Iraq and Afghanistan

Why are we in Afghanistan? OIL!

We wanted a huge oil pipeline to go from the Afghan-Pakistan region to the Indian Ocean and the Taliban was in our way. So we got them out of our way which is what 9/11 provided and now we get our oil pipeline. Simple!

The permanent US military bases all correspond to oil areas and they are so massive that they rival the permanent bases in Europe. Here is a clue: we aren't leaving Iraq or Afghanistan any time soon. And the war has all been for oil. Blood for oil. At least that's how the oil is seen by the Bush Administration. So that's why American and British soldiers are dying in Afghanistan ... for a pipeline that the Taliban did not allow. The leader of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai was a consultant for the Unocal Oil Company.

Shootings: A Symptom of how Afghanis view the Occupation

Many of us have probably viewed long coverage of the funerals of soldiers recently. The most recent deaths involved 5 British soldiers shot dead by an Afghan who they were apparently training as a Policeman.

With all the media pontificating about 'vetting procedures' and 'security', is there any analysis of the likely fact that this incident is a symptom of how the Afghans in general feel about our presence there? The BBC's report described the alleged attacker - an Afghan Policeman the British Forces were training, as an individual who had gone "Rogue". An odd description to make of an individual in his own country being trained as a collaborator of the occupation forces.

One thing must be made clear: occupying armies do not have any rights. They do not have the right to be safe from being killed by someone who they thought they had turned into a pet policeman to serve the interests of a US puppet government and they do not have the right to be called 'heroes'. They are paid enforcers for Imperialistic Aggression - there is nothing 'heroic' about our presence in Afghanistan.

The government and media would have us believe that the war we have started in this enormously ethnically diverse region is a black and white issue of good guys and bad guys: US/Nato Forces good, Taliban bad, Hamid Karzai and his armed forces & Police good, "al Qaeda" insurgents bad. The fact that we are propping up a puppet regime of some of the worst drug dealers and warlords in the region - every bit as unpleasant as the numerous factions of the Taliban - seems to be completely absent from media analysis, as is the salient fact that such a 'government' cannot possibly be described honestly as a 'democracy' - 'Dictatorship Lite" would be more appropriate.

The deaths themselves, and the subsequent funerals, all become the opposite of what they should be: a distorted, drawn out exercise in propaganda to further the war resulting in even more tragic deaths based on nothing but lies, instead of a motive for the media to honestly analyse this conflict and seek a withdrawal. The jingoistic baying for blood in the tabloid press will even further divide the population at home.

The idea that murdering Afghan tribesman and bombing villages, while trampling all over the rights and dignity of the indigenous people will reduce the threat of terrorism in the UK is absurd. The opposite is true. The longer we stay, the more the Afghan people will turn against us in body as well as in mind. It is no argument to say 'we need to stay to get the job done'. There is no 'job' - only the Hegemonic ambitions of the United States who seeks to control Central Asia and its important oil and gas reserves to fuel its continuing world power status and deny Russia and China those same resources.

Today, reports were coming in of the shooting dead of US soldiers in an army base on home soil by one Major Nidal Malik Hasan. What little has emerged indicates that this Muslim American of Middle Eastern origin, was suffering from racial abuse. Is it any wonder that such things happen when our soldiers are encouraged to dehumanise and kill muslims abroad? Is it any wonder that the victim of this abuse begins to see his 'fellow' soldiers as the enemy?

OrwellianUK

Will the Empire end in Good Leadership or Blood?

"The silver lining is that we manage this [transition] with good leadership, consistent, sustained good leadership ... it has to be twenty to twenty-five years of good leadership. Where we gonna find that with our political process?"

"Think about 2000, I sat there as a member of the Republican party and I said to myself, My god, three hundred million people in this country and all we can come up with is Al Gore and George W. Bush! My god, how do we change that? I think that's part of the problem, that we have got to have sustained leadership. We've got to have good leadership and we've got to begin meeting these challenges."

"If we want oil, if we want gas, if we want it for our allies -- one of the things that wasn't mentioned about Mohammed Mossadeq, in '53 Truman didn't want to do it, Truman was adamantly opposed to it. Truman didn't like the CIA very much. Read his editorial in the Washington Post, December 22, 1963, right after Kennedy was assassinated. Truman says, I didn't recognize the CIA I created, that ain't the CIA I created."

"One of the reasons Eisenhower changed his mind, because Eisenhower came in opposed also, one of the reasons was a guy by the name of Allen Dulles at the CIA and a guy by the name of Winston Churchill who'd come back to power in the UK. And both were essentially saying not just that the Communists were coming ... which was kind of farcical but they were saying the Marshall Plan, the Marshall Plan and England and England. Because this money was huge, coming from the AIOC into the coffers of the Europeans and part into England. And you needed cheap oil to fuel the recovery of England and the recovery of Europe after that very cataclysmic war for them. We were the only nation essentially that was unscathed. The rest of Europe and Japan were ruined, they had to start over again. So that was part of the motivation."

"If part of the motivation is that we have to go after oil and gas in the world then, by god, we better start telling the American people about this, shouldn't we? And we should give the American people, including you here tonight, a right to vote on this! And you should have the right to say, that's not the way we want to do it."

"I believe the blueprint is the better way to do it, I believe that we should deal with world leaders, that the marketplace ... ought to designate where this goes and if it starts running out and we haven't made the transition fast enough to the basket of energy resources that we're gonna have to have it administered somehow and you don't administer -- as I was looking at doing in war planning in the US Pacific Command in the mid-'eighties by mounting the Arabian Peninsula with five million American soldiers, taking it over, putting the oil wells under the UN in a trusteeship and administering them for the world. That's not the way to do it! You need to get talking beforehand, you need to get dealing diplomatically beforehand, you need to work on the problem. You do not need bombs, bullets and bayonets! And I'm a soldier up here telling you because soldiers die, soldiers get wounded. I tell my students that the most fateful decision a President can make is the decision to send young boys and young girls to die for state purposes. And something we forget, to kill others for state purposes. Even by DoD's estimate we've killed one hundred thousand in Iraq. I think it's more like three hundred thousand. We have sent the greatest refugee problem into Syria and Jordan that the world confronts right now ... and where do you see it in an American newspaper? No one is reporting it."

"How do we Americans get out of this mess? This fiscal mess, this war instrument, the highest use mess, this business of presidents thinking that the only disciplined instrument of national power they have lives in the Pentagon? It isn't going to be because of President Obama, it isn't going to be because of national security adviser Jim Jones, it isn't going to be because of secretary Clinton, it's only going to happen if we Americans say we're fed up with it. It's only going to happen if we begin to stop doing what we've been doing for the past, I don't know, my lifetime, and I've been right there with you. We've been so damned apathetic about our government."

..."And we have allowed power to be used and misused in this country, particularly since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. It's been going on for a long time ... Where is the debate going on, where is the discussion going on? It isn't in the Congress of the United States. There are people over there who do not even realize that we are bankrupt. They think we can continue to print money because they've been printing money for so long that that is a lifestyle for them! The only way this is going to change is from the ground up. And we will be, let me say as cynically as I can, probably the first democratic republic possessed of an empire, commercial or territorial or otherwise, to resurrect itself from the ashes because history says we're going down. That's what history says. I dare you to name a single empire in human history that has survived. It is nowhere written in stone that the American empire will be exceptional."

"So it's about time we get busy and do everything in our power to make sure that whatever is happening happens so that our posterity which we seem to have forgotten about, so that our posterity survives with some prospects for the future ... Collectively [our children] are going to have a lower standard of living. That's the reality. Whether they turn that around so that their generation [and future] generations after them even have a place that is free, that is marked by democratic principles, that looks like a well-governed republic that isn't dominated by its military, that isn't physically irresponsible, it's up to them. That's the challenge they have. We have not left them, will not leave them a great opportunity in that regard. The challenge is much greater than it was for my generation or the generations before that, in my view."

"This fiscal crisis ... is more profound than 1929 and we will see the results of that slowly over the next five to ten years. It is going to be difficult, it is going to be challenging, it is going to be extremely hard. And Afghanistan and Iraq are going to be solved in that sense ... all of these things are coming, all of these things can be dealt with, all of these things can be managed with good leadership. But most of all they require a vigilant, alert, constantly-watching , constantly-overseeing electorate. And that may be the greatest challenge of all."

Uzbek Terror and the USUK

Ex-ambassador Craig Murray exposes the horrific tortures taking place in Uzbekistan and the reasons why the USUK are secretly complicit in them.

"Anyone interested in hydrocarbon resources needs to be in Uzbekistan," he observes. He highlights two incidents of torture after which he began to realize that greatly exaggerated CIA intelligence reports were resulting from them. He reports that the CIA were flying in people to be tortured.

"I knew the CIA people who were doing it," he claims.

"When Bush came into power the relationship between the US and Uzbekistan became very cosy" Now Obama is planning to warm up the relationship and to beef up the Uzbek dictator, Karimov.

"To find out that respect for international law and human rights had gone out of the window and that people I knew and worked with were prepared to justify torture and that people knew we were using torture to beef up the terrorist scare ... when something like that hits you it really does plunge you into questioning everything you ever believed in."

GEOPOLITICS: Iran/Russia - a deadly embrace

Forget the 'War on Terror' and the rest of the MSM's hype and propaganda. If you want to understand what's going on in the world, Geopolitics is the name of the game. It's an age-old game about the control of wealth and resources and it still goes on.

Pepe Escobar is one of today's more interesting and prolific analysts of Geopolitics. Another is F. William Engdahl. In the UK, Peter Fainton has written some useful stuff on his blog on Geopolitics and a general search on Geopolitics will throw up some interesting material.

To understand US foreign policy a must read is Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chess board which is available in PDF form. There is a tentative list of reference sources on Geopolitics in Afghanistan (Pipelineistan) on the Medialens Forum.

The following video is Part One of two in a series by Pepe Escobar concerning the geopolitics of Russian-Iranian relations in the light of a sinking Dollar and Anglo-American Empire