Pipeline politics taint U.S. warfare
March 18, 2002 | By Salim Muwakkil. Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor at In These Instances.

An ongoing supply of frustration and anger for many People is the lack of help the battle on terrorism has obtained abroad. Different nations are considerably less enthusiastic about our use of “daisy cutter” and “thermobaric” bombs than we think they should be. Why is that?

One motive is their media. Tales alleging imperial and industrial motives for the battle on terrorism are rife.

Exterior this country, there’s a widespread perception that U.S. army deployments in Central Asia mostly are about oil.

An article within the Guardian of London headlined, “A professional-western regime in Kabul ought to give the U.S. an Afghan route for Caspian oil,” foreshadowed the type of skeptical coverage the U.S. conflict now receives in lots of nations.

“The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a marketing campaign towards terrorism,” wrote author George Monbiot in the Oct. 22, 2001, piece, “however it may also be a late colonial adventure.”

He wrote that the U.S. oil company Unocal Corp. had been negotiating with the Taliban since 1995 to construct “oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, by Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian sea.” He cited Ahmed Rashid’s authoritative e-book “Taliban, Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia” as a source for this information.

Rashid, who has reported on Afghan wars for greater than 20 years as a correspondent for the Jap Economic Evaluate and the Daily Telegraph, carefully paperwork in his e book how the U.S. and Pakistan helped set up the Taliban in hopes of bringing stability to the warfare- ravaged area and making it safer for the pipeline venture. Unocal pulled out of the deal after the 1998 terrorist assaults on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were linked to terrorists based mostly in Afghanistan.

“The battle against terrorism is a fraud,” exclaimed John Pilger in an Oct. 29 commentary within the British-primarily based Mirror. Pilger, the publication’s former chief international correspondent, wrote, “Bush’s concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves within the Caspian basin, the best supply of untapped fossil gas on earth.”

These harsh assessments are not just those of embittered ideologues. They’re common fare. “Just as the Gulf Warfare in 1991 was about oil, the brand new battle in South and Central Asia is not any less about entry to the area’s plentiful petroleum resources,” writes Ranjit Devraj in the Hong Kong-primarily based Asia Instances, a enterprise- oriented publication.

A preferred French book titled “Bin Laden, the Forbidden Truth,” which alleges that the Bush administration blocked investigations of Osama bin Laden whereas it bargained for him with the Taliban in trade for political recognition and economic aid, is guiding much of the latest European coverage.

Written by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, the ebook adds another plank to the argument that America’s main goal was to achieve access to the area’s oil and gas reserves.

In accordance with the e-book, the Bush administration started to negotiate with the Taliban immediately after coming into energy. The events talked for a lot of months before reaching an impasse in August 2001.

The terrorist acts of Sept. Eleven, though tragic, offered the Bush administration a professional cause to invade Afghanistan, oust the recalcitrant Taliban and, coincidentally, smooth the way for the pipeline.

To make things even smoother, the U.S. engineered the rise to energy of two former Unocal staff: Hamid Karzai, the brand new interim president of Afghanistan, and Zalmay Khalizad, the Bush administration’s Afghanistan envoy.

“Osama bin Laden didn’t comprehend that his actions serve American interests,” writes Uri Averny, in a Feb. 14 column within the daily Ma’ariv in Israel. Averny, a former member of the Israeli Knesset and a famous peace activist, added, “If I have been a believer in conspiracy idea, I’d suppose that bin Laden is an American agent. Not being one I can solely marvel on the coincidence.”

Averny argues that the struggle on terrorism gives an ideal pretext for America’s imperial interests. “If one seems to be on the map of the big American bases created for the conflict, one is struck by the truth that they are utterly similar to the route of the projected oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean.”

The Asia Instances reported in January that the U.S. is growing “a network of multiple Caspian pipelines,” and that people close to the Bush administration stand to profit.

For instance, the proposed Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, linking Azerbaijan by Georgia to Turkey, is represented by the law firm Baker & Botts. The principal lawyer is James Baker, former secretary of state and chief spokesman for the Bush marketing campaign in the Florida vote controversy.

In 1997, the now disgraced Enron Corp. conducted the feasibility examine for the $2.5 billion Trans-Caspian pipeline being constructed underneath a joint venture between Turkmenistan, Bechtel Corp. and Normal Electric, the article noted.

There are lots of other connections, too numerous to recount here. No wonder the rest of the world is a bit skeptical about our conflict petroleum equipment suppliers on evildoers. We’re making such materials obtainable in our efforts to advance understanding of criminal justice, political, human rights, financial, democracy, scientific, and social justice points, and so forth. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Part 107, the fabric on this site is distributed with out profit to those who have expressed a prior curiosity in receiving the included information for analysis and academic purposes. For more data go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.

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