History Today November 2004
Poetry, Wordsworth wrote, involves 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'.
Many believe that history should be written with similar detachment,
and for no other purpose than to inform ourselves about times
other than our own. Yet such a view falls foul of the perennial
concern that history should be 'relevant'.
Certainly the volume among a selection of the current crop of
new paperbacks that demanded immediate attention was the most
topical: The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia by
Lutz Kleveman (Atlantic, £8.99). Its opening account, of
a US helicopter raid on Falluja in May 2003, prompts the author's
reflection that America will lose the war in Iraq.
Parallels are drawn with the original Great Game, the tussle
between Britain and Tsarist Russia for supremacy in Central Asia,
but the focus is squarely on the immediate past and the present.
Claims that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction were
'intelligence failures at best and blatant lies at worst': the
key issue was and is oil. George W. Bush wishes to be free of
the OPEC cartel, and therefore US imperialism is now directed
towards the world's largest untapped oil and gas reserves, in
and around the Caspian Sea. The United States is thus in competition
with Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran. The author's investigations
of this theme took him on a journey of thousands of miles - from
the Caucasus peaks, across the Central Asian plains, down t the
Hindu Kush and Kashmir - that led him to interview the game's
players, victims and observers, including diplomats, businessmen,
mullah's security guards, bandits, oil workers and generals. The
result is a direct and racy account, written mostly in the present
tense and with plenty of dialogue (the sort of dialogue one finds
in books like this rather than in real life).
What will happen in the future is 'anyone's guess', but Kleveman
notes that many of the region's impoverished youth, especially
in the ex-Soviet areas of Central Asia, are embracing Islam and
militant anti-Americanism.
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