Oil Power Politics: Iraq as American armlock on Europe and Asia

Dear Mimi,
I found this very interesting and also very curious. There is little 
emphasis that Wolfowitz, who only gets two mentions, has been driving force 
for this war for some time and there is only one mention of Israel in the 
entire article and that is a reference to the lobby, and nothing about the 
role Israel will play in the region and why it is backing the war or that 
most of the neo-cons are Jewish and strongly Zionist.. I find this 
extraordinary and not an accident. The origin of the neo-cons is also 
wrong. The originals were a group of anti-communist Jewish socialists 
[Social Democrats USA], led by Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, who 
decided that Stalin and Communism was the overall enemy and that they 
should ally themselves with the US government which would also be good for 
Israel. They did rally behind Scoop Jackson and Moynihan, both of whom 
were, of course, huge supporters of Israel.
Jeff
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.
Nor is there any mention of JINSA.

The Thirty Year Itch
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.

"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."

"The U.S. military wants to use at least part of [Iraq's] oil revenue to 
pay for the cost of military occupation."

Robert Dreyfuss
March 1, 2003

<http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/10/ma_273_01.html>http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/10/ma_273_01.html

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 '80s, 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.

<javascript:email_article()>E<javascript:email_article()>-mail article

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
. . .

This article has been made possible by the 
<http://www.motherjones.com/about/admin/index.html>Foundation for National 
Progress, the 
<http://www.motherjones.com/about/philanthropy/index.html>Investigative 
Fund of Mother Jones, and 
<http://www.guidestar.org/partners/helping/gs_report.jsp?ein=94-2282759>gifts 
from generous readers like you.  © 2003 The Foundation for National Progress

**********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Now TIE ALL THIS TOGETHER WITH the FOLLOWING ARTICLE WHICH APPEARED IN THE 
LONDON FINANCIAL TIMES.....last week.  In which the journal puts together 
everything from the Horn of Africa, to Egypt to Afghanistan.....Iraq is the 
earthquake to make it all happen.....!!!

<http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1045511175683&p=1012571727162>http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1045511175683&p=1012571727162
Financial Times of London
US expands its military presence around globe
By Peter Spiegel in Washington
Published: February 27 2003 4:00 | Last Updated: February 27 2003 4:00
28564fc.jpg

Buried in the US military's budget submission to Congress this month was a 
little-noticed request for $200m (€186m, 127m) to help train and equip 
forces of foreign countries. Compared with other items in the Pentagon's 
$380bn budget, the figure is minimal, close to the cost of a single new 
F/A-22 tactical fighter.

But the request is a sign of things to come. It is part of a growing effort 
by senior defence officials to use the US military in a growing number of 
foreign countries, sending military advisers and combat troops to fight 
alongside foreign forces in numbers unseen since the cold war.

From the Pankisi Gorge in the former Soviet republic of Georgia to the 
so-called "tri-border area" joining Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, 
thousands of US troops, most of them special operations forces, have been 
dispersed around the globe, in the words of the Bush administration, "to 
help those who have joined the fight" against terrorism.

Some of the expanded footprint of the US military presence is a legacy of 
the pre-September 11 world, where the Clinton administration sent troops on 
a variety of peacekeeping missions and anti-drugs efforts.

In Bosnia, for example, President George W. Bush has kept 3,500 troops as 
part of Nato's stabilisation force even after vowing to withdraw them 
earlier in his administration. Part of the reason for the renewed 
commitment to the region, officials have said, is their ability to conduct 
anti-terrorist operations within Bosnia.

The administration has also expanded the military presence in Colombia, 
where US troops are training the Colombian army in counterterrorism to 
protect critical infrastructures such as the Cano Limon pipeline. The US 
presence will soon grow, however, with plans this year to dispatch 
"operations and intelligence planning assistance teams" to selected units 
of the Colombian military fighting anti-government guerrillas.

But the most aggressive moves have come in regions where the US believes 
terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda are finding safe havens. The most 
recent example is the decision by the Pentagon last week to send another 
1,750 US troops to the Philippines to assist their army's war with the Abu 
Sayyaf group.

Last year more than 1,300 US personnel, including 160 special operations 
advisers, spent six months training 25 field companies of the Philippine 
armed forces and provided them with military transport aircraft, 30,000 
assault rifles, two coastguard cutters and eight Huey helicopters.

The Pentagon has made similar plans in Djibouti, where it has based a new 
joint task force to monitor terrorist movements in the Horn of Africa. 
Currently stationed off Djibouti on the USS Mount Whitney, approximately 
1,300 troops will be eventually moved to Camp Lemonier, a base being 
upgraded by advance forces.

The task force will oversee military-to-military relations with seven 
countries in the region, including Yemen, where a separate contingent of US 
forces has been active for months. US special forces trained 200 Yemeni 
army troops in counterterrorism techniques last year, and the Pentagon has 
set up an office of defence co-operation that will work on the training and 
equipping of Yemen's military.

US special operations forces have been in Georgia since last April, when 
the Tbilisi government asked for assistance to fight guerrillas believed to 
be associated with Islamic extremist groups and Chechen rebels. Training 
has already been completed for senior military staff and they have begun 
for four battalions and one armoured company that will go after the rebel 
groups based in the Pankisi Gorge.

The stepped-up global presence includes about 9,000 military and civilian 
personnel who remain in Afghanistan.

Philippines defers joint exercises with US for soldiers pursuing Abu Sayyaf 
rebels

The Philippines said yesterday it would defer joint military exercises with 
the US in the southernmost island of Sulu until the two allies agreed on 
new terms of reference, reports Roel Landingin in Manila. Angelo Reyes, the 
Philippine defence secretary, on his way to meet Donald Rumsfeld, his US 
counterpart, tomorrow, said American troops could not take part in 
offensive military operations in the Philippines because that would 
contravene the constitution.

About 1,700 US soldiers are to train and assist Filipino troops fighting 
remnants of the Abu Sayyaf rebel force. The new exercises, dubbed Balikatan 
03-1, or "shoulder-to-shoulder", are scheduled to begin next month. The 
guerrillas fled to Sulu last year, driven by sustained US-supported 
campaigns on nearby Basilan island.

However, a Pentagon statement last week that suggested American troops 
would take a more active role in fighting the Islamic guerrilla force has 
stirred opposition to the exercises in Manila. That prompted President 
Gloria Macapagal to seek more explicit guarantees from the US that American 
forces would not take an offensive role.

"We would rather hold deployment in connection with Balikatan 03-1 until 
final agreement on their exact size and shape is reached," Mr Reyes said. 
"We don't envision US forces . . calling the shots."
2856589.jpg========

Bush Selects Zionist U.S. General Jay Gardner To Run Iraq
by Uncensored Internet Wednesday February 26, 2003 at 08:55 AM
http://www.sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/02/1578177.php

While the S.F. Chronicle lauds this general turned "humanitarian," the 
general's past roles as one of the key leaders of JINSA and longtime 
advocate of using the U.S. military to support Zionism has been removed 
from the JINSA site

The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a cabal of 
Jewish American military officers who have long advocated putting Israel's 
security needs before those of the United States, has removed most all 
links to JINSA positions which may embarass the Bush administration's drive 
to appoint General Gardner as the U.S. installed dictator of "liberated" Iraq.