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.

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.



_____________________________

'Father of the bomb... ' - the deal

pv vivekanand

Abdul Qadeer Khan, the disgraced Pakistani nuclear
scientist who has confessed to having sold nuclear
secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea, has been
placed under strict house arrest after failing to
hand over documents and taped statements that
implicate senior Pakistani military officials,
including President Pervez Musharaf, in his nuclear
proliferation activities.
The "evidence" that all Pakistani military leader,
including Mushraf himself, since 1977 knew that
Qadeen Khan had been selling his nuclear know-how in
the black market, is said to be with his daughter
Dina, who smuggled it out of Pakistan.
Obviously, Qadeer Khan, 68, used it as a leverage to
ensure that he would be given to government "pardon"
for his activities -- which netted him tens of
millions of dollars, but now that he has secured a
blanket pardon in return for the evidence, he is said
to be refusing to hand over the documents and taped
conversations and statements.
Reports indicate that Dina, under instructions from
her father, is holding onto the evidence to ward off
any legal action against him. Although he had been
given a pardon, the likelihood remains strong that
legal action could be taken against him.
Qadeer Khan remained under house arrest and tight
restrictions were imposed on his movements over the
weekend in a bid to apply pressure on him for the
evidence.
Musharaf, according to sources in the Gulf and North
America, had wanted to prosecute Qadeer Khan under
pressure from the US, but his plans went wrong when it
emerged that the nuclear scientist had taken out
"insurance" against that eventuality by stashing
evidence that implicates the president and some of his
senior military brass.
Therefore, the pardon was part of a deal that involved
Qadeer Khan pledging that he would hand over the
evidence in return.
According to the sources, the evidence implicates
every military chief of Pakistan since the late 70s in
his nuclear peddling.
The trail since then winds from Pakistan through the
Gulf to Europe and the Far East and to Qadeer Khan's
fat bank accounts, and holdings and investments,
mainly outside Pakistan.
The story so far.
Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgist, worked in the
Netherlands for a Dutch company called Physics Dynamic
Research Laboratory (FDO), which did research for
consortium called URENCO, set up by the British, Dutch
and German governments to provide equipment to enrich
uranium. It was based in the town of Almelo in
Holland.
In his compacity as a metallurgist working for FDO,
Qadeer Khan stole URENCO blueprints for centrifuges
-- metal tubes which spin uranium hexafluoride gas in
order to separate out the uranium 235 which is needed
to make a nuclear reaction and from there to a level
needed for a nuclear bomb.
He was given access to the highly confidential
blueprints because he enjoyed high security clearance
since he was married to a South African-born Dutch
woman and had announced he planned to settle down
permanently in the Netherlands. He was also fluent in
English, German and Dutch.
However, Qadeer Khan left the Netherlands in 1976 when
he was placed under investigatin by Dutch
intelligence.
He established the AQ Khan Research Laboratories near
Islamabad and began to build the bomb. Material for
the project came from European companies.
He also wrote to Frits Veerman, a technical
photographer and fromer colleague at FDO, to secure
some finer details.
Veerman has disclosed how he knew Qadeer Khan had
stolen the Urenco bluepints and also the letter in a
Dutch-language book called Atoomspionage.
It is not yet clearly known when he started his
clandestine dealings with Libya and Iran and North
Korea.
The Iranian government,under threat of sweeping UN
sanctions, disclosed to the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) last year that it was one of the
clandestine clients. Tehran said it had received help
from an external source, and the trail led to a third
party and to Qadeer Khan although the scientist and
the Iranian government are not known to have had any
direct dealing.
The Iranians provided the IAEA with a centrifuge and
the IAEA found that it was contaminated with enriched
uranium. The question immediately came up from where
did Iran got uranium. The Iranians were faced with the
question whether it had processed the fuel itself and
they explained that they got it by accident.
IAEA investigations indicated that Qadeer Khan had
surplus equipment and had also developed new
centrifuges, allowing him to seel old ones. It is
believed it was one of those old ones that ended up
with the Iranians.
Tehran told the IAEA it got the parts through a third
party but, IAED technical analysis found clear signs
that Qadeer Khan was involved in the designs.
The Libyan connection with Qadeer Khan was made by the
Libyan government iself to the US and UK after
undertaking to give up all projects of weapons of mass
destruction.
The reclusive North Korea is not forthcoming with any
revelations. But the South Korean government has said
it had come across evidence that Qadeer Khan was
passing on nuclear technology as well as equipment to
the North.
The US had been pressing Pakistan to take action
against Qadeer Khan for several months but it was the
Libyan connection in January that pulled the plug.
US President George W Bush himself gave the details of
the affair last week. He identified the key figure in
the clandestinen network as BSA Tahir, a Sri Lankan
businessman who was running a computer company in
Dubai . Bush called Tahir, the Pakistani
scientist's"deputy and chief financial officer and
money launderer."
Tahir, using another Dubai-based firm, a British
company in which he was a partner, placed an order
for centrifuge parts with a Malaysian company under
the guise that the parts were for the oil and gas
industry. Tahir's British partner has disowned any
knowledge of the clandestine operation or nything
about the centrifuge order.
The parts were delivered to Dubai and loaded onto a
German ship the BBC China and were sent to Libya in
the late summer of 2003. However, by then the Libyans
had entered too deep into negotiations with the US and
UK on giving up their projects for weapons of mass
destruction. It is believed that the Libyans, as a
sign of their good faith in the negotiations to give
up the projects, gave the tip-off that led to the
seizure of the vessels en route to Libya.
German and Italian authorities intercepted the vessel
and fund that consignment described as "used machinery
parts" listed as the cargo were found to be the
centrifuges manufactured in Malaysia.
The Libyans also showed the Americans and British a
design for a nuclear warhead, which intelligence
agencies believe originated with Qadeer Khan. Tripoli
said it had paid $50 million to Qadeer Khan for the
information he passed on about uranium centrifuges and
Chinese-inspired nuclear warhead designs as well as
equipment.
Successive Pakistani governments/military leaders had
given Qadeer Khan a free hand and this allowed him to
disguise his actions throughout if only because of his
"top-secret work" in the service of the country.
According to Shyam Bhatia, author of "Nuclear Rivals
In the Middle East" (1988), Qadeer Khan claims he was
linked to Mohammed Shahabuddin Ghauri, the 13th
century ruler of Delhi.
Perhaps it is one of the reasons that Pakistan named
its ballistic missiles bought from North Korea as
Ghauri.
Qadeer Khan used to live in astonishing luxury
throughout the last three decades, says Bhatia.
The Pakistani air force had given him the
round-the-clock use of a C-130 transport aircraft to
take him anywhere he wanted to in the world. Bhatia
argues that Qadeer Khan used this plane to fly in
parts of uranium centrifuges and other components to
Pakistan in the intial days before turning the
aircraft as his personal plane.
He even flew antique furniture from Pakistan to
Timbuktu to furnish the Hendrina Khan Hotel, which is
named after his South African-born wife.
When their plans to put Qadeer Khan and several of his
associates on trial went awry with the finding that
his daughter was holding evidence against them,
Pakistani officials, including the intelligence chief,
negotiated with him to apologise unconditionally and
surrender the evidence in exchange for a pardon.
Otherwise, experts argue, they would have put him on
trial.
Relatives of six other scientists who worked with
Qadeer Khan — who also held incommunicado at secret
locations — have accused the government of covering up
the affair.
In any event, the revelations have been startling, and
it remains to be seen whether Qadeer Khan would make a
fresh deal with the government for the evidence his
daughter holds.
However, his life might not be worth much once he
concludes that deal.

No such thing as Pak bomb

THERE is no such as a Pakistani-made nuclear weapon.
Indeed, Pakistan has atomic weapons, but the only
Pakistani component in them is enriched uranium. The
design for the warhead was supplied by China and the
missile delivery system was provided by North Korea.
The disgraced Abdul Qadeer Khan, often described as
the "father of the Pakistani bomb," is not an expert
in nuclear technology, but a metallurgist turned rogue
nuclear trader who sold Chinese technology dating back
to the 60s and linked equipment designed from stolen
blueprints to Iran and Libya.
Khan, 51, is not a nuclear physicist; nor could he
successfully develop a long-range missile system
without outside help. His contribution was at best his
knowledge of metallurgy.
This is not a new theory. It has been heard for
several years. However, it has proved to be true in
the wake of the crisis triggered by revelations that
Khan clandestinely sold nuclear technology and
equipment to the Libyans and Iranians.
The following facts have been established so far from
various sources, named and unnamed.
— Khan, a metallurgy graduate from Europe, stole
blueprints for gas centrifuges from a Dutch company in
the mid-70s and took them to Pakistan.
— He was put in charge of the country's nuclear
programme by the then prime minister Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto and given a free hand and mandate to develop a
nuclear weapon. Successive government, both military
and civilian, continued to give him absolute authority
and confidentiality to accomplish the goal of
acquiring nuclear weapons.
— Khan, with help from the government and military,
secured a 1962 Chinese design for a nuclear warhead.
He also secured Chinese support for building a nuclear
reactor capable of producing 50 megawatts of power
that went operational in the late 80s.
— Simultaneously, he also secured missile componets
from North Korea and assembled them in Pakistan (the
most noted among the missiles is the one called
Ghauri).
— With help from Pakistani nuclear scientists assigned
to him, Khan built up a reserve of enough enriched
uranium — about 350 kilogrammes — from the
Chinese-built reactor to assemble to 15 to 17 nuclear
weapons by 1998. Some accounts have put the amount of
enriched uranium at 600 kilogrammes, enough to build
30 nuclear weapons.
— In May 1998, he carried out six nuclear tests, and
gave the impression to the outside world that Pakistan
not only has nuclear warheads but also the long-range
system to deliver them. One device is said to be
embedded underground ready for test.
— Since then, Khan regularly hosted seminars and
workshops on "vibrations in rapidly rotating
machinery" — which implied centrifuge technology
essential for producing weapons-gade uranium. Those
forums offered him the chance to draw interest from
Iran and Libya with whom he negotiated deals for
selling them gas centrifuges and other equipment which
he had obtained from China and North Korea.
— Khan was caught last year when the International
Atomic Energy Agency focused on Iran's nuclear
programme and Libya volunteered in secret to give up
its programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Centrifuges in Iran's possession were traced to Khan,
and Libya offered information to the US and UK that
its nuclear knowhow and centrifuges came from Khan
through middlemen based in the Gulf and Malaysia.
Since then, Khan has made a public confession that he
had made the deals with Iran and Libya. Conveniently,
the Pakistani government has pardoned but continues to
keep him under detention since he has refused to
surrender "evidence" that the Pakistani government and
military knew about his dubious deals. The evidence is
said to be with his daughter outside Pakistan, and
Khan, fearing for his life after he was caught, is
holding on to the evidence in return for a pledge that
he would not be killed and allowed to leave Pakistan
for a safe haven outside the country.

9/11 probe - Deception again

PV Vivekanand

BY NAMING a hand-picked group of peopled mostly deemed as Republican loyalists to conduct an investigations into "intelligence" failure in Iraq, the Bush administration is seen as trying to conceal the real fact of the affair -- intelligence data was tailored to suit and facilitate the administration's determination to launch war against Iraq.
The argument among American commentators today is that the so-called neoconservatives — read as pro-Israeli hardliners — in Washington were determined to wage on Iraq from the day George Bush entered the White House in 2001.
Such an argument was rife in the Middle East but it has gathered so much strength in Washington today that the administration is accused of creating the right atmosphere and conditions to launch military action against Iraq and went about it ruthlessly, picking and choosing information that suited its purposes and discarding anything that could raise questions about its intentions.
The "independent" investigation has been ordered with the predetermined objective that it would come up with a tailor-made finding exenorating Bush and the hardline neoconservatives around him of the political crime of deliberately waging an unprovoked war based on false and misleading claims that they themselves had created in the first place, argues Barry Grey, writing on the World Socialist Web Site.
That is one of the many salvos against Washington.
"Claims Iraq had nuclear weapons, death rays, vans of death, drones of death, mobile germ labs, poison gas factories, hidden weapons depots, long-ranged missiles, links to Al Qaeda — all were false," says The only thing real: Iraq's oil," says by Eric Margolis, a syndicated foreign affairs columnist and broadcaster, and author of War at the Top of the World - The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Tibet.
The New York Times recently carried an article recalling that US Secretary of State Collin Powell appeared at the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 that the evidence added up to "facts" and "not assertions" that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and that it was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program and building a fleet of advanced missiles.
"Powell's testimony, delivered at a moment of high suspense as American forces gathered in the Gulf region, was widely seen as the most powerful and persuasive presentation of the Bush administration's case that Iraq was bristling with horrific weapons. His reputation for caution and care gave it added credibility," said the New York Times.
"A year later, some of the statements made by Powell have been confirmed, but many of his gravest findings have been upended by David A. Kay, who until Jan. 23 was Washington's chief weapons inspector...," notes the paper.
The emerging consensus among American commentators is that
Bush and his people, having failed to tconvince the world that Saddam Hussein was somehow linked to Al Qaeda and thus to the Sept.11 attacks, came up with charges that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a security threat to the US and the rest of the world.
Now, having invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam but failing to come up with any proof that he had any weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration is engaged in an effort to exonerate itself by blaming intelligence failure for the pre-war claims.
Bush this week shifted his rationale for the war saying Saddam had the capability to build weapons of mass destruction and he needed to be removed. Saddam having the capability was enough reason for war, he argued.
As a footnote, Bush also asserted that he had done a big favour for the people of Iraq by removing Saddam. Of course, Bush stayed away from recalling that prior to the war he himself had rattled off a list of specific quantities of chemical weapons like nerve gas and biological weapons and cited them as offering a legitimate reason for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam.
The very structure of the investigating panel indicates that the outcome of the inquiry would clear the administration saying that US intelligence agencies "misread" information and reached the conclusion that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and advised senior administration officals accordingly. These officials in turn conveyed the information to people closest to Bush like Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice and Powell, who in turn advised Bush, and the president acted accordingly; and that solves the problem, according to the thinking of those who are orchestrating the exercise now.
Washington describes the investigators as independent. But there is little of any independence about the group.
Retired federal judge Laurence Silberman, who co-chairs the investigating panel, is known as a long-time Republic supporters and has a record of having cleared senior Republican administration officials of any wrongdoing in past cases, points out Grey in an article on World Socialist Web Site under the title "Bush’s Iraq commission and the 'intelligence failure' fraud."
Grey specifically efers to the infamous Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan adminstration years. (The scandal stemmed from a revelation that Reagan had authorised a secret operation to finance and arm, in violation of US law, the contra death squads that killed tens of thousands of people in Nicaragua. Silberman played a key role in sabotaging the investigation by Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh).
Grey argues:
"Bush brought into his administration precisely those extreme militarists such as Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz who had for the better part of a decade been campaigning for a new war to “finish the job” left undone by the Gulf war of 1991—overthrowing the Baathist regime, occupying Iraq, and seizing control of its oil resources. Both he and Cheney had the closest ties to American oil and energy conglomerates that stood to benefit most immediately and directly from this imperialist enterprise.
"The evidence is, by now, voluminous that Bush and his top advisers came to power with the determination to invade Iraq. What they lacked was a pretext. The terrorist attacks of Sept.11, 2001, provided them with precisely the casus belli they had been seeking, and they eagerly seized on it, even though they knew Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the hijack-bombings and had no links to Al Qaeda.
"Far from being misled, Bush and his co-conspirators proceeded to concoct a case for waging an unprovoked war, relying on the complicity of the Democratic Party and the media. A central preoccupation of the administration became the fabrication of intelligence."

Suspect timing

The timing of the expected submission of the inquiry panel's report — until after the November elections — is also suspect. No doubt, the timing is set to serve the purpose of concealing the real facts and pre-empt any political fallout from the report, argues Bush opponents.
Most telling is the mandated task of the panel — determining why there was an "intelligence failure" that led to conflicting claims and statements by Bush and his closest aides like Vice-President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell and others on Iraq's alleged stocks of weapons of mass destruction.
The whole premise of this assertion sidesteps any investigations into determining whether these false claims were issued with the sole objective of justifying the war and those who made the claims knew that they were based on doctored intelligence reports.
The investigation should have been entrusted with a non-partisan group and ordered to focus on the behind-the-scene conduct of Bush and others around him as they plotted the war against Iraq. Such an inquiry, if conducted in transparency and objectivity, would have revealed the truth of the political conspiracy and disinformation campaign that the administration waged in order to build the case against Saddam.
That anyone in the administration who opposed that approach was booted out was evident in the dismissal of Paul O’Neill as treasury secretary last year. O'Neill has revealed that the Bush administration started discussing means to set the ground for invading and occupying Iraq as soon as Bush assumed office in January 2001. He stated that the overthrow of Saddam was a priority topic at the first National Security Council meeting of the Bush administration and that he had access to documents that clearly indicated that the administration was planning the invasion and occupation of Iraq and exploitation of its oil reserves in the first days after assuming office.
Rumseld himself is said to have advocated seizing the Sept.11 attacks as the pretext for war against Iraq and preparing for invasion and occupation of that country in less than 24 hours after the aerial assaults in New York and Washington. The war on Afghanistan was only the fore-runner of the action against Iraq.
When one speaks about "intelligence failure," the agency that would be faulted should be the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In the case of Iraq, the CIA had done its job, but its findings were twisted and used selectively and often out-of-context to serve the purpose of those who were determined to wage war on Iraq.
A honest and objective investigation would reveal that
Rumsfeld and his associates at the Defence Department had set up their own intelligence operation, called the Office of Special Plans.
This operation skirted all intelligence agencies of the US, including the CIA, and created, twisted and filtered information in a manner that a case for war against Iraq was built on dubious grounds.
Apart from discrediting and twisting CIA findings that there was no evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, the Office of Special Plans adopted the view that the CIA was undermining the OSP findings.
Laurie Mylroie, who is close to Cheney and other hardliners in Washington, has accused the CIA and the State Department of "systematically" discrediting "critical intelligence about Saddam’s regime, including indisputable evidence of its possession of weapons of mass destruction.”
According to Washington insiders, these bent upon discrediting the State Department and the CIA included Cheney, Rumsfeld, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Wolfowitz' deputy Douglas Feith and Pentagon adviser Richard Perle.
Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst, has provided an insight to the workings of the Office of Special Plans. He says that the Bush ddministration gave "greatest credence to accounts that presented the most lurid picture of Iraqi activities. In many cases intelligence analysts were distrustful of those sources, or knew unequivocally that they were wrong. But when they said so, they were not heeded...."
The administration aslo drew heavily on newspaper articles that conformed to the views of administration officials, he says.
"To a great extent OSP personnel ‘cherry-picked’ the intelligence they passed on, selecting reports that supported the Administration’s pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest," says Pollack.
A particular example, he says, was the way the OSP accepted every "report" given by the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress (INC) headed by Ahmed Chalabi on Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction and rejected reports given by trained intelligence officers because the INC was saying what the OSP "wanted to hear."
In turn, the OSP passed "raw, unverified intelligence straight to the cabinet level as gospel," says Pollack.
Such formal submission of reports was made an integral part of the OSP activities since the senior administration officials who made public statements based wanted to back up themselves.
The Washington Post wrote in June 1003 that Cheney and one of his top aides had tried to pressure the CIA "into producing more categorical and blood-curdling assessments of Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons capacities" and “sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here.”
The Post went on to say that Iraq analyst at the CIA were under pressure to find information or write reports in a way that would help the administration make the case that going into Iraq was urgent.
Seymour Hersh wrote in the New Yorker magazine in October 2003: “The administration eventually got its way, a former CIA official said. ‘The analysts at the CIA were beaten down defending their assertions. And, they blame George Tenet for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.’”
No doubt these reports will be reviewed as routine by the new investigators, but it is unlikely that the officials will be questioned whether they were aware that the documents were based on doctored intelligence and they were filing it away for a situation where they were asked what their sources were.
The Bush administration is hoping that ordering an "independent" investigation will put to rest questions about the duplicity of its approach to war and the issue would not cast clouds on Bush's re-election chances.
But it might not be the case. In the days, weeks and months ahead, there would be more revelations and political horse-trading in Washington — plus a potential failure of Washington's political efforts in Iraq — that could raise more serious and focused questions about why the war itself. And those questions would refuse to be shelved, given the added ammunition Bush's Democrat rivals have found in their arsenal.
Bill van Auken, leader of the Socialist Equality Party of the US, summarised what many Americans feel today.
He says that the Iraq embroglio was "not a matter of miscalculations or exaggerations by intelligence agents."
"The administration repeatedly claimed that it had irrefutable evidence that Iraq had several hundred tonnes of chemical and biological weapons and was on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons," Van Auken points out. "Top officials insisted that they even knew the precise whereabouts of these weapons. Now, with the first anniversary of the war approaching, they are forced to admit that not a single vial of such material is to be found in all of Iraq.
"If no weapons were there, clearly there existed no verified evidence that they were there, something that United Nations inspectors attested to before the war began. The inescapable conclusion is that the government manufactured a pretext for dragging the American people into war. As a result, tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed. At least 525 US soldiers have lost their lives and thousands more have been wounded.
"This would be the starting point for any genuinely independent investigation. The questions before such a panel would include: Who was responsible for lying to the American people and to the world in order to carry out an illegal war? Whose interests—hidden behind the false claims about WMD—were served by this war? How was the administration allowed to get away with it?"

The in-house battle in Iran

PV Vviekanand

The reformists and conservative hard-liners in Iran
are locked in a bitter battle after the powerful
religious establishment arbitrarily used its powers to
disqualify reform-minded candidates from running in
the next parliamentary elections with an obvious view
to pre-empting them continuing to enjoy a majority in
parliament. The dispute might sound like technical ,
but it is not as much as a political crisis as it is
a fight for survival for both sides, for giving in to
the other means the end for either side and easy
solutions would not be easy.
The uproar in Iran following the rejection of more
than 3,500 people as candidates in next month's
parliamentary elections is not a simple political
crisis. It is a crucial tug-of-war between the
hard-line conservative camp represented by the
powerful Guardians Council and liberal reformists who
seek to steer a fresh political and economic course
for the country away from the path dictated by the
theocrats who control the religious establishment.
Ultimately, the ongoing battle will determine whether
the people of Iran would gain the power to rule their
country or the hard-line conservatives — the
religious establishment — would strengthen their upper
hand in determining what is good and bad for their
people.
The omnipresent element in the equation is the steady
pressure the US has been applying on Tehran after the
invasion and occupation of Iraq. And this has made it
a bitter struggle for survival of both conservatives
and liberal reformists.
The conservatives fear is high that at some point the
American pressure would penetrate the ranks of the
liberal camp and that would signal a dramatic change
in the shape and nature of the county -- meaning the
demise of the superiority of the theocratic camp. They
want to pre-empt not only another liberal majority in
parliament – Majlis — but also cut down the strength
of reformists in the legislative body.
For the liberals, accepting the hard-line-imposed
conditions means nothing but saying good-bye to their
political future.
On the external front, their attempts to present a
more moderate face of Iran have been dealt a severe
blow, particularly that Tehran often boasts about its
regular elections and the country's status as an
"Islamic democracy."
The claims are often compared with the reality that an
unelected body has control over elections and only an
unelected official can overrule that body.
The struggle has been simmering for after it burst
forth when moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected
president in 1997 and set out a liberal agenda which,
he hoped, would address some of the basic economic
woes of his people and advance the country towards
returning to the mainstream world politics.
However, Khatami soon found out that the president's
wings were clipped already since the religious
establishment held all the aces and could veto him at
will; the Guardian Council held powers that superseded
those of the presidency.
Beyond that is the absolute authority of the council
to decide who could seek power in the country through
elections, and it exercised that authority this month
by rejecting 3,533 out of 8,144 prospective candidates
for the Feb.20 elections, including some 80 serving
members of the Majlis.
Several ministers and vice presidents in the
government had submitted their resignations in
protest at the mass disqualification of candidates.
However, they were expected to stay on in their jobs
pending appeals lodged with the Guardians Council.
The council has lifted the ban on 200 candidates, but
that seen as cosmetic. Most of the reformists were
expected to remain banned by the time the council
concluded its review.
The Guardians Council argued that the rejections were
made on the basis of "data collected from reliable
sources and the investigations conducted in
[applicants'] neighbourhoods."
Most of the rejected individuals are connected with
the reformist 2nd of Khordad coalition, which is named
after the date of President Khatami's election on May
23, 1997.
However, the stated reason for disqualifying them
include applicants' alleged drug abuse, links with
banned groups, or lack of Iranian nationality.
Throughout his presidency -- and particularly in his
second term — Khatami had to content with opposition
to his liberal approach from the religious
establishment, which also exercised control over the
judiciary as well as the security forces of the
country.
Any sign of political dissent challenging the absolute
authority of the conservatives was immediately put
down; moves adopted by Khatami to address some of the
basic problems were shot down; reformists pro-reform
journalists who spoke out were jailed; and liberal
activists had to content with threats to their life.
In the 1997 and 2001 elections, Iranians voted
overwhelmingly for liberals and reformists but the
elected candidates, despite their commitment,
seriousness and devotion, could achieve little since
they were restrained by the system itself that favours
the entrenched hard-liners, who, by virtue of the
powers given to them, could override them at any
point and at any time.
The actual executive powers of the Khatami government
is severely curtailed and its options are limited in
exercising what should be the legitimate rights of an
executive authority. It is even more ironic that the
government enjoys a majority in the legislative
assembly but the MPs are helpless in view of the
constitutional bindings under which they have to
function.
It is not as if the hard-liners are short-sighted in
strategy. A recent report in the Washington Post
summarised that the relative relaxation of the strict
dress code and a ban on make-up, and the strict
enforcement of laws against watching satellite
channels, men and women holding hands in public and
similar moves are the hard-liners' way of giving the
people "more of what they want and divert attention
from the reformists' demand for a more powerful
democratic say for the people.
The stand-off is indeed a battle of wits and wills as
much as it is a struggle for survival for both sides.
And an easy way does not look any near.

Hossein Khomeini back in Iran

pv vivekanand

HOSSEIN Khomeini, grandson of the late Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini — founder of the Islamic republic —
has been placed under restrictions in the Iranian holy
city of Qom where he quietly returned after spending
more than six months outside the country calling for
American military intervention against the thecratic
regime in power in Tehran.
Hossein Khomeini, 46, who was last in the US where he
had delivered a series of lectures denouncing the
clerical regime in Tehran, was pressured into
returning to Iran because his wife and family were not
allowed to leave the country to join him, according to
sources.
He had left Iran in July and crossed to Iraq where he
lived for some time before going to the US on a visit
sponsored by the Iranian American community and backed
by the Bush administration, which is seeking "regime
change" in Tehran.
He gave a series interviews to the press and also
spoke at several gatherings in the US saying the
theocratic regime in power in Iran today had betrayed
the founding principles of the Islamic republic as
envisaged by his grandfather and that he favoured
American military intervention in the country if that
was needed to remove the hardliners from the country's
leadership. He favoured the reforms sought by
President Mohammed Khatami, a moderate aligned with
the reformist camp, although he did not fully agree
with Khatami's stated positions.
It was then seen that Washington was trying to use the
Khomeini name to advance its efforts for a regime
change in Iran.
The Tehran government reacted cooly to his criticism.
Spokesmen said Hossein Khomeini was exercising his
right to free speech and the Iranian government had no
comment on him.
However, Iran insiders said the conservative camp of
hardline theocrats seethed in anger at his criticism
and had engineered his return by applying pressure
through his family. "He was told his family would
never be allowed to leave Iran and he would be better
off returning to Qom and confine himself to religous
studies in there," said a source. "At Qom's Hawzah
Al-Ilmiyah, he has been told not to make political
statements or meet foreign visitors," according to the
source.
He returned to Iran in mid-January and since then been
questioned by agents of the conservative camp led by
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who wields supreme powers in
the country.
The hardliners also control the bulk of the security
and intelligence network as well as the judiciary, and
hence their operations do not always come under the
scrutiny of the government.
It was also believed that Hossein Khomeini was adviced
by the US to return home and "work from within" to
bring about changes. His return home comes amid a
bitter struggle between the reformist camp led by
Khatami and the hardliners who want to clip the wings
of the reformists by using their special powers to
deny the reformist a majority in parliament in Feb.20
elections.
Hossein Khomeini is the son of Mustafa Khomeini, who
died of a heart attack in Al Najaf one year before the
1979 Iranian revolution. His uncle Ahmad Khomeini
was killed in 1995, reportedly by the Iranian regime,
after he bitterly criticized the regime's policies.
Hossein Khomeini said in commetns during his stay
outside the country that "Iran needs a democratic
system that does not use religion as a tool to repress
the people and suffocate society." He also called for
the need to "separate religion from the state and to
end the despotic theocracy" in Iran.
He said Iran is on the verge of a popular revolution,
adding: "Freedom is more important than bread. If the
Americans can provide it, then let them come."

'Sting' missile deal

pv vivekanand

HEMANT LAKHANI, a British national of Indian origin,
who is accused of trying to smuggle shoulder-fired
missiles into the US and offering help to obtain a
"dirty bomb" for use by alleged terrorists, has denied
all charges and is scheduled to make his defence
motions in April at a court in New Jersey.
Lakhani, 68, a London resident, was arrested in Newark
in August in a "sting" operation mounted by US,
Brtiish and Russian intelligence. He faces charges of
trying to sell anti-aircraft missiles, offering to
obtain a radioactive "dirty bomb" -- - a rudimentary
device using radioactive materials -- and to procure
anti-aircraft guns, tanks, armoured personnel
carriers, radar systems and C-4 explosives for use by
terrorists.
In the same case, New York diamond dealer Yehuda
Abraham, 75, is charged with money laundering in
connection with the alleged missile smuggling plot,
and Indian citizen Moinuddeen Ahmed Hameed, 38, is
charged with helping to transfer cash for alleged
missile purchases.
Abraham remains free on a $6 million bail. Lakhani and
Hameed remain in US police custody.
No trial date has been set but the accused are asked
to to appear in court on April 26 when therr defence
motions will be heard.
It is expected that it would take several monhs after
April for the trial to start.
He faces up to 25 years in jail if convicted.
The case has raised eyebrows throughout the world
since the operation that led to Lakhani's arrest made
little sense. He is a Hindu by birth and is not
reported to have any "terror" links and trapping him
in an elaborate sting was not seen to have served any
purpose except to serve the American interest of
having to keep alive the image of security threat that
the US is facing.
In formal terms, Lakhani charged with one count of
"attempting to provide material support to
terrorists", one count of unlawful brokering of
foreign defence articles, two counts of money
laundering, and one count of attempting to import
merchandise into the US by means of false statements.
Accounts in the press shortly after Lakhani's arrest
indicated that both ends of the "sting operation" --
the people who offered to arrange the missiles and
other weapons and explosives as well as those who
offered to buy them — were American intelligence
operatives and he was trapped because of he was
desperate for the money that he thought he could make
from the purported deal.
Speculation is that the FBI wanted to use the case in
order to focus world attention on the threat of
shoulder-mounted missiles against aircraft after
unknown assailants narrowly missed an Israeli charter
flight taking off from Mombasa, Kenya.
Another missile missed a US military jet taking off
from Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.
The sting began when a Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) agent posed as a "Muslim activist" of a Somali
militant group and contacted Lakhani saying he wanted
to buy 50 shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles from
Russia.
The agent, who insisted that the missile should be
effective against aircraft and even suggested
St.Petersburg as the possible source for the missiles,
also made a down payment of $30,000 for the purchase
of one missile, according to reports. The total worth
of the deal was said to be $5 million for 50 missiles,
with a 10 per cent "down payment" to be made when a
"sample" missile was shown to the "Somali" militant in
the US.
On the other end, in St.Peterburg, other FBI agents,
in co-ordination with their British and Russian
counterparts, offered to sell Lakhani the missiles. A
Russian arms factory, also working with US
intelligence, then provided Lakhani with a
Russian-made shoulder-launched SA-18 Igla missile. The
weapon was "neutralised" at the source of origin, but
Lakhani did not know that.
The missile was shipped to the US and Lakhani flew to
Newark to "close the deal." That was when he was
arrested, five months after the "sting" was launched.
The key prosecution evidence is expected to a
collection of over 150 audio and video tapes which
purportedly show him offering to sell the missiles and
other weapons and discussing how to best "terrorise"
Americans with them. He is also said to have commented
that he was an admirer of Osama Bin Laden.
"On many occasions in recorded conversations he
referred to... Osama Bin Laden as a hero who had done
something right and set the Americans straight,"
according to US Attorney Christopher Christie.
Lakhani is also shown speaking of of shooting down a
commercial aircraft to "shake the economy" of the US,
according to Christie.
The shipment of one Igla missile — described in
freight documents as medical equipment — was allowed
into the US with the full knowledge and co-operation
of US officials and was stored at a warehouse. When
Lakhani collected the shipment and returned to his
Newark hotel, he was arrested.
A short time later, Yehuda Abraham and Moinuddeen
Ahmed Hameed, an Indian citizen living in Malaysia,
were arrested from Abraham's New York gem dealership
on Fifth Avenue and charged with helping to finance
the deal.

Empire of Blood

PV VIVEKANAND

The Project for the New American Century envisions the forced creation and imposition on the world of Pax Americana, or American peace. It means creating a global empire that ensures the energy security of the United States and American domination of every part of this planet. Within the Middle Eastern context, this would easily explain why the US concocted the story that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and fraudulently manufactured proof to support that lie and threw in, for good measures, the contention that Saddam Hussein had links with Al Qaeda and posed a direct security threat to the American people. And it also explains why the US so closely aligned with Israel at the cost of its ties with the Arab and Muslim world and is gunning for Iran.
There was no intelligence failure, there was no misreading of evidence and there was no misguiding indication. The Bush administration set its objective as invasion and occupation of Iraq and then worked its way backwards to create a path leading to it. "Evidence" was manufactured whenever the need arose in the dedicated campaign to invade a sovereign country thousands of kilometres from the American shore in order to serve the interests of imperial America.
Anything that cropped up was either dismissed as irrelevant or explained away to fit in the overall scheme of things. Had there been a genuine WMD or terror threat from Iraq, it would have manifested itself. The hawks in the Bush administration would not have had to come up with fabricated charges like Saddam Hussein wanting to buy uranium from Niger and even had drones capable of hitting the US with chemical or biological weapons; nor would British Prime Minister Tony Blair's "intelligence" agencies have had to "sex up" reports on Iraq's military capabilities with outdated university theses.
It is now established that there is no ground for continued insistence that the invasion of Iraq and ouster of Saddam Hussein served to protect Americans from 9/11-style terror attacks using chemical and biological weapons.
The massive 1,000-page report prepared by the Iraq Survey Group led by American Charles Duelfer has eliminated any excuse or pretext for such insistence. The report established that Iraq had no WMD, was not engaged in any effort to develop it and its 1980s ability to produce WMD had all but eroded at the time when the US-led invading forces went into the country last year.
The 9/11 attacks helped Washington's plans to invade and occupy Iraq since they offered the Bush administration a pretext to portray Saddam as terror threat by linking him with Al Qaeda.

Lure of oil

The reality was that the US wanted to grab a piece of oil-rich real estate in the Middle East in order to secure its energy security, and, in the bargain, set up an advanced military base in the region and also get rid of a potential military threat to Washington's strategic partner, ally and protégé, Israel.
That was what happened, but what the US did not count on was messing up what it had hoped would be a smooth transition to an American-friendly regime to replace Saddam. It has proved a catastrophic humanitarian crisis and military imbroglio that defies solution.
A document drawn up in 2000 showed that George W Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure "regime change" even before he took power in January 2001.
The document, officially titled "Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century," was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The brains behind it included Dick Cheney, who went to become Bush's vice- president, Donald Rumsfeld, who was named defence secretary by Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, who now serves as Rumsfeld's deputy, Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby, who is now Cheney's chief of staff.
In fact, the document was a refurbished version of a plan drawn up by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz two years earlier. The plan was sent in January 1998 to the then president, Bill Clinton, saying:
"The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing.
"In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.
"We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts."
Well, Clinton did not have enough time to prepare the ground for an invasion of Iraq, and hence Bush inherited it and implemented it. Rest is history.

Colonising the world

Have a closer look at the 1998 call on Clinton. It talks only about the removal of Saddam from power "in the long term." It talks nothing about any plan beyond it. Obviously, the idea was to retain Iraq as an American colony with whatever that entails.
In fact, the 2000 report identified Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an "axis of evil" and Bush was only borrowing the term from the report when he started using it in late 2002.
While the report had highlighted the "nuclear" threat posed by the three countries grouped in the "axis of evil," the US military invaded and occupied the one country among the three which did not have any nuclear programme at all.
The report listed 27 people as having been closely involved in preparation of the document. Six of them assumed key defence and foreign policy positions in the Bush administration.
It was interesting to hear Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, acknowledging the truth this week that the US would have still gone to war on Iraq even if it had known that Saddam possessed no WMD. But Rice gave it a nice twist.
"He was someone who had an insatiable appetite for weapons of mass destruction. He had the means, he had the intent, he had the money to do it," said Rice. "You were never going to break the link between Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. And now we know that, had we waited, he would have gotten out of the sanctions, he would have undermined them by both trying to pay off people on the Security Council and doing what he could to keep his expertise in place," she said.
Perhaps Rice should spare a little time and remind herself that Chevron -- the company in which she occupied a director's seat before joining the administration -- was among the recipients of Saddam's "oil vouchers."
Her further comments on the war were even more hilarious. "Because we invaded the country, because we were able to interview the scientists and get the documents that Saddam Hussein had refused to give to the United Nations, we now know that he did not have those stockpiles," she said.
Wow! We thought the US had irrefutable evidence that Saddam had WMD before the first American military tank crossed the border to Iraq on March 20, 2003; we had no idea that the US motive behind the war was to determine whether or not Saddam had WMD.
Rice's next comment took the cake, if indeed one was left.
"He (Saddam) would have gotten out of the sanctions, and rebuilt his weapons of mass destruction programmes," Rice said. "We know he had the means to do so, it was only a matter of time. And it was time for us to take care of this threat."
So, as far as Washington was concerned, it was enough that Saddam had a wishlist of WMD and not necessarily possess them in order for the US to strike.
That brings up the question: Who authorised the US to invade any country simply because that country wished it had WMD?
Well, that where the Project for a New American Century, or Pax Americana comes into play.
Under that doctrine, the US reserves for itself the right to take any action it deems fit not only to protect its interests anywhere in the world but also to establish itself as a global empire which will have the sole responsibility as the policeman of planet Earth.

Building bases

That is further supported by reports saying that amid the fierce guerrilla war in Iraq, the US military is building more than a dozen "enduring bases" in the country to set up a permanent military presence in the Gulf.
The bases run from Kirkuk in the north to Basra in the north and are given names like Camp Victory (adjoining Baghdad airport), Camp Renegade (in Kirkuk) etc. The two American hostages beheaded last month were working as civil engineers constructing a base in Taji, north of Baghdad,
The Pentagon has not released any details of the planned bases to the public. However, it is expected that between 50,000 and 60,000 American soldiers would be housed at these bases in Iraq once Washington realises its hoped-for goal of pacifying Iraq by next year. The plan, in principle, is a repeat of what the US did in Japan after World War II.
The only top official to indirectly refer to the plan for bases in Iraq was Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who mentioned it even before the US forces invaded that country last year. The US already has bases in Kuwait and Qatar.
Installing a token government in Baghdad through elections in January and then drawing up a permanent constitution leading to fresh elections to another government in 2006 is the American definition of pacifying Iraq.
The building of the bases is parallel and separate from the ongoing US military operations in Iraq.
The US bases in Iraq will serve the military to keep a close eye on developments in the region and move forces to quickly intervene in any area where Washington perceives its interests to be threatened.
The presence will also serve as a reminder to the countries in the region that the US has at its disposal the military capability to invade and occupy countries and remove regimes.
Supplementing the American military presence in Iraq will be Israel's strength. Israel, with only sx million people, is counted among the top 10 strongest countries in the world.
However, Iran is a wild card in the game. The US has to neutralise the Iranians since the US military cannot afford to have its bases in Iraq within Iranian missile range as long as Tehran remains hostile to Washington.
The annual cost of maintaining the bases in Iraq is estimated at between $5 billion and $7 billion, according to Gordon Adams, director of Security Policy Studies at George Washington University in Washington.
The US maintains 890 military installations in foreign countries, ranging from major air force facilities to smaller installations, say a radar station. It is expected that the planned bases in Iraq would enable the Pentagon to close a few of those facilities.
However, the key question remains unanswered: It is widely accepted that a majority of Iraqis oppose the US presence in the country. How would they accept to have permanent American military bases in their land?
But then, what the people of Iraq think is not as important as what the US wants.
Rumsfeld has dismissed suggestions that the US covets Iraqi territory by maintaining bases, but then one only has to remember that the US military still has bases in Japan, nearly 60 years after World War II ended.
The National Security Strategy outlined by President Bush on Sept.20, 2002 -- or the so-called Bush Doctrine -- outlines a newly aggressive military and foreign policy, including pre-emptive attack against those who threaten American interests.
The doctrine bases itself on the neoconservative document of 2000.
As David R Francis, a respected American journalist known for objective and accurate writing, put it, the strategy "includes a plan for permanent American military and economic domination of every region on the globe, unfettered by international treaty or concern. And to make that plan a reality, it envisions a stark expansion of our global military presence."
He quotes from the report:
"The United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of US troops."
While Bush sought to create an impression that the National Security Strategy was inspired by the Sept.11 attacks, Francis notes, the same language is used in the 2002 report.
Francis writes:
"It advocates the 'transformation' of the US military to meet its expanded obligations, including the cancellation of such outmoded defence programmes as the Crusader artillery system. That's exactly the message being preached by Rumsfeld and others.
"It urges the development of small nuclear warheads "required in targeting the very deep, underground hardened bunkers that are being built by many of our potential adversaries." (Francis notes that the Republican-dominated House of Representatives has given the Pentagon the green light to develop such a weapon, called the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, while the Senate has so far balked at approving it).
"To preserve the Pax Americana, the report says US forces will be required to perform 'constabulary duties' -- the United States acting as policeman of the world -- and says that such actions 'demand American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations.'
"To meet those responsibilities, and to ensure that no country dares to challenge the United States, the report advocates a much larger military presence spread over more of the globe, in addition to the roughly 130 nations in which US troops are already deployed."
According to Francis, the report's recommendation that the US needs permanent military bases in the Middle East, in Southeast Europe, in Latin America and in Southeast Asia is being followed. He notes that the Bush administration rushed to install US troops in Georgia and the Philippines, as well as our eagerness to send military advisers to assist in the civil war in Colombia.
"The 2000 report directly acknowledges its debt to a still earlier document, drafted in 1992 by the Defence Department. That document had also envisioned the US as a colossus astride the world, imposing its will and keeping world peace through military and economic power," says Francis. . When leaked in final draft form, however, the proposal drew so much criticism that it was hastily withdrawn and repudiated by George Bush Senior, he says.

Alliance with Israel

Donald Kagan, a professor of classical Greek history at Yale and an influential advocate of a more aggressive foreign policy who served as served as co-chairman of the 2000 New Century project "willingly embraces the idea that the United States would establish permanent military bases in a post-war Iraq."
"I think that's highly possible," Francis quotes Kagan as saying. "We will probably need a major concentration of forces in the Middle East over a long period of time. That will come at a price, but think of the price of not having it. 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."
That brings in the alliance between the US and Israel and the American quest to ensure its energy security by not allowing any Arab/Muslim country in the Middle East to reach a position where it could call the shots in the international oil market.
The strength of the US-Israel alliance is conventionally attributed to the powerful political and financial strengths and influence of the pro-Israeli lobby in Washington as well as to the image of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East sharing American "values."
However, equally important in this equation is the US anxiety to ensure the steady flow of oil from the Middle East to suit American interests.
Proponents of this theory argue that the US has been retaining and is continuing to strengthen its relationship with Israel in order not to allow an Arab/Muslim country in the Middle East to emerge as the dominant regional power that could undermine the US quest for energy security for Americans based on Arab and Muslim oil. That explains why the US was silent when Israel bombed Iraq's Osirak nuclear plant in 1981 and why Washington today supports Israel's contention that Iran poses a threat to it by seeking nuclear weapon-capability.

Oil dependency

A report written by Erich Marquardt appearing on www.pinr.com underlines this point. Marquardt writes:
"The primary motives behind US support of Israel can be explained by Washington's foreign policy aims of securing a Middle East capable of producing a stable supply of oil at a low price that buoys the economies of oil dependent countries. Israel, a state that is dependent on the United States due to its strategic and cultural isolation in a region that is hostile to its existence, can be relied on by Washington to assist in maintaining the status quo by preventing any Middle Eastern country from accruing enough power to alter the regional balance in a way that would damage the interests of the United States and other oil dependent countries."
Michael T Klare, a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency, points out that America's dependence on imported petroleum has been growing steadily since 1972.
Domestic production in the US was 11.6 million barrels per day in 1972 and today it stands at 9mbpd and is expected to continue to decline.
"Even if some oil is eventually extracted from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, as the Bush administration desires, this downward trend will not be reversed " he asserts.
On the other hand, the total oil consumption in the US today is estimated at around 20 million barrels per day and is expected to hit 29mbpd by 2025.
"This means ever more of the nation's total petroleum supply will have to be imported - 11mbpd today (about 55 per cent of total US consumption) but 20mbpd/d in 2025 (69 per cent of consumption)," says Klare.
In an implicit reference to the Middle East, Klare notes that an increasing share of that oil will come from "hostile, war-torn countries in the developing world, not from friendly, stable countries such as Canada or Norway. "
"Because oil is viewed as the primary motive for US involvement in these (hostile) areas, and because the giant US oil corporations are seen as the very embodiment of US power, anything to do with oil - pipelines, wells, refineries, loading platforms - is seen by insurgents as a legitimate and attractive target for attack; hence the raids on pipelines in Iraq, on oil-company offices in Saudi Arabia, and on oil tankers in Yemen," according to Klaire.
Klare notes that the US military is having a tough time ensuring the security of oil installations in Iraq, meaning that the very objective of the war remains under threat.

Blood and oil

"Iraq has developed into a two-front war: the battles for control over Iraq's cities and the constant struggle to protect its far-flung petroleum infrastructure against sabotage and attack," he says. "The first contest has been widely reported in the US press; the second has received far less attention."
He points out: "Iraq is hardly the only country where US troops are risking their lives on a daily basis to protect the flow of petroleum. In Colombia, Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Georgia, US personnel are also spending their days and nights protecting pipelines and refineries, or supervising the local forces assigned to this mission.
"American sailors are now on oil-protection patrol in the Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the South China Sea, and along other sea routes that deliver oil to the United States and its allies. In fact, the US military is increasingly being converted into a global oil-protection service."
And the going is getting tougher for American forces, he notes.
"With thousands of kilometers of pipeline and hundreds of major facilities at risk, this task will prove endlessly demanding -- and unrelievedly hazardous," he says.
"While anti-terrorism and traditional national-security rhetoric will be employed to explain risky deployments abroad, a growing number of American soldiers and sailors will be committed to the protection of overseas oilfields, pipelines, refineries and tanker routes," Klare observes. "And because these facilities are likely to come under increasing attack from guerrillas and terrorists, the risk to American lives will grow accordingly. Inevitably, Americans will pay a higher price in blood for every additional litre of oil they obtain from abroad."
Seen in that vein, although Klare does not refer to that aspect, the natural Israeli role is to step in and take over part of the American policeman's job at some point or another; and countries like Iraq (had it remained under the Saddam regime) and Iran would challenge that Israeli role, and hence the need to ensure that they are reshaped to suit American interests. That is what happened in Iraq, and Iran would be subjected to similar treatment if the US plans go ahead as they were drawn up by the Project for the New American Century that aims to create a global American empire.