OT Rob Newman on Oil

In message , Mike Smith writes

And there was I thinking the first world war was precipitated by someone called Gavrilo Princip shooting the nephew of emperor and heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, archduke Franz Ferdinand, together with his wife Sophie.

An Newman noted; killing one person is an unlikely cause, no one is -that- popular! The first British deployment of the war was in fact the Devonshires sent to Basra (the various Navies having switched to oil firing made it important). Worth a watch of it comes on again.

Regards

Mike

In message , Mike Smith writes

Gordon Bennett, aren't the British in Basra now. Does this mean that Dubya's war against Iraq is the start of World War 3?

Cheers, Steve

"Steve W" wrote in message news:44429c3a$0$33909$ snipped-for-privacy@ptn-nntp-reader03.plus.net...

Iffy that - and all to do with railways (after A.J.P. Taylor) - WW1 got a jump start because a spy was able to steal the entire Serbian defense plan - The Germans had a mutual defense pact with Serbia but they thought the Serbs would be able to hold the Russians for quite a while. The Germans were convinced that the French would attack them given an opportunity so they built a plan under which all the troops actually went south (by rail) first to deal with the French, then got on trains to head north and support the Serbs. As the Serbs were not able to hold the Russians the whole plan fell apart and as it took six months to re-write the railway time tables the Germans were not able to re-plan without the French bit before the war started. Had the Serbs been able to hold, and had the French not attacked (which seems likely) then it would have been a Russo-German war. A big part of the current problem is the use of the US dollar for all oil purchases (agreed by all OPEC in about 1973), if everyone switched to the Euro the US would be plunged into a massive recession. Hussain switched to Euros as he objected to using dollars, the Euro then did rather well so Iran switched as well (Axis of Evil member No.2), then North Korea switched as well, Venezuela is now head of OPEC and their current president does not like the Americans so a switch to Euro accounting is (I gather) on the OPEC table. Saddam had also been doing deals for the sale of Iraqi oil to the Russians and the French, basically (having been installed and supported by the US) he had outlived his usefulness.. The US thought it could cope with a spot of empire building, they paid for this by borrowing from the Chinese but they didn't see the Chinese starting to open up to and interact with the outside world. I think mess is perhaps a better word than war.

Regards

Mike

No, I think that will be when "Bush" Nukes the Iranian nuclear sites.

Don't you mean "nucular"?

No. If it's Bush it's "newkiller".

-- Cheers

Roger T.

Home of the Great Eastern Railway

Yes, and you dont have to be a nucular scientist to pronounce foilage.

Que?

That's the way Bush pronounces it ;-).

"Mike Smith" wrote

My school history teacher declared (possibly following AJP Taylor) that WW1 became inevitable fairly soon after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in July 1914 because the railway line from Russia into Serbia was single track so Tsarist troops despatched in the spirit of "mutual aid" (Russia has historically been strongly pro-Serb, including into the most recent Balkans debacle) could not readily be withdrawn as there weren't enough passing loops to run an effective two-way service. One provocation led to another; one ultimatum too many could not be met; result: bloodbath across Europe.

Apart from good diplomatic relations with the Ottomans, why would the Germans want oil for their navy, though? I know they were early adopters of the diesel engine (hence their submarine fleet being more effective than ours) but Germany has/had extensive coalfields, though much of it is poor grades of lignite, and I imagined their Kriegsmarin battle fleet (whose building provoked the "we want eight and we won't wait" rush to build Dreadnoughts in Britain - war with Germany was envisaged a good ten years before it happened, blood ties between British and German royals nonwithstanding) was as filthily steam-powered as ours was. Photographs seem to suggest so, including the poor coal as evidenced at the funnel tops...

Tony Clarke, whose great-grandfather allegedly got caught up in the battle of Jutland

A couple of years ago I was at the National Archives [PRO] reading a formerly secret British military report on a Russian railway though central Asia. Some anorak-clad equivalents of James Bond had looked at the loops and sidings to calculate how many trains of men and horses the Czar migtht be able to send in the general direction of India, and where the capacity restrictions were. I get the impression every train on the route must have been full of spies from European powers making notes!