LOST ON THE CASPIAN

Baku, Azerbaijan. Have you ever tried to go to sleep during fireworks?

It's not easy, but for such occasions I always bring earplugs while traveling (along with other necessities such as a flashlight, duck tape, and a Leatherman tool kit).  I happened to arrive here late at night as the latest phony election was being celebrated.  Fireworks in place of freedom.

Yet however Azerbaijan is a lost backwater on the Caspian for Americans, it has amazing potential to screw things up or make things better not just for this whole part of the world but for us as well.

We need to study the map to understand why:

What to notice first:  It's between a rock and a hard place, Russia and Iran;  it's divided, with one section (called Nakichivan) separated by part of Armenia; Nakichivan has a small border, but a border nonetheless, with Turkey; look carefully and you'll see a scribbly line outlining a region called Nagorno-Karabakh; this region has been militarily seized by Armenia.

That's just for starters.  Underneath the part of the Caspian Sea belonging to Azerbaijan lie billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas.  They've been exploited for a long time (there was an oil boom here 100 years ago), but outdated Soviet/Russian technology can't tap the newly-discovered deepwater fields.  Only Western companies can like Exxon and BP.

To get all this oil and gas out, the now-famous (because one of the failed goals of Russia's invasion of Georgia was to destroy it) Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline was built.  It runs from Baku to Tbilisi – making sure to go around Armenia – then into Turkey south all the way to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan (to avoid the chokepoint of the Bosphorus out of the Black Sea).

Thanks to the BTC pipeline, oil and gas revenues are responsible for Azerbaijan having the highest GDP growth in the world for the past three years, 36% in 2006, 24% in 2007, and projected over 20% this year – although it may be lower as the government eliminates deficit spending and works to keep inflation down.

So you see a welter of high rise office buildings and condos here emerging out of a true Third World city. There're two million people here (in a country of 8 million). Traffic jams are horrendous, people drive junky cars like total (and I mean total) maniacs over barely-paved streets, street lights are a concept, hotels are ridiculously expensive, bars and good restaurants are popping up all over.

Notice I said "bars."  This is a Moslem country, all Azeris are Moslems – at least they say they are.  I've yet to see a woman in a burqa or veil.  There are no restrictions on Moslems drinking.  There are mosques, but you don't hear those obnoxious calls to prayer blasted out from huge megaphones on the minarets five times a day – you don't hear any calls at all.

Even the name of the place isn't Moslem, for it's thousands of years old and retained its Zoroastrian name, meaning "protected by holy fire" – fire being worshipped by the ancient Zoroastrians.

That's the good news.  The bad is that corruption is endemic – it ranks 158 on the Transparency International Global Corruption Index.  The current ruler is Ilham Aliyev, preceded by his father Heydar, the former head of the KGB in Soviet Azerbaijan who had been on the Kremlin's Politburo.

When Azerbaijan broke free of the Soviet Union in 1991, prospects for democracy looked okay.  An Azeri anti-Soviet dissident was freely elected in 1992, Abulfaz Elchibay.  It was the only free election the country would ever have to this day.

Elchibay couldn't oppose the Russian-backed military seizure by Armenia of the Nagorno-Karabakh region – 16% of Azeri territory.  With Russian money, an Azeri Army Colonel, Surat Huseynov, led a military coup overthrowing Elchibay in 1993, and Heydar Aliyev took over.

He ran the place as a mafiacracy and made sure his son would inherit it when he died in 2003.  The son has been a distinct improvement.  He's scared and intimidated by the Russians, but hates and distrusts them.  He had the BTC pipeline built anyway, against their wishes.  Now he's pushing for another pipeline which makes the Russians even madder.

It's called Nabucco.  It may be the most important geostrategic project in the world today. 

Nabucco will pipeline billions of cubic meters of natural gas from a Caspian terminal in Azerbaijan through Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary to Vienna, thence to Western and Eastern Europe.  And where does the Caspian terminal get this gas?

From the other side of the Caspian, Turkmenistan, via a planned Trans-Caspian Pipeline (TCP) that goes underneath the Caspian directly to Azerbaijan – which means very much on purpose bypassing both Russia and Iran. 

As we learned in How To Kill Putin's Russia, natural gas is Putin's key strategy to re-colonize Eastern Europe and make Western Europe subservient.  Which means it's also his key vulnerability.  The Trans-Caspian/Nabucco will negate Putin's North Stream/South Stream pipelines designed for his strategy.

Further, as we learned, Russia doesn't have the gas for the pipelines from its old depleted fields.  New fields have to be developed at enormous expense and non-Russian (meaning American) technology.

Turkmenistan, by contrast, has the world's largest reserves of natural gas ready to go; the TCP will have a capacity of ten billion cubic meters a year.

But – the giant but – is that it will take a US president with moxie to stand up to the Russians and push for TCP/Nabucco. Another example of the stakes on November 4.

Want another example?  Look at the map again and focus on all that land marked "Iran."  All of it and more is populated not by ethnic Persians but by Azeris, and is called by them South Azerbaijan.  The capital of South Azerbaijan is Tabriz.

The population of South Azerbaijan is at least three times the population of Azerbaijan, between 24 and 30 million vs. eight.  Right across the border to their north, their Azeri brothers have their own country, while they take orders from mullahs and crazy ayatollahs in Tehran.  There are millions of South Azeris who would like to move that border south of Tabriz.

All it would take to create the Triple U (uncontrollable urban unrest) and liberate South Azerbaijan would be forthright support from the President of the United States.  Bush never had the moxie for it.  McCain has. 

There's another example of the November stakes.  It's more problematic because of Armenia's masochistic hatreds of its neighbors.  Note that Armenia is small, isolated, and landlocked.  It still lives in Grievance City over atrocities 100 years ago with Turkey (Armenians sure could use Dr. Joel Wade's wisdom on the self-destructiveness of grievance) and conducts an unending war with Azerbaijan.

You can see Armenia-occupied Nagorno-Karabakh on the map.  Now let's look at the Meghri Strip, that narrow finger of Armenia that extends to the Aras River (the border with Iran), making Nakichivan a separate enclave.

Armenia's rationale for seizing Nagorno-Karabakh was that it was an old Soviet oblast (province) that was 75% Armenian, 25% Azeri.  Most of it has now been ethnically cleansed of Azeris, but not all.

The obvious solution is a land swap, trading the main Armenian portion of Nagorno-Karabagh including the capital of Stepanakert for the lower part of the Meghri Strip.  Most of Nagorno-Karabakh would be integrated and connected to Armenia;  Nakichivan would be integrated and connected to Azerbaijan.

To effect this, Ilham Aliyev should put some of his massive oil wealth to good use and buy a gross lot of Armenian politicians and generals. 

Politicians everywhere are always for sale – that's what they do, being for sale – and generals in this part of the world are as well.  Oh, and be sure and buy as many Armenian journalists and reporters as you can, Ilham.  Then make the swap, no muss no fuss.

Doing so would unite, albeit by a thread, Azerbaijan and Turkey (there's a road that goes through the narrow valley connecting Turkey with Nakichivan).  Azeris are a Turkic people who use the same Romanized alphabet as Turks (no Russian Cyrillic or Persian script for them!), and speak a language understood by Turks.

There's an awful lot of business and trade to be made if the Meghri Strip wasn't in the way.

But for Azeris like Arastun Orujlu, head of the East-West Research Center in Baku, it's only part of the solution between his country and Armenia.  Over a beer and pizza at the Baku Pizza Hat (yes, Hat, a ripoff but they have good pizza and good draft beer), he explained that the way to have peace with Armenia was free trade.

"You mean, ‘make money, not war'?" I asked.  He smiled.  "Yes exactly," he said.  "Armenians love to make money.  They're very good businessmen.  We should be able to do so much business together that we haven't time for these problems between us."

Then his mood darkened.  "But the Aliyev clan that runs this country doesn't understand free trade, free markets, real capitalism – although Ilham is much better than his KGB father.  In Georgia they understand, here no.  It's why many Georgians are getting more prosperous, here much fewer."

Arastun was at the economic conference in Tbilisi I was just at, where he met many people from all over Europe (especially Eastern) inspired by the prophets of laissez faire, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand. 

The Prime Minister of Georgia, Lado Gurgenidze, is so much of an Ayn Rand Objectivist that he founded an investment firm called Galt and Taggart Securities!

"Georgia has a government that is both truly pro-capitalist and democratic.  We here in Azerbaijan have neither," Arastun glumly observed.

It's why many young Azeris like Hayala Halilli, head of the Free Minds Association in Baku are indifferent towards democracy here.  "There is no point in voting when the results are fixed in advance," she says.

There are no protests, no demands for free elections.  I asked her why.  "Because no one in the world seems to care.  We are lost here on the Caspian Sea.  All the countries of Europe seem to care about, all your President Bush seems to care about, is getting our oil." 

"If only we could get some encouragement from the American president," she continued.  President Bush went to Georgia (May, 2005) and so many thousands of people came to see him.  The Georgians even named a boulevard in Tbilisi after him.  We would love to name a street after him if he would encourage democracy and freedom in Azerbaijan."

I told her I believed that a President McCain would do what his predecessor did not, so maybe someday there will be a street in Baku named for him.

"But what if Obama wins?" Hayala asked.

"Then we are all lost.  We are all lost on the Caspian.  We in America will have as little freedom and democracy as you do here."

That was my answer.  We agreed to pray for American voters.  The stakes are very high on November 4^th, not just in our own country but even here on the Caspian Sea.