Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Bin Laden a Bush weapon

March 31, 2004
Bin Laden a Bush weapon
PV Vivekanand



The frenzy in the American hunt for Osama Bin lll and the way Washington is going about it with a no-holds-barred approach clearly indicate that having Bin Laden under American custody — or to establish that he is no more — in time for the presidential elections in November is the top-most priority for President George W Bush. In fact, it could be Bin Laden's fate that would determine whether Bush remains in the White House for another four years.
AMERICAN soldiers are on an unprecedented do-or-die mission thousands of kilometres from home: Catch Osama Bin Laden. However, not many of them might have given it a second thought that their mission is not as much important as averting the "biggest threat" to the national security of their country as ensuring the political future of their president.
It does not need a magic ball to see that George W Bush's chances of re-election in November depend largely on images of Bin Laden in American custody flashed throughout the US similar to those of Saddam Hussein or vivid signs that the Al Qaeda leader — America's number one enemy — continues to elude capture and thump his nose at the mighty US military and intelligence network.
Recent reports had said that Bin Laden had been "cornered" on the wild mountainous frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan and it was only a matter of time that the elusive Al Qaeda leader was caught. The reports were quickly denied, however.
What has not been widely reported was that the mission to capture Bin Ladin or at least produce evidence that he had been "eliminated" is that orders have gone out of the White House: Get Bin Laden at all costs and well ahead of the presidential elections.
US military officers have spoken of a “renewed sense of urgency” that is fuelling the search for Bin Laden.
Pakistan has thrown its military and intelligence weight behind the American soldiers combing the tough and unforgiving terrain on the Pak-Afghan border. It has deployed some 7,000 soldiers on its side of the border to back up the American forces on the Afghan side.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharaff is definitely under American pressure. Otherwise he would not have authorised a military action that led to the death of nine Pakistanis in a shootout and arrest of some 25 tribals last week near the border in a sweep through three villages. Soldiers conducted house-to-house searches and blew up houses to punish unco-operative villagers who refused to hand over suspects.
Islamabad said the operation was launched after militants had ignored a Feb. 20 deadline to surrender
However, experts, including Pakistani analysts said, Musharraf, who has always remained committed to a longstanding understanding to respect the autonomy of the tribal territories, would not have allowed such action to take place unless without American presure.
Applying such pressure on Musharaff is only a reflection of Washington's anxiety to stage a dramatic capture of Bin Laden and turn it into political capital for Bush in November. Washington could not but be aware that such pressure carries high risk in Pakistan.
It does not an expert Washington watcher to see the connection .
Liaqt Baloch, deputy president of the conservative Islamic party Jamaat-I-Islami of Pakistan, has argued that the military assault is designed to produce an intelligence success ahead of the US elections in November. “There’s a strong link between the activity in the tribal areas and the US election,” he said. “This isn’t anti-terrorism; it’s just a political action to bolster support for Bush in the United States.”
Musharraf himself has hinted at the pressure being applied by Washington by telling religious leaders that Pakistan had to co-operate with the US to avoid becoming a target of the war on terrorism.
It has also not been lost on observers that the US adopted a low-key approach to revelations that Pakistan's AQ Khan had clandestinely sold nuclear know-how to Libya, Iran and North Korea, particularly that the last two are indeed among the "axis of evil" coined by Bush himself.
Given Bush's ardent public drive against "weapons of mass destruction"and nuclear proliferation, it would have been unthinkable for Washingto to have accepted Pakistani explanations and actions following the revelations. But then, Pakistani assistance is vital to the US quest to nab Bin Laden and to have raised an issue with Pakistan in any serious manner over the nuclear embroglio would have seriously set back its hopes of getting the Al Qaeda leader in the run-up to the presidential elections.
Commentators around the world are unanimous that with Saddam Hussein in Amercian custody, catching Bin Laden would be the most significant election boost for Bush.
Indeed, the way in which the Bush administration is throwing everything it has into the "get-Bin-Laden" campaign clearly shows how worried Washington strategists are over the prospect of the Al Qaeda leader remaining elusive when Americans vote in November.
The Pentagon has done a 180-degree turn in strategy. It has pulled out Task Force 121, the elite squad which co-ordinated the capture of Saddam and other bigwigs in pre-war Iraq, and assigned with the new mission of catching Bin Laden.
Task Force 121 it consists of Army Delta Force soldiers and Navy SEALs, transported on helicopters. The unit is credited with last December’s seizure of Saddam. The task force is deploying in strategic locations, practising missions and wait ing for intelligence to provide the locations of targets.
Many of the American soldiers now being sent to Iraq are National Guard members or reservists whereas soldiers with fighting experience are assigned to Afghanistan.
The units in Afghanistan are given everything technically possible to help them reach Bin Laden, including the firepower, intelligence help and plenty of money to woo poor Pakistan and Afghan villagers in the targeted areas.
Heavily bearded Delta Force soldiers and Navy Seals in local dress have been seen in villages close to the border with Pakistan, and Britain is sending in SAS detachments, reports The Independent of London.
It has also been confirmed that Pakistani soliders have sealed off mountain passes and are continuing sweeps in the wild tribal areas of northern and southern Waziristan on the border.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported from from southern Waziristan this week that tribesmen in the area had said that Bin Laden was not in the region.
Southern Waziristan has been cited many times as the most likely hideout of Bin Laden and his supporters.
However, according to the BBC, most tribesmen argue that it would be impossible to remain out of sight in this inhospitable region for long.
South Waziristan, often called Pakistan's Wild West, is a mass of mostly arid mountains and hills, and is difficult to live in. It has a population of about one million, almost all of them Waziris, who are described as one of the most warlike tribes living along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
The American and Pakistani operations in pursuit of Bin Laden are given high media exposure, and the security forces make no secret of their presence in the region.
Obviously, they are hoping that increasing military activities and hyped up reports, coupled with misleading and confusing information planted among the tribals in the area , could trigger electronic communications among Bin Laden's supporters and thus give some inkling to his whereabouts.
However, Bin Laden is not believed to have gone near an active mobile phone since the day he managed to evade capture and flee from the Afghan moutains in 2002 after the US forces took control of the country.
He is believed to have a several-layer "security" ring of supporters whose job is to remain alert for any "alien" movement in their designated areas. Word is passed on mouth to mouth and is relayed back and forth and this makes it doubtful whether the US forces' hope that intercepted electronic traffc would lead them to Bin Laden.
It is nothing new. That was the case since the Afghan war. The added element now is the sense of urgency that has been given to efforts to catch Bin Laden, possibly alive so that he could be paraded in front of cameras and give the very lifeline that Bush is seeking in his race for re-election.
Why should Bin Laden be the key to a second term in the White House for Bush?
Well, it is not as much a relief that Bin Laden has been removed as a "security threat" to the US that would count among American voters: It is Bush's image of having achieved "success" in leading the US, and indeed the rest of the world, in the war against terrorism that would be relayed through Bin Laden's capture. Equally importantly, it would help partly do away with the negative fallout of the growing disbelief among Americans that their president was genuinely convinced that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to the US.
Bush did get a lift in rating after the capture of Saddam but it did not last long, but having Bin Laden under US custody would definitely guarantee the president's re-election if only because he would be portrayed as a hero fighting a world full of terrorists hostile to the US posing real and imaginary threats.
The series of revelations of intelligence doctoring under the stewardship of the so-called neo-conservatives in Washington and reports that they had planned the war that toppled Saddam even before Bush entered the White House have done massive damage to the incumbent president's hopes of re-election.
According to the Independent:
"If the Bush administration can metaphorically place the Al Qaeda leader's head on a pole along Saddam Hussein's, it will also have a powerful answer to critics who argue that the Iraq war, far from advancing the campaign against terrorism, was a distraction and diversion of resources from it."
Americans are also questioning whether the "elimination" of Bin Laden would make their country safe.
Even Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet does not believe so. He says the threat posed to the US will remain high, with or without Al Qaeda.
Questions are also raised why the Bush administration has failed to prove that Al Qaeda was behind the Sept.11 attacks, particularly that a German court has ascertained that the plot for the assaults was hatched in Germany and not Afghanistan as Washington had asserted.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which lists Bin Laden as among the 10 most wanted men, makes no reference to the Sept.11 attacks while offering $25 million in reward for his capture.
It says on its website that Bin Laden is wanted in connection with the Aug.7, 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Dar es Salam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, which killed over 200 people. "In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world," it says.
Obviously, the US does not have material evidence that Bin Laden had plotted the Sept.11 attacks.
These points are being increasingly raised in US and Canadian media.
Noted commentator Eric Margolis writes in the Toronto Sun:
"We are still not even sure Al Qaeda was responsible for 9/11, as Bush claims. If the Bush administration was so totally wrong about Iraq's secret weapons and links to Al Qaeda, why is its information any more reliable about the shadowy Bin Laden?"
Margolis notes that the main legal evidence cited so far by the US against Al Qaeda comes from a former fugitive member who embezzled its funds. "Interestingly, much of the phony "evidence" about Iraq came from another convicted embezzler, Ahmad Chalabi," writes Margolis, is a syndicated foreign affairs columnist and broadcaster, and author of War at the Top of the World - The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Tibet.
What the Americans — and indeed the rest of the world — know today is that although it applauded the Sept.11 attack, Al Qaida may not have been actively involved in planning or financing the assaults.
However, notes Margolis, there is evidence that Al Qaida was behind bombings of some US targets abroad, like the USS Cole and attacks in East Africa. "The 9/11 plotters were largely from Saudi Arabia and operated from Germany. Yet 9/11 was the pretext the US used to invade Afghanistan," he writes.
Margolis is convinced that "if before November elections Al Qaida finally manages to stage a devastating attack on the US mainland, as its number two, Dr Ayman Al Zawahiri, threatens, Bush will face popular outrage and be sliced and diced by Democrats."
"Luckily for the US, what's left of Al Qaida has so far produced more hot air than explosions," he writes. "Hopefully, the alleged dangers from Al Qaida will be no more substantial than Iraq's infamous but non-existent `drones of death,' which, Bush comically warned, were about to fly off Iraqi vessels and shower America with pestilence."
Another source of concern for many is the tight veil of secrecy that the administration has drawn around pre-9/11 intelligence findings and the course of events running to the attacks.
Obviously aware of the scepticism in the air, Bush has finally agreed to answer in private all questions raised by a government commission investigating the Sept.11 attacks, as announced by the White House this week.
Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry has accused Bush of "stonewalling" investigations of the Sept.11 attacks. Kerry's allegation is backed by revelations that the administration has not been fully co-operating with the investigating commission.
The 10-member commission had been seeking to question Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney about what the administration knew before the attacks. The two are seen to have been trying to stall the request and put off answering questions.
Bush had agreed to meet privately for an hour with the chairman and vice chairman of the commission, but said it was unnecessary for him to testify publicly. Cheney also has said he would meet with some commissioners.
Bush has now dropped the one-hour limit,
The importance that the Bush administration attaches to capturing Bin Laden was underlined by a visit that Defence Secretary Ronald Rumsfled in late February and the planned visit this week of Secretary of State Colin Powell.
With the drop in Bush’s poll ratings, his the Republican camp is also seeking to show off an apparent victory to keep public attention diverted from the quaqmire that the US has entered both in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They want that victory fast and definitie before November.
US military officials say that they plan to intesify the search and the ongoing spring offensive will climax in April or May. They are planning a “hammer-and-anvil” effect to trap Al Qaeda fighters between US forces operating from the Afghan side and Pakistani troops advancing along the north-western Pakistan border.
Will Bin Laden be caught between the hammer and anvil before Nov.5?
Unlike some of his military commanders who have voiced confidence that Bin Laden would be caught soon, Rumsfeld is non-committal: "I don't believe it (capturing Bin Laden) is closer or farther at any given moment."
Indeed, giving the hunt for Bin Laden the high media hype it is given now might prove to be the Bush camp's undoing if the Al Qaeda leader slips through the net.
(with input from wire agencies and website sources).

Tuesday, March 30, 2004

9/11 inquiry, why the Rice refusal

March 30 2004

Something to conceal


PV Vivekanand



THERE is indeed something disturbing about the unfolding episode in Washington where National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice is refusing to testify under oath before the independent commission investigating the Sept.11 attacks. While it is difficult to be accurate about why one feels unease about the affair, it seems clear that it has more to do with other aspects of Sept.11 than former White House aide Richard Clarke's contentions that the Bush administration had not taken seriously the perceived threat from Al Qaeda.
Whether Clarke is right is an issue of relevance more to the American sense of government responsibility to protect citizens than to any Middle Eastern worry or concern. Indeed, it could to an extent influence the re-election prospects of President George W Bush in November and thus it is indeed of concern to the rest of world.
However, there seems to be more than meets the eye and it has to do with Middle Eastern links — perceived, established, unconfirmed and otherwise — with the Sept.11 attacks. The Arabs and Muslims have paid a heavy price in the aftermath of 9/11 and hence they too have the right know the truth and whether they fell prey to a well-orchestrated operation designed to target them.
It stems from the conviction among many in this part of the world that the assaults presented the right opportunity for the Bush administration to launch efforts to realise its long-sought objectives in the Middle East: Assuming control of Arab oil resources of a size that would allow it to dictate terms in the international oil market and, in the bargain, eliminating a potent threat to the US's "strategic ally" in the Middle East, Israel, and also building a major military presence in the Gulf to facilitate armed intervention whenever it suited American interests.
Again, these "objectives" —  which, at this point in time, the US is one whisker away from fully accomplishing (and it is indeed a thick whisker at that) — are not products of Middle Eastern imagination. Some of the mainstream American media outlets that referred to the existence of decades-old plans to seize Arab oil wells as a strategic need in order to serve American strategic needs. Couple those needs with Israeli interests to see Iraq eliminated as a military power, and bingo!!
And that is why the a growing belief that Rice is more apprehensive about being forced to reveal more sinister aspects of the events before and after the Sept.11 attacks than the administration's purported shortcomings in tackling Al Qaeda before the aerial assaults in New York and Washington.
These include the Iraq angle. Obviously, Rice wants to duck questions whose answers which has the potential of definitely establishing that the Bush administration was preoccupied with its determination to wage war against Iraq and assume absolute control of that country and it could not bother much about Al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden at the expense of its plans for Iraq.
It even appeared as if the pro-Israeli hawks in Washington were waiting for something like 9/11 to happen before stampeding the administration into planning the war against Iraq.
The Washington Post has reported that "six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush signed a two-and-a-half-page document marked 'top secret' that "directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq."
CBS News has reported that five hours after the 9/11 attacks, "Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq."
Obviously, Rice would not want to be cornered into having to answer questions related to the Iraq angle since it would expose the reality that the Sept.11 attacks was the pretext that the neoconservatives in Washington were waiting for in order to implement their campaign against Iraq and influence the president into approving it.
Most definitely, Rice would not want to be the person whose testimony under oath exposed the real motivations behind the war against Iraq and whose interests were really served through the invasion and occupation of that country. Such revelations would seal the fate against Bush in November elections and Rice would find herself not only out of a job but out of favour with the powers that matter in Washington.
Another angle Rice would not want to touch is perhaps the perceived Israeli links to Sept.11.
The outside world knows little about the fate of the more than 120 Israeli espionage agents — most of them masquerading as arts students — who were arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) in six to 48 hours after the Sept.11 attacks.
The FBI detained them because many of them were observed earlier in suspicious circumstances and some of them were trying to pass off as Arab Muslims and in contact with Arab and Muslim organisations that the FBI had kept under surveillance.
It is unclear whether the FBI had realised that the Israelis were "double agents," but the agency found it fit to detain them immediately after the 9/11 strikes.
A few American newspapers did report the detentions but have maintained a studious silence about their fate since then.
Reports tucked away in the inside paged of the Israeli press indicate that all of the Israeli "suspects" detained post-Sept.11 have been released without charges after top-level government intervention.
There has been speculation that some of these Israelis had posed as Arabs and Palestinians with an axe to grind against the US for its support for Israel and "penetrated" the cells which carried out the New York and Washington attacks and even offered logistic information that helped them implement their plans.
Some of them were picked up and questioned at length by the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) before 9/11.
It is not known what they had revealed and we don't know yet from where the FBI and CIA had gathered enough information to warrant pre-9/11 warnings to the White House that Al Qaeda attack could be imminent.
However, reports clearly show that the warnings might have been based on information provided by some of the Israeli agents picked up and questioned before 9/11.
In the immediate context, Rice is obviously putting up a strong effort to establish that the Bush administration remained focused on Al Qaeda, but she seems to be overdoing it by contradictions.
In May 2002, Rice said: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."
But NBC Television and Los Angeles Times reported on Sept.27, 2001 that President Bush t personally "received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama Bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane."
In July 2001, the administration was also told that terrorists had explored using airplanes as missiles.
In May 2002, Rice at a press conference that she had called defended the administration from new revelations that the president had been explicitly warned about an Al Qaeda threat to airlines in August 2001. She "suggested that Bush had requested (a CIA) briefing because of his keen concern about elevated terrorist threat levels that summer."
But the CIA says that the briefing was its idea and it did not come from the White House, according to the Washington Post.
Above all, Rice is contradicting Bush himself. The president admitted that he "didn't feel the urgency" about terrorism before Sept.11, the Washington Post reported in January 2002. But Rice insisted last week: "The fact of the matter is (that) the administration focused on this before 9/11."
Rice's contradictions are too numerous and she would not be able to escape with broad answers when confronted by questioners who have done their homework. And she knows it too well.
Again, it is a matter to be decided by the Americans whether they should insist that their national security adviser tell them the truth under oath and be held responsible for her claims and counter-claims about the events leading up to attacks that claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 of their compatriots.
However, it is not only the Americans who need to know the truth about how 9/11 led to 20/03 — the day the US launched its invasion of Iraq — and whether 9/11 itself was the orchestration of a plot where Al Qaeda was skillfully used as the executing weapon by parties which stood to benefit as a result of the deadliest terror attack in history. The world, particularly the Arabs and Muslims, has been badly affected by Sept.11, and it too has the right to know.

Thursday, March 25, 2004

The real reason for Iraq invasion

The following was written by an American
writer/researcher. It appeared in March 2002,
five months after I summarised the same thing
although I did not have the kind of access to quotable
analysts and sources that he has. Anyway, this would
be an eye-opener that I am not a minority of one who
argues that the US plans in the Middle East has much
wider implications than Saddam, weapons, Al Qaeda and
terrorism put together.


The Thirty-Year Itch

Three decades ago, in the throes of the energy crisis,
Washington's hawks conceived of a strategy for US
control of the Persian Gulf's oil. Now, with the same
strategists firmly in control of the White House, the
Bush administration is playing out their script for
global dominance.
By Robert Dreyfuss

Oil and Arms: An In-Depth Look
 

If you were to spin the globe and look for real estate
critical to building an American empire, your first
stop would have to be the Persian Gulf. The desert
sands of this region hold two of every three barrels
of oil in the world -- Iraq's reserves alone are
equal, by some estimates, to those of Russia, the
United States, China, and Mexico combined. For the
past 30 years, the Gulf has been in the crosshairs of
an influential group of Washington foreign-policy
strategists, who believe that in order to ensure its
global dominance, the United States must seize control
of the region and its oil. Born during the energy
crisis of the 1970s and refined since then by a
generation of policymakers, this approach is finding
its boldest expression yet in the Bush administration
-- which, with its plan to invade Iraq and install a
regime beholden to Washington, has moved closer than
any of its predecessors to transforming the Gulf into
an American protectorate.

In the geopolitical vision driving current U.S. policy
toward Iraq, the key to national security is global
hegemony -- dominance over any and all potential
rivals. To that end, the United States must not only
be able to project its military forces anywhere, at
any time. It must also control key resources, chief
among them oil -- and especially Gulf oil. To the
hawks who now set the tone at the White House and the
Pentagon, the region is crucial not simply for its
share of the U.S. oil supply (other sources have
become more important over the years), but because it
would allow the United States to maintain a lock on
the world's energy lifeline and potentially deny
access to its global competitors. The administration
"believes you have to control resources in order to
have access to them," says Chas Freeman, who served as
U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first
President Bush. "They are taken with the idea that the
end of the Cold War left the United States able to
impose its will globally -- and that those who have
the ability to shape events with power have the duty
to do so. It's ideology."

Iraq, in this view, is a strategic prize of
unparalleled importance. Unlike the oil beneath
Alaska's frozen tundra, locked away in the steppes of
central Asia, or buried under stormy seas, Iraq's
crude is readily accessible and, at less than $1.50 a
barrel, some of the cheapest in the world to produce.
Already, over the past several months, Western
companies have been meeting with Iraqi exiles to try
to stake a claim to that bonanza.

But while the companies hope to cash in on an
American-controlled Iraq, the push to remove Saddam
Hussein hasn't been driven by oil executives, many of
whom are worried about the consequences of war. Nor
are Vice President Cheney and President Bush, both
former oilmen, looking at the Gulf simply for the
profits that can be earned there. The administration
is thinking bigger, much bigger, than that.

"Controlling Iraq is about oil as power, rather than
oil as fuel," says Michael Klare, professor of peace
and world security studies at Hampshire College and
author of Resource Wars. "Control over the Persian
Gulf translates into control over Europe, Japan, and
China. It's having our hand on the spigot."
To get a sense of how control of the Gulf's oil
economy has become the focus of Washington's military
strategy, one need only look at the map.
Ever since the oil shocks of the 1970s, the United
States has steadily been accumulating military muscle
in the Gulf by building bases, selling weaponry, and
forging military partnerships. Now, it is poised to
consolidate its might in a place that will be a
fulcrum of the world's balance of power for decades to
come. At a stroke, by taking control of Iraq, the Bush
administration can solidify a long-running strategic
design. "It's the Kissinger plan," says James Akins, a
former U.S. diplomat. "I thought it had been killed,
but it's back."

Akins learned a hard lesson about the politics of oil
when he served as a U.S. envoy in Kuwait and Iraq, and
ultimately as ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the
oil crisis of 1973 and '74. At his home in Washington,
D.C., shelves filled with Middle Eastern pottery and
other memorabilia cover the walls, souvenirs of his
years in the Foreign Service. Nearly three decades
later, he still gets worked up while recalling his
first encounter with the idea that the United States
should be prepared to occupy Arab oil-producing
countries.

In 1975, while Akins was ambassador in Saudi Arabia,
an article headlined "Seizing Arab Oil" appeared in
Harper's. The author, who used the pseudonym Miles
Ignotus, was identified as "a Washington-based
professor and defense consultant with intimate links
to high-level U.S. policymakers." The article
outlined, as Akins puts it, "how we could solve all
our economic and political problems by taking over the
Arab oil fields [and] bringing in Texans and
Oklahomans to operate them." Simultaneously, a rash of
similar stories appeared in other magazines and
newspapers. "I knew that it had to have been the
result of a deep background briefing," Akins says.
"You don't have eight people coming up with the same
screwy idea at the same time, independently.

"Then I made a fatal mistake," Akins continues. "I
said on television that anyone who would propose that
is either a madman, a criminal, or an agent of the
Soviet Union." Soon afterward, he says, he learned
that the background briefing had been conducted by his
boss, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Akins
was fired later that year.

Kissinger has never acknowledged having planted the
seeds for the article. But in an interview with
Business Week that same year, he delivered a thinly
veiled threat to the Saudis, musing about bringing oil
prices down through "massive political warfare against
countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran to make them risk
their political stability and maybe their security if
they did not cooperate."

In the 1970s, America's military presence in the Gulf
was virtually nil, so the idea of seizing control of
its oil was a pipe dream. Still, starting with the
Miles Ignotus article, and a parallel one by
conservative strategist and Johns Hopkins University
professor Robert W. Tucker in Commentary, the idea
began to gain favor among a feisty group of hardline,
pro-Israeli thinkers, especially the hawkish circle
aligned with Democratic senators Henry Jackson of
Washington and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York.

Eventually, this amalgam of strategists came to be
known as "neoconservatives," and they played important
roles in President Reagan's Defense Department and at
think tanks and academic policy centers in the 1980s.
Led by Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's
influential Defense Policy Board, and Deputy Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, they now occupy several
dozen key posts in the White House, the Pentagon, and
the State Department. At the top, they are closest to
Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, who have been closely aligned since both men
served in the White House under President Ford in the
mid-1970s. They also clustered around Cheney when he
served as secretary of defense during the Gulf War in
1991.

Throughout those years, and especially after the Gulf
War, U.S. forces have steadily encroached on the Gulf
and the surrounding region, from the Horn of Africa to
Central Asia. In preparing for an invasion and
occupation of Iraq, the administration has been
building on the steps taken by military and policy
planners over the past quarter century.

Step one: The Rapid Deployment Force
In 1973 and '74, and again in 1979, political
upheavals in the Middle East led to huge spikes in oil
prices, which rose fifteenfold over the decade and
focused new attention on the Persian Gulf. In January
1980, President Carter effectively declared the Gulf a
zone of U.S. influence, especially against
encroachment from the Soviet Union. "Let our position
be absolutely clear," he said, announcing what came to
be known as the Carter Doctrine. "An attempt by any
outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf
region will be regarded as an assault on the vital
interests of the United States of America, and such an
assault will be repelled by any means necessary,
including military force." To back up this doctrine,
Carter created the Rapid Deployment Force, an
"over-the-horizon" military unit capable of rushing
several thousand U.S. troops to the Gulf in a crisis.

Step two: The Central Command
In the 1980s, under President Reagan, the United
States began pressing countries in the Gulf for access
to bases and support facilities. The Rapid Deployment
Force was transformed into the Central Command, a new
U.S. military command authority with responsibility
for the Gulf and the surrounding region from eastern
Africa to Afghanistan. Reagan tried to organize a
"strategic consensus" of anti-Soviet allies, including
Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. The United States
sold billions of dollars' worth of arms to the Saudis
in the early '80s, from AWACS surveillance aircraft to
F-15 fighters. And in 1987, at the height of the war
between Iraq and Iran, the U.S. Navy created the Joint
Task Force-Middle East to protect oil tankers plying
the waters of the Gulf, thus expanding a U.S. naval
presence of just three or four warships into a
flotilla of 40-plus aircraft carriers, battleships,
and cruisers.

Step three: The Gulf War
Until 1991, the United States was unable to persuade
the Arab Gulf states to allow a permanent American
presence on their soil. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, while
maintaining its close relationship with the United
States, began to diversify its commercial and military
ties; by the time U.S. Ambassador Chas Freeman arrived
there in the late Ô80s, the United States had fallen
to fourth place among arms suppliers to the kingdom.
"The United States was being supplanted even in
commercial terms by the British, the French, even the
Chinese," Freeman notes.

All that changed with the Gulf War. Saudi Arabia and
other Gulf states no longer opposed a direct U.S.
military presence, and American troops, construction
squads, arms salesmen, and military assistance teams
rushed in. "The Gulf War put Saudi Arabia back on the
map and revived a relationship that had been severely
attrited," says Freeman.

In the decade after the war, the United States sold
more than $43 billion worth of weapons, equipment, and
military construction projects to Saudi Arabia, and
$16 billion more to Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the
United Arab Emirates, according to data compiled by
the Federation of American Scientists. Before
Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military enjoyed the
right to stockpile, or "pre-position," military
supplies only in the comparatively remote Gulf state
of Oman on the Indian Ocean. After the war, nearly
every country in the region began conducting joint
military exercises, hosting U.S. naval units and Air
Force squadrons, and granting the United States
pre-positioning rights. "Our military presence in the
Middle East has increased dramatically," then-Defense
Secretary William Cohen boasted in 1995.

Another boost to the U.S. presence was the unilateral
imposition, in 1991, of no-fly zones in northern and
southern Iraq, enforced mostly by U.S. aircraft from
bases in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. "There was a massive
buildup, especially around Incirlik in Turkey, to
police the northern no-fly zone, and around [the Saudi
capital of] Riyadh, to police the southern no-fly
zone," says Colin Robinson of the Center for Defense
Information, a Washington think tank. A
billion-dollar, high-tech command center was built by
Saudi Arabia near Riyadh, and over the past two years
the United States has secretly been completing another
one in Qatar. The Saudi facilities "were built with
capacities far beyond the ability of Saudi Arabia to
use them," Robinson says. "And that's exactly what
Qatar is doing now."

Step four: Afghanistan
The war in Afghanistan -- and the open-ended war on
terrorism, which has led to U.S strikes in Yemen,
Pakistan, and elsewhere -- further boosted America's
strength in the region. The administration has won
large increases in the defense budget -- which now
stands at about $400 billion, up from just over $300
billion in 2000 -- and a huge chunk of that budget,
perhaps as much as $60 billion, is slated to support
U.S. forces in and around the Persian Gulf. Military
facilities on the perimeter of the Gulf, from Djibouti
in the Horn of Africa to the island of Diego Garcia in
the Indian Ocean, have been expanded, and a web of
bases and training missions has extended the U.S.
presence deep into central Asia. From Afghanistan to
the landlocked former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan
and Kyrgyzstan, U.S. forces have established
themselves in an area that had long been in Russia's
sphere of influence. Oil-rich in its own right, and
strategically vital, central Asia is now the eastern
link in a nearly continuous chain of U.S. bases,
facilities, and allies stretching from the
Mediterranean and the Red Sea far into the Asian
hinterland.

Step five: Iraq
Removing Saddam Hussein could be the final piece of
the puzzle, cementing an American imperial presence.
It is "highly possible" that the United States will
maintain military bases in Iraq, Robert Kagan, a
leading neoconservative strategist, recently told the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "We will probably need a
major concentration of forces in the Middle East over
a long period of time," he said. "When we have
economic problems, it's been caused by disruptions in
our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will
be no disruption in oil supplies."

Kagan, along with William Kristol of the Weekly
Standard, is a founder of the think tank Project for
the New American Century, an assembly of
foreign-policy hawks whose supporters include the
Pentagon's Perle, New Republic publisher Martin
Peretz, and former Central Intelligence Agency
director James Woolsey. Among the group's affiliates
in the Bush administration are Cheney, Rumsfeld, and
Wolfowitz; I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief
of staff; Elliott Abrams, the Middle East director at
the National Security Council; and Zalmay Khalilzad,
the White House liaison to the Iraqi opposition
groups. Kagan's group, tied to a web of similar
neoconservative, pro-Israeli organizations, represents
the constellation of thinkers whose ideological
affinity was forged in the Nixon and Ford
administrations.

To Akins, who has just returned from Saudi Arabia,
it's a team that looks all too familiar, seeking to
implement the plan first outlined back in 1975. "It'll
be easier once we have Iraq," he says. "Kuwait, we
already have. Qatar and Bahrain, too. So it's only
Saudi Arabia we're talking about, and the United Arab
Emirates falls into place."

LAST SUMMER, Perle provided a brief glimpse into his
circle's thinking when he invited rand Corporation
strategist Laurent Murawiec to make a presentation to
his Defense Policy Board, a committee of former senior
officials and generals that advises the Pentagon on
big-picture policy ideas. Murawiec's closed-door
briefing provoked a storm of criticism when it was
leaked to the media; he described Saudi Arabia as the
"kernel of evil," suggested that the Saudi royal
family should be replaced or overthrown, and raised
the idea of a U.S. occupation of Saudi oil fields. He
ultimately lost his job when rand decided he was too
controversial.

Murawiec is part of a Washington school of thought
that views virtually all of the nations in the Gulf as
unstable "failed states" and maintains that only the
United States has the power to forcibly reorganize and
rebuild them. In this view, the arms systems and bases
that were put in place to defend the region also
provide a ready-made infrastructure for taking over
countries and their oil fields in the event of a
crisis.

The Defense Department likely has contingency plans to
occupy Saudi Arabia, says Robert E. Ebel, director of
the energy program at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank
whose advisers include Kissinger; former Defense
Secretary and CIA director James Schlesinger; and
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security
adviser. "If something happens in Saudi Arabia," Ebel
says, "if the ruling family is ousted, if they decide
to shut off the oil supply, we have to go in."

Two years ago, Ebel, a former mid-level CIA official,
oversaw a CSIS task force that included several
members of Congress as well as representatives from
industry including ExxonMobil, Arco, BP, Shell,
Texaco, and the American Petroleum Institute. Its
report, "The Geopolitics of Energy Into the 21st
Century," concluded that the world will find itself
dependent for many years on unstable oil-producing
nations, around which conflicts and wars are bound to
swirl. "Oil is high-profile stuff," Ebel says. "Oil
fuels military power, national treasuries, and
international politics. It is no longer a commodity to
be bought and sold within the confines of traditional
energy supply and demand balances. Rather, it has been
transformed into a determinant of well-being, of
national security, and of international power."

As vital as the Persian Gulf is now, its strategic
importance is likely to grow exponentially in the next
20 years. Nearly one out of every three barrels of oil
reserves in the world lie under just two countries:
Saudi Arabia (with 259 billion barrels of proven
reserves) and Iraq (112 billion). Those figures may
understate Iraq's largely unexplored reserves, which
according to U.S. government estimates may hold as
many as 432 billion barrels.

With supplies in many other regions, especially the
United States and the North Sea, nearly exhausted, oil
from Saudi Arabia and Iraq is becoming ever more
critical -- a fact duly noted in the administration's
National Energy Policy, released in 2001 by a White
House task force. By 2020, the Gulf will supply
between 54 percent and 67 percent of the world's
crude, the document said, making the region "vital to
U.S. interests." According to G. Daniel Butler, an
oil-markets analyst at the U.S. Energy Information
Administration (EIA), Saudi Arabia's production
capacity will rise from its current 9.4 million
barrels a day to 22.1 million over the next 17 years.
Iraq, which in 2002 produced a mere 2 million barrels
a day, "could easily be a double-digit producer by
2020," says Butler.

U.S. strategists aren't worried primarily about
America's own oil supplies; for decades, the United
States has worked to diversify its sources of oil,
with Venezuela, Nigeria, Mexico, and other countries
growing in importance. But for Western Europe and
Japan, as well as the developing industrial powers of
eastern Asia, the Gulf is all-important. Whoever
controls it will maintain crucial global leverage for
decades to come.

Today, notes the EIA's Butler, two-thirds of Gulf oil
goes to Western industrial nations. By 2015, according
to a study by the CIA's National Intelligence Council,
three-quarters of the Gulf's oil will go to Asia,
chiefly to China. China's growing dependence on the
Gulf could cause it to develop closer military and
political ties with countries such as Iran and Iraq,
according to the report produced by Ebel's CSIS task
force. "They have different political interests in the
Gulf than we do," Ebel says. "Is it to our advantage
to have another competitor for oil in the Persian
Gulf?"

David Long, who served as a U.S. diplomat in Saudi
Arabia and as chief of the Near East division in the
State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research
during the Reagan administration, likens the Bush
administration's approach to the philosophy of Admiral
Mahan, the 19th-century military strategist who
advocated the use of naval power to create a global
American empire. "They want to be the world's
enforcer," he says. "It's a worldview, a geopolitical
position. They say, 'We need hegemony in the region.'"


UNTIL THE 1970s, the face of American power in the
Gulf was the U.S. oil industry, led by Exxon, Mobil,
Chevron, Texaco, and Gulf, all of whom competed
fiercely with Britain's BP and Anglo-Dutch Shell. But
in the early '70s, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the other
Gulf states nationalized their oil industries, setting
up state-run companies to run wells, pipelines, and
production facilities. Not only did that enhance the
power of opec, enabling that organization to force a
series of sharp price increases, but it alarmed U.S.
policymakers.

Today, a growing number of Washington strategists are
advocating a direct U.S. challenge to state-owned
petroleum industries in oil-producing countries,
especially the Persian Gulf. Think tanks such as the
American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage
Foundation, and CSIS are conducting discussions about
privatizing Iraq's oil industry. Some of them have put
forward detailed plans outlining how Iraq, Saudi
Arabia, and other nations could be forced to open up
their oil and gas industries to foreign investment.
The Bush administration itself has been careful not to
say much about what might happen to Iraq's oil. But
State Department officials have had preliminary talks
about the oil industry with Iraqi exiles, and there
have been reports that the U.S. military wants to use
at least part of the country's oil revenue to pay for
the cost of military occupation.

"One of the major problems with the Persian Gulf is
that the means of production are in the hands of the
state," Rob Sobhani, an oil-industry consultant, told
an American Enterprise Institute conference last fall
in Washington. Already, he noted, several U.S. oil
companies are studying the possibility of
privatization in the Gulf. Dismantling
government-owned oil companies, Sobhani argued, could
also force political changes in the region. "The
beginning of liberal democracy can be achieved if you
take the means of production out of the hands of the
state," he said, acknowledging that Arabs would resist
that idea. "It's going to take a lot of selling, a lot
of marketing," he concluded.

Just which companies would get to claim Iraq's oil has
been a subject of much debate. After a war, the
contracts that Iraq's state-owned oil company has
signed with European, Russian, and Chinese oil firms
might well be abrogated, leaving the field to U.S. oil
companies. "What they have in mind is
denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to
American oil companies," says Akins. "The American oil
companies are going to be the main beneficiaries of
this war."

The would-be rulers of a post-Saddam Iraq have been
thinking along the same lines. "American oil companies
will have a big shot at Iraqi oil," says Ahmad
Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, a
group of aristocrats and wealthy Iraqis who fled the
country when its repressive monarchy was overthrown in
1958. During a visit to Washington last fall, Chalabi
held meetings with at least three major U.S. oil
companies, trying to enlist their support. Similar
meetings between Iraqi exiles and U.S. companies have
also been taking place in Europe.

"Iraqi exiles have approached us, saying, 'You can
have our oil if we can get back in there,'" says R.
Gerald Bailey, who headed Exxon's Middle East
operations until 1997. "All the major American
companies have met with them in Paris, London,
Brussels, all over. They're all jockeying for
position. You can't ignore it, but you've got to do it
on the QT. And you can't wait till it gets too far
along."

But the companies are also anxious about the
consequences of war, according to many experts,
oil-company executives, and former State Department
officials. "The oil companies are caught in the
middle," says Bailey. Executives fear that war could
create havoc in the region, turning Arab states
against the United States and Western oil companies.
On the other hand, should a U.S. invasion of Iraq be
successful, they want to be there when the oil is
divvied up. Says David Long, the former U.S. diplomat,
"It's greed versus fear."

Ibrahim Oweiss, a Middle East specialist at Georgetown
University who coined the term "petrodollar" and has
also been a consultant to Occidental and BP, has been
closely watching the cautious maneuvering by the
companies. "I know that the oil companies are scared
about the outcome of this," he says. "They are not at
all sure this is in the best interests of the oil
industry."

Anne Joyce, an editor at the Washington-based Middle
East Policy Council who has spoken privately to top
Exxon officials, says it's clear that most
oil-industry executives "are afraid" of what a war in
the Persian Gulf could mean in the long term --
especially if tensions in the region spiral out of
control. "They see it as much too risky, and they are
risk averse," she says. "They think it has 'fiasco'
written all over it." What do you think?

A Mother Jones contributing writer, Robert Dreyfuss
was named one of the "best unsung investigative
journalists working in print" last year by the
Columbia Journalism Review.



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