Re: you won't believe this.

In article
<georgewspamk-9CB941.11060728032008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
POW <georgewspamk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

If the Mission was endless war?

The Myth of the Surge
Hoping to turn enemies into allies, U.S. forces are arming Iraqis who
fought with the insurgents. But it's already starting to backfire. A
report from the front lines of the new Iraq

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18722376/the_myth_of_the_surge

and; the rest of the story;

http://www.themodernreligion.com/terror/thirty-year-itch.html

The Thirty-Year Itch
By Robert Dreyfuss, Mother Jones, 29 March 2003


Three decades ago, in the throes of the energy crisis, Washington's
hawks
conceived of a strategy for US control of the Persian Gulf's oil. Now,
with
the same strategists firmly in control of the White House, the Bush
administration is playing out their script for global dominance.

If you were to spin the globe and look for real estate critical to
building an American empire, your first stop would have to be the Persian
Gulf. The desert sands of this region hold two of every three barrels of
oil
in the world -- Iraq's reserves alone are equal, by some estimates, to
those
of Russia, the United States, China, and Mexico combined. For the past 30
years, the Gulf has been in the crosshairs of an influential group of
Washington foreign-policy strategists, who believe that in order to
ensure its
global dominance, the United States must seize control of the region and
its
oil. Born during the energy crisis of the 1970s and refined since then
by a
generation of policymakers, this approach is finding its boldest
expression
yet in the Bush administration -- which, with its plan to invade Iraq and
install a regime beholden to Washington, has moved closer than any of its
predecessors to transforming the Gulf into an American protectorate.

In the geopolitical vision driving current U.S. policy toward Iraq,
the
key to national security is global hegemony -- dominance over any and all
potential rivals. To that end, the United States must not only be able to
project its military forces anywhere, at any time. It must also control
key
resources, chief among them oil -- and especially Gulf oil. To the hawks
who
now set the tone at the White House and the Pentagon, the region is
crucial
not simply for its share of the U.S. oil supply (other sources have
become
more important over the years), but because it would allow the United
States
to maintain a lock on the world's energy lifeline and potentially deny
access
to its global competitors. The administration "believes you have to
control
resources in order to have access to them," says Chas Freeman, who
served as
U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. "They are
taken with the idea that the end of the Cold War left the United States
able
to impose its will globally -- and that those who have the ability to
shape
events with power have the duty to do so. It's ideology."

Iraq, in this view, is a strategic prize of unparalleled importance.
Unlike the oil beneath Alaska's frozen tundra, locked away in the
steppes of
central Asia, or buried under stormy seas, Iraq's crude is readily
accessible
and, at less than $1.50 a barrel, some of the cheapest in the world to
produce. Already, over the past several months, Western companies have
been
meeting with Iraqi exiles to try to stake a claim to that bonanza.

But while the companies hope to cash in on an American-controlled
Iraq,
the push to remove Saddam Hussein hasn't been driven by oil executives,
many
of whom are worried about the consequences of war. Nor are Vice President
Cheney and President Bush, both former oilmen, looking at the Gulf
simply for
the profits that can be earned there. The administration is thinking
bigger,
much bigger, than that.

"Controlling Iraq is about oil as power, rather than oil as fuel,"
says
Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire
College and author of Resource Wars. "Control over the Persian Gulf
translates
into control over Europe, Japan, and China. It's having our hand on the
spigot."

Ever since the oil shocks of the 1970s, the United States has
steadily
been accumulating military muscle in the Gulf by building bases, selling
weaponry, and forging military partnerships. Now, it is poised to
consolidate
its might in a place that will be a fulcrum of the world's balance of
power
for decades to come. At a stroke, by taking control of Iraq, the Bush
administration can solidify a long-running strategic design. "It's the
Kissinger plan," says James Akins, a former U.S. diplomat. "I thought it
had
been killed, but it's back."

Akins learned a hard lesson about the politics of oil when he served
as a
U.S. envoy in Kuwait and Iraq, and ultimately as ambassador to Saudi
Arabia
during the oil crisis of 1973 and '74. At his home in Washington, D.C.,
shelves filled with Middle Eastern pottery and other memorabilia cover
the
walls, souvenirs of his years in the Foreign Service. Nearly three
decades
later, he still gets worked up while recalling his first encounter with
the
idea that the United States should be prepared to occupy Arab
oil-producing
countries.

In 1975, while Akins was ambassador in Saudi Arabia, an article
headlined
"Seizing Arab Oil" appeared in Harper's. The author, who used the
pseudonym
Miles Ignotus, was identified as "a Washington-based professor and
defense
consultant with intimate links to high-level U.S. policymakers." The
article
outlined, as Akins puts it, "how we could solve all our economic and
political
problems by taking over the Arab oil fields [and] bringing in Texans and
Oklahomans to operate them." Simultaneously, a rash of similar stories
appeared in other magazines and newspapers. "I knew that it had to have
been
the result of a deep background briefing," Akins says. "You don't have
eight
people coming up with the same screwy idea at the same time,
independently.

"Then I made a fatal mistake," Akins continues. "I said on
television that
anyone who would propose that is either a madman, a criminal, or an
agent of
the Soviet Union." Soon afterward, he says, he learned that the
background
briefing had been conducted by his boss, then-Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger. Akins was fired later that year.

Kissinger has never acknowledged having planted the seeds for the
article.
But in an interview with Business Week that same year, he delivered a
thinly
veiled threat to the Saudis, musing about bringing oil prices down
through
"massive political warfare against countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran
to
make them risk their political stability and maybe their security if
they did
not cooperate."

In the 1970s, America's military presence in the Gulf was virtually
nil,
so the idea of seizing control of its oil was a pipe dream. Still,
starting
with the Miles Ignotus article, and a parallel one by conservative
strategist
and Johns Hopkins University professor Robert W. Tucker in Commentary,
the
idea began to gain favor among a feisty group of hardline, pro-Israeli
thinkers, especially the hawkish circle aligned with Democratic senators
Henry
Jackson of Washington and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York.

Eventually, this amalgam of strategists came to be known as
"neoconservatives," and they played important roles in President Reagan's
Defense Department and at think tanks and academic policy centers in the
1980s. Led by Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's influential
Defense
Policy Board, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, they now
occupy
several dozen key posts in the White House, the Pentagon, and the State
Department. At the top, they are closest to Vice President Cheney and
Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who have been closely aligned since both men
served
in the White House under President Ford in the mid-1970s. They also
clustered
around Cheney when he served as secretary of defense during the Gulf War
in
1991.

Throughout those years, and especially after the Gulf War, U.S.
forces
have steadily encroached on the Gulf and the surrounding region, from
the Horn
of Africa to Central Asia. In preparing for an invasion and occupation of
Iraq, the administration has been building on the steps taken by
military and
policy planners over the past quarter century.


Step one: The Rapid Deployment Force

In 1973 and '74, and again in 1979, political upheavals in the
Middle East
led to huge spikes in oil prices, which rose fifteenfold over the decade
and
focused new attention on the Persian Gulf. In January 1980, President
Carter
effectively declared the Gulf a zone of U.S. influence, especially
against
encroachment from the Soviet Union. "Let our position be absolutely
clear," he
said, announcing what came to be known as the Carter Doctrine. "An
attempt by
any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be
regarded
as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America,
and such
an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military
force."
To back up this doctrine, Carter created the Rapid Deployment Force, an
"over-the-horizon" military unit capable of rushing several thousand U.S.
troops to the Gulf in a crisis.


Step two: The Central Command

In the 1980s, under President Reagan, the United States began
pressing
countries in the Gulf for access to bases and support facilities. The
Rapid
Deployment Force was transformed into the Central Command, a new U.S.
military
command authority with responsibility for the Gulf and the surrounding
region
from eastern Africa to Afghanistan. Reagan tried to organize a "strategic
consensus" of anti-Soviet allies, including Turkey, Israel, and Saudi
Arabia.
The United States sold billions of dollars' worth of arms to the Saudis
in the
early '80s, from AWACS surveillance aircraft to F-15 fighters. And in
1987, at
the height of the war between Iraq and Iran, the U.S. Navy created the
Joint
Task Force-Middle East to protect oil tankers plying the waters of the
Gulf,
thus expanding a U.S. naval presence of just three or four warships into
a
flotilla of 40-plus aircraft carriers, battleships, and cruisers.


Step three: The Gulf War

Until 1991, the United States was unable to persuade the Arab Gulf
states
to allow a permanent American presence on their soil. Meanwhile, Saudi
Arabia,
while maintaining its close relationship with the United States, began to
diversify its commercial and military ties; by the time U.S. Ambassador
Chas
Freeman arrived there in the late Ô80s, the United States had fallen to
fourth
place among arms suppliers to the kingdom. "The United States was being
supplanted even in commercial terms by the British, the French, even the
Chinese," Freeman notes.

All that changed with the Gulf War. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf
states no
longer opposed a direct U.S. military presence, and American troops,
construction squads, arms salesmen, and military assistance teams rushed
in.
"The Gulf War put Saudi Arabia back on the map and revived a
relationship that
had been severely attrited," says Freeman.

In the decade after the war, the United States sold more than $43
billion
worth of weapons, equipment, and military construction projects to Saudi
Arabia, and $16 billion more to Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United
Arab
Emirates, according to data compiled by the Federation of American
Scientists.
Before Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military enjoyed the right to
stockpile, or "pre-position," military supplies only in the comparatively
remote Gulf state of Oman on the Indian Ocean. After the war, nearly
every
country in the region began conducting joint military exercises, hosting
U.S.
naval units and Air Force squadrons, and granting the United States
pre-positioning rights. "Our military presence in the Middle East has
increased dramatically," then-Defense Secretary William Cohen boasted in
1995.

Another boost to the U.S. presence was the unilateral imposition, in
1991,
of no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq, enforced mostly by U.S.
aircraft from bases in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. "There was a massive
buildup,
especially around Incirlik in Turkey, to police the northern no-fly
zone, and
around [the Saudi capital of] Riyadh, to police the southern no-fly
zone,"
says Colin Robinson of the Center for Defense Information, a Washington
think
tank. A billion-dollar, high-tech command center was built by Saudi
Arabia
near Riyadh, and over the past two years the United States has secretly
been
completing another one in Qatar. The Saudi facilities "were built with
capacities far beyond the ability of Saudi Arabia to use them," Robinson
says.
"And that's exactly what Qatar is doing now."


Step four: Afghanistan

The war in Afghanistan -- and the open-ended war on terrorism, which
has
led to U.S strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere -- further boosted
America's strength in the region. The administration has won large
increases
in the defense budget -- which now stands at about $400 billion, up from
just
over $300 billion in 2000 -- and a huge chunk of that budget, perhaps as
much
as $60 billion, is slated to support U.S. forces in and around the
Persian
Gulf. Military facilities on the perimeter of the Gulf, from Djibouti in
the
Horn of Africa to the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, have
been
expanded, and a web of bases and training missions has extended the U.S.
presence deep into central Asia. From Afghanistan to the landlocked
former
Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, U.S. forces have
established
themselves in an area that had long been in Russia's sphere of influence.
Oil-rich in its own right, and strategically vital, central Asia is now
the
eastern link in a nearly continuous chain of U.S. bases, facilities, and
allies stretching from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea far into the
Asian
hinterland.


Step five: Iraq

Removing Saddam Hussein could be the final piece of the puzzle,
cementing
an American imperial presence. It is "highly possible" that the United
States
will maintain military bases in Iraq, Robert Kagan, a leading
neoconservative
strategist, recently told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "We will
probably
need a major concentration of forces in the Middle East over a long
period of
time," he said. "When we have economic problems, it's been caused by
disruptions in our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will be
no
disruption in oil supplies."

Kagan, along with William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, is a
founder of
the think tank Project for the New American Century, an assembly of
foreign-policy hawks whose supporters include the Pentagon's Perle, New
Republic publisher Martin Peretz, and former Central Intelligence Agency
director James Woolsey. Among the group's affiliates in the Bush
administration are Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz; I. Lewis Libby, the
vice
president's chief of staff; Elliott Abrams, the Middle East director at
the
National Security Council; and Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House liaison
to
the Iraqi opposition groups. Kagan's group, tied to a web of similar
neoconservative, pro-Israeli organizations, represents the constellation
of
thinkers whose ideological affinity was forged in the Nixon and Ford
administrations.

To Akins, who has just returned from Saudi Arabia, it's a team that
looks
all too familiar, seeking to implement the plan first outlined back in
1975.
"It'll be easier once we have Iraq," he says. "Kuwait, we already have.
Qatar
and Bahrain, too. So it's only Saudi Arabia we're talking about, and the
United Arab Emirates falls into place."

LAST SUMMER, Perle provided a brief glimpse into his circle's
thinking
when he invited rand Corporation strategist Laurent Murawiec to make a
presentation to his Defense Policy Board, a committee of former senior
officials and generals that advises the Pentagon on big-picture policy
ideas.
Murawiec's closed-door briefing provoked a storm of criticism when it was
leaked to the media; he described Saudi Arabia as the "kernel of evil,"
suggested that the Saudi royal family should be replaced or overthrown,
and
raised the idea of a U.S. occupation of Saudi oil fields. He ultimately
lost
his job when rand decided he was too controversial.

Murawiec is part of a Washington school of thought that views
virtually
all of the nations in the Gulf as unstable "failed states" and maintains
that
only the United States has the power to forcibly reorganize and rebuild
them.
In this view, the arms systems and bases that were put in place to
defend the
region also provide a ready-made infrastructure for taking over
countries and
their oil fields in the event of a crisis.

The Defense Department likely has contingency plans to occupy Saudi
Arabia, says Robert E. Ebel, director of the energy program at the
Center for
Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank whose
advisers include Kissinger; former Defense Secretary and CIA director
James
Schlesinger; and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security
adviser. "If
something happens in Saudi Arabia," Ebel says, "if the ruling family is
ousted, if they decide to shut off the oil supply, we have to go in."

Two years ago, Ebel, a former mid-level CIA official, oversaw a CSIS
task
force that included several members of Congress as well as
representatives
from industry including ExxonMobil, Arco, BP, Shell, Texaco, and the
American
Petroleum Institute. Its report, "The Geopolitics of Energy Into the 21st
Century," concluded that the world will find itself dependent for many
years
on unstable oil-producing nations, around which conflicts and wars are
bound
to swirl. "Oil is high-profile stuff," Ebel says. "Oil fuels military
power,
national treasuries, and international politics. It is no longer a
commodity
to be bought and sold within the confines of traditional energy supply
and
demand balances. Rather, it has been transformed into a determinant of
well-being, of national security, and of international power."

As vital as the Persian Gulf is now, its strategic importance is
likely to
grow exponentially in the next 20 years. Nearly one out of every three
barrels
of oil reserves in the world lie under just two countries: Saudi Arabia
(with
259 billion barrels of proven reserves) and Iraq (112 billion). Those
figures
may understate Iraq's largely unexplored reserves, which according to
U.S.
government estimates may hold as many as 432 billion barrels.

With supplies in many other regions, especially the United States
and the
North Sea, nearly exhausted, oil from Saudi Arabia and Iraq is becoming
ever
more critical -- a fact duly noted in the administration's National
Energy
Policy, released in 2001 by a White House task force. By 2020, the Gulf
will
supply between 54 percent and 67 percent of the world's crude, the
document
said, making the region "vital to U.S. interests." According to G. Daniel
Butler, an oil-markets analyst at the U.S. Energy Information
Administration
(EIA), Saudi Arabia's production capacity will rise from its current 9.4
million barrels a day to 22.1 million over the next 17 years. Iraq,
which in
2002 produced a mere 2 million barrels a day, "could easily be a
double-digit
producer by 2020," says Butler.

U.S. strategists aren't worried primarily about America's own oil
supplies; for decades, the United States has worked to diversify its
sources
of oil, with Venezuela, Nigeria, Mexico, and other countries growing in
importance. But for Western Europe and Japan, as well as the developing
industrial powers of eastern Asia, the Gulf is all-important. Whoever
controls
it will maintain crucial global leverage for decades to come.

Today, notes the EIA's Butler, two-thirds of Gulf oil goes to Western
industrial nations. By 2015, according to a study by the CIA's National
Intelligence Council, three-quarters of the Gulf's oil will go to Asia,
chiefly to China. China's growing dependence on the Gulf could cause it
to
develop closer military and political ties with countries such as Iran
and
Iraq, according to the report produced by Ebel's CSIS task force. "They
have
different political interests in the Gulf than we do," Ebel says. "Is it
to
our advantage to have another competitor for oil in the Persian Gulf?"

David Long, who served as a U.S. diplomat in Saudi Arabia and as
chief of
the Near East division in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence
and
Research during the Reagan administration, likens the Bush
administration's
approach to the philosophy of Admiral Mahan, the 19th-century military
strategist who advocated the use of naval power to create a global
American
empire. "They want to be the world's enforcer," he says. "It's a
worldview, a
geopolitical position. They say, 'We need hegemony in the region.'"

UNTIL THE 1970s, the face of American power in the Gulf was the U.S.
oil
industry, led by Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Texaco, and Gulf, all of whom
competed
fiercely with Britain's BP and Anglo-Dutch Shell. But in the early '70s,
Iraq,
Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf states nationalized their oil
industries,
setting up state-run companies to run wells, pipelines, and production
facilities. Not only did that enhance the power of opec, enabling that
organization to force a series of sharp price increases, but it alarmed
U.S.
policymakers.

Today, a growing number of Washington strategists are advocating a
direct
U.S. challenge to state-owned petroleum industries in oil-producing
countries,
especially the Persian Gulf. Think tanks such as the American Enterprise
Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and CSIS are conducting discussions
about
privatizing Iraq's oil industry. Some of them have put forward detailed
plans
outlining how Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and other nations could be forced to
open up
their oil and gas industries to foreign investment. The Bush
administration
itself has been careful not to say much about what might happen to
Iraq's oil.
But State Department officials have had preliminary talks about the oil
industry with Iraqi exiles, and there have been reports that the U.S.
military
wants to use at least part of the country's oil revenue to pay for the
cost of
military occupation.

"One of the major problems with the Persian Gulf is that the means of
production are in the hands of the state," Rob Sobhani, an oil-industry
consultant, told an American Enterprise Institute conference last fall in
Washington. Already, he noted, several U.S. oil companies are studying
the
possibility of privatization in the Gulf. Dismantling government-owned
oil
companies, Sobhani argued, could also force political changes in the
region.
"The beginning of liberal democracy can be achieved if you take the
means of
production out of the hands of the state," he said, acknowledging that
Arabs
would resist that idea. "It's going to take a lot of selling, a lot of
marketing," he concluded.

Just which companies would get to claim Iraq's oil has been a
subject of
much debate. After a war, the contracts that Iraq's state-owned oil
company
has signed with European, Russian, and Chinese oil firms might well be
abrogated, leaving the field to U.S. oil companies. "What they have in
mind is
denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to American oil
companies," says Akins. "The American oil companies are going to be the
main
beneficiaries of this war."

The would-be rulers of a post-Saddam Iraq have been thinking along
the
same lines. "American oil companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil,"
says
Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, a group of
aristocrats
and wealthy Iraqis who fled the country when its repressive monarchy was
overthrown in 1958. During a visit to Washington last fall, Chalabi held
meetings with at least three major U.S. oil companies, trying to enlist
their
support. Similar meetings between Iraqi exiles and U.S. companies have
also
been taking place in Europe.

"Iraqi exiles have approached us, saying, 'You can have our oil if
we can
get back in there,'" says R. Gerald Bailey, who headed Exxon's Middle
East
operations until 1997. "All the major American companies have met with
them in
Paris, London, Brussels, all over. They're all jockeying for position.
You
can't ignore it, but you've got to do it on the QT. And you can't wait
till it
gets too far along."

But the companies are also anxious about the consequences of war,
according to many experts, oil-company executives, and former State
Department
officials. "The oil companies are caught in the middle," says Bailey.
Executives fear that war could create havoc in the region, turning Arab
states
against the United States and Western oil companies. On the other hand,
should
a U.S. invasion of Iraq be successful, they want to be there when the
oil is
divvied up. Says David Long, the former U.S. diplomat, "It's greed versus
fear."

Ibrahim Oweiss, a Middle East specialist at Georgetown University who
coined the term "petrodollar" and has also been a consultant to
Occidental and
BP, has been closely watching the cautious maneuvering by the companies.
"I
know that the oil companies are scared about the outcome of this," he
says.
"They are not at all sure this is in the best interests of the oil
industry."

Anne Joyce, an editor at the Washington-based Middle East Policy
Council
who has spoken privately to top Exxon officials, says it's clear that
most
oil-industry executives "are afraid" of what a war in the Persian Gulf
could
mean in the long term -- especially if tensions in the region spiral out
of
control. "They see it as much too risky, and they are risk averse," she
says.
"They think it has 'fiasco' written all over it."

A Mother Jones contributing writer, Robert Dreyfuss was named one of
the
"best unsung investigative journalists working in print" last year by the
Columbia Journalism Review.

--
when you believe the only tool you have is a hammer.
problems tend to look like nails.
.

Relevant Pages