Climategate, Russiagate, and Jihadgate

I took the liberty of creating a new successor to the Watergate scandal that brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon. I am calling it the Jihad-gate by adding the suffix ‘gate’ to Jihad. The other two ‘gates’ in the title are already taken. In that war of the 80s, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The Americans wanted to fight them because they were still seething from the Vietnam defeat at the hands of the Soviet backed Viet Cong. They wanted to give the Soviets their own Vietnam in Afghanistan. The Saudis came on board matching dollar for dollar with America in supporting the Jihad in order to be the champions of Islam because they did not want the Iranians to claim that title, who were quickly gaining the reputation of a revolutionary Islamic state that stood up to and kicked out of their country the mighty America.

More importantly, the Americans and the Saudis knew full well that a marching Soviet Union would not stop in Afghanistan and would move toward controlling the Strait of Hormuz, allowing the communists to control a major chunk of the global oil supply and holding a knife to the throat of America and Saudi Arabia. The Soviets had to be fought with arms and propaganda to avoid any hiccups in the oil business. Their support for Jihad was a hoax, it was about oil.

Fast forward. Hackers with links to Russia and WikiLeaks hacked into an email server and then released those emails in an orchestrated propaganda campaign to affect the American politics. I am not talking about Russiagate but rather what is known as the Climategate. The above-mentioned hacking is not from the 2016 US presidential election but rather from the days leading up to the December 2009 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. The climate activists had hoped that finally the situation was ripe to address and tackle the issue of climate change. The conference in Copenhagen was nicknamed Hopenhagen.

The hacking of a UK university computer server stole thousands of emails between climate scientists from around the world. The bits and pieces of those emails were rearranged allowing the fossil fuel industry paid attack dogs to take them out of context and cast doubt about the science of climate change. Climategate was coined by the attack dogs to hint at the cooking of the books by scientists. A fake scandal was manufactured. The work of the scientists was proven authentic two years later but the doubt had been cultivated in the minds of the people.

Now, we come to Russiagate. Putin’s Russia stole emails from the Democratic National Convention (DNC) servers and personal Gmail account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta and forwarded their contents to WikiLeaks. Russia also indulged in a massive social media propaganda campaign. The aim was to ensure a Clinton defeat in the election. The mainstream US media rhetoric is that Putin wanted the sanctions against Russia lifted, which he knew Clinton wouldn’t do. While that may be true, that certainly is not all. Russia’s main asset is fossil fuel and it wanted ExxonMobil to work along with Russia’s state oil company Rosneft in order to develop the largest untapped oil reserves in the world — Arctic, Siberian, and the Black Sea petroleum reserves, which has an estimated worth of $500 billion. Putin needed a climate change denier in the White House for that. Only Trump had the credentials.

America and Saudi Arabia came together in the 1980s to counter the Soviets from disturbing the oil business. In 2018, America, Saudi Arabia, and Russia all came together in an alliance of climate denialism to fight against the pledge to keep the global temperature below 1.5 degrees centigrade. While Climategate, Russiagate, and Jihadgate were all about the untrammelled ability to sell oil, only Jihadgate wasn’t fighting climate change. Their worry today are not rivals but rather clean energy alternatives.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 4^th, 2021.

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