[iwar] [fc:War.on.terror.masks.Bush's.grand.strategy]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-03-11 17:38:32


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Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 17:38:32 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:War.on.terror.masks.Bush's.grand.strategy]
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War on terror masks Bush's grand strategy
By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor
Toronto Sun; March 10, 2002


I enlisted in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam conflict because I believed 
the war was just and it was the duty of male citizens of democracies to 
perform military service in wartime.

Thirty-five years later, White House tape recordings revealed that by 1967 
Democratic president Lyndon Johnson knew the war was lost, yet kept 
sending tens of thousands of American soldiers to their deaths because he 
had no better plan and feared the domestic political consequences of a 
pullout. Johnson and Robert McNamara, his secretary of defence, 
persistently lied to and deceived Americans.

This bitter experience, and two decades as a journalist, left me with deep 
cynicism and a profound distrust of most politicians. The present war in 
Afghanistan fills me with unease. Once again, the White House is not 
telling the full truth to its citizens, and is risking the lives of 
soldiers in a war whose aims are constantly shifting, nebulous and 
overreaching. What began as a limited operation to kill the elusive Osama 
bin Laden has ballooned into a campaign to invade Iraq and dominate 
South/Central Asia.

Afghanistan, as last week's bloody fighting showed, was not the cakewalk 
predicted by hawks and instant experts. Far from "mopping up isolated 
al-Qaida remnants," U.S. forces and their auxiliaries battled heavily 
armed forces that included hundreds of new volunteers.

The Pentagon and unquestioning U.S. media always refer to Afghans fighting 
on the U.S. side as "anti-Taliban Afghan forces." In fact, almost all are 
U.S.-paid mercenaries. Their lack of martial ardour is why U.S. troops 
were used in last week's attacks.

President George Bush's claim the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to "defend 
democracy" and/or "stamp out terrorism" is certainly not the whole story. 
The Pentagon had drawn up plans to invade Afghanistan, and U.S. Special 
Forces were operating in Kyrgyzstan, well before 9/11. Over the past five 
months, the U.S. has established permanent military bases in Afghanistan, 
Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and facilities in Kazakstan. 
In short, a constellation of air and army bases designed for long-term 
strategic control of the region, under the command of the newly activated 
U.S. 3rd Army, whose HQ was recently moved from the Southern U.S. to Kuwait.

OIL RESERVES

The so-called "war on terrorism" is being used to mask a far grander 
imperial design: the overthrow of Saddam Hussein that will allow the U.S. 
to gain control of Iraq's huge oil reserves, which are second only to 
Saudi Arabia's, and secure American control of the giant Caspian Oil 
Basin. The new U.S. bases just happen to follow the route of the planned 
American pipelines that will bring Central Asia's oil and gas riches - the 
"new Silk Road" - south through Pakistan. Each day, the U.S. is plunging 
deeper and deeper into South and Central Asia - which I call the Mideast 
East. American soldiers could end up fighting there 50 years hence. In 
fact, the Bush administration seems to be emulating the old British Empire.

What was known in Vietnam as "mission creep" is already at work. A brief 
U.S. incursion into Afghanistan is now growing into permanent commitment 
and the very "nation-building" that Bush vowed to avoid. The client regime 
of U.S.-appointed Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, is kept in power in Kabul 
by British and U.S. bayonets - just as former Afghan communist regimes 
were maintained by the Soviet Red Army. The affable Karzai has become the 
darling of the U.S. media, which gushes over him and his green cloak with 
the same misplaced rapture it showed for another CIA "asset," Egypt's late 
leader, Anwar Sadat, who was adored in New York but hated in Cairo.

The U.S. relied on the Russian-controlled Northern Alliance, run by the 
reinvigorated Afghan Communist party, to overthrow the Taliban. Russia 
sent $4 billion worth of arms to the Alliance, the real power behind 
Karzai's let's pretend regime. The Alliance is bankrolled by the drug 
trade, which it restored after the Taliban was overthrown. Because Pashtun 
mercenaries hired by the U.S. are unreliable, the U.S. now plans to build 
an 80,000-man Afghan national army, trained by American "advisers" (shades 
of Vietnam). The Soviets did exactly the same thing after they invaded 
Afghanistan in 1979. The Afghan communist Army proved as poor and disloyal 
as most of South Vietnam's Army.

Old Afghan hands, this writer included, have repeatedly warned the U.S. 
not to get involved in Afghan tribal and ethnic politics, not to set up 
permanent bases, not to drive north into Central Asia, and not to force 
Pakistan into becoming another obedient U.S. client state, like Egypt or 
Turkey. To get in and then out of Afghanistan as fast as possible. But 
Bush administration crusaders, gripped by a lust for blood and oil, are 
charging forward. In a truly shameful act, the administration is even 
sending troops to Georgia to battle Chechen independence fighters in the 
Caucasus mountains.

America has been scourged by terrorist attacks because of its often 
heavy-handed interventions abroad, not because Muslims hate democracy or 
McDonald's. The Saudis who staged kamikaze attacks on the U.S. did so 
because of the agony of Palestine and Iraq, and American domination of 
Saudi Arabia. Deeper U.S. involvement in Asia will likely mean more, not 
less, risk of terrorist attacks.

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