In 1776 a movement against colonial rule started in the land now known as the United States of America, and its founding fathers and leaders of the historic struggle which led to its creation showed subjugated nations a new path of hope. But the America of today is completely different from what its founder fathers had conceived it.
In the era following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US became a greater hegemonic state than it ever was, and sharply intensified its wars for oil, weapons and drugs. According to James Petras, professor of sociology at Binghamton University, New York, there is a consensus among US congressional investigators and international banking experts that US and European banks laundered between $4 to $6 trillion of dirty money during the era of George W Bush and Dick Cheney. Half of the money was laundered by US banks alone. Thus, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the new war in Libya, are business ventures, and are meant to capture oil and gas resources and secure new military bases.
The reality behind the “war against terrorism” is well-known. The authors of this agenda have common Unocal connections, including Bush and Cheney themselves, Condoleezza Rice, Zalmay Khalilzad, Hamid Karzai and many others.
It is a matter of record that it is much before 9/11 that the US and its Nato allies decided to invade Afghanistan. The decision was taken in Berlin during a top-level meeting held in November 2000 during the Clinton administration. Contrary to claims by the US and its coalition partners that the Sept 11 attacks were the sole reason for the invasion of Afghanistan, the actual cause was apprehensions regarding the Turkmenistan Gas Pipeline Project. Powerful corporate entities which rule the US and other Western countries had financial interests in the project. It was not the existence of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan that forced the US and its allies to invade Afghanistan but the financial interests of the US and its Nato allies.
Bush appointed Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, former aide to Unocal, as special envoy to Afghanistan only nine days after the US-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai took office in Kabul. This appointment underscored the real economic and financial interests at stake in the US military intervention in Central Asia. Khalilzad was intimately involved in the long-running US efforts to obtain direct access to the oil and gas resources of the region, largely unexploited but believed to be the second-largest in the world after those of the Persian Gulf region. As an advisor for Unocal, Khalilzad drew up a risk analysis of a proposed gas pipeline from the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. He participated in talks between the oil company and Taliban officials in 1997, which were aimed at implementing a 1995 agreement to build the pipeline across western Afghanistan. Unocal was the lead company in the formation of the Centgas consortium, whose purpose was to bring to market natural gas from the Dauletabad field in southeastern Turkmenistan.
The $2 billion project involved a 48-inch-diameter pipeline from the Afghanistan-Turkmenistan border, passing near the Afghan cities of Herat and Kandahar and crossing into Pakistan near Quetta and then linking up with the existing pipelines at Multan. An additional $600-million extension to India was also under consideration.
Khalilzad lobbied publicly for a more sympathetic US government policy towards the Taliban. In an op-ed article in The Washington Post, he defended the Taliban regime against accusations that it was a sponsor of terrorism. “The Taliban does not practice the anti-US style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran. We should…be willing to offer recognition and humanitarian assistance and to promote international economic reconstruction,” he declared. “It is time for the United States to re-engage” the Afghan regime. This “re-engagement” would, of course, have been enormously profitable to Unocal, which was otherwise unable to bring gas and oil to market from landlocked Turkmenistan.
Khalilzad shifted his position on the Taliban only after the Clinton administration fired cruise missiles at targets in Afghanistan in August 1998, claiming that terrorists under the direction of Afghan-based Osama bin Laden were responsible for bombing US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. One day after the attack, Unocal put Centgas on hold. Two months later it abandoned all plans for a trans-Afghan pipeline. The oil interests began to look towards a post-Taliban Afghanistan, and so did their representatives in the US national security establishment.
After Bush was installed as president by a 5-4 vote of the US Supreme Court, following the controversial presidential elections of November 2000, Khalilzad was nominated for the National Security Council (NSC), where no confirmation vote was needed. At the NSC Khalilzad was to report to Condoleezza Rice, who also served as an oil company consultant on Central Asia. After serving in the first Bush administration from 1989 to 1992, Rice was placed on the board of directors of Chevron Corporation and served as its principal expert on Kazakhstan, where Chevron holds the largest concession of any of the international oil companies. The oil industry connections of Bush and Cheney played the prominent role in the United States’ Afghan policy.
The San Francisco Chronicle published an article on Sept 26, 2001, by staff writer Frank Viviano, which first commented on the link with oil of the imminent US invasion of Afghanistan. “The hidden stakes in the war against terrorism can be summed up in a single word: OIL. The map of terrorist sanctuaries and targets in the Middle East and Central Asia is also, to an extraordinary degree, a map of the world’s principal energy sources in the 21st century,” he noted. “It is inevitable that the war against terrorism will be seen by many as a war on behalf of America’s Chevron, Exxon, and Arco; France’s TotalFinaElf; British Petroleum; Royal Dutch Shell and other multinational giants, which have hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the region.”
What Viviano wrote in September 2001 was to prove true not too long afterwards. Writing in the May 19, 2003, issue of Time magazine, Donald L Barlett and James B Steele exposed the dark side of American oil policy quoting from classified government documents and oil industry memos. Now, in 2011, US-Nato forces have intensified all efforts in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and elsewhere which can best be summed up as a quest for new oil resources.
This is the America of today: from great democracy to a hegemonic state fighting a “war against terrorism,” which is nothing but eyewash. In reality the sole superpower is subservient to Big Business, and companies running oil, arms and drug cartels, which know how to move money from one part of the world to another, buy government functionaries, control politicians, law enforcement officials and get the profits they want.
In the era following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US became a greater hegemonic state than it ever was, and sharply intensified its wars for oil, weapons and drugs. According to James Petras, professor of sociology at Binghamton University, New York, there is a consensus among US congressional investigators and international banking experts that US and European banks laundered between $4 to $6 trillion of dirty money during the era of George W Bush and Dick Cheney. Half of the money was laundered by US banks alone. Thus, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the new war in Libya, are business ventures, and are meant to capture oil and gas resources and secure new military bases.
The reality behind the “war against terrorism” is well-known. The authors of this agenda have common Unocal connections, including Bush and Cheney themselves, Condoleezza Rice, Zalmay Khalilzad, Hamid Karzai and many others.
It is a matter of record that it is much before 9/11 that the US and its Nato allies decided to invade Afghanistan. The decision was taken in Berlin during a top-level meeting held in November 2000 during the Clinton administration. Contrary to claims by the US and its coalition partners that the Sept 11 attacks were the sole reason for the invasion of Afghanistan, the actual cause was apprehensions regarding the Turkmenistan Gas Pipeline Project. Powerful corporate entities which rule the US and other Western countries had financial interests in the project. It was not the existence of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan that forced the US and its allies to invade Afghanistan but the financial interests of the US and its Nato allies.
Bush appointed Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, former aide to Unocal, as special envoy to Afghanistan only nine days after the US-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai took office in Kabul. This appointment underscored the real economic and financial interests at stake in the US military intervention in Central Asia. Khalilzad was intimately involved in the long-running US efforts to obtain direct access to the oil and gas resources of the region, largely unexploited but believed to be the second-largest in the world after those of the Persian Gulf region. As an advisor for Unocal, Khalilzad drew up a risk analysis of a proposed gas pipeline from the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. He participated in talks between the oil company and Taliban officials in 1997, which were aimed at implementing a 1995 agreement to build the pipeline across western Afghanistan. Unocal was the lead company in the formation of the Centgas consortium, whose purpose was to bring to market natural gas from the Dauletabad field in southeastern Turkmenistan.
The $2 billion project involved a 48-inch-diameter pipeline from the Afghanistan-Turkmenistan border, passing near the Afghan cities of Herat and Kandahar and crossing into Pakistan near Quetta and then linking up with the existing pipelines at Multan. An additional $600-million extension to India was also under consideration.
Khalilzad lobbied publicly for a more sympathetic US government policy towards the Taliban. In an op-ed article in The Washington Post, he defended the Taliban regime against accusations that it was a sponsor of terrorism. “The Taliban does not practice the anti-US style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran. We should…be willing to offer recognition and humanitarian assistance and to promote international economic reconstruction,” he declared. “It is time for the United States to re-engage” the Afghan regime. This “re-engagement” would, of course, have been enormously profitable to Unocal, which was otherwise unable to bring gas and oil to market from landlocked Turkmenistan.
Khalilzad shifted his position on the Taliban only after the Clinton administration fired cruise missiles at targets in Afghanistan in August 1998, claiming that terrorists under the direction of Afghan-based Osama bin Laden were responsible for bombing US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. One day after the attack, Unocal put Centgas on hold. Two months later it abandoned all plans for a trans-Afghan pipeline. The oil interests began to look towards a post-Taliban Afghanistan, and so did their representatives in the US national security establishment.
After Bush was installed as president by a 5-4 vote of the US Supreme Court, following the controversial presidential elections of November 2000, Khalilzad was nominated for the National Security Council (NSC), where no confirmation vote was needed. At the NSC Khalilzad was to report to Condoleezza Rice, who also served as an oil company consultant on Central Asia. After serving in the first Bush administration from 1989 to 1992, Rice was placed on the board of directors of Chevron Corporation and served as its principal expert on Kazakhstan, where Chevron holds the largest concession of any of the international oil companies. The oil industry connections of Bush and Cheney played the prominent role in the United States’ Afghan policy.
The San Francisco Chronicle published an article on Sept 26, 2001, by staff writer Frank Viviano, which first commented on the link with oil of the imminent US invasion of Afghanistan. “The hidden stakes in the war against terrorism can be summed up in a single word: OIL. The map of terrorist sanctuaries and targets in the Middle East and Central Asia is also, to an extraordinary degree, a map of the world’s principal energy sources in the 21st century,” he noted. “It is inevitable that the war against terrorism will be seen by many as a war on behalf of America’s Chevron, Exxon, and Arco; France’s TotalFinaElf; British Petroleum; Royal Dutch Shell and other multinational giants, which have hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the region.”
What Viviano wrote in September 2001 was to prove true not too long afterwards. Writing in the May 19, 2003, issue of Time magazine, Donald L Barlett and James B Steele exposed the dark side of American oil policy quoting from classified government documents and oil industry memos. Now, in 2011, US-Nato forces have intensified all efforts in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and elsewhere which can best be summed up as a quest for new oil resources.
This is the America of today: from great democracy to a hegemonic state fighting a “war against terrorism,” which is nothing but eyewash. In reality the sole superpower is subservient to Big Business, and companies running oil, arms and drug cartels, which know how to move money from one part of the world to another, buy government functionaries, control politicians, law enforcement officials and get the profits they want.
