Obama, Congress and Our Afghan Reality

 

By

 Roger Armbrust

 -

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

 

By

 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.

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.

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

 

By

 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.