From: "Mitchel Cohen"
Subject: [sprayno] Humpty Dumptying the War
MISSING PIECES from our antiwar/antiglobalization analysis
"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?" - Zbigniew Brzezinski,
President Jimmy Carter's National Security adviser, in Le Nouvel Observateur
(France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76, in French. This quote was noticeably
absent from the English language edition.
A. Saudi Arabia
1998, after the collapse of oil prices due to the Asian Financial Crisis:
Saudi monarchy meet extensively with oil man and former CIA head George
Bush, Sr., representing the Carlyle Group -- the world's largest private war
contractor. (Wall Street Journal, Sept. 27, 2001) - Between 1983 and 1993,
the Saudi Gross National Product per capita fell from approximately $13,000
to $8,000, and has since continued to fall. (Cordesman 1997: 64)
- The unemployment rate has been growing dramatically among Saudi Arabia's
young citizens. The wealth is dependent on oil exports and its huge foreign
labor force (in 1993 there were 4.6 million foreign workers out of a total
population of 14.6 million; today they are approximately 6 million in a
population of about 23 million.
- The Saudi monarchy decides to open-up its economy and society, beginning
with the oil sector, abandoning almost seventy years of restrictive, even
unfriendly policy toward foreign investment. (MacKinnon 2000)
- The new foreign investment law was the first concrete step in implementing
a NAFTA-like agreement between the Saudi monarch and the US and European oil
companies. Under the new law, tax holidays are abolished in favor of
sweeping reductions of taxes on profits payable by foreign entities. Wholly
owned foreign businesses WILL NOW HAVE THE RIGHT TO OWN LAND, sponsor their
own employees and benefit from concessionary loans previously available only
to Saudi companies.
- This process of opening up Saudi Arabia to foreign privatization --
especially the new ability of foreign corporations to own land -- was
strongly opposed by sectors of the Saudi and Egyptian ruling class,
including (notably) Osama bin Laden, who also strongly opposed the
presence
of US troops on Saudi soil, which he predicted would be used at the behest
of foreign corporations and the royal family as the arm of the new policy.
- At the same time, a ministerial committee announced that up to $500
billion of new investments would be deployed over the next decade to
change
the form of the national economy. $100 billion of this investment was
already promised by foreign oil companies.
- In May of 2001, Exxon/Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell Group and eight other
foreign companies (including Conoco and Enron from the US) agreed to build
a $25 billion natural gas development project in Saudi Arabia, as part of
a "long-term ploy of the oil companies, [which] want ultimately to get
access again to Saudi crude." (LA Times 5/19/2001)
Thus, by the Summer of 2001, as George Caffentzis (University of Southern
Maine) points out (and also see work by Greg Moses), "the Saudi monarchy
cast the die and then legally, socially and economically entered the
Rubicon of globalization." Whatever hopes the Islamic opposition in the
ruling classes of the Arabian Peninsula harbored of getting their
governments to send the American troops packing and turning their oil
revenues into the economic engine of a resurgent Islam, vanished. Without
a
major reversal by the Summer of 2001, the Islamic fundamentalist opposition
was facing the prospect of a total civil war in their own countries or
extinction. Certain elements -- whether they were individuals or groups, we
do not yet know -- of this opposition apparently decided that only a
spectacular action like the September 11 hijackings and destruction of
thousands of people could turn back the tide.
B. Asian oilfields and geopolitics
On Sept. 7, 2001, Chevron announced FTC approval of the Chevron-Texaco
merger. Together with Mobil, Chevron owns 70 percent of the 9 billion
barrel Tengiz oil field of Kazakhstan. Vice President Dick Cheney sat on
the Kazakhstan Oil Advisory Board; James Baker III & IV, Henry Kissinger,
et. al., also have extensive financial interests in the region. The rush
to
Central Asia becomes part of an unprecedented consolidation of global
interests in Central Asian oil & gas.
The US Department of Energy reported in December, 2000, that "Afghanistan's
significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographical position
as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from Central
Asia to the Arabian Sea."
Recently, Russia and China signed an agreement for cooperation in oil & gas
evelopment. China has been releasing reports of very promising oil fields in
several regions of Tibet, usually associated with British Petroleum.
C. The Brzezinski statements
The US knowingly established the very organizations they are now fighting
in Afghanistan. These organizations were not a response to the Soviet
intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979, as is commonly reported, but
were formed and funded almost six months before the Soviet Union began
pouring its troops into the region: "According to the official version of
history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say,
after
the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality,
secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was
July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for
secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.
"What is most important to the history of the world?," asked Zbigniew
Brzezinski, former US National Security Advisor, "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 1997, Brzezinski outlined US government strategy towards Eastern Europe:
"A wider Europe and an enlarged NATO will serve the short term and longer
term interests of US policy," Brzezinski explained. "A larger Europe will
expand the range of American influence without simultaneously creating a
Europe so politically integrated that it could challenge the United States
on matters of geopolitical importance, particularly in the Middle East."
("A Geostrategy for Asia," Foreign Affairs, September/October 1997). In
other words, Brzezinski's policies would work to unify Europe to serve as
US trading partner and military policeman, but keep a number of
conflagrations going to prevent the EU from getting too powerful and
becoming a threat to e.g. Exxon's oil interests.
- Mitchel Cohen
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