Next Phase of Washington's
Global Agenda:
From the 'War on Terrorism' to the 'War on Tyranny'
A Peek Behind Bush II’s
War on Tyranny
Part I:
Control all
?tyrannical? world oil chokepoints
In recent public speeches,
George W. Bush and others in the Administration, including Condi Rice,
have begun to make a significant shift in the rhetoric of war. A new War
on Tyranny is being groomed to replace the outmoded War on Terror. Far
from being a semantic nuance, the shift is highly revealing of the next
phase of Washington’s global agenda.
In his 20 January
inaugural speech, Bush declared:
"It is the policy of the
United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and
institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of
ending tyranny in our world."
Bush repeated the last
formulation, “ending tyranny in our world” in the State of the
Union. (author’s emphasis). In 1917 it was a "war to make the world safe
for democracy," and in 1941 it was a "war to end all wars."
The use of tyranny as
justification for US military intervention marks a dramatic new step on
the road to Washington’s quest for global domination. Washington, of
course today, is shorthand for the policy domination by a private group of
military and energy corporate giants, from Halliburton to McDonnell
Douglas, from Bechtel to ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, not unlike that
foreseen in Eisenhower’s 1961 speech warning of excessive control of
government by a military-industrial complex.
Congress declared World
War II following a Japanese aggressive attack on the US fleet at Pearl
Harbor. While Washington stretched the limits of deception and fakery in
Vietnam and elsewhere to justify its wars, up to now it has always at
least justified the effort with the claim that another power had initiated
aggression or hostile military acts against the USA. Tyranny has to do
with the internal affairs of a nation: it has to do with how a leader and
a people interact, not with its foreign policy. It has nothing to do with
aggression against the United States or others.
Historically Washington
has had no problem befriending some of the world’s all-time tyrants, as
long as they were “pro-Washington” tyrants, such as the military
dictatorship Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, a paragon of oppression. We
might name other befriended tyrants—Aliyev’s Azerbaijan, or Karimov’s
Uzbekistan, or the Al-Sabah’s Kuwait, or Oman. Maybe Morocco, or Uribe’s
Colombia. There is a long list of pro-Washington tyrants.
For obvious reasons,
Washington is unlikely to turn against its “friends.” The new anti-tyranny
crusade would seem, then, to be directed against “anti-American” tyrants.
The question is which tyrants are on the radar screen for the Pentagon’s
awesome arsenal of smart bombs and covert operations commandoes?
Condoleezza Rice dropped a hint in her Senate Foreign Relations Committee
testimony two days prior to the Bush inauguration. The White House, of
course, cleared her speech first.
Target some tyrannies,
nurture others?
Rice hinted at
Washington’s target-list of tyrants amidst an otherwise bland statement in
her Senate testimony. She declared, "?in our world there remain
outposts of tyranny? in
Cuba, and Burma and North
Korea, and Iran and Belarus, and Zimbabwe."
Aside from the fact that the designated Secretary of State did not bother
to refer to Burma under its present name, Myanmar, the list is an
indication of the next phase in Washington’s strategy of pre-emptive wars
for its global domination strategy.
As reckless as this seems
given the Iraq quagmire, the fact that little open debate on such a
broadened war has yet taken place, indicates how extensive the consensus
is within the US Washington establishment for the war policy. According to
the January 24 New Yorker report from Seymour Hersh, Washington
already approved a war plan for the coming 4 years of Bush II, which
targets ten countries from the Middle East to East Asia. The Rice
statement gives a clue to six of the ten. She also suggested Venezuela is
high on the non-public target list.
Pentagon Special Forces
units are reported already active inside Iran, according to the Hersh
report, preparing details of key military and nuclear sites for presumable
future bomb hits. At the highest levels, France, Germany and the EU are
well aware of the US agenda for Iran, on the nuclear issue, which explains
the frantic EU diplomatic forays with Iran.
The President declared in
his State of the Union speech that Iran was, the world’s primary state
sponsor of terror.? Congress is falling in line as usual, beginning to
sound war drums on Iran. Testimony to the Israeli Knesset by the Mossad
chief recently, reported in the Jerusalem Post, estimated that by
the end of 2005 Iran’s nuclear weapons program would be “unstoppable.”
This suggests strong pressure from Israel on Washington to stop Iran this
year.
According also to former
CIA official, Vince Cannistraro, the new Rumsfeld war agenda includes a
list of ten priority countries. In addition to Iran, it includes Syria,
Sudan, Algeria, Yemen and Malaysia. According to a report in the January
23 Washington Post, Gen. Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, also has a list of what the Pentagon calls "emerging
targets" for pre-emptive war, which includes Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia,
and Philippines and Georgia, a list he has sent to Secretary Rumsfeld..
While Georgia may now be
considered under de facto NATO or US control since the election of
Saakashvili, the other states are highly suggestive of the overall US
agenda for the new War on Tyranny. If we add Syria, Sudan, Algeria and
Malaysia, as well as Condi Rice’s list of Cuba, Belarus, Myanmar (Burma)
and Zimbabwe, to the JCS list of Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia and
Philippines, we have some 12 potential targets for either Pentagon covert
destabilization or direct military intervention, surgical or broader. And,
of course, North Korea, which seems to serve as a useful permanent
friction point to justify US military presence in the strategic region
between China and Japan. Whether it is ten or twelve targets, the
direction is clear.
What is striking is just
how directly this list of US emerging target countries, outposts of
tyranny maps onto the Administration strategic goal of total global energy
control, which is clearly the central strategic focus of the Bush-Cheney
Administration.
General Norman
Schwarzkopf, who led the 1991 attack on Iraq, told the US Congress in
1990: ``Middle East oil is the West's lifeblood. It fuels us today, and
being 77% of the free world's proven oil reserves, is going to fuel us
when the rest of the world runs dry.'' He was talking about what some
geologists call peak oil, the end of the era of cheap oil, without drawing
undue attention to the fact.
That was in 1990. Today,
with US troops preparing a semi-permanent stay in Iraq and moves to
control global oil and energy chokepoints, the situation is far more
advanced. China and India have rapidly emerged as major oil import
economies in the last several years at a time existing sources of the
West’s oil, from North Sea to Alaska and beyond, are in significant
decline. Here we have a pre-programmed scenario for future resource
conflict on a global scale.
Oil geopolitics and the
War on Tyranny?
Cuba as a tyranny target
is a surrogate for Chavez Venezuela, which is strongly supported by Putin,
via Cuba, and now by China. Rice explicitly mentioned the close ties
between Castro and Chavez. After a failed CIA putsch attempt early in the
Bush tenure, Washington is clearly trying to keep a lower profile in
Caracas. The goal remains regime change of the recalcitrant Chavez, whose
most recent affront to Washington was his latest visit to China, where he
signed a major bilateral energy deal. Chavez also had the gall to announce
plans to divert oil sales away from the US to China, and sell its US
refineries. Part of the China deal would involve a new pipeline to a port
on Colombia’s coast, which avoids US control of the Panama Canal. Rice
told the Senate that Cuba was an "outpost of tyranny" and in the same
breath labeled Venezuela a "regional troublemaker."
Indonesia, with huge
natural gas resources serving mainly China and Japan, presents an
interesting case, since the country has apparently been cooperative with
Washington’s War on Terror since September 2001. Indonesia’s Government
raised an outcry in the wake of the recent Tsunami disaster when the
Pentagon dispatched a US aircraft carrier and special troops within 72
hours to land on Aceh to do “rescue work.” The USS Abraham Lincoln
aircraft carrier, with 2,000 supposedly Iraq-bound Marines aboard,
together with the USS Bonhomme Richard from Guam, landed some 13,000 US
troops on Aceh, which alarmed many in the Indonesian military and
government. The government acceded, but demanded the US leave by end March
and not establish a base camp on Aceh. No less than Deputy Defense
Secretary abd Iraq war strategist, Paul Wolfowitz, former US Ambassador to
Indonesia, made an immediate fact-finding tour of the region. ExxonMobil
runs a huge LNG production on Aceh, which supplies energy to China and
Japan.
If we add Myanmar to the
list of emerging targets, a state which, however disrespectful of human
rights, is also a major ally and recipient of military aid from Beijing, a
strategic encirclement potential against China emerges quite visibly.
Malaysia, Myanmar and Aceh in Indonesia represent strategic flanks on
which the vital sea lanes from the Strait of Malacca, through which oil
tankers from the Persian Gulf travel to China , can be controlled.
Moreover, 80% of Japan’s oil passes here.
The US Government’s Energy
Information Administration identifies the Malacca Strait as one of the
most strategic "world oil transit chokepoints." How convenient if in the
course of cleaning out a nest of tyrant regimes, Washington might
militarily acquire control of these Straits? Until now the states in the
area have vehemently rejected repeated Washington attempts to militarize
the Straits.
Control or militarization
of Malaysia, Indonesia and Myanmar would give US forces choke-point
control over the world’s busiest sea-channel for oil from the Gulf to
China and Japan. It would be a huge blow to China’s efforts to secure
energy independence from the US. Not only has China already lost huge oil
concessions in Iraq with the US occupation, but China’s oil supply from
Sudan is also under increasing pressure from Washington.
Taking Iran from the
Mullahs would give Washington chokepoint control over the world’s most
strategically important oil waterway, the Straits of Hormuz, a
two-mile-wide passage between the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. The
major US military base in the entire Middle East region is just across the
Straits from Iran in Doha Qatar. One of the world’s largest gasfields also
lies here.
Algeria is another obvious
target for the war on tyranny. Algeria is the second most important
supplier of natural gas to Continental Europe, and has significant
reserves of the highest-quality low sulfur crude oil, just the kind US
refineries need. Some 90% of Algeria’s oil goes to Europe, mainly Italy,
France and Germany. President Bouteflika read the September 11 Washington
tea leaves and promptly pledged his support for the War on Terror.
Bouteflika has made motions to privatize various state holdings, but not
the vital state oil company, Sonatrach. That will clearly not be enough to
satisfy the appetite of Washington planners.
Sudan, as noted, has
become a major oil supplier to China whose national oil company has
invested more than $3 billions since 1999, building oil pipelines from the
south to the Red Sea port. The coincidence of this fact with the
escalating concern in Washington about genocide and humanitarian disaster
in oil-rich Darfur in southern Sudan, is not lost on Beijing. China
threatened a UN veto against any intervention against Sudan. The first act
of a re-elected Dick Cheney late last year was to fill his Vice
Presidential jet with UN Security Council members to fly to Nairobi to
discuss the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, an eerie reminder of Defense
Secretary Cheney’s “humanitarian” concern over Somalia in 1991.
Washington’s choice of
Somalia and Yemen is a matched pair, as a look at a Middle East /Horn of
Africa map will confirm. Yemen sits at the oil transit chokepoint of Bab
el-Mandap, the narrow point controlling oil flow connecting the Red Sea
with the Indian Ocean. Yemen also has oil, although no one yet knows just
how much. It could be huge. A US firm, Hunt Oil Co. is pumping 200, 000
barrels a day from there but that is likely only the tip of the find.
Yemen fits nicely as an
?emerging target? with the other target nearby, Somalia.
Yes, Virginia, the 1992
Somalia military action by Herbert Walker Bush, which gave the US a bloody
nose, was in fact about oil too... Little-known was the fact that the
humanitarian intervention by 20,000 US troops, ordered by father Bush in
Somalia, had little to do with the purported famine relief for starving
Somalians. It had a lot to do with the fact that four major American oil
companies, led by Bush’s friends at Conoco of Houston Texas, and including
Amoco (now BP), Condi Rice’s Chevron, and Phillips, all held huge oil
exploration concessions in Somalia. The deals had been made with the
former ?pro-Washington? tyrannical and corrupt regime of Siad Barre.
Barre was inconveniently
deposed just as Conoco reportedly hit black gold with nine exploratory
wells, confirmed by World Bank geologists. US Somalia Envoy, Robert B.
Oakley, a veteran of the US Mujahadeen project in Afghanistan in the
1980?s, almost blew the US game when, during the height of the civil war
in Mogadishu in 1992, he moved his quarters onto the Conoco compound for
safety. A new US cleansing of Somalian tyranny would open the door for
these US oil companies to map and develop the possibly huge oil potential
in Somalia. Yemen and Somalia are two flanks of the same geological
configuration, which holds large potential petroleum deposits, as well as
being the flanks of the oil chokepoint from the Red Sea.
Belarus is also no
champion of human rights, but from Washington’s standpoint, the fact that
its government is tightly bound to Moscow makes it the obvious candidate
for a Ukraine-style “Orange Revolution” regime change effort. That would
complete the US encirclement of Russia on the west, and of Russia’s export
pipelines to Europe, were it to succeed. Some 81% of all Russian oil
exports today go to Western European markets. Such a Belarus regime change
now would limit the potential for a nuclear-armed Russia to form a bond
with France, Germany and the EU as potential counterweight against the
power of the United States sole superpower, a highest priority for
Washington Eurasia geopolitics.
The military
infrastructure for dealing with such tyrant states seems to be shaping up
as well. In the January 24 New Yorker magazine, veteran journalist
Seymour Hersh cited Pentagon and CIA sources to claim that the position of
Rumsfeld and the warhawks is even stronger today than before the Iraq war.
Hersh reported that Bush signed an Executive Order last year, without
fanfare, placing major CIA covert operations and strategic analysis into
the hands of the Pentagon, sidestepping any Congressional oversight. He
adds that plans for the widening of the War on Terror under Rumsfeld were
also agreed upon in the Administration well before the election.
The Washington Post
confirmed Hersh’s allegation, reporting that Rumsfeld’s Pentagon had
created, by Presidential Order, and bypassing Congress, a new Strategic
Support Branch, which co-opts traditional clandestine and other functions
of the CIA. According to a report by US Army Col.(ret.) Dan Smith, in
Foreign Policy in Focus last November, the new SSB unit includes the elite
military special SEAL Team Six, Delta Force Army squadrons and
potentially, a paramilitary army of 50,000 available for ?splendid little
wars? outside Congressional purview.
The list of emerging
targets in a new War on Tyranny is clearly fluid, provisional, and
adaptable as developments change. It is clear that a breathtaking array of
future military and economic offensives is in the works at the highest
policy levels to transform the world. A world oil price of $150 a barrel
or more in the next few years would be joined by chokepoint control of the
supply by one power if Washington has its way.
(to be continued)
F.
William Engdahl is the author of ?A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil
Politics and the New World Order,? by Pluto Press Ltd.
13 February 2005
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