http://top.rbc.ru/english/index.shtml?/news/english/2003/06/17/17181539_bod.shtml
Anyone want to guess what country is to the southwest of Azerbaijan?
Oo oo oo, I know this one. Iran.
Damn, college paid off.
So, what do you want to be that we will storm into Iran before November of 2004?
Also, how many want to bet, that it will be far worse than invading Iraq.
So how many excuses for the war will we recycle this time?
Well, the U.S. has had “military advisors” in Georgia for a while now. Guess who is right next to Georgia? Azerbaijan and Chechnya. Guess who is probably NOT going to be happy at the prospect of the U.S. moving more troops to the Caucasus, especially given how many U.S. troops have set foot recently in other parts of formerly Soviet Central Asia? Russia, in addition to Iran.
And guess what formerly Soviet, now independent nation is a large producer of oil? Yup: Azerbaijan. Guess where one of the major pipelines from the Caspian Sea region to Western markets runs? Not too far from Grozny.
I think this is Dubya’s personal challenge: just how many troops can he send to the site of the Great Game before the whole darn region goes kablooey? Someone needs to write a nice, juicy conspiracy theory book about post-Soviet petroleum/military geopolitics…there have been some opinion and analysis pieces, and some journal articles and collections of essays, but I haven’t seen a good, solid monograph on the subject.