Targeting the Pipeline

Until now, the notion that the battle in Georgia had an oil component was an educated conclusion, in my case based on the 11 years I spent living in the region, including in Tbilisi during the 1990s. Now we have two independent reports, including one this morning by my former Wall Street Journal colleague Guy Chazan, confirming that Russia took advantage of its assault to tell the West that the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline isn't necessarily safe.

(Credit where credit is due: Damien McElroy of The Daily Telegraph actually had the story first. But the WSJ had the foresight to publish an actual photograph, so that there is no parsing the facts now.)

The WSJ report says that the attack, coming within 10 feet of the Baku-Ceyhan line, occurred last Saturday. Here is Chazan's description:

"The line of craters left by the alleged Russian attacks runs through the middle of a hilly, mostly uninhabited plain some 15 miles south of Tbilisi, near the town of Rustavi. The area lacks military or even human targets. The only sign of civilization is a small farm surrounded by haystacks and grazing herds of cows and sheep. The 45 craters -- each some 60 feet across -- scar the hillside like footprints left by a giant."

On Tuesday, a jet returned and appeared to bomb a nearby smaller oil pipeline that terminates at Supsa, a port on Georgia's Black Sea coast.

The goal? As Chazan states well: "Russia wasn't only aiming to humiliate its neighbor militarily but also to damage its reputation as an energy corridor."

Georgia has no appreciable oil or natural gas. But the U.S. got behind it under the Clinton administration as a corridor for 1 million barrels a day of oil, plus considerable volumes of natural gas.

The United States originally intended the corridor as a way to weaken Russia's hold on its traditional colonial south. The strategy has been to take away the countries into which it normally expands: Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. That explains the U.S. support for NATO expansion. And it explains the so-called East-West Energy Corridor, of which Georgia is part.

The bombings did not strike the actual lines. But they demonstrated that Russia can, and might, do so.

Photo: Guy Chazan, The Wall Street Journal