| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Feb 10, 2005 12:59 am Post subject: NYSun: Chalabi for PM?! |
| From: "Ronald" <rbleier@igc.org>
To: "rbleier" <rbleier@igc.org>
Subject: NYSun: Chalabi for PM?!
Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2005 19:18:58 -0500
Thanks to warandpiece.com for pointing to this article.
If Chalabi manages it, and he's brilliant and devious enough to manage it, the war will go on indefinitely. But that is exactly what the Bushcons want. Note how the pro-Zionist Sun is pushing for him. --RB
As much predicted, Ahmad Chalabi is back, and seeking to become Iraq's prime minister:
In a phone interview yesterday with The New York Sun, Mr. Chalabi said he had said yes to the request from prominent members of the United Iraqi Alliance list, the slate of candidates that will likely control a majority of seats in the transitional national assembly to be announced in the coming days.--Laura Rozen: www.warandpiece.com
http://www.nysun.com/article/8934
February 9, 2005 Edition > Section: Foreign > Printer-Friendly Version
Ahmad Chalabi Is on the Brink of a Comeback
BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 9, 2005
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/8934
WASHINGTON - The former Iraqi exile leader who helped found the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi, is seeking his country's highest office and says he has accepted an informal nomination to be prime minister.
In a phone interview yesterday with The New York Sun, Mr. Chalabi said he had said yes to the request from prominent members of the United Iraqi Alliance list, the slate of candidates that will likely control a majority of seats in the transitional national assembly to be announced in the coming days.
Among Mr. Chalabi's supporters is the leader of a resistance against Saddam Hussein in southern Iraq in 1991, Abdul Karim Al Muhammadawi, known as the "prince of the marshes." Mr. Chalabi has also garnered support from a former member of the Iraqi Governing Council, Salama al-Khufaji,who is one of the highest-ranking women on the UIA list. Mr. Chalabi also draws support from the Shiite Political Council, the organization he helped build this summer after he was excluded from the interim government headed by Prime Minister Allawi.
If Mr. Chalabi manages to secure enough support to be prime minister of Iraq, it will mark an extraordinary comeback for the man most analysts wrote off last May, when American and Iraqi soldiers raided his home and confiscated computers on charges that he had employed thugs to bully bureaucrats in the finance ministry. Throughout last summer, Mr. Chalabi was targeted by an untrained judge appointed by the Americans; all charges were eventually dropped. The CIA had written off the former banker as having no political base in Iraq, while leading Democratic politicians blamed him for fabricating intelligence on Saddam Hussein's links to Al Qaeda and arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
Yesterday, Mr. Chalabi said he harbored no ill will towards his old nemeses in Washington and went out of his way to thank the American people, the American military, and President Bush for liberating Iraq. He even found kind words for Jordan, which has an outstanding warrant from a military court for his arrest in connection with his role in the collapse of the Petra Bank. Mr. Chalabi is suing the Jordanian government in federal district court in Washington for racketeering in connection with the bank collapse.
"I am always a friend of the Jordanian people," he told the Sun. "I lived there a long time. I will not comment on this issue other than to say the sting of animosity from some quarters in Jordan against me has been taken out."
In the race for prime minister, Mr. Chalabi's chief rivals are other Shiite politicians, such as the current finance minister, Adel Abdel-Mehdi, who this week rejected a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. Another aspirant to head the Iraqi government is the current leader of the Dawa party, Ibrahim Jafari. Mr. Jafari was a vice president in the Allawi government, but has been a vocal critic of Mr. Allawi in the run-up to the election.
"Chalabi will be influential. He is a force to be reckoned with. He has shown substantial political skills. But in this situation, I think the Shiites will want to choose one of their own, that is their inclination," an Iraq specialist for the Congressional Research Service ho is a former CIA analyst, Kenneth Katzman, said yesterday. "I don't think they can necessarily trust him. He has been with the Americans, now he is not with the Americans. He is not Islamist and he is secular."
A former adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, Michael Rubin, said yesterday that it was too soon to predict who would be the next leader of Iraq. "We are in the primaries. What matters now is that they know who the candidates are, so let the horse-trading begin."
Iraq's election commission is currently counting the ballots Iraqis cast on January 30. According to Iraqi sources, the UIA is likely to receive anywhere from 51% of the seats in the new assembly to more than 60%. The next-highest voting bloc will be the Kurdish slate with Mr. Allawi's party running a distant third.
In the interview yesterday, Mr. Chalabi said one of his main goals would be to open up the heavily guarded "green zone" in the middle of Baghdad to regular Iraqi citizens. Since the fall of Saddam, the palaces and grand hotels that marked the epicenter of the Baathist tyranny have been turned into living quarters and offices, first for coalition officials and later the interim government.
"Symbols of sovereignty must be returned to the Iraqi people through their government. The republican palace is one of the most important symbols, it must be returned to the Iraqi people," Mr. Chalabi said. He added that President al-Yawar has said that President Bush was unaware that the republican palace of Saddam has been virtually off-limits to Iraqis and agreed that the situation should be changed. "We are acutely aware of the security concerns of the United States, and there are sites on the periphery of Baghdad which we will provide to them willingly," Mr. Chalabi said.
Mr. Chalabi also said that he expected the new government to focus on rooting out Baathist elements in the security services that are sympathetic to terrorists. "On the issue of security services, the security plan implemented since the transfer of sovereignty has failed. The number of attacks has more than doubled on a daily average," he said. "That means we believe a major problem has been the introduction of former regime elements at a high level in the intelligence service and the National Guard. It is important to review the background of these people meticulously."
He said he expected the new security services would target geographic areas where the insurgency was strongest, but that he would also fight to make sure the country's courts actually tried terrorists, complaining that there have been no trials for terrorists and many times they have been released after their arrest. "The role of the executive branch in Iraq has been too strong," he said. "We must make the judicial branch stronger and fortify it in order for it to stand up to the executive."
Mr. Chalabi said he agrees with human-rights advocates who wanted to make sure Iraq did not turn into a tyranny of the majority. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal ran an essay by Iraqi author and human rights activist Kanan Makiya warning the ascendant Shiite political class to eschew the confessional politics of ethnicity and religion and help build an inclusive political Iraq. Mr. Chalabi said he agreed with Mr. Makiya without reservation. "We do not want ethnic-or sectarian-based politics in Iraq. But saying it does not make it happen," Mr. Chalabi said. "We believe we are able to do that because we will have another election and write a constitution that will make sectarianism impossible in the new Iraq."
To that end, Mr. Chalabi said that in the coming months, he did not expect the UIA slate or Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani (the world's leading authority on Shiite religious doctrine) to support a constitution that made Islam the sole source of Iraqi law. Stressing that he was not speaking in any way for Mr. Sistani, Mr. Chalabi said, "Ayatollah Sistani is a man who, if anything, is very keen to be consistent. The platform of the UIA, which he basically blessed, contains a reference to the role of Islam in Iraq which is not far from the transitional administrative law, which only said it was one source."
Mr. Chalabi said that he wanted to rethink the presence of some 20,000 security contractors in Iraq and try to give these jobs to Iraqis who will do a better job at security. "Their presence is not welcome at this time and their utility is very limited. They also present a heavy burden on the Iraqi economy, padded in security costs. This is not the way to do it," he said. "We are not going to do anything drastic without coordination and careful planning, but we need to examine ways of doing this differently." The issue is likely to come up in any negotiation of a Status of Forces Agreement. The Coalition Provisional Authority granted security contractors immunity from Iraqi law.
In the interview, Mr. Chalabi's voice was noticeably excited. On three different occasions, he waxed effusively about the historic significance of the elections in which he just ran. He even said, "These elections will have an influence on the democratic movement in Iran." For Mr. Chalabi, who has been accused anonymously of passing American signal intelligence to the Iranians by the CIA and maintained State Department-funded offices in Iran for years before Iraq's liberation, the statement was significant. Mr. Chalabi has denied passing intelligence to the Iranians and has challenged Congress to hold an open hearing at which he could face his accusers on the issue.
Mr. Chalabi said the impact of the elections would reach the entire Islamic world. "Iraqi people voted out a government which had the support of the United States and 150,000 troops in Iraq, with funding 50 times more than the other lists combined, especially on TV time. They did that in the face of major threats by terrorists. The Iraqi people demonstrated this can happen."
February 9, 2005 Edition > | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Feb 10, 2005 1:45 pm Post subject: The Israeli Palestinian Conflict and the spread of Empire an |
| http://desip.igc.org/1-27-05talk.html
The Israeli Palestinian Conflict and the spread of Empire and Desolation
A talk presented at the Friends Peace Center
San Jose, Costa Rica,
January 27, 2005
by Ronald Bleier[i]
Good evening. My name is Ronald Bleier. I'd like to begin with a few words about my background. I was born during the Second World War, in November 1942, on a tiny island called Lopud off the Croatian coastline near Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, while my parents were escaping from the Nazis. Fifteen months later, my brother was born in February 1944 on yet another of these islands called Vis, as my parents continued their escape. In due course, we made it safely to a refugee camp in Italy from where were fortunate to find passage along with about 1,000 mostly Jewish refugees who were granted temporary asylum in the United States by President Roosevelt during the war. About a year after the war, our entire group was granted permanent residency leading to citizenship by an act of Congress during the Truman presidency. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York where I attended yeshiva elementary and high school and where I was indoctrinated in Zionism, an ideology that I didn't question for many years. After graduating from Brooklyn College, I spent two years with the Peace Corps in Iran.
It was only in the aftermath of the 1967 war when it became clear to me that the Israelis did not intend to withdraw from the territories they captured, and were bent on an indefinite military occupation, that my views slowly changed. In the fullness of time I was to meet with a series of disillusionments that culminated in my present anti-Zionist views. The horrific Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 made me understand some of the depths of the savagery and the ruthlessness of Israeli policy. The first Palestinian uprising in December 1987 sparked tremendous interest and activism on the Palestinian issue and roughly coincided with the publication of several revisionist histories by such writers as Simcha Flapan, Benny Morris, Tom Segev, Avi Schlaim and others which opened my eyes to the myths surrounding the birth of Israel. It was then that I learned that Israel was born out of the expulsion of the Palestinian people, and that cruelty and oppression was required in order to retain control of a second class population. Around that time, I realized that I needed to determine for myself the meaning of Zionism. I deduced that it meant the ideology that a Jewish state should replace the former Palestine. From this I concluded that Zionism is manifestly racist in theory and in practice since it treats only Jews as first class citizens.
In my yeshivas we were taught ethical, universal Judaism. We learned about the Torah, the Law of Moses and the Talmudic tradition. I was imbued by my rabbis with the notion of Judaism as a religion embodying justice and human rights. Only much later did I begin to recognize the reality of Israel as a state like other states, engaging in the very worst atrocities of which it was capable in order to further its political goals. And later still I began to recognize the special, terrible way Israel was different from other states since it acted with the full diplomatic, economic and military support of the United States.
My next great disillusionment was to find that I was alone among my family and friends in taking an objective and critical view of Israeli policy. I can still recall the moment in the early 80s when I broached my new views of Israel with my father, a dedicated Zionist. We were in a restaurant and his first reaction was to laugh at my ignorance and naiveté. He couldn't believe that his son would take the side of the Arabs – that's how he saw it. His second reaction was to ask me to lower my voice lest others overhear my outlandish views. My father and I very quickly had to agree to disagree on the issue.
I underwent another disillusionment with regard to the role of the media. I had already been something of a critic of the press, not to mention TV news, but it was a completely new world to learn of the power of the “friends of Israel” lobby to obscure the reality of the crimes of Israel. As it happened, my first publications appeared in the now unfortunately defunct magazine, Lies of Our Times. The rumor going around when the magazine died was that its forthright stand on the Israeli Arab issue doomed its funding in the post Oslo period. On the power of the Israeli lobby to ruin careers, to stifle dissent and to procure political support and scores of billions of dollars in military and economic aid for Israel, I read Paul Findley, Moshe Menuhin, Donald Neff, Jeffrey Blankfort, Alfred Lilienthal and others who pointed to the dramatic and rigid control by Zionists and their supporters over the media and over Congress and the administration on Middle East Policy.
The Widening Gyre
Until the advent of the current Bush administration and the terrible events of 9/11, it may have been possible even for those sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle, to view events in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East, as confined to that area of the world, with relatively minimal effects on daily life elsewhere. Needless to say there was more than an element of denial in such a view as we had to put to one side the corruption of our national discourse and the censorship of information coming out of the Middle East, not to mention the raiding of the U.S. Treasury of $3-6 billion a year or more to satisfy Israeli demands.
But today, in the wake of 9/11 and the reinstallation of George W. Bush for a second term as president, once again, many believe through fraudulent means, we are confronted with an energized and radical neo conservative movement with nowhere to go but onward and down. I think my father said it best a few months before he died a year and a half ago, “they don't do anything good.” He was absolutely right. They are bent on an ideological destruction of the mission of government which is supposed to be by, for, and of the people.
One way to get some perspective on what is happening to the Palestinians and their prospects is to examine in some detail Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Gaza Disengagement plan which was published in the Israeli papers April 16, 2004.[ii] The disengagement plan appeared at the height of the corruption scandal that engulfed Sharon and his sons and served to deflect domestic criticism as well as growing international opposition to Israel's construction of the Wall on Palestinian territory. Sharon's plan provided President George W. Bush with sufficient cover to reverse long-standing U.S. policy relating to the Palestinians. In particular, Bush brushed aside the critical principle, often reiterated at the U.N., of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory conquered by force. In his dramatic joint press conference in Washington with Sharon on April 14, 2004, President Bush, bowing, as he put it, to “new realities on the ground,” declared that Israel could permanently keep major settlements in the West Bank. Bush also rejected the Palestinian right of return to Israeli territory and froze the Palestinian leadership out of negotiations. At the same time, Bush effectively gave carte blanche to the continued Israeli construction of the Wall albeit with the meaningless reservation that it was to be regarded as a temporary structure. In June 2004, both houses of Congress, by lop sided majorities, followed up with resolutions unreservedly endorsing President Bush's giveaway to Sharon.
The disengagement plan provided Sharon with cover on the military front. A succession of ruthlessly brutal intensive major Israeli Defense Forces operations followed the March 2004 assassination of wheelchair bound Hamas political leader Sheik Yassin in Gaza and continued the next month with the murder of his successor, Dr. Abd al- Rantisi. This was only the beginning for Gaza residents as operations followed from May 2004 through October. Typical of the brutality, in a two-week period during Operation Rainbow in southern Gaza in May, at least 60 Palestinians were killed, almost 300 Palestinian homes demolished, and close to 4,000 people made homeless. Throughout these operations, large amounts of Palestinian farmland and property including olive groves were confiscated and bulldozed.
One reason that Sharon has continued to get a free ride on the strength of his disengagement plan, despite his long history as a tireless and powerful opponent of Palestinian national rights, is that many cannot believe that he would be so reckless as to propose the unilateral removal of Jewish settlements in Gaza without the intention of following through. But such a view of Sharon fails to take into consideration his willingness to take unprecedented risks, as well as his shrewd calculation of both the domestic and international political landscape. In Israel, there is no opposition to speak of. In the United States, Bush and his radical, pro Israeli neocon team is firmly in place for a second term and wholly supportive of Sharon's goals and vicious tactics. Moreover, as a veteran of more than 50 years on the Middle East scene, Sharon understands that pretexts can always be found to break, postpone and put off indefinitely agreements and treaties with the Arabs.
Thus far only a few lonely voices in Israel have pointed to the counterintuitive nature of the disengagement plan and have openly questioned Sharon's intention to remove the Gaza settlements. Israeli author and academic Tanya Reinhart has gone further than anyone else, providing invaluable documentation demonstrating the lack of any practical steps Israel is taking that would indicate a serious intent to remove the settlers. Despite the absence of such evidence, the media and the international community largely continue to take Sharon's disengagement plan seriously. Meanwhile Israel continues to pour resources into the settlements, suggesting that so far from evicting Jewish settlers from Gaza, the plan is to maintain them over the long term. In that case, it's not the Israeli settlers who will be leaving, but rather a million Palestinians who will be forced from Gaza.
As part of her expose, Tanya Reinhart also reveals that compensation to settlers willing to leave Gaza is to be postponed indefinitely. She explains that if the Israeli government were seriously interested in removing settlements, they would begin to compensate those willing to leave in order to isolate the remaining hardcore. Many believed that the compensation plan was approved by the Knesset in November. However, upon closer examination we find that the required 2nd and 3rd readings of the bill “will take place only after the government decides on actual evacuation, in March 2005 or later. Till then no one will be compensated.” [iii] Meanwhile, the Israeli press reported that in December, 11 more families moved into a Gaza settlement. [iv]
Kathleen Christison, a former CIA analyst who has been following Middle East issues for three decades, in a recent article, summarized some of the bitter reality Palestinians confront under the current regime. The picture she paints is important because it is evidence that Sharon is in the midst of a campaign to make civil life impossible for the Palestinian community. The current dimension of the situation, she writes, goes back to the April 2002 siege of the West Bank when
Israeli forces rampaged through the territory, destroying the entire infrastructure of Palestinian civil society: Israeli soldiers laid waste Palestinian civil ministries for education and health and agriculture; smeared feces throughout the Ministry of Culture; destroyed computers and hard disks and, with them, the entire written record of Palestinian society; ransacked Palestinian businesses and banks; bulldozed whole housing blocks; destroyed land registry maps and census records, as if to erase all trace of Palestinian existence. …
Gaza is largely in ruins, a Middle Eastern Dresden, thanks to repeated Israeli air and bulldozer assaults. Nearly two thousand homes have been demolished in Gaza since the [September 2000] intifada began, leaving many more thousands of innocent civilians homeless, and Israeli helicopter gunship attacks and assassination operations have wrought still more destruction.
Israel's separation wall has destroyed prime Palestinian agricultural land, bulldozed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian olive trees, destroyed or more often appropriated for Israeli use most Palestinian water wells, destroyed Palestinian markets [and] homes. Israeli closure policies have prevented most Palestinians from working inside Israel since the beginning of the peace process a dozen years ago. Israeli checkpoints throughout the West Bank impede movement and halt commerce. …Yet the West wonders why the Palestinian economy is not thriving.
Israel has reduced every Palestinian security headquarters throughout the West Bank and in Gaza to rubble. These structures, which served…as security headquarters [and also] as the center of municipal governance, with mayor's offices, jails, and health clinics [are] now mere heaps of concrete.[v]
Arafat's sudden illness and death in November [2004] briefly put a halt to some of Israel's most high profile deadly and destructive military operations. Yet, only a month later in mid December, using the pretext of rockets fired by the military wing of Hamas, Israel resumed its pitiless assaults in a two-day operation that killed 11 Palestinians in Khan Yunus in Gaza.[vi] Confiscations of Palestinian land also resumed. In early January, Dr. James Zogby appeared on BBC TV news, pointing out that in the previous two weeks, Israel had appropriated 3,000-4,000 acres of Palestinian land. [vii]
Arafat's death and the election of Mahmoud Abbas as new president of the Palestinian Authority spurred hopes that we might be entering a new period of reconciliation and movement toward a meaningful peace process. However, even the mildly positive atmospherics did not last beyond a week or two after the election as Sharon used a predictable “terror” incident as a pretext to “temporarily” end such discussions as had been envisioned. Nor is this a surprise since Sharon is dead set against giving up anything to the Palestinians in negotiations since he holds all the political and military cards. Sharon's immediate plan is to destroy any and all remnants of Palestinian resistance. He is embarked on a campaign to make civil life more and more impossible for the Palestinian community as he pursues the logic of Zionism, which foresees a land of Israel for Jews only. Such a plan would involve ethnic cleansing on a massive scale – the mass expulsion of the Palestinian people similar in scope to the events of 1948 when upwards of 750,000 Palestinians were expelled.
Turning now to US foreign policy and the origins of the Iraq war we see evidence of Israeli influence on US actions –what one writer called “The Fatal Embrace.” First I'd like to tackle the question of whether the Iraq war was fought for oil. I have always believed that the issue of US control over Iraqi oil was subsidiary to ideological goals. Now that we see oil prices near $50 with no apparent prospect of returning below $30, some are beginning to realize that if regime change in Iraq was about oil, it hasn't succeeded. Had the Administration's purpose been about providing US drivers with a steady and cheap supply of Middle East oil, the last thing they would have done was go to war against Iraq. Rather, I argue, war against Iraq was driven by a coterie of neoconservatives who have a long record of supporting a Likudnik agenda of destabilizing and fragmenting all of Israel's potential enemies.[viii] Those like Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Eliot Abrams and others in senior government positions are interested in extending U.S. military power abroad not in the interests of democracy as they claim, but in order to sow chaos, confusion, and violent conflict.
They aim to maintain and grow the military budget and starve domestic social spending. In order to maintain an aggressive posture and ensure maximum freedom of action they are determined to subvert the international order that has been the foundation of the stability that has allowed the US and many other nations to grow and prosper over the last century. They eschew conflict resolution and diplomacy because that would threaten to bring peace, which is their anathema. Their modus operandi is to create desolation and call it democracy.
We are confronted in the age of George W. Bush with the enormous success of the neocon program. Many of the neocons were former Democrats in the 70s who were opposed to the liberal agenda of demilitarization, social spending and criticism of Israel's military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. From relatively modest beginnings we find today that they have achieved their goal of regime change in Iraq against the best advice of major elements of the Republican Party including George H.W. Bush, the father of the president. They have pursued the Iraq war against the greatest outpouring of protest in the US and the rest of the world since the Vietnam War, and against common sense and the best interests of the security of the United States. So the question becomes how did they pull it off? One part of the answer that concerns us tonight is the assistance provided by the powerful Israeli lobby in the United States. The ability of the Israeli lobby to smooth the way for war was highlighted by the furor over Virginia Congressman Jim Moran's response in early March 2003 to a constituent question during a town hall meeting.[ix] He said: that "if it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq we would not be doing this. The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going and I think they should."
Congressman Moran was correct and extraordinarily courageous in pointing to the leadership of the major Jewish organizations, suggesting that they could have blocked the war. As a 13-year veteran member of the House, Jim Moran has been around long enough to understand how political power on Middle East issues operates in Congress. War against Iraq has so isolated the United States and made so little sense that were it not perceived as good for Israel, in all likelihood it would not have gained sufficient traction in the media or in Congress.
It's probably not possible to reconcile opposing sides on the question of whether Tel Aviv or Washington drives US Mideast policy, but one element of this issue may be worth emphasizing. I would stress the difference between Prime Minister Sharon's brutal and ruthless pragmatism as he drives forward toward his goal of a Greater Israel at the expense of the Palestinians and the Arab nation. From a Zionist perspective, it is a zero sum game with winners and losers. On the other hand, the Washington neocons, are bent on war for the sake of war, with tragedy, and death the only winners. Fallujah today is an excellent example of the desolation that the public relations people call democracy. Another example of the new dark age are the ruins of the Museum in Baghdad, the destroyed Baghdad Library, the ravaged Iraqi universities and archeological sites, the murder of scores of the cream of the Iraqi academic, professional and diplomatic classes, not to mention the deaths of a 100,000 and counting ordinary Iraqis.
The Dimensions of the present problem
There is no point in attempting to soften our description of the nature of the current crisis that we face with the reinstallation of George W. Bush for another four years. With the results of the election in place, the most radical of the neocons are entrenched and empowered to forward their extremist agenda. No doubt there are many like me in tonight's audience who first read George Orwell's 1984, awakened but at the same time confident that we would never live to see a US administration that could embody such evil. Lo and behold, we are now confronted with an administration bent on the continual creation of enemies and fighting endless war.
The current devastation and horror that Bush has made of Iraq while not exactly a PR bonanza, is not necessarily perceived by them as a total defeat. For example, if Iraq should wind up fragmented into its three main groups, that would play into neocon and Israeli hands since a potential area counterforce will have been eliminated. Moreover the anarchic climate in Iraq, a perfect breeding ground for terrorism suits their purpose by fomenting real, imagined and created enemies against whom the US leadership can rally and unify the populace, stifle dissent, and push through the most extreme of their radical domestic and international agenda.
The next target on the Bush-Cheney neocon agenda is Iran, now Israel's strongest enemy. On January 20th, the same day that George W. Bush was sworn in for a second term, Vice President Cheney with astonishing chutzpah, gave Israel the green light to attack Iran. In a radio interview, he said that Iran is “right at the top of the list” of the world's trouble spots and given that “Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards.” The naked irresponsibility and recklessness of such a statement is staggering. For added measure we learn from articles in current issues of the New Yorker by Seymour Hersh that plans have already been made for attacking Iran and reconnaissance for such an attack has already begun including on the ground infiltration of commando forces. (As an aside it may be interesting to speculate that US government leaks to Hersh were intended as a trial balloon in order to measure domestic US reaction as well as to spread confusion in Iran.)
One measure of the contretemps we are in is that there is no one in sight with the stature or courage to challenge Cheney's characterization of Iran's posture which is essentially defensive. If there was one thing that the Bush-Cheney wars against Afghanistan and Iraq have taught Iran and North Korea and the rest of the world it is that weak countries including those without a nuclear deterrent are vulnerable to threats from the US and/or Israel. Iran would be “crazy,” as one analyst elegantly put it,[x] if it did not seek a nuclear deterrent against threatening superpowers. Meanwhile, in Western circles, Israel's nuclear monopoly is ignored while Iran's nuclear potential is characterized as a threat to peace. [xi] Israel and the US neocon Likudniks are determined to maintain the nuclear status quo in the Middle East because an Iranian nuclear capability might serve as a brake to Israeli and US aggression.
One question raised by US-Israeli threats is whether an attack against Iran would lead to a wider Middle East war. But it is difficult to see who would be or could be waging war against the two superpowers. The military balance in the Middle East is not comparable to that of Europe for example of the 20th and earlier centuries where the various states worked to achieve balance through alliances and détentes. Especially now with Iraq effectively out of the picture, there is no foreseeable combination of Middle Eastern powers that could stand up to an Israel backed by the US. Moreover the latest version of Iran's Shebab 3 medium range missile, rumored to be able to reach Israel, carries no nuclear warhead and so its deterrent capability is strategically limited. Moreover, Iranian missile strikes against Israel, while doing relatively little damage would serve as pretexts for Israel's disproportionate retaliations, exactly as we see today in the Occupied Territories. Some analysts have pointed out that Israel's potential air attacks against Iran may originate in US controlled airbases in Iraq. Thus Israel's continued nuclear monopoly means that Iran is virtually defenseless against Israeli aggression. [xii]
Would an Israeli/US attack on Iran lead to a wider war? One radical faction, led by veteran neoconservative Michael Ledeen who heads the Coalition for Democracy in Iran seems bent on regime change in Saudi Arabia, but it is hard to see how such a change would benefit the US. A destabilized Saudi Arabia would put much of the world oil supply at risk and have nightmare ramifications for the international economy. The Bush-Cheney administration which has longstanding business and personal relations with the Saudi leadership seems to be resisting the concept of regime change there since such plans seem to pass the line of recklessness into pure stupidity. But since the administration seems determined to attack Iran (and Syria for some of the same reasons) we may be in a situation where events are in the saddle and pressures may build to the point where a shaky Saudi monarchy is toppled.
But here we are approaching the horizon of foreseeable events. Suffice it to say for now that the world faces a challenge similar to 1939 with the US and Israel bent on regime change, destabilization, tension, chaos, and endless war.
On the other hand, it may be useful to pull back and remind ourselves that the US is mired in a quagmire in Iraq and that neither the US or Israel have the forces to invade or occupy Iran. Perhaps just as important, on the economic front the US has become a debtor nation big time, no better than a banana republic. Even worse, the Bush Cheney regime shows every evident intention to apply foot to the pedal and drive the US further into bankruptcy by spending endlessly on the Iraq war, and on their military toys, spy satellites and Star Wars programs. Similarly on the domestic front they appear to be determined to continue destroying the economy, with more tax cuts for the wealthy and the huge costs involved in “strengthening” social security. Is it possible that such policies can be sustained another four years? Who knows?
One interesting historical footnote takes us back to the 1956 Suez war when France, England and Israel combined to attack Egypt and Gaza. At the time President Eisenhower – the only US president until Jimmy Carter to stand up to Israel -- was enraged and was able to reverse the tripartite attack by applying pressure on England which at the time was deeply in the US debt for World War Two costs. Is it possible that economically based constraints can save us from the most extreme military daydreams of the current gang in Washington? But even in that least worst case scenario, there will be much desolation, despair and suffering for hundreds of millions of people everywhere.
Solutions
How do we speak of solutions confronted as we are with the magnitude of the current challenges to peace and democracy? My own instincts are to begin by looking the devil – that is to say, reality – in the eye. Our job is first to describe and understand the situation we face as best and as clearly as we are able. That is exactly our purpose this evening. Our next step is to find ways to struggle for our visions and our dreams and our futures. One way to do this is to build community and that is the essential second element of our purpose tonight. From small local beginnings we can try to work to forge the unity and the leadership that we require to survive and prevail. There are certainly no easy answers and no single answer. There is only a difficult and puzzling and impossible process and we need to find ways to plug into that process and to make it happen. And for that task we are armed only with the hope that day will follow night and that we can toil our way toward a better future than the one we seem headed towards now.
The End
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[i] Ronald Bleier is a freelance writer based in NYC. He edits DESIP, an environmental and security website.
[ii] Uri Avnery, December 18, 2004. “The Mountain and the Mouse. Tanya Reinhart, “Sharon's disengagement” from Gaza,” March 30, 2004 and “What kind of state deserves to exist, Yediot Aharonot, April 20, 2004.
[iii] Tanya Reinhart, “Sharon's Gaza Pullout: Not Gonna Happen!” November 2004. http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3331.shtml
[iv] Ha'aretz, December 17, 2004. Nadav Shraga, “11 new families settle in Gaza's Nissanit.”
[v] Kathleen Christison, January 3, 2005, “Patronizing the Palestinians: The Trouble with Optimism” http://www.counterpunch.org/christison01032005.html
[vi] Al Jazeera, December 19, 2004, “Israeli helicopters strike Gaza towns.”
[vii] BBC TV news, January 10, 2005.
[viii] Here and in some of the analysis below I am indebted to Stephen J. Sniegoski, “The Future of the Global War on Terrorism,” Current Concerns , September 3-5, 2004.
[ix] Others like Philip Zelikow, the Executive director of the 9/11 Commission, outgoing Senator Ernest “Fritz’ Hollings, Patrick Buchanan, Justin Raimondo and others have expressed similar views but Moran's case seemed to attract more media attention in part because, as a result of his remarks he was seen as vulnerable.
[x] Israeli military historian, Martin Van Creveld, International Herald Tribune, August 21, 2004. Cited in Khalid Amayreh, “Israel to U.S.: Now for Iran,” August 29, 2004.
[xi] Sniegoski, op.cit.
[xii] Based on 2004 analysis by Andrew Cordesman | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 5:35 pm Post subject: Tinker, Banker, NeoCon, Spy |
| While this article doesn't specifically say Chalabi and Sharon are meeting, Chalabi definitely is hanging out with those who do.....
http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/21/dreyfuss-r.html
Tinker, Banker, NeoCon, Spy
Ahmed Chalabi's long and winding road from (and to?) Baghdad
By Robert Dreyfuss
Issue Date: 11.18.02
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If T.E. Lawrence ("of Arabia") had been a 21st-century neoconservative operative instead of a British imperial spy, he'd be Ahmed Chalabi's best friend. Chalabi, the London-based leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), is front man for the latest incarnation of a long-time neoconservative strategy to redraw the map of the oil-rich Middle East, put American troops -- and American oil companies -- in full control of the Persian Gulf's reserves and use the Gulf as a fulcrum for enhancing America's global strategic hegemony. Just as Lawrence's escapades in World War I-era Arabia helped Britain remake the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, the U.S. sponsors of Chalabi's INC hope to do their own nation building.
"The removal of [Saddam Hussein] presents the United States in particular with a historic opportunity that I believe is going to prove to be as large as anything that has happened in the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the entry of British troops into Iraq in 1917," says Kanan Makiya, an INC strategist and author of Republic of Fear.
Chalabi would hand over Iraq's oil to U.S. multinationals, and his allies in conservative think tanks are already drawing up the blueprints. "What they have in mind is denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to American oil companies," says James E. Akins, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Even more broadly, once an occupying U.S. army seizes Baghdad, Chalabi's INC and its American backers are spinning scenarios about dismantling Saudi Arabia, seizing its oil and collapsing the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). It's a breathtaking agenda, one that goes far beyond "regime change" and on to the start of a New New World Order.
What's also startling about these plans is that Chalabi is scorned by most of America's national-security establishment, including much of the Department of State, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is shunned by all Western powers save the United Kingdom, ostracized in the Arab world and disdained even by many of his erstwhile comrades in the Iraqi opposition. Among his few friends, however, are the men running the Bush administration's willy-nilly war on Iraq. And with their backing, it's not inconceivable that this hapless, exiled Iraqi aristocrat and London-Washington playboy might end up atop the smoking heap of what's left of Iraq next year.
The Chalabi Lobby
Almost to a man, Washington's hawks lavishly praise Chalabi. "He's a rare find," says Max Singer, a trustee and co-founder of the Hudson Institute. "He's deep in the Arab world and at the same time he is fundamentally a man of the West."
In Washington, Team Chalabi is led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the neoconservative strategist who heads the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. Chalabi's partisans run the gamut from far right to extremely far right, with key supporters in most of the Pentagon's Middle-East policy offices -- such as Peter Rodman, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Michael Rubin. Also included are key staffers in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, not to mention Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey.
The Washington partisans who want to install Chalabi in Arab Iraq are also those associated with the staunchest backers of Israel, particularly those aligned with the hard-right faction of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Chalabi's cheerleaders include the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). "Chalabi is the one that we know the best," says Shoshana Bryen, director of special projects for JINSA, where Chalabi has been a frequent guest at board meetings, symposia and other events since 1997. "He could be Iraq's national leader," says Patrick Clawson, deputy director of WINEP, whose board of advisers includes pro-Israeli luminaries such as Perle, Wolfowitz and Martin Peretz of The New Republic.
What makes Chalabi so attractive to the Washington war party? Most importantly, he's a co-thinker: a mathematician trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago and a banker (who years ago hit it off with Albert Wohlstetter, the theorist who was a godfather of the neoconservative movement), a fellow mathematician and a University of Chicago strategist. In 1985, Wohlstetter (who died in 1997) introduced Chalabi to Perle, then the undersecretary of defense for international-security policy under President Reagan and one of Wohlstetter's leading acolytes. The two have been close ever since. In early October, Perle and Chalabi shared a podium at an American Enterprise Institute conference called "The Day After: Planning for a Post-Saddam Iraq," which was held, appropriately enough, in AEI's 12th-floor Wohlstetter Conference Center. "The Iraqi National Congress has been the philosophical voice of free Iraq for a dozen years," Perle told me.
Philosophical or not, since its founding in 1992, Chalabi's INC has been trying to drag the United States into war with Iraq. By its very nature, the INC's strategy -- building a paramilitary presence inside Iraq, creating a provisional government, launching attacks on Iraqi cities -- was intended to create inexorable momentum for a war in which in the United States would be compelled to support the INC. But American policy in the 1990s was focused primarily on containing Saddam Hussein and depriving him of weapons of mass destruction, so the INC's efforts were sidetracked during the Clinton administration.
At the time, most of the national-security establishment saw the INC as weak and ineffectual. Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of Central Command for U.S. forces in the Middle East, famously ridiculed Chalabi and company as "silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London," adding, "I don't see any opposition group that has the viability to overthrow Saddam." Supporting the INC, he warned, meant that "the Bay of Pigs could turn into the Bay of Goats." And a widely cited 1999 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Rollback Fantasy," lambasted the INC's strategy for a gusano-style offensive by a ragtag army operating out of the so-called no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq, saying it was "militarily ludicrous and would almost certainly end in either direct American intervention or a massive bloodbath."
Indeed, in 1996 an ill-organized INC offensive in northern Iraq, where Chalabi had assembled about 1,000 fighters, was half-heartedly backed by the CIA. Not only did Saddam Hussein's troops not defect en masse, as predicted by Chalabi, but one of the INC's key allies, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, chose to ally itself with Baghdad, inviting the Iraqi army back into northern Iraq's Kurdish areas for a mop-up exercise. Another of the INC's allies, the Iraqi National Accord, apparently blew up the INC's main offices in an act of bloody fratricide. These tragic failures only increased the distaste for Chalabi at the CIA and among the U.S. military.
Still, Chalabi is a survivor. Since the 1996 fiasco, he's managed a precarious balance atop a fractious and quarrelsome constellation of Iraqi opposition factions, from Kurds and Shi'a tribal leaders to Islamic fundamentalists, monarchists and military officers.
Our Man in Baghdad
Born in 1945, Chalabi is the scion of a wealthy, oligarchic Shi'a family with close ties to the Hashemite monarchy that was installed in Iraq after World War I by Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and the British imperial authorities. Chalabi's grandfather served in nine various Iraqi cabinet positions, his father was a cabinet officer and president of the figurehead Iraqi senate, and his mother ran political salons that catered to Iraq's elite. In 1958 that all came to a crashing end when a coalition of army officers and the Iraqi Communist Party led a revolution that toppled King Faisal II. The Chalabis scattered.
As a young man Chalabi lived in Jordan, Lebanon, the United Kingdom and the United States, where he attended MIT before earning a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Chicago. He took a position teaching math at the American University of Beirut. In 1977, Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan invited Chalabi to Amman to establish the Petra Bank, a financial institution that would soon become the second-largest commercial bank in Jordan.
In an August 1989 episode still surrounded by controversy, however, the government of Jordan seized the Petra Bank under martial law, arresting its chief currency trader and using Jordan's central bank to pump $164 million into the Petra Bank and its allied institutions to keep them liquid. To avoid arrest, Chalabi fled the country "under mysterious circumstances," according to a 1989 article in the Financial Times. The Hudson Institute's Max Singer says that Prince Hassan personally drove Chalabi to the Jordanian border, helping him escape. (According to one account, Chalabi was in the trunk of the car.) Chalabi eventually was tried in absentia by a Jordanian court and sentenced to 22 years of hard labor for embezzlement, fraud and currency-trading irregularities. He reportedly got away with more than $70 million.
The INC offers a different version. According to Zaab Sethna, an INC spokesman, King Hussein of Jordan executed a politically motivated coup against Chalabi in coordination with Iraq because Chalabi was "using the bank to fund [Iraqi] opposition groups and learning a lot about illegal arms transfers to Saddam." Because the Petra Bank had inside information about Jordanian-Iraqi trade, Chalabi used his position in a freelance, cloak-and-dagger operation to feed intelligence about Iraq's trade deals to the CIA. Because Chalabi was already active in anti-Iraq opposition groups and had a connection with Perle, it's possible that Chalabi's account is true.
Further evidence of political motives behind the seizure of the Petra Bank and Chalabi's intelligence connections: The American lawyer who represented the Petra Bank's Washington, D.C., subsidiary was former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. And when Chalabi fled the country, anonymous leaflets reportedly circulated linking Chalabi to an alliance with Iraq's Shi'a and with (mostly Shi'a) Iran, all in a vague conspiracy against Iraq and Jordan. (During the Iran-Iraq war and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Jordan -- always delicately balanced between "Iraq and a hard place," as King Hussein was wont to say -- tilted toward Iraq. Afterward, King Hussein distanced himself from Baghdad and eventually reconciled with Chalabi. The jail sentence for bank fraud stands but reportedly might be lifted soon by Jordan's King Abdullah.)
Of course, the fact that Chalabi may have been prosecuted for political reasons does not mean that he is innocent of embezzlement and fraud. In any case, allegations of self-dealing have followed him everywhere since.
Puppet Theater
Soon after fleeing Jordan, Chalabi began making the contacts with the CIA that would eventually lead to the INC's founding in 1992. Meeting first in Vienna, Austria, and then in Salahuddin in northern Iraq, the INC emerged as an umbrella group for the many factions of Iraqi opposition in exile. In the early 1990s, the CIA spent about $100 million through the INC and its Kurdish allies in the north -- until the fiasco of 1996. Though the CIA cut off the INC after that, Chalabi was undeterred and went about working with congressional Republicans to pass the Iraq Liberation Act. That law set up a pool of funds and in-kind contributions for the INC and other opposition forces. In its implementation, however, the INC has been embroiled in repeated disputes with the State Department over its accounting for funds received. (In 1999, when asked about secrecy in accounting for certain INC expenditures, Chalabi blurted: "Damn right! It was covert money.") "He's a criminal banker," says Akins, the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia. "He's a swindler. He's interested in getting money, and I suspect it's all gone into his bank accounts and those of his friends."
Earlier this year, the State Department and the INC were deadlocked over payments to the INC, and the dispute was resolved only when the Pentagon, with its pro-Chalabi group, agreed to take over payments to the INC for the latter's intelligence-gathering work inside Iraq.
Even after 1996, Chalabi continued to insist that Saddam Hussein's government would crumble if the INC, with only limited American backing, were to launch its planned offensive. In June 1997, Chalabi spoke to JINSA's board, which includes, not surprisingly, Perle, Woolsey and key hard-line backers of Israel such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Max Kampelman, Eugene Rostow and former Rep. Steve Solarz (D-N.Y.). "The INC plan for Saddam's overthrow is simple," Chalabi told JINSA. From its base in northern Iraq, the INC would begin to confront Iraqi forces with only political and logistical support from the United States, including U.S. efforts to "feed, house and otherwise provide for the Iraqi army as it abandons Saddam." Then, Chalabi concluded, "With U.S. political backing and regional support for a process of gradual encirclement, Saddam can be driven into hiding in Takrit and eventually removed." That's it.
The idea that ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein is as easy as that was, of course, ridiculed by virtually all CIA, military and State Department strategists. But without the ability to commit hundreds of thousands of American troops and a relentless wave of bombing sorties, it was all that Chalabi and his allies had -- until September 11.
Effectively capitalizing on the impact of 9-11, Perle, Woolsey and company began beating the drums for a full-scale war against Iraq. With President Bush in tow and railing against "the guy who tried to kill my dad," the war party got the upper hand. According to the latest leaks about U.S. strategy, a war against Iraq now could involve up to 250,000 U.S. troops and would result in an open-ended military occupation of Iraq modeled on the post-World War II occupations of Germany and Japan.
The INC, meanwhile, hopes to ride into Baghdad on American tanks. Weeks ago the Pentagon began a program to train INC combatants for a coming conflict in Iraq, but its effort fooled no one. Ousting Saddam Hussein, if it happens, will be the work of U.S. troops, not the INC. But a Big Brother-style public-relations offensive is being readied, aimed at creating the myth that Iraq has been liberated by an alliance of the United States and the INC. "I want to create the national story that Iraqis liberated themselves," says WINEP's Clawson. "It may have no more truth than the idea that the French liberated themselves in World War II." But, insists Clawson, it's a fiction that will resonate with Iraqis.
Almost no one, not even the INC itself, thinks that Chalabi has any cachet inside Iraq. Entifadh Qanbar, the earnest, young ex-Iraqi officer who heads the INC's office in Washington, says that Chalabi represents Iraq's "silent majority." Asked whether people in Baghdad have even heard of Chalabi, Qanbar says: "They may not know the man. But he represents their views."
Others scoff at even that notion. "It's a formula for setting up a puppet regime," says David Mack, vice president of the Middle East Institute, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and ex-deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs who's dealt extensively with Iraqi opposition politicians and military officers. "And we will have responsibility for propping them up for a long, long time to come, possibly with the blood of American soldiers."
But indefinitely propping up an INC-style quisling regime might be exactly what the United States wants, as it would mean that U.S. troops would be occupying Iraq's oil fields for years to come.
Striking Oil
It's hard to overstate the importance of Iraqi oil. With proven reserves of 112 billion barrels (and many analysts saying that its true reserves are double that), Iraq sits above the second largest supply of oil in the world. Its crippled industry can produce only 2 million barrels of oil a day at present, but with a modest effort, Iraq's output could soar to as high as 7 million to 8 million barrels per day by decade's end. Controlling that much oil would give the United States enormous leverage over Europe and Japan, which depend heavily on Gulf oil; over Russia, whose economy is hinged to the price of its oil exports, which could be manipulated by an American-run Iraq; and over Saudi Arabia, whose regime's survival is linked to oil. "The American oil companies are going to be the main beneficiaries of this war," says Akins. "We take over Iraq, install our regime, produce oil at the maximum rate and tell Saudi Arabia to go to hell." "It's probably going to spell the end of OPEC," says JINSA's Bryen.
The INC is quietly courting the American oil companies. In mid-October, Chalabi had a series of meetings with three major U.S. oil firms in Washington. "The oil people are naturally nervous," says INC spokesman Zaab Sethna, who took part in the meetings between Chalabi and the oil executives. "We've had discussions with them, but they're not in the habit of going around talking about them." That's true. In interviews, oil company officials speak cautiously and only on background about Iraq, laughing nervously at the idea of being quoted. They are extremely wary of associating themselves with the INC or with U.S. war plans for fear of angering Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries in the Persian Gulf. Asked about talks with the INC, one U.S. oil executive blanched, saying, "I can't discuss that, even on background."
But the untold riches that lie beneath the soil of Iraq are a powerful lure for multinational oil companies. "I would say that especially the U.S. oil companies ... look forward to the idea that Iraq will be open for business," says an executive from one of the world's largest oil companies, adding that the companies are trying hard not to be noticed.
"We don't have a stake in Iraq now," says another oil industry executive. "One of the frustrations that U.S. oil companies have is that the Russians, the French and the Chinese already have existing relations with Iraq. And the question is: How much of that will be sanctified by the people who succeed Saddam?"
The INC and its backers make no bones about the fact that the American forces gathering to attack Iraq will be liberating Iraq's oil. Unable to restrain himself, Chalabi blurted to The Washington Post that the INC intends to reward its American friends. "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil," he proclaimed.
Meanwhile, economists allied with the INC -- including strategists at the Heritage Foundation, the AEI and JINSA -- are abuzz with plans to "denationalize" the Iraqi oil industry and then distribute it to Western, mostly American, companies. In late September, in "The Future of a Post-Saddam Iraq: A Blueprint for American Involvement," the Heritage Foundation's Ariel Cohen put forward a nearly complete scheme for the privatization of Iraq's oil, creating three separate companies for southern Iraq, the region around Baghdad and the Kirkuk fields in northern Iraq, with additional companies to operate pipelines and refineries and to develop Iraq's natural gas. In an interview, Cohen warned that France, Russia and China might find that their existing oil contracts with Iraq won't be honored by the INC. "It will be up to the next government of Iraq to examine the legal validity of the deals signed by the Saddam regime," says Cohen. "From a realpolitik point of view, these governments should try to get in early with the Iraqi National Congress and abandon Saddam. The window of opportunity is closing."
It's hard to imagine that a regime that denationalized Iraq's oil would be very popular with Iraqis. The nationalization, which took place between 1972 and 1974, electrified Iraqis and stunned the industry worldwide. It also set dominoes falling throughout the Persian Gulf and the OPEC nations, as other countries ousted the multinationals and created state-owned enterprises. Eventually, even Saudi Arabia seized control of all-powerful Aramco, the consortium of Exxon, Mobil, Texaco and Chevron that had long been the colossus of the Persian Gulf. Now, cautiously, the oil industry sees a war in Iraq as a way to win back what's been lost.
"Even in Saudi Arabia, all we can do is buy their oil," says an American oil company official. U.S. companies, this executive confirmed, want to return to greater direct control, perhaps through so-called production-sharing agreements that would give them both a direct stake in the oil fields and a greater share of the profits.
It's also clear that the INC, the neoconservatives and oil executives are thinking beyond Iraq to Saudi Arabia. Ever since Robert W. Tucker wrote an article in Commentary in the 1970s proposing a U.S. occupation of Saudi Arabia's oil fields, such a scenario has been a cherished vision for a small but growing circle of strategists. (Last summer Perle invited a RAND Corporation analyst to speak to the Defense Policy Board on exactly that topic.) Earlier this year, in an article titled "Free the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia," Singer suggested that the United States should help create a Muslim Republic of East Arabia. "I meant it seriously," says Singer. "Saudi Arabia is vulnerable not only to a U.S. seizure of their land but to U.S. unofficial participation in a rebellion by minority Shi'a in the Eastern Province." The Eastern Province, which is largely Shi'a, happens to include the vast bulk of Saudi Arabia's oil fields.
One other problem is that the INC does not represent the entire Iraqi opposition movement. The two main Kurdish parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, though long-time bloody rivals, have momentarily patched things up. They've allied, in turn, with the Iraqi National Accord, a CIA-backed group of former Iraqi military officers, and with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to form the Group of Four, an alternative to the INC that, they hope, will attract further American support. There is even a monarchist group trying to restore T.E. Lawrence's Hashemite kingdom in Baghdad that, some say, could promote a kingship in Iraq for Prince Hassan of Jordan, a Hashemite himself.
Do these strategic realities, and the wide ridicule of Chalabi among Middle East experts, matter? "I don't think their point of view is relevant to the debate any longer," says Danielle Pletka, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute. "Sor-ry!" Thanks to the "entire vast army [of neoconservatives]" who've successfully won over Bush and Cheney, she observes, the INC has something that the other groups lack: the support of the president of the United States.
Robert Dreyfuss | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Sep 03, 2005 6:24 pm Post subject: |
| One can listen to JINSA/CSP/PNAC (Israel first) Neocon Richard Perle lying to Congressman Walter ('Freedom Fries') Jones about the 'A Clean Break'/war for Israel agenda that esteemed US intelligence author James Bamford discusses on pages 261-269/321 of his 'A Pretext for War' book:
http://gorillaintheroom.blogspot.com/2005/04/operating-off-different-agenda.html | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Sep 05, 2005 9:51 am Post subject: Bush’s implicit answer to Cindy Sheehan’s question |
| http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/5/2005/1204
Bush’s implicit answer to Cindy Sheehan’s question
September 4, 2005
President Bush has evaded Cindy Sheehan’s question, “What was the noble cause that my son died for?” But he provided a partial answer on the day that the New Orleans levees gave way.
The media coverage was scant and fleeting -- but we should not allow the nation’s Orwellian memory hole to swallow up a revealing statement in Bush’s speech at a naval air station near San Diego.
In the Aug. 30 speech, moments after condemning “a brutal campaign of terror in Iraq,” the president said: “If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks. They’d seize oil fields to fund their ambitions.” In other words, the U.S. war effort in Iraq must continue because control of Iraqi oil is at stake.
Would U.S. troops be in Iraq if that country didn’t have a drop of oil under its sand? Most politicians dodge that kind of question. And for years, the U.S. news media -- with few exceptions -- have elided the oily obvious. Such denials go back a long way.
* * * * * * * * * *
On Aug. 15, 1990 -- two weeks after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait -- President George H.W. Bush expressed great concern about oil as the Pentagon moved to deploy troops and weaponry to the Persian Gulf. Of course the confrontation was about “our own national security interests” along with ensuring “peace and stability,” but there was something more.
“We are also talking about maintaining access to energy resources that are key -- not just to the functioning of this country, but to the entire world,” the president said. “Our jobs, our way of life, our own freedom and the freedom of friendly countries around the world would all suffer if control of the world’s great oil reserves fell into the hands of Saddam Hussein,” he declared.
But by autumn the official story had shifted. Confronted by protesters while speaking at a fundraiser in Des Moines, the president had this rejoinder: “You know, some people never get the word. The fight isn’t about oil. The fight is about naked aggression that will not stand.” Addressing a Republican crowd in Vermont a week later, the first President Bush flatly said that “it isn’t oil that we’re concerned about. It is aggression. And this aggression is not going to stand.”
Papering over corporate interests with humanitarian ones is standard media operating procedure for presidents and their administrations along with many pundits. On the last day of November 2003, with U.S. troops occupying Iraq, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman gushed that “this war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan.” He lauded the war as “one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad.” Friedman did not mention the estimated 112 billion barrels of untapped oil in Iraq.
The publicized arguments in favor of war do not usually include zeal to serve corporate interests. But once in a blue moon, politicians opt to openly illuminate such motives, as when -- during congressional debate in January 1991, a few days before the Gulf War began -- Senator Warren Rudman grounded the prevailing lofty arguments with a factor more crude. “Can anyone reasonably assert,” he asked, “that it would serve our interests to mortgage the production and pricing levels of nearly one-half of the world’s proven oil reserve to the whims of an ambitious tyrant? I think not.”
A dozen years later, weeks before the invasion of Iraq, liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen launched a barrage of invective against a member of Congress who had dared to identify oil as “the strongest incentive” for the impending war. Cohen was vitriolic. The first word of his column was “liar.” From there, he peppered his piece with references to Representative Dennis Kucinich as an “indomitable demagogue” and a “fool” who was “repeating a lie.”
But Cohen would have done well to reread a front page of his own newspaper. Five months earlier, on Sept. 15, 2002, a page-one Post story carried the headline “In Iraqi War Scenario, Oil Is Key Issue; U.S. Drillers Eye Huge Petroleum Pool.” In the article, Ahmad Chalabi, the exile leader of the U.S.-backed Iraqi National Congress, said that he favored the creation of a U.S.-led consortium to develop oil fields in a post-Saddam Iraq: “American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil.”
The same Post article quoted former CIA Director James Woolsey -- a Chalabi supporter who, according to a Legal Times story, had been on the payroll of Chalabi’s group. Woolsey said: “France and Russia have oil companies and interests in Iraq. They should be told that if they are of assistance in moving Iraq toward decent government, we’ll do the best we can to ensure that the new government and American companies work closely with them. If they throw in their lot with Saddam, it will be difficult to the point of impossible to persuade the new Iraqi government to work with them.”
As business pages had sometimes indicated, it was actually quite reasonable to identify oil as very important in U.S. policy toward Iraq. But in political news coverage, and among all but a few mainstream political pundits, such talk was in general disrepute.
On Wall Street, financial analysts were inclined to be much more candid than politicians or political reporters. “Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath,” said Fadel Gheit, an expert on the oil industry for Oppenheimer & Company. He added: “You can’t ask for better than that.” After more than a quarter century of tracking the oil business, Gheit commented: “Think of Iraq as virgin territory. ... It is the superstar of the future. That’s why Iraq becomes the most sought-after real estate on the face of the earth.”
A Toronto Star columnist and author, Linda McQuaig, cited internal documents that the Bush administration had used for policy formulation (papers not intended for public viewing but released due to a successful lawsuit). In spring 2001, high-ranking Bush officials and oil firm execs pored over a map showing details of “Exploration Blocks” and other intricacies of Iraq’s oil fields. Meeting in secret, the energy task force -- chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney -- had also examined a chart that featured information about 63 oil companies from 30 nations under the heading “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfields.”
The documents, McQuaig wrote, “suggest that those who took part in the Cheney task force -- including senior oil company executives -- were very interested in Iraq’s oil and specifically in the danger of it falling into the hands of eager foreign oil companies, rather than into the rightful hands of eager U.S. oil companies. As the documents show, prior to the U.S. invasion, foreign oil companies were nicely positioned for future involvement in Iraq, while the major U.S. oil companies, after years of U.S.-Iraqi hostilities, were largely out of the picture.” Of course, for oil corporations based in the USA, that picture would drastically change after the invasion.
* * * * * * * * * *
On Aug. 30, 2005, less than a minute after declaring that if terrorists “gain control of Iraq” they would “seize oil fields to fund their ambitions,” President Bush vowed: “We will stay on the offensive. We will stand with the people of Iraq. And we will prevail.”
The next day, the Associated Press reported that “President Bush answered growing antiwar protests yesterday with a fresh reason for U.S. troops to continue fighting in Iraq: protection of the country’s vast oil fields, which he said would otherwise fall under the control of terrorist extremists.” The end of another AP dispatch noted: “A one-time oilman, Bush has rejected charges that the war in Iraq is a struggle to control the nation’s vast oil wealth. The president has avoided making links between the war and Iraq’s oil reserves, but the soaring cost of gasoline has focused attention on global petroleum sources.”
For years, war supporters have pooh-poohed slogans like “No Blood for Oil.” But let the record show: In a scripted speech, the president of the United States has cited Iraqi oil as a key reason for the U.S. military to keep killing in Iraq.
___________________________
This article is adapted from Norman Solomon’s new book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
