Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, with anti-American bias, factual misstatement
Review: This review was first published in the Massachusetts Sierran, the magazine of the Massachusetts Sierra Club.Back when there was a Soviet Union, the northern end of the Caspian Sea was a national wildlife refuge sheltering over 350 species, including sturgeon, Caspian seals and numerous migratory birds.
Koshbakht Yussifzadeh, the Soviet geologist in charge of the Caspian region, wanted to drill for oil in that wildlife refuge.
"So I flew to Moscow and applied for an authorization to do a test drilling at Kashagan. The lady colonel in charge of the matter declined the request categorically. 'Only over my dead body!' she said. Today the lady colonel is dead, and the foreign corporations are drilling at Kashagan. No one mentions the environment anymore."
Kashagan is the largest oilfield in the Caspian, but it is only one of many oil fields in Kazakhstan, a nation that just a few years ago was one of the poorest and most backward regions of the U.S.S.R.
On the western shore of the Caspian, a landlocked sea the size of California, lies the city of Baku, Azerbaijan, where oil wells that have been pumping crude since the 1870's still contain billions of barrels. Today, Koshbakht Yussifzadeh is the vice president of the national oil company. He remains profoundly uninterested in environmental impact.
Across the Caspian from Baku lies Turkmenistan. A contest to decide which of the new Caspian states is more corrupt would be close, but Turkmenistan would be a strong contender. Turkmenistan probably has somewhat less oil than Kazakhstan. I write probably because test drilling here is so recent that good figures are not yet available.
The consequences of pumping and burning fossil fuel: global warming and ecosystem devastation, are of negligible significance to the careers of politicians now in office.
Changing this fact would not merely require an electorate determined to halt environmental devastation. It would require nations in which government is not responsible to an electorate to back policies to end global warming and ecosystem destruction. National leaders have little incentive to do so.
For today's statesmen, the looming crisis is not environmental devastation. It is the threat of rapidly rising and wildly fluctuating oil prices. To avoid this economic threat, China, Europe, and the United States are locked in a high-stakes competition for control of Caspian oil. And Iran and Russia are only the most aggressive of several nations vying to profit by controlling the pipelines.
The shortcoming of the Caspian is that the Caspian is landlocked. Because it cannot be shipped directly, Caspian oil and gas can only be turned into money by pouring it through a pipeline. But every route from the Caspian to market runs through one or more of the most politically unstable nations on earth. Kleveman's compelling book takes us to each of those nations.
You can get some idea of the scope of the problem by beginning where Kleveman does, with the simplest case: Azerbaijan, where oil has flowed for decades through a pipeline to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiisk.
For Azerbaijan, this route has two great drawbacks. It makes Azerbaijan dependent on its hated former colonial master, Russia. And it runs through Chechnya. The Azeris may feel a certain Muslim brotherhood with the Chechens, but this does not override the risk of pumping oil through an active war zone.
A better route would run in a straight line from Baku to the deep-water Mediterranean port of Ceyhan on the Turkish coast. Unfortunately, such a pipeline would run through Armenia. In a bitter and bloody war marked by large-scale ethnic cleansing duirng the 1990's, Christian Armenia wrested the Christian Armenian majority province of Nagorno-Karabakh from Azerbaijan. Azeris interviewed by Kleveman express eagerness to renew the "jihad" against Armenia. Cooperation on a pipeline is out of the question.
The pipeline to Ceyhan is, however, being built. It will take a wide detour through Christian Georgia and eastern Turkey, where Kurdish sentiment for independence from Turkey is strong. This is an expensive route not merely because it is so long, but because much of the way the pipeline will be buried several meters deep to lessen the risk of sabotage.
Kleveman accurately characterizes Georgian independence as marked by "civil wars, political anarchy, and economic chaos." Georgians believe that their civil wars were fueled by Russia as a pretext for sending "peacekeeping" troops intended to incorporate Georgia into Russia. Certainly, with 16,000 Russian soldiers on Georgian soil, Georgia is far from real independence.
The fledgling nation-state does get some of its own back by harboring and supplying Chechen guerillas. Russian troops, meanwhile, have given effective autonomy to the Muslim province of Abkhazia, which, less than a decade ago, expressed its discontent with being part of Christian Georgia by teaming up with Chechen warlords in raids in which Georgian civilians were killed by the hundreds.
Although it is not Kleveman's intention, The New Great Game is a persuasive argument that lives would be saved everywhere in the region by a series of population exchanges of the type that finally ended the Turkish massacres of Greeks, and the smaller scale Greek massacres of Turks. (cont. below)
Rating: 
Summary: THIS JUST IN: OIL IS IMPORTANT
Review: Travelling through Central Asia, Lutz Kleveman has compiled a series of essays describing the power struggle that has been taking place in the region over the allocation of the oil and gas resources locked under the surface of the volatile area. Kleveman refers to this as the 'New Great Game'. This is a direct reference to the original Great Game played by Russia and Britain over one hundred years ago for control of Central Asia's access to the riches of India and China. Kleveman contends that the New Great Game's players consist of Russia, the United States, China, Iran, and Pakistan. The prize this time is control of the oil and gas reserves and the pipelines that will transport the product to market. The various endpoints for these pipelines include Turkey, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and China. While each of the non-American players obviously prefers their own country as the chosen destination, the United States prefers a Mediterranean location on the coast of our NATO ally Turkey. Kleveman visited several countries for this book including Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, Iran, China, etc. The main gist of his talks in these various countries is that everybody is accusing everybody else of nefarious, underhanded dealings in their quest for oil. And of course, none of these people will impugn their own or their country's motives likewise. The main point that I picked up from "The New Great Game" is that most of the people in this region are decidedly uninformed about what the United States is all about. There are of course the lunatic conspiracy theories about the US government being responsible for September 11 and that we were simply using it as an excuse to get at their oil. Even more than that though there seems to be, at least according to the people Kleveman spoke with, a majority opinion that, even if Al Qaeda was behind September 11, the United States is only using its war or terrorism as a pretext to ensconce itself in the region to control the eventual pipeline flows. This is particularly odd coming from a region of the world where blood feuds still rage on unchecked. You would think that they, more so than most other peoples in the world, would understand our desire to revenge this attack. If Kleveman had stopped here he would have had an average, maybe even good, book. Unfortunately he decided to put his two cents in regarding America's foreign policy. I do believe that we are pursuing a very dangerous course in this region of the world. Backing dictators and warlords instead of true reformers is not a way to create a stable, peaceful region (as if we haven't reaped enough of those sowed seeds already). Kleveman however bald-facedly accuses the United States of engaging in war for oil. Folks like Kleveman who accuse the US of this are missing a nuanced part of this subject. The point is not that we went to war in Iraq FOR oil but BECAUSE OF oil. And yes, there is a big difference. To go to war FOR something means that is your primary motive. To go to war BECAUSE OF something means that it is an underlying reason. Consider this: would the US have ever gone to war against Iraq (even in 1991) if Iraq did not have all that oil sitting underneath it? The answer to that is no. However, if Iraq did not have oil, it likely never would have become a problem in the first place. And, even if it did, we would have been inclined to ignore it since a vital interest of ours would not have been threatened. A free, stable Iraq is in our interest specifically because it is a potentially large supplier of inexpensive oil. To say that we are in Iraq FOR oil is to say that we are uninterested in stabilizing the country. To say that we are in Iraq BECAUSE OF oil is to say that we are very interested in stabilizing the country (even if we have done a lousy job of it so far). While our methods may be wrong our intentions are just. This is a point that Kleveman drastically misses and which harms his overall work.
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