More on Kazakhstan

I hate to pilfer from Kevin Drum so shamelessley, but since I just posted on the visit from Kazakhstan's president yesterday, I wanted to add this additional take on things. 

BLACK GOLD….Spencer Ackerman reads Peter Baker's Washington Post story about the upcoming visit of Kazakhstan's president and notes that Baker is oddly reticent about mentioning Kazakhstan's vast oil wealth as a motivating factor for playing nice with them:

Similarly,
early in the piece Baker notes that other moderate-to-serious tyrannies
receiving Bush's thumbs-up are Azerbaijan and Equitorial Guinea, and he
also points out Dick Cheney's recent Caspian Sea excursion. But he does
this all without mentioning that what all these nations have in common
is possession of or access to quite a lot of a certain black, viscous
substance that greases the wheels of the global economy and
international relations.

….Look: There's a certain ridiculous tap dance in politics and in
the media about talking about oil, as if the simple recognition that
oil influences foreign policy is somehow a gauche or extreme statement.
That doesn't mean that everything reduces to a question of who has oil
and who doesn't. But what good does it serve to strenuously pretend
that oil has only a trivial impact on U.S. decision-making?

Spencer is right, and this is one of the reasons that Americans are
so clueless about how the rest of the world views us. I can understand
a reluctance to be associated with the fever swamps of oil-based
conspiracy mongering, but the plain fact is that a great deal of
American foreign policy is driven by concerns over the stability of our
oil supply. The rest of the world is well aware of this, and our blithe
pretense that we're not concerned with such grubby issues ? it's all
about democracy! ? is one of the reasons so many non-Americans don't
believe a word we say on other issues as well…

On our end, of course, most Americans just end up being perplexed. Why do foreigners think we're after everyone's oil? How can they believe such a thing about us?
The answer is easy: they believe it because there's a lot of truth to
it…

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