“Instead of liberating the people, I was liberating their
oil fields,” the military veteran claimed before throwing his medal off the
platform into the street.
“I have one word for this global war on terrorism medal, and
it is shame,” another said, then turned and tossed away his award, as shown in
the news film clip on Chicago’s
local CBS affiliate.
The two speakers were in an anti-NATO group of some 50
military veterans who threw their medals in the street, protesting America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. That was on Sunday
near the NATO summit in Chicago.
Today, Monday, Barack Obama and other leaders of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization announced they had agreed to an “irreversible
transition” in Afghanistan,
meaning they would finally bring to an end the violent invasion. After 2014,
“this will not be a combat mission,” the NATO summit’s communiqué stated.
Can we believe them? Probably not. The international military-industrial
complex must have endless, aggressive war, or else its purpose would cease to
exist.
Also on Monday, Reuters
reported this treacherous irony:
“Turkmenistan
plans this week to sign a long-awaited agreement to supply natural gas to Pakistan and India
through an ambitious U.S.-backed pipeline that would cross Afghanistan, a source in the
Central Asian country's government told Reuters
on Monday.”
Long-awaited indeed. Peculiar
Progressive reported in the New York City-based Clyde Fitch Report two years ago about Western oil companies’
decades-long effort to secure a trans-Afghan pipeline. We cited the necessity
for power and the pipeline as the U.S.’s
chief reason for invading Afghanistan,
supporting the report with the following facts:
Zbigniew Brzezinski,
President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor from 1977-81, has for
decades espoused the need for America
to control Eurasia: i.e. the uninterrupted landmass of Europe and Asia. To have this occur, he knew Russia needed
to be weakened. He encouraged and got Carter to sign a directive to provide
secret support to opponents of Afghanistan’s
Soviet-supported regime, leading America’s
chief foe to intervene in Afghanistan
in 1979. Brzezinski has called that “Russia’s
Vietnam,” meaning the aid to
Russia’s
decline through a military quagmire.
Brzezinski explained
the plan in a 1998 interview in the French news magazine Le Nouvel
Observateur:
According to the
official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980, that
is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979.
But the reality, closely 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. And that very day, I wrote a
note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid
was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
That secret operation
was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the
Afghan trap…The
day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President
Carter, essentially: "We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its
Vietnam war." Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a
war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that brought about the
demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Brzenzinski also has
recognized the importance of controlling the flow of energy as the key to power
in Eurasia. He reviews this within three
paragraphs of his 1998 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its
Geostrategic Imperatives:
About 75 per cent of
the world's people live in Eurasia, and most
of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and
underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for
about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources. (p. 31)
The world's energy
consumption is bound to vastly increase over the next two or three decades.
Estimates by the U.S. Department of Energy anticipate that world demand will
rise by more than 50 percent between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant
increase in consumption occurring in the Far East. The momentum of Asia's
economic development is already generating massive pressures for the
exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian
region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas
and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea. (p.
125)
America is now the
only global superpower, and Eurasia is the
globe's central arena. Hence, what happens to the distribution of power on the
Eurasian continent will be of decisive importance to America's
global primacy and to America's
historical legacy. (p. 194)
Control of the flow of natural gas and oil was also of
primary importance to America’s
and other Western oil companies. As Larry Chin wrote in the March 3, 2002 issue
of Online Journal:
As of 1992, 11 western
oil companies controlled more than 50 percent of all oil investments in the
Caspian Basin, including Unocal, Amoco, Atlantic Richfield, Chevron,
Exxon-Mobil, Pennzoil, Texaco, Phillips and British Petroleum.
They also became actively involved in efforts to create a
trans-Afghan pipeline that would carry natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan
and India.
And familiar American political names were associated with those Western oil
companies. Chin notes:
The United States
government, its affiliated transnational oil and construction companies, and the
ruling elite of the West had coveted the same oil and gas transit route for
years… Among the most active operatives for US efforts: Brzezinski (a
consultant to Amoco, and architect of the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1970s),
Henry Kissinger (advisor to Unocal), and Alexander Haig (a lobbyist for Turkmenistan),
and Dick Cheney (Halliburton, US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce).
Even the Taliban, when ruling Afghanistan, had come close to
an oil-companies contract to build a trans-Afghan pipeline, but that plan fell
apart due to both a civil war and Bill Clinton’s August 1998 order for a missile
strike in Afghanistan.
By the time George W. Bush entered the White House in 2000,
he brought Cheney with him as his Vice President, along with Condoleezza Rice,
who had sat on Chevron’s board, as his Secretary of State.
The Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World
Trade Center
and Pentagon gave Bush the reason he needed to invade Afghanistan.
But a week after those attacks, the BBC reported:
Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani
Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that
military action against Afghanistan
would go ahead by the middle of October.
It would seem logical that those Bush officials would know
that Naik would carry that information back and share it with Pakistan’s neighbor Afghanistan,
setting up a pre-emptive strike on the U.S.
Once having invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, Bush
set up a new government led by Hamid Karzai, who remains the current Afghan
president. By May 2002, Karzai was
planning a $2 billion trans-Afghan pipeline. The continuing war has delayed
those plans until the new plans this week.
Despite the NATO announcement today, look for continued U.S. and western military involvement in
protecting the pipeline efforts, and America’s
continued desire to control Eurasia.
(Peculiar Progressive
will rejoin the New York City-based Clyde
Fitch Report when it renews publication in early June.)
Veterans throw away medals:
NATO leaders seal end to Afghan invasion:
Turkmenistan
plans trans-Afghan pipeline:
Zbigniew Brzezinski interview in Le Nouvel
Observateur:
Larry Chin’s article on Afghan pipeline connections: http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHI203A.html
An Afghan pipeline ‘90s timeline: http://www.worldpress.org/specials/pp/pipeline_timeline.htm
BBC story on Bush plans to attack Afghanistan:
Karzai’s 2002 pipeline plans:
Thank you again Roger. You bring clarity to a difficult issue. Webb
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