Monday, August 14, 2023

Obama, Congress and Our Afghan Reality

June 29, 2010

By Roger Armbrust
Special to The Clyde Fitch Report

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that “Congress will debate its divisions over U.S. policy on Afghanistan.” Let’s not let political rhetoric fog our view of historic reality.

President Barack Obama and Congress’ efforts to secure the invasion of Afghanistan represent a continuum going back to Jimmy Carter. Our present president realizes, just as his predecessors did, that the object of maneuvering in Afghanistan is not to destroy the Taliban — which obviously no nation’s been able to do since we first gave them weapons in the early 1980s — but to continue efforts to neutralize Russia while also forcing the Taliban eventually to reach an agreement. On what? Allowing multibillion-dollar Trans-Afghanistan pipelines for natural gas and oil, stretching from Turkmenistan to Pakistan, India and beyond. Why? Controlling energy is the key to superpower. American presidents and lawmakers know this, although they don’t seem to want to talk about it.

Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, revealed in a 1998 interview that Carter in 1979 had provided the catalyst for the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. The president signed a secret directive on July 3 of that year which aided enemies of Kabul’s pro-Soviet regime. Brzezinski said the move was calculated to induce the Soviets into the “Afghan trap,” thus “giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.”

U.S. arming of Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan pushed the Taliban into a power foothold. Brzezinski’s 1998 view of that:

“What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”

In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Brzezinski presents his premise that the U.S. must concentrate on Eurasia to remain the lone global superpower and “to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia.” To do that, it helps to control energy sources and supplies.

Brzezinski went on to become a consultant for Amoco, which later became a player in the push for Trans-Afghan pipelines. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s former secretary of state, got involved, too, through consulting for California-based Unocal, which led negotiations with the Taliban in a major Trans-Afghan effort. Dick Cheney’s Halliburton also joined the mix, as did Chevron when Condoleezza Rice sat on its board. Enron chief Ken Lay, a George W. Bush crony, also worked for an Afghan pipeline to feed a gigantic Enron-built Indian power plant. All this in the 1990s after the Soviet Union’s fall, allowing the strong Western attempt to take control of gas and oil in the Caspian region.

Bill Clinton stalemated oil companies’ efforts at the Trans-Afghan lines in the late ’90s, classifying the Taliban as an enemy. In April 1999, excluding U.S. interests, Afghanistan (under the Taliban), Pakistan and Turkmenistan reactivated the Trans-Afghan effort. In July, Clinton froze the Taliban’s U.S. assets and prohibited trade with Afghanistan, economically frustrating the pipeline effort.

Meanwhile, Clinton had put millions of U.S. tax dollars and thousands of administrative man hours in developing the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, moving the Caspian Sea’s oil and gas through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean — a way to get energy to Europe and circumvent Russia.

Then, Clinton’s out of the White House, and oilman George W. Bush is in, bringing Cheney and Rice, along with other oil connections, with him. And the Trans-Afghan pipelines again become a quiet priority.

One Bush cohort, Paul Wolfowitz, joins them with a position paper describing how the U.S. could seize the Persian Gulf’s oil wells: “some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor” (see page 51). Bush and Cheney obviously respond to that. Bush later canonizes Wolfowitz president of the World Bank, where he begins rerouting hundreds of millions of dollars, designed originally for fighting poverty, to Pakistan and other nations supporting the U.S. in its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

After Sept. 11, 2001, news reports began appearing, revealing how the Bush Administration had attempted to negotiate with the Taliban about the Trans-Afghan pipelines, as well as trying to get the Afghan rulers to turn Osama bin Laden over to the U.S. The BBC reported that U.S. representatives had informed a former Pakistani foreign secretary in mid-July 2001 that Bush — tired of negotiating — was preparing to attack Afghanistan as early as October. A U.S. State Department report noted that U.S. reps met with the Taliban, for the last time, five weeks before Sept. 11.

After invading Afghanistan, Bush placed Hamid Karzai as head of the interim government. He now reigns after a disputed election. Karzai is a former consultant to Unocal. Under him, in December 2002, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Pakistan again signed an agreement to build the Trans-Afghanistan natural gas pipeline. Meanwhile, the war has kept the Trans-Afghan pipelines from developing.

But news reports surfaced last week that Karzai had recently met with Taliban leader and al-Qaida affiliate Sirajuddin Haqqani in an effort to build a “separate peace” with the Taliban. The New York Times reported that Karzai was discussing with Haqqani (who has a $5 million U.S. price on his head) a “power sharing” arrangement.

Meanwhile, as President Obama and Congress scurry to replace U.S. military leadership in Afghanistan, the Trans-Afghan pipelines just might remain quietly in their plans. And not so quietly in the mind of Brzezinski (called by Obama “one of our most outstanding thinkers“). Brzezinski was reported saying after the 2008 Russia-Georgia war how “the construction of a pipeline from Central Asia via Afghanistan to the south…will maximally expand world society’s access to the Central Asian energy market.” The news report, by Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar, placed the price on the 1,600 km gas pipeline at more than $7.6 billion. And where there’s a natural gas pipeline in place through Afghanistan, would an oil pipeline not be far behind?

American Coup: When U.S. versus Iran Really Began

Roger Armbrust

December 16, 2012

If you really want to understand why the United States’ presidents through Bush and Obama are determined to attack Iran, take a look at the documentary film American Coup. Produced by Matador Films and directed by Joe Ayella, the 53-minute film traces the Central Intelligence Agency’s first coup: the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democracy.

mosaddeq — Mosaddegh after nationalizing oil.

That’s right: democracy. In 1951, Iran’s parliament elected Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh-a brilliant lawyer and politician, fierce nationalist and social reformer-as prime minister. You’d think the U.S., which preaches democracy, would love the idea.

But there was a problem. At the beginning of the 20th Century, the then Shah of Iran, the country’s ruler, had given British businessman William Knox D’arcy permission to search for oil. By 1908, he’d found it, and formed the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), which contracted with Iran to handle oil production and split the profits.

By 1923, APOC’s parent company hired Winston Churchill, later Britain’s prime minister, as a paid consultant. He lobbied the British government, which allowed APOC exclusive rights to Persian oil resources. The Shah went along. And when the Shah got the international community to recognize Persia as “Iran,” APOC went along, changing its name to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC).

Long story short, following World War II, nationalism was rising in Iran, and democracy set in. Mosaddegh, with his electoral mandate, declared that Iran’s old contract with AIOC had been manipulated in favor of the oil company, that Iran was still a poor country because of it. He nationalized all Iranian oil production, basically taking it away from AIOC and ending its free flow to Great Britain. This set the stage for the U.S. entry and eventual clandestine effort.

Director Ayella uses archived footage and interviews with authorities to unfold the ’53 coup. Author Stephen Kinzer (All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror) shares his research and analysis of the coup process. So does Malcolm Byrne (co-editor of the textbook Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran). Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a former aide to Gen. Colin Powell, discusses how Churchill-Brit prime minister when Mosaddegh nationalized the oil-urged President Truman to overthrow Iran’s democracy. Truman was irate, Wilkerson notes, and bellowed no. But Eisenhower, who followed Truman in the presidency, feared Iran’s possible communist alignment with Russia, and saw a coup much cheaper than a war. American oil companies also saw threats of other such nationalization efforts possibly rising elsewhere in the Middle East.

president_eisenhower_and_john_foster_dulles_in_1956 — Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles

That led to the entrance of the Dulles brothers-John Foster, secretary of state, and Allen, CIA director-who devised the Iranian coup. They brought in Kermit Roosevelt, a son of former President Theodore Roosevelt, who went to Iran and, from the basement of the U.S.embassy, masterminded the overthrow. This included bribes to newspapers who painted Mosaddegh a villain, criminals who would form mobs to disrupt the peace, and members of the Iranian military who would eventually arrest Mosaddegh.

The documentary does a masterful job of detailing Roosevelt’s efforts, which set the pattern for future U.S. coups around the globe. It also notes that the coup established Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the new Shah and dictator, and AIOC came back into the mix under a new name: British Petroleum.

But the coup also aroused radical opposition to the U.S.-once seen as the star opponent of colonialism-by the Iranian mullahs, who after 25 years of the Shah’s rule, led the revolt and remain in power, including over Iranian oil (the world’s third largest reserves) and natural gas (the globe’s second largest reserves).

Kinzer ends by bemoaning the coup, saying that it kept true democracy from flourishing in Iran, which might have made the country a stable mainstay in the Middle East today, as opposed to helping create repressive conditions which led to last year’s Arab Spring.

LinkTV, the American satellite channel broadcasting international documentaries, news and entertainment, has been airing American Coup through December. You can find the schedule here.

This column is now in my book The Vital Realities for 2020 and Beyond: Writings on Water Wars, Nuclear Devastation, Endless War, Economic Revolution, and Surveillance Versus Freedom published by Parkhurst Brothers, Publishers.

The Vital Realities for 2020 and Beyond: Writings on Water Wars, Nuclear Devastation, Endless War, Economic Revolution, and Surveillance Versus Freedom - Kindle edition by Armbrust, Roger. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Let’s Get Real About Iran Nuke Deal

Roger Armbrust

August 16, 2015

It’s time to stop listening to the neocons in the Millionaire Congress (with its 14% public approval rating) and corporate media, and consider some facts and fresh voices on the Iran Nuclear Deal.

The corporate media keeps wanting us to think that problems with Iran began with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini‘s followers taking American embassy workers hostage in 1979.

Not so.

The American problem with Iran began in 1953 when the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) instigated a coup, overthrowing the DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED government in Iran. The U.S. installed the Shah as ruler, giving the West control again over Iranian oil.

The neocons want the American public to believe that our chief concern should be the possibility that Iran can create a nuclear weapon, which could spell doom for the free world.

Not so.

Instead, the American public should concern itself with who actually IS DEVELOPING nuclear weapons: The Obama administration has instituted a 10-year TRILLION-DOLLAR revitalizing of nuclear armaments. In response, Russia has announced adding 40 nuclear-warhead missiles, with capabilities to penetrate missile defense systems, to its arsenal. And China is increasing its nuclear defense program. In the past, we called that a Cold War. But with U.S. saber-rattling, it could get hot fast.

Is the Iran Nuke Deal a Good Deal?

The neocons in Congress, and the neocon leader of Israel, say the nuclear agreement with Iran is evil. The Obama administration says it’s good for America. Here’s what some non-politicians say:

Israel’s former security advisors — including former generals and the Mossad — are urging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept the Iran deal, a move they feel would help restore trust between Jerusalem and Washington.

As far back as April, a plethora of nuclear experts welcomed the blueprint of the Iran nuclear agreement. You can read all their statements here.

Who Will Control Oil, Gas, Eurasia?

The problem has never really been about Iran’s nuclear capability. The real concern is this: Who will control Eurasia and the flow of oil and natural gas?

Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, since the ’70s has been pushing for the U.S. to be the world’s lone super power by controlling Eurasia. He takes credit for the U.S. arming the Taliban in the ’70s and seducing Russia into invading Afghanistan, which Brzezinski saw as “Russia’s Vietnam”.

Not learning from Russia’s mistakes in Afghanistan or America’s in Vietnam, the U.S. followed Russia, invading Afghanistan, pushing into Iraq, in Libya and around Ukraine through NATO, and now into Syria.

Meanwhile, the U.S. sanctions on Iran and Russia created another form of declared war. And opponents to Iran possess major concerns which have nothing to do with nuclear weapons or supporting terrorism. Here is the major concern:

Iran, once sanctions are lifted, will become a major supplier of oil and natural gas to Russia, China and possibly the other BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Indeed, Iran may end up becoming a member of BRICS, and join its effort to grow the global economy separate from American and European control, as well as operating in currencies separate from the U.S. dollar.

But none of this may prove of concern if the public doesn’t force policymakers to halt the growing U.S./Russia/China nuclear buildup and begin sanely negotiating standing down on nuclear weapons. Remember: in this age of high technology, with nuclear weapons depending on computer controls, all it might take is some mad hacker, or team of hackers, to set off a first nuclear missile. Guess where we’ll all end up then.

Sunday, July 30, 2023

The Coming Conflict over Santa’s Home

Roger Armbrust

December 25, 2013

St. Nick, the missus, their elves and eight tiny reindeer are about to be joined by major nations’ military forces, in what could lead to conflict over possession of the North Pole’s oil, gas, and fresh-water reserves.

Scientists consider the Arctic-one of the last vast wilderness areas-vital to biodiversity and extremely sensitive to global warming. The northern global sector, a wide ice-covered ocean surrounded by treeless permafrost, has seen recent years of warmer temperatures and melting sea ice.

But the jolly old elf’s homeland is also deep in natural resources, including oil, gas, and fresh water, along with fish and, in the subarctic, forestlands-all considered economic boons to the major nations. A number of those countries claim property rights to sections of the area. Those sovereignties include Canada, Russia, the United States (Alaska), Denmark (Greenland), Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. They are limited to a 200-nautical-mile economic zone around their border coasts which lie within the Arctic region.

Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a country has ten years to claim an extended continental shelf beyond those 200 nautical miles. Russia, Canada, Norway, and Denmark all have started projects to claim extended territories. All are signees to the U.N. convention on sea law.

Canada has made the most recent and controversial move, last week marking a claim, and it appears to be extensive. According to the article “Did Canada Just Claim the North Pole?” in The Diplomat, a Tokyo-based, online magazine covering politics, society and culture in the Asia-Pacific region:

Canada may have positioned itself to eventually claim sovereignty over the North Pole. Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird made a statement last week that revealed that a scientific and geographical survey regarding its claim to Arctic territories will be submitted to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf and may contain data robust enough to lay claim to the North Pole. The submission is necessitated by Canada’s participation in the UN Convention on the Law of Sea (UNCLOS). The move represents a bold political push by Stephen Harper’s conservative government to extend Canada’s rights in the Arctic.

The Canadian decision to assertively pursue a claim to the North Pole has a clear foundation in its national interest: the Arctic seabed is expected to contain over one-quarter of the world’s undiscovered energy resources, according to The Globe and Mail. The U.S. Geological Survey provides more specific numbers: the Arctic may contain 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil reserves, 30 percent of undiscovered gas deposits, and 20 percent of the undiscovered natural gas liquids.

According to UK’s The Guardian newspaper, the Canadian move has led Russia to increase its military presence in the Arctic. Territorial claims before the U.N. could drag on for years, with other countries’ approval required. But that’s not stopping active military buildup, according to the paper:

In the meantime Canada and Russia have been stepping up their military footprint in the oil- and gas-rich region. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has said Russia will restore Arctic bases that fell into disrepair after the collapse of the Soviet Union, including one on the New Siberian Islands. On Tuesday he said this base and others were crucial to protecting Russia’s “security and national interests”.

How the U.S. will respond to Canada’s and Russia’s actions isn’t clear yet. But two things are clear:

First, the U.S. has not even signed the U.N. convention on sea law, even though it helped form it. Republican senators have opposed the convention and held back the Senate’s ability to attain a two-thirds majority vote favoring the treaty.

Second, America’s vast military seems to need conflict to survive, having a record of constant invasion of foreign lands ranging from the Middle East to Africa, either through direct fighting or as “advisers” or supporters of reigning governments. Congress doesn’t ever seem to declare war or call them wars anymore. It just keeps funding presidents’ decisions to militarily enter other nations’ borders for “regional conflicts,” with U.N. approval or no.

And the U.S. is preparing militarily for a move in the Arctic, according to a Reuters Nov. 22 article:

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced on Friday the Pentagon’s first Arctic strategy to guide changes in military planning as rapidly thawing ice reshapes global commerce and energy exploration, possibly raising tensions along the way.

So stay tuned. And if your kids want to write Santa a thank-you letter after hauling in their loot this Christmas, suggest to them they warn St. Nick to stay alert for invading foreigners. Meanwhile, you may want to contact your senators and find out if they’re going to approve the U.N. sea-law convention, and if they want to send Americans to fight in the Arctic.

Merry Christmas.

This column was first published in The Clyde Fitch Report, and is now in my book The Vital Realities for 2020 and Beyond: Writings on Water Wars, Nuclear Devastation, Endless War, Economic Revolution, and Surveillance Versus Freedom.

Sunday, July 16, 2023

Is War a Racket? An Honored Marine General Said “Yes!”

Roger Armbrust

June 17, 2014

Have you heard of Smedley Butler? Perhaps not lately. He was a U.S. Marine who received the Congressional Medal of Honor TWICE. Also the Corps’ highly respected Brevet Medal and the Army and Navy Distinguished Service Medal. He retired as a Major General in 1939.

But before he retired, in 1935, he wrote a book. Was it called Courage in Battle? No. Was it called We Defend the World? No. Was it called America, Love It or Leave It? No. It was called War is a Racket.

Based on his career as a military officer, Butler discussed—first in a speech then later in book form—how business profiteered from war. In the book, he summarized his view this way:

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

Butler suggested three actions to quell the war racket. First, take the profit motive out of war:

It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war. The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labour before the nation’s manhood can be conscripted. … Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our ship-builders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted — to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

Second, decide to go to war only by a limited referendum, with the only eligible voters being those who would fight on the front lines.

size0 — U.S. military seems mired in the Middle East.

Third, limit the military to only actions of self-defense, with the Navy staying within 200 miles of the U.S. coastline, the army held within the country’s territorial limits.

By 1940, he was dead at age 58, via an illness similar to cancer.

By 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower, another war hero and a Republican president, was warning America of the military-industrial complex’s potential to take over Washington. By 1964, we saw it spreading with our invasion of Vietnam, followed in our new century with the quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Which brings us to this week, and the Obama administration beginning to ingrain us again in Iraq. This from today’s Associated Press:

Obama met with his national security team Monday evening to discuss options for stopping the militants known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Officials said the president has made no final decisions on how aggressively the U.S. might get involved in Iraq, though the White House continued to emphasize that any military engagement remained contingent on the government in Baghdad making political reforms.

Still, there were unmistakable signs of Americans returning to a country from which the U.S. military fully withdrew more than two years ago. Obama notified Congress that up to 275 troops would be sent to Iraq to provide support and security for U.S. personnel and the American Embassy in Baghdad. The soldiers — 170 of which have already arrived in Iraq — were armed for combat, though Obama has insisted he does not intend for U.S. forces to be engaged in direct fighting.

“We are hard-wired into their system,” the fledgling democracy that America helped institute, said Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Baghdad. “We can’t walk away from it.”

This, of course, is an exercise in military frustration and continued corporate profit. Frustration because a foreign nation that’s a couple of hundred years old (America) is trying to end a 14-centuries-old religious rivalry. National Public Radio summarized that yesterday in a report, which you can read and listen to here.

Meanwhile, the multinational corporations will benefit by continuing to support America’s efforts in nationalism and endless war, and also in rebuilding destroyed areas in the aftermath. And don’t forget how both the U.S. and Russia profit from weapons sales.

You can find a listing of corporations profiting from the military here. A good place to begin as you get organized, get educated, and get active in changing your government’s racket that Washington doesn’t want to change.

Originally published in The Clyde Fitch Report, now in my book The Vital Realities for 2020 and Beyond: