprised that Westinghouse was not represented at the dinner as one of the major players in the United States nuclear industry.
You need to think Dubai Ports.
The major part of your nuclear industry is foreign owned.
It is owned by a company owned by a foreign government.
Yes, a large part of your nuclear industry which is such a vital part of your security is owned by a UK company in which the UK government has a primary stake.
Please don't worry. This won't be for long. Whilst GE was desperately keen to buy it, Toshiba has come along and doubled the offer. So that's O.K. It's not those pesky Brits anymore, it's Japan that will be in charge.
Quite why the UK is selling Westinghouse just at the time that the world market is about to go crazy for nuclear plants is a very British scandal. To do with hidden black holes in a supposed balanced government budget that Blair and his cronies know isn't, according to a spokesman for the Liberal Democratic Party. I must find a UK blog on which to diary that story. You have enough of your own.