A THREAT TO
RUSSIA AND U.S.-RUSSIAN RELATIONS
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Here are a few things
you might bear in mind as you read the following article on the international
drug trade, Russia, and America. Prof. Scott seems to ignore Israel and
America’s close ties and makes no Jewish mafia/Mossad/CIA connections at all.
So that is your job to do as you read along. Also he neglects to mention that
part of America’s war on Russia involves use of drugs to render the young of
Russia useless.
These Talmudic
imperialists did it in China; today it is Russia’s turn. It is no different
than their target groups in the United States with crack which was quickly
hustled into poor Black areas. The destruction of character and youth has
already been orchestrated by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and deep
government America is quite happy to keep things going both at home and abroad.
I have a hunch,
one of those gut feelings not to be ignored, that there are connections on upper
levels that America hasn’t got a clue about. Could there be some possible
secret collaboration between Moscow and TelAviv? These two playing Devil’s advocate
to each other whilst secretly working in tandem (on an international Jew level)
to further bring down the US; this is quite possible.
By Prof. Peter Dale Scott
May 26, 2012
PREFACE
FOR A NORTH AMERICAN AUDIENCE
I delivered the following remarks at an anti-NATO conference held in Moscow on May 15, 2012. Unlike other speakers, my paper urged Russians ~ despite the expansionist and aggressive activities in Central Asia of the CIA, SOCOM, and NATO ~ to cooperate under neutral auspices with like-minded Americans, towards dealing with the related crises of Afghan drug production and drug-financed Salafi jihadism.
Since the
conference I have continued to reflect intensely on the battered state of
U.S.-Russian relations, and my own slightly utopian response to it. Although
the speakers at the conference represented many different viewpoints, they
tended all to share a deep anxiety about US intentions towards Russia and the
other former states of the USSR. Their anxiety was based on shared knowledge of
past American actions and broken promises, of which they (unlike most
Americans) are only too aware.
A key example of
such broken promises was the assurance that NATO would not take advantage of
détente to expand into Eastern Europe. Today of course Poland is a member of
NATO, and there are still proposals on the table to expand NATO also into the
Ukraine ~ i.e. the very heart of the former Soviet Union.
This push was matched by U.S. joint activities and operations ~ some
of them under NATO auspices ~ with the army and security
forces of Uzbekistan. (These began in 1997 ~ i.e.
in the Clinton administration.)
Some of the
conferees I spoke to see Russia has having been threatened for two decades
after World War Two by active US and UK plans for a nuclear first strike
against Russia, before it could gain nuclear parity. While obviously these
plans were never implemented, those I spoke to were sure that the ultras who
desired them have never abandoned their desire to humiliate Russia and reduce
it to a third-rate power. I cannot refute this concern: my recent book American
War Machine also sees a relentless push since World War Two to establish and
sustain global American dominance in the world.
Thus the
conference speakers were bitterly opposed to Putin’s endorsement, as recently
as April 11 of this year, of NATO’s military efforts in Afghanistan. They are
particularly incensed by Putin’s agreement this year to the establishment of a
NATO base in Ulianovsk, two hundred kilometers east of Moscow in Russia itself.
Although the base
has been sold to the Russian public as a way to facilitate US withdrawal from
Afghanistan, one speaker assured the conference that the Ulianovsk outpost is
described in NATO documents as a military base.
And they resent
Russia’s support of the US-inspired UN sanctions against Iran; they see Iran
instead as a natural ally of Russia against American efforts to achieve global
domination.
Apart from the
remarks below, I was mostly silent at the conference. But my mind, almost my
conscience, is heavy when I think of the recent revelations that Rumsfeld and
Cheney, immediately after 9/11, responded with an agenda to remove several
governments friendly to Russia, including Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran. [1]
(Ten years
earlier the neocon Richard Perle told Gen. Wesley Clark in the Pentagon that
America had a window of opportunity to remove exactly these Russian clients, in
the period of Russian restructuring after the breakup of the USSR.)
What we have
seen, even under Obama, looks very much like a progressive implementation of
this agenda, even if we acknowledge that in Libya and now Syria Obama has shown
much greater reluctance to put large numbers of US boots on the ground. (Small
numbers of US Special Forces were reportedly active in both countries, stirring
up resistance to first Qaddafi and now Assad.)
What particularly concerns me is the relative absence of public response in America to a long-term Pentagon-CIA agenda of aggressive military expansion ~ of dominationism, if you will.
No doubt many
Americans may think that a global pax Americana will secure a period of peace,
much like the pax Romana of two millennia ago. I myself am confident that it
will not: rather, like the imperfect pax Britannica of a century ago, it will
lead inevitably to a major conflict, possibly another nuclear war.
For the secret of the pax Romana was that Rome, under Hadrian, withdrew from Mesopotamia and accepted strict limits to its area of dominance.Britain never achieved that wisdom until too late;America, to date, has never achieved it at all.
And so very few
in America seem to care about Washington’s global domination project. We have
seen much critical examination of why America fought in Vietnam, and even the
American involvement in atrocities like the Indonesian massacre of 1965.
Authors like Noam Chomsky and Bill Blum have chronicled America’s criminal acts
since World War Two. But only a few, like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich,
have written about the progressive consolidation of a war machine that now
dominates America’s political processes.
The nascent
Occupy movement has little to say about America’s unprovoked wars; I am not
sure they have even targeted the militarization of surveillance, law
enforcement, and detention camps ~ the so-called “continuity of
government” (COG) measures by which America’s military planners have prepared
never again to have to deal with a successful American anti-war movement.
If I were to
return to Russia I would again, as a former diplomat and as a Canadian, call
for US-Russian collaboration to deal with the world’s pressing problems. But
for a week I have been wondering whether I have not perhaps been blinding
myself to the realities of America’s intransigent strive towards dominance. [2]
Here in London I
have just met with an old friend from my diplomatic days, a senior UK diplomat
and Russian expert. I was hoping that he would dissuade me from my negative
assessment of US and NATO intentions, but if anything he increased them.
So I am now
publishing my talk with this preface for a North American audience ~ to
see who if anyone shares my concerns, and to learn what steps if any are being
taken to remedy them.
I believe that
the most urgent task today to preserve the peace of the world is to curb
America’s drive towards dominationism, and to re-energize the UN”s prohibition
of unilateral and preemptive wars, for the sake of coexistence in a peaceful
and multilateral world.
NOTES
[1]
Rumsfeld initially wanted to respond to 9/11 with an attack against Iraq rather than Afghanistan, on the grounds that there were “no good targets in Afghanistan.”
[2]
Two nights ago I had a vivid and unnerving dream, in which at the end I saw the opening of a conference where I would again speak as I did in Moscow. Immediately after my talk the conference agenda called for a discussion of the possibility that “Peter Dale Scott” was a fiction serving some nefarious covert end, and that no real “Peter Dale Scott” in fact existed.
PRESENTATION TO ANTI-NATO CONFERENCE,
MOSCOW, MAY 15, 2012
I
wish to thank the organizers of this conference for the chance to speak about
the acute problem of the Afghan drug traffic, a current threat to both Russia
and U.S.-Russian relations. I will discuss today the deep political perspective
of my book Drugs, Oil, and War, which looks at factors underlying the
international drug traffic and also U.S. interventions harmful to the interests
of both the Russian and American people.
I
will also talk about the role of NATO in facilitating strategies for U.S.
hegemony in Asia. But first I want to look at the drug traffic in the light of
an important factor that is prominent in my book: the role of oil in U.S.
policies for Asia, and also the role of the major international U.S.-aligned
oil companies, including BP.
Oil
has been a deep driving force behind all recent U.S. and NATO offensive
actions: one has only to think about Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, and
Libya in 2011. [1]
My
book studies the role of oil companies and their representatives in Washington
(including lobbies) in all of the major U.S. interventions since Vietnam in the
1960s. [2]
The
power of U.S. oil companies may need a little explanation to an audience in Russia,
where oil companies are controlled by the state. In America the relationship is
almost reversed: oil companies tend to dominate both U.S. foreign policy and
also the U.S. Congress. [3]
This
explains why presidents from Kennedy to Reagan to Obama have been powerless to
limit the oil industry’s special tax break called the oil depletion allowance,
even now when most Americans are sinking deeper into poverty. [4]
The
underlying cause of U.S. activity in Central Asia, in traditional areas of
Russian influence like Kazakhstan, lies in the heightened interest of western
oil companies and their representatives in Washington, for three decades or
longer, in developing and above all controlling the underdeveloped oil and gas
resources of the Caspian basin. [5]
To
this end Washington has developed policies that have produced forward bases in
Kyrgyzstan and for four years in Uzbekistan (2001-05). [6]
The
overt purpose of these bases was to support U.S. military operations in
Afghanistan. But the U.S. presence also encourages the governments in nearby
Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, both areas of U.S. oil and gas investment, to act
more independently of Russian approval.
Washington
serves the interest of western oil companies, not just because of their corrupt
influence over the administration, but because the survival of the current U.S.
petro-economy depends on western domination of the global oil trade. A passage
in Drugs, Oil, and War describes this policy, and how it has contributed to
recent American interventions, and also the impoverishment of the Third World
since 1980.
In essence, the U.S. handled the quadrupling of oil prices in the
1970s by arranging, by means of secret agreements with the Saudis, for the
recycling of petrodollars back into the U.S. economy. The first of these deals
assured a special and on-going Saudi stake in the health of the U.S. dollar;
the second secured continuing Saudi support for the pricing of all OPEC oil in
dollars. [7]
These
two deals assured that the U.S. economy would not be impoverished by OPEC oil
price hikes. The heaviest burdens would be borne instead by the economies of
less developed countries. [8]
The
U.S. dollar, weakening as it is, still depends largely on the OPEC policy of
demanding U.S. dollars for payment of OPEC oil. Just how strongly America will
enforce this OPEC policy can be seen by the fate of those countries that have
chosen to challenge it. “Saddam Hussein in 2000 insisted Iraq's oil be sold for
euros, a political move, but one that improved Iraq's recent earnings thanks to
the rise in the value of the euro against the dollar." [9]
Three
years later, in March 2003, America invaded Iraq. Two months after that, on May
22, 2003, Bush by executive order decreed that Iraqi oil sales would be
returned from euros to dollars. [10]
Shortly
before the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, Qaddafi, according to a Russian
article, initiated a movement, like Saddam Hussein’s, to refuse the dollar for
oil payments. [11]
Meanwhile
Iran, in February 2009, announced that it had “completely stopped conducting
oil transactions in U.S. dollars.” [12]
The
full consequences of Iran’s daring move have yet to be seen. [13]
I
repeat:
Every recent U.S. and NATO intervention has served to prop up the waning dominance of western oil companies over the global oil and petrodollar system.
But
I believe that oil companies themselves are capable of initiating or at least
contributing to political interventions. As I say in my book (p.8):
There are recurring allegations that US oil companies, either directly or through cutouts, engage in covert operations; in Colombia (as we shall see) a US security firm working for Occidental Petroleum took part in a Colombian army military operation "that mistakenly killed 18 civilians.”
More
relevant to Russia was a 2002 covert operation in Azerbaijan, a classic
exercise in deep politics. There former CIA operatives, employed by a dubious
oil firm (MEGA Oil), “engaged in military training, passed ‘brown bags filled
with cash’ to members of the government, and set up an airline…which soon was
picking up hundreds of mujahedeen mercenaries in Afghanistan.” [14]
These
mercenaries, eventually said to number 2000, were initially used to combat
Russian-backed Armenian forces in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh; but
they also backed Muslim fighters in Chechnya and Dagestan. They also
contributed to the establishment of Baku as a transshipment point for Afghan
heroin to both the Russian urban market and also the Chechen mafia. [15]
In
1993 they also contributed to the ouster of Azerbaijan’s elected first
president, Abulfaz Elchibey, and his replacement by Heidar Aliyev, who then
agreed to a major oil contract with BP, including what eventually became the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline to Turkey.
Note
that the U.S. background of the MEGA Oil operatives is unmistakable. However
who financed MEGA is unclear; and may have been the oil majors, many of which
have or have had their own covert services. [16]
There
are allegations that major oil corporations, including Exxon and Mobil as well
as BP, were “behind the coup d’état” replacing Elchibey with Aliyev. [17]
It
is clear that Washington and the oil majors have a common perception that their
survival depends on maintaining their present dominance of international oil
markets. In the 1990s, when it was widely believed that the world’s largest
unproven reserves of hydrocarbons lay in the Caspian basin of Central Asia,
this region became the central focus for both corporate U.S. petro investment
and also for U.S. security expansion. [18]
Clinton’s
close friend Strobe Talbott, speaking as Deputy Secretary of State, attempted
to put forward a reasonable strategy for this expansion. In an important speech
of July 21, 1997,
Talbott
outlined four dimensions of U.S. support to the countries of the Caucasus and
Central Asia:
1) The promotion of democracy;2) The creation of free market economies;3) The sponsorship of peace and cooperation within and among the countries of the region: and,4) Integration into the larger international community.
Inveighing
against what he considers an outdated conception of competition in the Caucasus
and Central Asia, Mr. Talbott admonished any who would consider the "Great
Game" as a model on which to base current views of the region. He
proposed, instead, an arrangement where everyone cooperates and everyone wins. [19]
But
this multipolar approach was immediately attacked by members of both parties.
Only three days later, the right-wing Heritage Foundation, think-tank for the Republican
Party, charged that, "The Clinton Administration ~ intent on placating
Moscow ~ has hesitated to take advantage of the strategic opportunity to secure
U.S. interests in the Caucasus." [20]
In
October this critique was echoed in a new book, The Grand Chessboard, by former
National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, perhaps Russia’s most important
opponent in the Democratic Party.
Conceding that the “ultimate objective of American policy should be… to shape a truly cooperative global community,” Brzezinski nonetheless defended for now the “great game” that Talbott had rejected.“It is imperative,” he wrote, “that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of … challenging America.” [21]
Meanwhile,
behind this verbal debate, the CIA and Pentagon, through NATO, were developing
a “forward strategy” in the area that was antithetical to Talbott’s. Under the
umbrella of NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PFP) Program, the Pentagon in 1997
began military training exercises with Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan,
as “the embryo of a NATO-led military force in the region.” [22]
These
CENTRAZBAT exercises had in mind the possible future deployment of U.S. combat
forces; and a deputy assistant secretary of defense, Catherine Kelleher, cited
“the presence of enormous energy resources” as a justification for American
military involvement.[23] Uzbekistan, which Brzezinski singled out for its
geopolitical importance, became the linchpin of U.S. training exercises,
despite having one of the worst human rights records locally. [24]
The
American sponsored “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan (March 2005) was another
conspicuous product of the CIA-Pentagon forward strategy doctrine. It came at a
time when George W. Bush repeatedly spoke of a “forward strategy of freedom,”
and Bush later, when visiting Georgia, endorsed the changeover (more like a
bloody coup d’état than a “revolution”) as an example of “spreading democracy
and freedom.” [25]
But
the new Bakiyev regime, in the words of Columbia University Professor Alexander
Cooley, “ran the country like a criminal syndicate.” In particular many
observers accused Bakiyev of taking over and running the local drug traffic as
a family enterprise. [26]
To
some extent the Obama regime has retreated from the hegemonic Pentagon rhetoric
of (in its words) “full spectrum dominance.” [27]
But
it is not surprising that under Obama pressures to reduce Russian influence
(e.g. in Syria) have continued. For a half century Washington has been divided
between a minority (principally in the State Department, like Talbott) who have
envisaged a future of cooperation with the Soviet Union, and those hegemonic
hawks (principally in the CIA and Pentagon, like William Casey, Dick Cheney and
Donald Rumsfeld) who have pushed for a U.S. strategy of unipolar global
domination. [28]
The
latter have not hesitated to use drug-trafficking assets in pursuit of this
unattainable goal, notably in Indochina, Colombia, and now Afghanistan. [29]
Significantly,
the hawks have used the drug eradication strategies of the DEA (Drug
Enforcement Administration) as well. [30]
As
I wrote in Drugs, Oil, and War (p. 89),
The true purpose of most of these campaigns … has not been the hopeless ideal of eradication. It has been to alter market share: to target specific enemies and thus ensure that the drug traffic remains under the control of those traffickers who are allies of the Colombian state security apparatus and/or the CIA. [31]
This
has been conspicuously true in Afghanistan, where the U.S. recruited former
drug traffickers to join in its 2001 invasion. [32]
Later
the U.S. announced a drug reduction strategy that was explicitly limited to
attacking those drug traffickers supporting the insurgents. [33]
Thus
those concerned (as I am) with reducing Afghan drug flows are faced with a
dilemma. Effective strategies against international drug trafficking must be
multilateral, and in Central Asia they will require increased U.S.-Russian
cooperation. On the other hand the energies of the principal pro-U.S. forces
currently on the ground there ~ notably the CIA, U.S. armed forces, NATO,
and the DEA ~ have in the past been intent primarily not on cooperation but on
U.S. hegemony.
The
answer I believe will lie in team efforts using the expertise and resources of
both countries, housed in bilateral or multilateral agencies not dominated by
either. A successful drug strategy will also have to be multi-faceted, like the
successful campaign in northern Thailand, and will probably require both
countries to consider people-friendly strategies not yet adopted by either. [34]
Russia
and America share many features and concerns. They are both still super states,
even if now losing preeminence in the face of a rising China.
As
superpowers both were tempted into Afghan adventures that many wiser heads
regret.
Meanwhile
Afghanistan, now a ravaged country, presents urgent problems for all three
superstates: the menace of drugs, and the related menace of terrorism.
The
whole planet has a stake in seeing Russia and America deal with these menaces
constructively and not exploitatively. And any progress made in reducing these
shared threats will hopefully be another step in the difficult process of
learning to consolidate peace.
The
last century saw a Cold War between the US and the USSR, two super states which
both armed heavily in the name of defending their people.
The
USSR lost, leaving an unstable Pax Americana much like the Pax Britannica of
the 19th century: that is, a dangerous mix of globalizing commerce, increasing
disparity of wealth and income, and wildly excessive and expansive militarism,
leading to increasing conflict (Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya), and
increasing danger of a possible new world war (Iran).
To
preserve its perilous dominance the US today is arming against its own people,
not just in defense of them. [35]
All
the peoples of the world,
including the Americans,
have a stake in seeing
that expansive dominance reduced,
towards a less militarist
and more multi-polar world.
including the Americans,
have a stake in seeing
that expansive dominance reduced,
towards a less militarist
and more multi-polar world.
[1]
Less obviously, but unmistakably, oil (or in this case an oil pipeline) was a factor also in the 1998 NATO intervention in Kosovo. See Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 29; Peter Dale Scott, “Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington’s On-Going Collusion with Terrorists, July 29, 2011,
[2]
Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 8-9,11.
[3]
Exxon for example is said to have paid no U.S. federal income tax in 2009, at a time of near-record profits (Washington Post, May 11, 2011,Cf. Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxinMobil and American Power (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 19-20: “In some of the faraway countries where it did business,… Exxon’s sway over local politics and security was greater than that of the United States embassy.”
[4]
Charles J. Lewis, “Obama again urges end to oil industry tax breaks,” Houston Chronicle, April 27, 2011,“Politics News: Obama Urges Congress to End Oil Subsidies,” Newsy.com, March 2, 2012,
[5]
Cf. an article in 2001 from the Foreign Military Studies Office of Fort Leavenworth:The Caspian Sea appears to be sitting on yet another sea—a sea of hydrocarbons. …The presence of these oil reserves and the possibility of their export raises [sic] new strategic concerns for the United States and other Western industrial powers. As oil companies build oil pipelines from the Caucasus and Central Asia to supply Japan and the West, these strategic concerns gain military implications. (Lester W. Grau, “Hydrocarbons and a New Strategic Region: The Caspian Sea and Central Asia. (Military Review [May–June 2001]. 96; quoted in Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 31)
[6]
See discussion in Peter Dale Scott, "Launching the U.S. Terror War: the CIA, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Central Asia," The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, March 15, 2012,There have also been diplomatic discussions of a possible U.S. base in Tajikistan: see Joshua Kucera, “U.S.: Tajikistan Wants to Host an American Air Base,” Eurasia.net, December 14, 2010,
[7]
David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999), x: “In 1974 [Treasury Secretary William] Simon negotiated a secret deal so the Saudi central bank could buy U.S. Treasury securities outside of the normal auction. A few years later, Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal cut a secret deal with the Saudis so that OPEC would continue to price oil in dollars. These deals were secret because the United States had promised other industrialized democracies that it would not pursue such unilateral policies." Cf. 103-12.
[8]
"So long as OPEC oil was priced in U.S. dollars, and so long as OPEC invested the dollars in U.S. government instruments, the U.S. government enjoyed a double loan. The first part of the loan was for oil. The government could print dollars to pay for oil, and the American economy did not have to produce goods and services in exchange for the oil until OPEC used the dollars for goods and services. Obviously, the strategy could not work if dollars were not a means of exchange for oil. The second part of the loan was from all other economies that had to pay dollars for oil but could not print currency. Those economies had to trade their goods and services for dollars in order to pay OPEC" (Spiro, Hidden Hand, 121).
[9]
Hoyos, Carol & Morrison, Kevin, "Iraq returns to the international oil market," Financial Times, June 5, 2003. Cf. Coll, Private Empire, 232: “A desperate Saddam Hussein, toward the end of his time in power, had signed production-sharing contracts with Russian and Chinese companies, but these agreements had never been implemented.”
[10]
Scott, Road to 9/11, 190-91. Cf. also William Clark, “The Real Reasons Why Iran is the Next Target:The Emerging Euro-denominated International Oil Marker,” Global Research, 27 October 2004,
[11]
“???????? ????? – ????????? ??????? ?? ??????? ???????? ???????? ??????,” Live Journal, March 21, 2011,discussion in Peter Dale Scott, “The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus,” , April 27, 2011,
[12]
“Iran Ends Oil Transactions In U.S. Dollars,” CBS News, February 11, 2009,
[13]
In March 2012 Swift, the body that handles global banking transactions, moved to cut Iran's banks out of the system, in response to American and UN sanctions (BBC News, March 15, 2012). Business Week (February 28, 2012) commented that the action “might roil oil markets on concern that buyers will be unable to pay the second-largest producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries for its 2.2 million barrels a day of oil exports.”
[14]
Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11, 163-64; cf. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7.
[15]
Scott, The Road to 9/11, 164
[16]
The World War II covert operations agency OSS was thrown together in part by recruiting Asia hands from oil companies like Standard Oil of New Jersey (Esso). See Smith, OSS, 15, 211.
[17]
“BP oiled coup with cash, Turks claim”, Sunday Times (London), March 26, 2000; quoted in Scott, The Road to 9/11, 165.
[18]
In 1998, Dick Cheney, when chief executive of the oil services company Hallibuton, remarked: “I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian” (Guardian [London], October 23, 2001,
[19]
R. Craig Nation, “Russia, the United States, and the Caucasus,” Army War College (U.S.). Strategic Studies Institute,Talbott’s words are worth quoting at length: “"For the last several years, it has been fashionable to proclaim or at least to predict, a replay of the 'Great Game' in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The implication of course is that the driving dynamic of the region, fueled and lubricated by oil, will be the competition of great powers to the disadvantage of the people who live there. Our goal is to avoid and to actively discourage that atavistic outcome. ….. The Great Game, which starred Kipling's Kim and Fraser's Flashman, was very much of the zero-sum variety. What we want to help bring about is just the opposite, we want to see all responsible players in the Caucasus and Central Asia be winners." (M.K. Bhadrakumar, “Foul Play in the Great Game,” Asia Times, July 13, 2005,
[20]
James MacDougall, “A New Stage in U.S.-Caspian Sea Basin Relations,” Central Asia, 5 (11), 1997,quoting from Ariel Cohen, “U.S. Policy in the Caucasus and Central Asia: Building A New"Silk Road" to Economic Prosperity,” Heritage Foundation, July 24, 1997,In October 1997 Sen. Sam Brownback introduced a bill, the Silk Road Strategy Act of 1997 (S. 1344), providing incentives for the new Central Asian states to cooperate with the United States, rather than with Russia or Iran.
[21]
Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), xiv.
[22]
Ariel Cohen, Eurasia In Balance: The US And The Regional Power Shift, 107.
[23]
Michael Klare, Blood and Oil (New York: Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt, 2004), 135-36; citing R. Jeffrey Smith, “U.S. Leads Peacekeeping Drill in Kazakhstan,” Washington Post, September 15, 1997. CF. Kenley Butler, “U.S. Military Cooperation with the Central Asian States,” September 17, 2001,
[24]
Brzezinski, Grand Chessboard, 121.
[25]
Peter Dale Scott, “Kyrgyzstan, the U.S. and the Global Drug Problem: Deep Forcesand the Syndrome of Coups, Drugs, and Terror,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus,quoting President Bush, State of the Union address, January 20, 2004; “Bush: Georgia’s Example a Huge Contribution to Democracy,” Civil Georgia, May 10, 2005,Likewise Zbigniew Brzezinski was quoted by a Kyrgyz news source as saying “I believe revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan were a sincere and snap expression of the political will”http://eng.24kg.org/politic/2008/03/27/4973.html, March 27, 2008).
[26]
Scott, “Kyrgyzstan, the U.S. and the Global Drug Problem;” citing 19 Owen Matthews, “Despotism Doesn’t Equal Stability,” Newsweek, April 7, 2010 (Cooley); Peter Leonard, “Heroin trade a backdrop to Kyrgyz violence,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 24, 2010; “Kyrgyzstan Relaxes Control Over Drug Trafficking,” Jamestown Foundation, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 7:24, February 4, 2010, etc.
[27]
U.S. Department of Defense, Joint Vision 2020, May 30, 2000; discussion in Scott, Road to 9/11, 20.
[28]
U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark has reported that back in 1991 one of the neocons in the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, told him that “we’ve about five or ten years to clean up those old soviet client regimes ~ Syria, Iran, Iraq ~ before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us” (Wesley Clark, Talk to Commonwealth Club, October 3, 2007,Ten years later, in November 2001, he heard in the Pentagon that plans to attack Iraq were “being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, …beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan” [Wesley Clark, Winning Modern Wars (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003], 130).
[29]
See Scott, American War Machine.
[30]
For the hegemonic perversion of the DEA’s “war on drugs” in Asia, see Scott, American War Machine, 121-40.
[31]
Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 89.
[32]
An example was Haji Zaman Ghamsharik who had retired to Dijon in France, where British and American official met with him and persuaded him to return to Afghanistan (Peter Dale Scott, “America’s Afghanistan: The National Security and a Heroin-Ravaged State,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus,citing Philip Smucker, Al Qaeda’s Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror’s Trail [Washington: Brassey’s, 2004], 9. For other drug traffickers, see Scott, Road to 9/11, 125.
[33]
Scott. American War Machine, 235 (insurgents); James Risen, “U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Lords Tied to Taliban,” New York Times, August 10, 2009: ”United States military commanders have told Congress that… only those [drug traffickers] providing support to the insurgency would be made targets.”
[34]
Russia has understandably been aggrieved by America’s and NATO’s failure over a decade to deal seriously with the huge Afghan drug crop (e.g. “Russia lashes out at NATO for not fighting Afghan drug production,” RT, February 28, 2010,But the simple remedy Russia has proposed, destruction of crops in the field, would by itself probably drive peasants further into the arms of Afghanistan’s militant Islamic fundamentalists, another threat to Russia and America alike. Many observers have noted that poppy field eradication leaves the small farmers in debt to the landowners and traffickers, often having to repay “in cash, land, livestock, or ~ not infrequently ~ a daughter….Poppy eradication just pushed them deeper into the poverty that led to their growing opium in the first place” (Joel Hafvenstein, Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier, 214); cf. “Opium Brides,” PBS Frontline,Opium eradication in Thailand, often cited as the most successful program anywhere since China’s in the 1950s, was achieved by combining military enforcement with comprehensive alternative development programs. See William Byrd and Christopher Ward, "Drugs and Development in Afghanistan," World Bank: Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction Unit, Working paper series, Vol. 18 (December 2004); also “Secret of Thai success in opium war,” BBC News, February 19, 2009,
[35]
See e.g. Peter Dale Scott, "Is the State of Emergency Superseding our Constitution? Continuity of Government Planning, War and American Society," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, November 28, 2010, http:/1/
Courtesy
Global Research.
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