Behind the fog of deception PDF Print E-mail
Tuesday, 30 November 1999 00:00

Washington\'s real war aims

Lance Selfa

All US military operations have justifications produced for public consumption that serve to cover over the real explanations. George Bush I cast the 1991 Persian Gulf War for oil as a noble effort to show that "naked aggression would not stand." In 1999, the US sold a war to preserve NATO's "credibility" as a humanitarian operation to save Kovosar refugees. George Bush II's "war on terrorism" is no different. If Bush was simply interested in "bringing to justice" the perpetrators of the 11 September attacks, he wouldn't be launching a multiyear, open-ended "war on terrorism." Bush's constant talk about "defending freedom" and vanquishing "evildoers" deliberately obscures the geopolitical and imperial aims of the US in this war.
 
The reason for these deceptions is simple to explain. If the American people knew the real reasons for intervention - as they came to understand during the Vietnam War - they wouldn't stand for it. Strobe Talbott, who participated in these deceptions as Clinton's special envoy to Russia during the Kosovo War, explained:
 
The American people have never accepted traditional geopolitics or pure balance of power calculations as sufficient reason to expend national treasure or to dispatch American soldiers to foreign lands. Throughout this [the twentieth] century, the US government has explained its decisions to send troops "over there" with some invocation of democracy and its defense. 1
 
At its most basic level, Operation Enduring Freedom is about defending one kind of freedom - the continued freedom of the US to intervene around the world and to bend countries to its will. Bush hopes Enduring Freedom will be his Operation Desert Storm, the 1991 war against Iraq that his father described as the proving ground for a US policy of "what we say goes." Perhaps in his wildest dreams, Bush II believes his "war on terrorism" will become the 21st-century equivalent of the Cold War, with "terrorism" standing in for "communism" as the all-purpose rationale for US imperial designs.
 
In its current phase as an attack on Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom has allowed the US to advance several long-standing geopolitical aims, of which three stand out: projecting US power into the "arc of conflict" in Asia, eroding Russian influence in Central Asia to gain greater access to Caspian Sea oil and gas resources, and strengthening US hegemony in the Middle East.
 
 
Asia: The next frontier for US domination
Since the end of the Cold War, the US has placed a priority on preventing or retarding the rise of a "peer competitor" whose military and economic strength could potentially challenge US hegemony in the landmass that stretches from Europe to Asia. Most US military scenarios assign the role of "peer competitor" to one of three Asian powers: Russia, China, or India. As the administration's Quadrennial Defense Review, issued 30 September 2001, put it:
 

The possibility exists that a military competitor with a formidable resource base will emerge in the region. The East Asian littoral - from the Bay of Bengal to the Sea of Japan - represents a particularly challenging area. The United States also has less assurance of access to facilities in the region. This places a premium on securing additional access and infrastructure agreements and on developing systems capable of sustained operations at great distances with minimal theater-based support. 2

 
The US defence establishment believes that the most likely "challenger" for regional hegemony in the next two decades will be China. The US views Asia as potentially the most unstable region in the world, a characterisation that gained credence when regional foes India and Pakistan detonated nuclear weapons within weeks of each other in 1998. Unlike Europe, where the end of the Cold War brought a significant reduction of US occupation forces, Asia plays host to Cold War levels of 100,000 troops in Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea. But recent regional developments - from rapprochement on the Korean Peninsula to movements to kick the US out of Okinawa, have made US bases in East Asia more uncertain. 3
 
What does this have to do with the "war on terrorism" being waged in Afghanistan? Quite a bit. First, a look at the publicly available map of US army and naval deployments shows that the US is ringing the region with troops, ships, and other military hardware. Whether the US looks at deployments in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and its attempt to negotiate a return to a naval base in the Philippines as permanent fixtures of its "forward defence" remains to be seen. But they would certainly help in the longer-term plan of the US to redeploy even more of its European-based forces to Asia.
 
Second, if China is the main "strategic competitor" of the future, US military operations in Afghanistan help to place China into a vice. US military might is now deployed in Japan, Korea, and the Strait of Taiwan on China's eastern flanks and in Central Asia to China's west. China doesn't have the power to stop US projection into Central Asia, and it dare not cross the United States. So it decided to take a limited role of support to the US war in Afghanistan because it:
 

would extend Chinese influence in Central Asia and thus balance the American extension in the region; it would win gratitude from the US, and in the process a new confidence could be built between the two countries. All these benefits would play in Beijing's favor on the Taiwan or Xinjiang issues. 4

 
China, Pakistan's ally for more than 50 years, has played a key behind-the-scenes role in gaining Pakistan's cooperation with the US. 5 China's long-term goal of becoming a regional power in Asia in the future depends on keeping the US at bay today. So, temporarily at least, China's interest in preventing the US from becoming an enemy coincides with the United States' interest in keeping China in check. 6
 
The US knows that "stability" in South Asia depends on its finding some way to navigate between Pakistan and India. Since the end of the Cold War, India - a rival to China - has craved a role as one of the chief partners of the US in Asia. It was the only major country besides Israel to hail Bush's 1 May 2001, speech outlining his "Star Wars" plans. So it came as no surprise that India offered basing rights, intelligence, and political support for America's war on "Islamic fundamentalism." As two establishment military analysts explained the US interest in South Asia:
 
The United States expects to maintain indefinitely a strong security presence in East Asia and in the Persian Gulf. It would like this presence to be regarded favorably by India, and it would like India at least to understand and preferably to share its view of how to strengthen the security of the region around the Indian Ocean.
The United States looks on the Indo-Pakistani dispute, with its nuclear dimension, as the biggest threat to the region's security, with the dangers of terrorism and of a weak Pakistan close behind. In all these issues, India's policies are crucial to regional peace. 7

But the US couldn't fully take up the Indian offers. Instead, it oriented primarily to its old Cold War ally Pakistan. Throughout the 1980s, Pakistan served as the main subcontractor to the US proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan. Pakistan's military intelligence trained most of the mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan, making a special project of the Taleban. Now, the US has forced Pakistan to pull its support from the Taleban. Ideally, Pakistan would like whatever postwar Afghanistan government emerges from the rubble to be a vassal that it can control. Because of Pakistan's obvious influence in Afghanistan, the US has chosen to orient primarily to Pakistan - and to encourage its support with a US$1 billion International Monetary Fund loan and a multibillion-dollar aid package. But to be able to exploit whatever advantages from either rival it can, the US lifted sanctions against both India and Pakistan.
 
 
The Caspian Sea oil rush
Afghanistan sits at the crossroads of an area that may hold the second largest deposits of oil and gas in the world, behind only the Persian Gulf. For that reason, all of the major and minor powers - the US, Russia, China, France, Britain, and Germany - have schemed for a decade since the USSR's collapse to get their hands on the area's resources. The US staked its claim with a well-publicised 1997 military operation - the deployment of 500 US paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division in North Carolina to the deserts of Kazakhstan. This, the longest airborne operation in military history (12,500 km), was meant to show the world that "there is no nation on the face of the Earth that we cannot get to," in the description of the operation's commander, Marine General John Sheehan. 8 Today's B-2 bombing runs, where US bombers take off from Missouri, bomb Afghanistan, and return to base in a single flight, exceed the global reach of the 1997 operation.
 
Because the Caspian riches are located hundreds of miles from international waterways, they have to be piped to market. Just what route those pipelines take will determine who the real winners and losers from the Caspian oil rush will be. Since the collapse of the USSR, the US has tried to use its power to make sure that the pipelines reward its friends and bypass its enemies. So, despite the fact that the shortest and most economically viable shipment route would lie through Iran to the Persian Gulf, the US has campaigned for an 1,770 km pipeline from Baku, Azerbaijan, through Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. This pipeline (and other similar routes) is aimed to keep Caspian Sea oil and gas away from Iran and the Soviet-era routes that run through Russia. The US has sought ways to drive wedges between the former Soviet republics and Russia so that they will sell their natural resources to the West. This US concern with promoting "independent, sovereign states that are able to defend themselves" (one of Sheehan's explanations for the 1997 airlift) serves the purpose of further weakening the ex-superpower in Moscow. To prevent this, Russia has tried to assert its remaining power over the Central Asian republics (Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan). 9
 
US policy in Afghanistan is wrapped up in this scramble for oil riches. In fact, the US and Pakistan sponsored the Taleban's rise to power as a means to create "stability" in the country to pursue these schemes. Today, the Wall Street Journal has joined the rest of the US media in calling for the Taleban's heads. But in 1997, the Journal declared, "Like them or not, the Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history." The Taleban's success was crucial to secure Afghanistan, "a prime transshipment route for the export of Central Asia's vast oil, gas and other natural resources," the Journal noted. The most audacious plan, by Unocal, to build a pipeline across Afghanistan to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan "was based on the premise that the Taleban were going to conquer Afghanistan."
 
To the US, the Taliban offered "stability" that could assure that Unocal's plans were realised. However, the US began to reverse its policy after the 1998 US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. It became increasingly convinced that the Taleban would no longer accept the subservient role the US had assigned. Therefore, the US began to look for ways to replace the Taleban with a more pliant Afghan government - three years before the 11September World Trade Center attack.
 
By 2000, it could be said that "the United States has quietly begun to align itself with those in the Russian government calling for military action against Afghanistan and has toyed with the idea of a new raid to wipe out Osama bin Laden. Until it backed off under local pressure, it went so far as to explore whether a Central Asian country would permit the use of its territory for such a purpose." 10 In Operation Enduring Freedom, the US went ahead with its plan. With Russian cooperation, the US gained access to two Soviet-era bases in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
 
This collaboration between the US and Russia could mark the most significant geopolitical shift to develop from the Afghan crisis. Russian president Vladimir Putin quickly offered his support to Bush after 11 September. Then he overrode the objections of his military chiefs to line up the Central Asian republics to provide basing to US military forces. Some reports suggest that Russian special forces troops are participating with the US in the war in Afghanistan. And certainly, Russia (along with Iran) used its pull over the Northern Alliance to cement it behind the Western attack on the Taleban.
 
Putin's actions amounted to an about-face of Russian strategy that had viewed the US and NATO as a hostile force. 11 Particularly since NATO humiliated Russia in pulverising its ally Yugoslavia in 1999, Putin had used the war in Chechnya to reinforce Russian control over its former empire. Clearly, Putin hopes his service to the West will be rewarded with more than a free pass in Chechnya. He wants - as does his main conduit to Europe, Germany - a transformed relationship with the West. Bush national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, an old Cold Warrior and Sovietologist, held out the possibility of a "fundamentally altered" relationship with the West. Putin even floated the possibility of Russia joining NATO - an amazing development, since one of NATO's chief missions has been to counter Russian influence in Europe.
 
However, Putin (or at least his military chiefs) may rue the day they ever agreed to US basing in Central Asia. On 7 October, the US completed an agreement with Uzbekistan pledging to defend the republic from outside intervention. The agreement "all but removes any impression that the US military presence in the region will be short-lived. It allows US ground forces to remain for a year, and is likely to be renewed, say officials familiar with the talks," the Wall Street Journal reported. The agreement is a step toward making "the entire region a Western energy preserve." 12
 
 
Reasserting American hegemony in the Middle East
The last time Afghanistan figured prominently in US attentions, President Jimmy Carter declared his "doctrine." Following the 1979 USSR invasion of Afghanistan, Carter asserted openly what all US administrations since the 1940s had believed: "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 any such assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."
 
The US didn't seriously believe the Soviet Union was using Afghanistan as a staging area for a thrust into the Persian Gulf. The "Soviet threat" justified a new policy of direct US intervention into a region made more unfriendly to US interests after the 1979 Iranian Revolution tossed out the main US strongman. 13 To enforce the "Carter Doctrine," the US created the Rapid Deployment Force, later renamed the US Central Command (CENTCOM). CENTCOM oversaw US efforts to "pre-position" tonnes of US military hardware and thousands of troops in friendly states around the Gulf. This deployment in the Gulf gave the US the power to respond immediately to any crisis that threatened its access to oil, and to "hold" the situation until a more substantial US force could be assembled for war. Operation Desert Storm, the US-led war in Iraq in 1991, represented the culmination of the Carter Doctrine and CENTCOM's mission. 14
 
The Gulf War rescue of the Kuwaiti monarchy established a "Bush doctrine" as well: "pledging defence assistance to oil-rich conservative regimes against any force that threatens them." 15 Indeed, the three major war-fighting scenarios of the US for the Persian Gulf focus on containing Iraq; preventing Iran from closing the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf's "chokepoint" as it empties into the Indian Ocean; and defending the Saudi regime from internal unrest or overthrow. 16 These scenarios, plus enforcing sanctions against Iraq and maintaining the "no-fly zones" over that country, further justified the presence of about 25,000 US troops either on land or on ships in the region (with another 155,000 on alert for rapid deployment). 17 Despite the overwhelming US presence in the Gulf:
 

the US suffers from two Achilles' heels in its role as regional superpower. One, it has been unable to solve the Palestinian question, which again threatens to explode the delicate balance in the region. And two, its own massive military intervention has rendered the Gulf monarchies even more unpopular - and more unstable. 18

 
Added to these problems are tensions with US allies that have built over the decade since the Gulf War. These include European and international oil firm resentment at US-imposed sanctions on Iraq and Iran and Saudi attempts to strike a more independent position from the United States. 19 The current crisis in Afghanistan and the "war on terrorism" offer the US a chance to arrest this erosion of its authority in the Persian Gulf. The largest buildup of US forces in the Gulf since the Gulf War has accompanied Bush's "war on terrorism."
 
 
Contradictions the war will uncover
In launching Operation Enduring Freedom, the US is taking a huge gamble. It is throwing its power into the middle of one of the most unstable regions in the world. Its geostrategic aims in the current war may be apparent, but they are no guarantee that the US will reach its goals. Bush may have promised that "we will not fail," but the contradictions inherent in the situation may blow the whole thing up.
 
First, the enormous faultlines in Bush's coalition can erupt at any time. Bush has assembled a coalition of convenience whose members share fundamental antagonisms to each other. Pakistan and India remain on hair-trigger alert, ready to go to war over Kashmir. As Pakistan cracks down on Islamist militants, they could strike back with attacks in Kashmir, goading India to respond. Only days before the US went to war, Islamist militants launched the biggest carbomb attack ever in Srinigar, killing 35. Since the war began, Pakistani and Indian forces have launched attacks across the "line of control" in Kashmir.
 
Georgia and Russia may be united with the US in the "war on terrorism," but Russia accuses Georgia of giving sanctuary to Chechen rebels. Only days after war began, it took its war against Chechnya into Georgia. In response, Georgia threatened to withdraw from the Commonwealth of Independent States and to send its forces to retake Abkhasia, a breakaway province that the Russians currently patrol. 20
 
Second, pre-11 September disputes between the US and its "coalition partners" that have been pushed under the rug will emerge again. Russia and China are riding the "war on terrorism" horse as far as it will take them. But will the US give up national missile defense (NMD) in exchange for future Russian and Chinese collaboration? That's unlikely. In fact, Bush has already started to repackage NMD as an "anti-terrorist" weapon. And even if the US issued a number of behind-the-scenes promises and guarantees to Russia, will it give up its plans to route Caspian Sea oil and gas away from Russian control or allow Russia into NATO? Again, highly unlikely. And with a US military foothold in Central Asia, it's even less likely to give up its Caspian Sea schemes. So Russia and China could as easily revert to their pre-11 September roles as the biggest challengers to the US in the Eurasian area.
 
Third, the war will pour petrol on political fires already burning around the Middle East and Asia. The sight of the US bully pounding one of the poorest countries in the world, forcing millions to flee or starve, will enrage millions more. The Islamist oppositions from Egypt to Saudi Arabia to Central Asia will gain more recruits to launch more serious attacks on US-allied governments. And any Israeli atrocity against Palestinians carried out while the US is bombing Afghanistan will heighten the outrage. Civil war conditions could develop in countries throughout the region. Only days after the US and Britain commenced bombing, Pakistani forces shot down demonstrators in cities across the country. And the Palestinian Authority (PA) faced its most serious confrontations with Islamists since 1994, prompting PA police to request riot gear from Israel!
 
Of all of these hot spots, the most troublesome for the US are Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the Taleban's two main sponsors. Within days of the first air strikes over Afghanistan, Pakistani dictator General Pervez Musharraf purged the army to remove potential coup plotters. In the face of large demonstrations and a destabilising refugee flow from Afghanistan, Musharraf called on the US to wind up its war before November, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Saudi Arabia's interior minister Prince Raif denounced the war against Afghanistan. The normally pliant Saudi regime refused the use of its bases to launch attacks on Afghanistan. As the London Guardian explained:
 

Officially, the state department in Washington remains "very satisfied" with the Saudi approach to the crisis, but this masks increasing alarm not merely about the governmental response but about potential insurrection that could endanger the Saudi regime. 21

 
These tensions will jump enormously - and the coalition will fracture - when the US moves on to its next "anti-terrorism" target. Already, hawks are pushing for Sudan, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Lebanon to be added to the hit list. For US imperialism, it won't be good enough simply to bomb Afghanistan from the sky. Its leaders want to re-establish the notion that the US will dispatch ground troops to enforce its will. But Afghanistan and the Taleban - the world's most isolated government - won't be a big enough prize. To really show that the US can enforce its will anywhere, it will move against another "rogue state." If all of the media chatter and clamour from the right is any indication, Iraq would be the most likely target.
 
In an incredible editorial, National Review editor Richard Lowry laid out the Right's fantasy program for Iraq. It's not simply the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, but the imposition of a US-run colony modeled on the nineteenth-century British Raj in India:

An American occupation would not last years, on the model of a MacArthur regency in Japan. Instead, the US would quickly - say, after less than a year - hand control over to a UN protectorate, with some Arab input to soothe feelings and a non-American - some anodyne European, such as a Swede - running the show. He would in effect act as Iraqi dictator, but without the brace of pistols. After five years or so the baton could be passed off to an Iraqi government.
The entire effort would represent a return to an enlightened paternalism toward the Third World, premised on the idea that the Arabs have failed miserably at self-government and need to start anew.
The goal would not be perfection, but a pro-Western and reasonably successful regime, somewhere between the Shah of Iran and the current government of Turkey.
It would guarantee the West's access to oil, and perhaps help break up OPEC (the ill-gotten gains from which fund repressive dictatorships and, indirectly, terrorists). And it would be a nice economic benefit to the United States: If the Teamsters like drilling in ANWR [Arctic National Wildlife Refuge], they should love occupying Iraq. 22

Whether the administration's plans are as far-reaching as Lowry's, we can't say at this point. But there's no doubt that some in the administration share his views. What's more, the administration has already announced plans to conduct a similar "nation-building" operation in Afghanistan, tossing aside Bush's campaign criticism of former president Bill Clinton for "nation-building" in Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans. Making such a scheme succeed portends a Kosovo-like occupation of Afghanistan for decades - a military task that will be "lengthy, costly, and ultimately doomed." 23
 
A US campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon will not confront an isolated and ragtag band of terrorists, but a substantial political movement that is heavily integrated into Lebanese society. What is more, Hezbollah's role in driving Israel out of southern Lebanon brought it national hero status, cutting across Lebanon's religious and political divides.
 
Any move to expand the war to the Middle East will put further pressure on the already tenuous alliance between the US and the so-called moderate (read "pro-US") Arab states. Around the region, millions know the US has maintained a genocidal sanctions regime against Iraq. They know that the US props up dictatorial regimes throughout the region. And they know the US provides political cover and weapons to Israel's repression of the Palestinians. Whether they support Islamists or not, they aren't likely to accept a revival of nineteenth century colonialism under the racist assumptions of "enlightened paternalism." If the US moves to impose a colonial regime on Iraq or any other country, it will ignite a national liberation movement greater than anything it has seen since the Iranian Revolution. Those with Lowry's delusions should recall what happened to the Shah of Iran.
 
 
A new American century?
The US begins the 21st century in a position of world strength that rivals the great empires of the past - from ancient Rome to Victorian Britain. Its economy accounts for 22 percent of world output, and it leads the world in all of the most cutting-edge technologies. Its military spends more than the next largest 15 militaries in the world combined. And the combined spending of the US and its most loyal allies - the NATO countries, South Korea, and Japan - outdistances military spending in the rest of the world. 24 This dominance has bred the kind of imperial hubris that contributes to dreams like Lowry's.
 
Yet every empire that thought it could reorder the world in its image has ultimately fallen by the wayside. Imperialism has always generated resistance to it - either from other potential rivals or from peoples and nations it tries to subjugate. Right now, the most likely US "peer competitors," Russia and China, are lined up with the "war on terrorism." But it doesn't take too much imagination to see that they will not accept US leadership forever. And if the US pushes its advantage in Central Asia, it could push them into opposition to US plans again. Russia and China, who counterposed a vision of a "multipolar" world to a US-dominated "unipolar" world before 11 September, might push themselves (or themselves and other countries) forward as rivals to the US in world politics.
 
Even more immediately, US blustering will provoke opposition from within its own empire. Its power depends on alliances with some of the most corrupt and repressive regimes in the world. Inevitably, the victims of these regimes will fight back - threatening not only the regime, but US power as well. If today's Saudi Arabia is truly facing an insurrectionary threat that the US can't suppress, the US faces the prospect of one of its biggest foreign policy disasters since the Second World War. The overthrow of the Saudi regime may not be imminent, but even talk about the possibility suggests an underlying fragility to US dominance.
 
As the world's only superpower, the US interposes its power into conflicts around the world. As it did in Vietnam, when it took over France's colonial administration, US intervention "Americanises" conflicts and makes the US a target of any people fighting for self determination. If the US pursues an out-and-out imperialist policy of the type Lowry advocates, then these challenges will simply multiply. Many fear that the US is already setting itself up for a Vietnam-like quagmire in Afghanistan. If it takes its "war on terrorism" to Lebanon or to the Philippines or to Indonesia (as some administration officials have hinted), it could face two, three, or many Vietnams.
 
Finally, and most importantly, the US is likely to find opposition at home, and not just from a self-identified anti-war movement. Bush's "war on terrorism" is unfolding in the context of a world recession. In the US, unemployment levels have hit ten year highs and the slowdown in industrial production is the worst since the Second World War. This means that as Bush ramps up the war, millions of workers in the US will be paying for it with job cuts, welfare cuts, and cuts in social spending to fatten the military contractors' bottom lines. As the socialist leader Eugene V. Debs put it in 1918:
 

[T]he working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. 25

 
In the space of a few days in September, US politicians' promises of Medicare prescription drug benefits and "saving Social Security" disappeared. Then the Congress handed out nearly US$15 billion in aid to airline bosses, while refusing to do anything to help the more than 100,000 laid off airline workers. "Corporate America is waving the flag with one hand and stuffing their pockets with the other - at the expense of working people," a United Auto Workers union official aptly explained. 26 As the war drags on and the economy worsens, more people will come to the realisation that they have no interest in this war drive. Then Bush will be exposed for what he did - cynically manipulating ordinary people's outrage at the September 11 attacks to push through his own right-wing agenda. That's the kind of opposition that Bush fears the most.
 
 
 

1 Quoted in Mark Curtis, The Great Deception: Anglo-American Power and World Order (London: Pluto Press, 1998), p. 40.
 
 
3 Tim Shorrock, "US faces pressure to reduce East Asian bases," Asia Times, 9 October, 2001.
 
4 Francesco Sisci, "Why China is taking America's side," Asia Times, 26 September, 2001.
 
5 Francesco Sisci, "China walks a fine line," Asia Times, 8 October, 2001.
 
6 An Israeli-American geopolitics website, www.debka.com, has claimed that "intelligence sources" reveal that China has infiltrated Muslim fighters into Afghanistan to tie down the US and to undermine US-Russian collaboration. While this scenario is certainly plausible, I haven't seen other reports confirming this. As with everything about this war, consider the source and treat everything you read with a healthy dose of scepticism.
 
7 Mandavi Mehta and Teresita C. Schaffer, "India and the United States: Security interests," South Asia Monitori 1 June, 2001, available on the Center for Strategic and International Studies Website at
http://www.mediamonitors.net/csis5.html
 
8 Sheehan quoted in David Brindley and Kevin Whitelaw, "Asia's big oil rush: Count us in," US News and World Report, 29 September, 1997.
 
9 See Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001), especially pp. 1-50 and pp. 81-108, for a description of the great power machinations in the Caspian Sea region. The Sheehan quote appears on p. 3.
 
10 Quote from Frederick Starr, chairman of the Central Asia Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins' Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, in Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, "Afghanistan, the Taliban and the United States," available on the Media Monitors Network Website at
http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq2.html The Ahmed article, on which much of this discussion is based, is an excellent resource. Incidentally, Starr's insight shouldn't be in question. Until 2001, his boss at Johns Hopkins was Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the administration's superhawk.
 
11 See Alexie G. Arbatov, The Transformation of Russian Military Doctrine: Lessons Learned from Kosovo and Chechnya (Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany: George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, 2000).
 
12 "US indicates new military partnership with Uzbekistan," Wall Street Journal, 15 October, 2001.
 
13 Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brezinski later bragged that the CIA had started covert assistance to Afghan guerrillas before the Soviet invasion - to bait the USSR into a quagmire. This further underlines the point that Carter used the "Soviet threat" to justify a policy of direct US intervention in the Gulf whose real reasons lay elsewhere. See Ahmed, "Afghanistan, the Taliban and the United States."
 
14 A good short description of this plan for direct US intervention in the Gulf is Sheila Ryan, "Countdown for a decade: The US build-up for war in the Gulf," in Phyllis Bennis and Michel Moushabeck, eds., Beyond the Storm: A Gulf Crisis Reader (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1991), pp. 91-102.
 
15 Quoted in Curtis, p. 117.
 
16 Klare, pp. 68-78.
 
17 These figures come from Anthony H. Cordesman, US Forces in the Middle East (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 48, 79.
 
 
19 See Fareed Mohamedi and Yahya Sadowski, "The decline (but not fall) of US hegemony in the Middle East," Middle East Report, Fall 2001. Saudi unease with its appearance as a lackey of the US apparently delayed the launch of US attacks on Afghanistan.
 
20 Robert Cottrell, "Tensions between Russia and Georgia reach new heights," Financial Times, October 11, 2001.
 
21 Matthew Engel, "Muslim allies break ranks with US," Guardian (London), 15 October, 2001.
 
22 Richard Lowry, "End Iraq," National Review, 15 October, 2001.
 
23 Stratfor Inc., "Conflict will follow Taliban's fall," 9 October, 2001.
 
24 Figures from Christopher Helman, "US military spending vs. the world," Defense Monitor, August 2001 (Washington: Center for Defense Information, 2001), p. 4.
 
25 From "The Canton Speech," in Jean Y. Tussey, ed., Eugene V. Debs Speaks (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), p. 261.
 
26 Lee Sustar, "Bosses cash in on US war drive," Socialist Worker, (Chicago) 19 October, 2001, p. 11.