Preface
for a North American Audience
I delivered
the following remarks at an anti-NATO conference held in Moscow
on May 15, 2012. Unlike other speakers, my paper urged Russians
– despite the expansionist and aggressive activities in Central
Asia of the CIA, SOCOM, and NATO – to cooperate under neutral
auspices with like-minded Americans, towards dealing with the related
crises of Afghan drug production and drug-financed Salafi jihadism.
Since the conference I have continued to reflect intensely on the
battered state of U.S.-Russian relations, and my own slightly utopian
response to it. Although the speakers at the conference represented
many different viewpoints, they tended all to share a deep anxiety
about US intentions towards Russia and the other former states of
the USSR. Their anxiety was based on shared knowledge of past American
actions and broken promises, of which they (unlike most Americans)
are only too aware.
A key example of such broken promises was the assurance that NATO
would not take advantage of détente to expand into Eastern
Europe. Today of course Poland is a member of NATO, and there are
still proposals on the table to expand NATO also into the Ukraine
– i.e. the very heart of the former Soviet Union. This push
was matched by U.S. joint activities and operations – some
of them under NATO auspices – with the army and security forces
of Uzbekistan. (These began in 1997 – i.e. in the Clinton administration.)
Some of the conferees I spoke to see Russia has having been threatened
for two decades after World War Two by active US and UK plans for
a nuclear first strike against Russia, before it could gain nuclear
parity. While obviously these plans were never implemented, those
I spoke to were sure that the ultras who desired them have never
abandoned their desire to humiliate Russia and reduce it to a third-rate
power. I cannot refute this concern: my recent book American War
Machine also sees a relentless push since World War Two to establish
and sustain global American dominance in the world.
Thus the conference speakers were bitterly opposed to Putin’s
endorsement, as recently as April 11 of this year, of NATO’s
military efforts in Afghanistan. They are particularly incensed
by Putin’s agreement this year to the establishment of a NATO
base in Ulianovsk, two hundred kilometers east of Moscow in Russia
itself. Although the base has been sold to the Russian public as
a way to facilitate US withdrawal from Afghanistan, one speaker
assured the conference that the Ulianovsk outpost is described in
NATO documents as a military base. And they resent Russia’s
support of the US-inspired UN sanctions against Iran; they see Iran
instead as a natural ally of Russia against American efforts to
achieve global domination.
Apart from the remarks below, I was mostly silent at the conference.
But my mind, almost my conscience, is heavy when I think of the
recent revelations that Rumsfeld and Cheney, immediately after 9/11,
responded with an agenda to remove several governments friendly
to Russia, including Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran.[1] (Ten years
earlier the neocon Richard Perle told Gen. Wesley Clark in the Pentagon
that America had a window of opportunity to remove exactly these
Russian clients, in the period of Russian restructuring after the
breakup of the USSR.)
What we have seen, even under Obama, looks very much like a progressive
implementation of this agenda, even if we acknowledge that in Libya
and now Syria Obama has shown much greater reluctance to put large
numbers of US boots on the ground. (Small numbers of US Special
Forces were reportedly active in both countries, stirring up resistance
to first Qaddafi and now Assad.)
What particularly concerns me is the relative absence of public
response in America to a long-term Pentagon-CIA agenda of aggressive
military expansion – of dominationism, if you will. No doubt
many Americans may think that a global pax Americana will secure
a period of peace, much like the pax Romana of two millennia ago.
I myself am confident that it will not: rather, like the imperfect
pax Britannica of a century ago, it will lead inevitably to a major
conflict, possibly another nuclear war. For the secret of the pax
Romana was that Rome, under Hadrian, withdrew from Mesopotamia and
accepted strict limits to its area of dominance. Britain never achieved
that wisdom until too late; America, to date, has never achieved
it at all.
And so very few in America seem to care about Washington’s
global domination project. We have seen much critical examination
of why America fought in Vietnam, and even the American involvement
in atrocities like the Indonesian massacre of 1965. Authors like
Noam Chomsky and Bill Blum have chronicled America’s criminal
acts since World War Two. But only a few, like Chalmers Johnson
and Andrew Bacevich, have written about the progressive consolidation
of a war machine that now dominates America’s political processes.
The nascent Occupy movement has little to say about America’s
unprovoked wars; I am not sure they have even targeted the militarization
of surveillance, law enforcement, and detention camps – the
so-called “continuity of government” (COG) measures by
which America’s military planners have prepared never again
to have to deal with a successful American anti-war movement.
If I were to return to Russia I would again, as a former diplomat
and as a Canadian, call for US-Russian collaboration to deal with
the world’s pressing problems. But for a week I have been wondering
whether I have not perhaps been blinding myself to the realities
of America’s intransigent strive towards dominance.[2] Here
in London I have just met with an old friend from my diplomatic
days, a senior UK diplomat and Russian expert. I was hoping that
he would dissuade me from my negative assessment of US and NATO
intentions, but if anything he increased them.
So I am now publishing my talk with this preface for a North American
audience – to see who if anyone shares my concerns, and to
learn what steps if any are being taken to remedy them. I believe
that the most urgent task today to preserve the peace of the world
is to curb America’s drive towards dominationism, and to re-energize
the UN”s prohibition of unilateral and preemptive wars, for
the sake of coexistence in a peaceful and multilateral world.
Notes
[1] Rumsfeld initially wanted to respond to 9/11 with an attack
against Iraq rather than Afghanistan, on the grounds that there
were “no good targets in Afghanistan.”
[2] Two nights ago I had a vivid and unnerving dream, in which at
the end I saw the opening of a conference where I would again speak
as I did in Moscow. Immediately after my talk the conference agenda
called for a discussion of the possibility that “Peter Dale
Scott” was a fiction serving some nefarious covert end, and
that no real “Peter Dale Scott” in fact existed.
Presentation
to Anti-NATO Conference, Moscow, May 15, 2012
I wish to thank
the organizers of this conference for the chance to speak about
the acute problem of the Afghan drug traffic, a current threat to
both Russia and U.S.-Russian relations. I will discuss today the
deep political perspective of my book Drugs, Oil, and War, which
looks at factors underlying the international drug traffic and also
U.S. interventions harmful to the interests of both the Russian
and American people. I will also talk about the role of NATO in
facilitating strategies for U.S. hegemony in Asia. But first I want
to look at the drug traffic in the light of an important factor
that is prominent in my book: the role of oil in U.S. policies for
Asia, and also the role of the major international U.S.-aligned
oil companies, including BP.
Oil has been
a deep driving force behind all recent U.S. and NATO offensive actions:
one has only to think about Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, and
Libya in 2011.[1]
My book studies
the role of oil companies and their representatives in Washington
(including lobbies) in all of the major U.S. interventions since
Vietnam in the 1960s.[2] The power of U.S. oil companies may need
a little explanation to an audience in Russia, where oil companies
are controlled by the state. In America the relationship is almost
reversed: oil companies tend to dominate both U.S. foreign policy
and also the U.S. Congress.[3] This explains why presidents from
Kennedy to Reagan to Obama have been powerless to limit the oil
industry’s special tax break called the oil depletion allowance,
even now when most Americans are sinking deeper into poverty.[4]
The underlying
cause of U.S. activity in Central Asia, in traditional areas of
Russian influence like Kazakhstan, lies in the heightened interest
of western oil companies and their representatives in Washington,
for three decades or longer, in developing and above all controlling
the underdeveloped oil and gas resources of the Caspian basin.[5]
To this end Washington has developed policies that have produced
forward bases in Kyrgyzstan and for four years in Uzbekistan (2001-05).[6]
The overt purpose of these bases was to support U.S. military operations
in Afghanistan. But the U.S. presence also encourages the governments
in nearby Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, both areas of U.S. oil and
gas investment, to act more independently of Russian approval.
Washington
serves the interest of western oil companies, not just because of
their corrupt influence over the administration, but because the
survival of the current U.S. petro-economy depends on western domination
of the global oil trade. A passage in Drugs, Oil, and War describes
this policy, and how it has contributed to recent American interventions,
and also the impoverishment of the Third World since 1980. In essence,
the U.S. handled the quadrupling of oil prices in the 1970s by arranging,
by means of secret agreements with the Saudis, for the recycling
of petrodollars back into the U.S. economy. The first of these deals
assured a special and on-going Saudi stake in the health of the
U.S. dollar; the second secured continuing Saudi support for the
pricing of all OPEC oil in dollars.[7] These two deals assured that
the U.S. economy would not be impoverished by OPEC oil price hikes.
The heaviest burdens would be borne instead by the economies of
less developed countries.[8]
The U.S. dollar,
weakening as it is, still depends largely on the OPEC policy of
demanding U.S. dollars for payment of OPEC oil. Just how strongly
America will enforce this OPEC policy can be seen by the fate of
those countries that have chosen to challenge it. “Saddam Hussein
in 2000 insisted Iraq's oil be sold for euros, a political move,
but one that improved Iraq's recent earnings thanks to the rise
in the value of the euro against the dollar."[9] Three years
later, in March 2003, America invaded Iraq. Two months after that,
on May 22, 2003, Bush by executive order decreed that Iraqi oil
sales would be returned from euros to dollars.[10]
Shortly before
the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, Qaddafi, according to a Russian
article, initiated a movement, like Saddam Hussein’s, to refuse
the dollar for oil payments.[11] Meanwhile Iran, in February 2009,
announced that it had “completely stopped conducting oil transactions
in U.S. dollars.”[12] The full consequences of Iran’s
daring move have yet to be seen.[13]
I repeat: every
recent U.S. and NATO intervention has served to prop up the waning
dominance of western oil companies over the global oil and petrodollar
system. But I believe that oil companies themselves are capable
of initiating or at least contributing to political interventions.
As I say in my book (p.8):
There are recurring
allegations that US oil companies, either directly or through cutouts,
engage in covert operations; in Colombia (as we shall see) a US
security firm working for Occidental Petroleum took part in a Colombian
army military operation "that mistakenly killed 18 civilians.”
More relevant
to Russia was a 2002 covert operation in Azerbaijan, a classic exercise
in deep politics. There former CIA operatives, employed by a dubious
oil firm (MEGA Oil), “engaged in military training, passed
‘brown bags filled with cash’ to members of the government,
and set up an airline…which soon was picking up hundreds of
mujahideen mercenaries in Afghanistan.”[14] These mercenaries,
eventually said to number 2000, were initially used to combat Russian-backed
Armenian forces in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh; but
they also backed Muslim fighters in Chechnya and Dagestan. They
also contributed to the establishment of Baku as a transshipment
point for Afghan heroin to both the Russian urban market and also
the Chechen mafia.[15]
In 1993 they
also contributed to the ouster of Azerbaijan’s elected first
president, Abulfaz Elchibey, and his replacement by Heidar Aliyev,
who then agreed to a major oil contract with BP, including what
eventually became the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline to Turkey. Note
that the U.S. background of the MEGA Oil operatives is unmistakable.
However who financed MEGA is unclear; and may have been the oil
majors, many of which have or have had their own covert services.[16]
There are allegations that major oil corporations, including Exxon
and Mobil as well as BP, were “behind the coup d’état”
replacing Elchibey with Aliyev.[17]
It is clear
that Washington and the oil majors have a common perception that
their survival depends on maintaining their present dominance of
international oil markets. In the 1990s, when it was widely believed
that the world’s largest unproven reserves of hydrocarbons
lay in the Caspian basin of Central Asia, this region became the
central focus for both corporate U.S. petroinvestment and also for
U.S. security expansion.[18]
Clinton’s
close friend Strobe Talbott, speaking as Deputy Secretary of State,
attempted to put forward a reasonable strategy for this expansion.
In an important speech of July 21, 1997,
Talbott outlined
four dimensions of U.S. support to the countries of the Caucasus
and Central Asia: 1) The promotion of democracy; 2) The creation
of free market economies; 3) The sponsorship of peace and cooperation
within and among the countries of the region: and, 4) integration
into the larger international community.… Inveighing against
what he considers an outdated conception of competition in the Caucasus
and Central Asia, Mr. Talbott admonished any who would consider
the "Great Game" as a model on which to base current views
of the region. He proposed, instead, an arrangement where everyone
cooperates and everyone wins.[19]
But this multipolar
approach was immediately attacked by members of both parties. Only
three days later, the right-wing Heritage Foundation, think-tank
for the Republican Party, charged that, "The Clinton Administration
– intent on placating Moscow – has hesitated to take advantage
of the strategic opportunity to secure U.S. interests in the Caucasus."[20]
In October this critique was echoed in a new book, The Grand Chessboard,
by former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, perhaps
Russia’s most important opponent in the Democratic Party. Conceding
that the “ultimate objective of American policy should be…
to shape a truly cooperative global community,” Brzezinski
nonetheless defended for now the “great game” that Talbott
had rejected. “It is imperative,” he wrote, “that
no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of … challenging America.”[21]
Meanwhile,
behind this verbal debate, the CIA and Pentagon, through NATO, were
developing a “forward strategy” in the area that was antithetical
to Talbott’s. Under the umbrella of NATO’s Partnership
for Peace (PFP) Program, the Pentagon in 1997 began military training
exercises with Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, as “the
embryo of a NATO-led military force in the region.”[22] These
CENTRAZBAT exercises had in mind the possible future deployment
of U.S. combat forces; and a deputy assistant secretary of defense,
Catherine Kelleher, cited “the presence of enormous energy
resources” as a justification for American military involvement.[23]
Uzbekistan, which Brzezinski singled out for its geopolitical importance,
became the linchpin of U.S. training exercises, despite having one
of the worst human rights records locally.[24]
The American
sponsored “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan (March 2005)
was another conspicuous product of the CIA-Pentagon forward strategy
doctrine. It came at a time when George W. Bush repeatedly spoke
of a “forward strategy of freedom,” and Bush later, when
visiting Georgia, endorsed the changeover (more like a bloody coup
d’etat than a “revolution”) as an example of “spreading
democracy and freedom.”[25] But the new Bakiyev regime, in
the words of Columbia University Professor Alexander Cooley, "ran
the country like a criminal syndicate.” In particular many
observers accused Bakiyev of taking over and running the local drug
traffic as a family enterprise.[26]
To some extent
the Obama regime has retreated from the hegemonic Pentagon rhetoric
of (in its words) “full spectrum dominance.”[27] But it
is not surprising that under Obama pressures to reduce Russian influence
(e.g. in Syria) have continued. For a half century Washington has
been divided between a minority (principally in the State Department,
like Talbott) who have envisaged a future of cooperation with the
Soviet Union, and those hegemonic hawks (principally in the CIA
and Pentagon, like William Casey, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld)
who have pushed for a U.S. strategy of unipolar global domination.[28]
The latter have not hesitated to use drug-trafficking assets in
pursuit of this unattainable goal, notably in Indochina, Colombia,
and now Afghanistan.[29]
Significantly,
the hawks have used the drug eradication strategies of the DEA (Drug
Enforcement Administration) as well.[30] As I wrote in Drugs, Oil,
and War (p. 89),
The true purpose
of most of these campaigns … has not been the hopeless ideal
of eradication. It has been to alter market share: to target specific
enemies and thus ensure that the drug traffic remains under the
control of those traffickers who are allies of the Colombian state
security apparatus and/or the CIA.[31]
This has been
conspicuously true in Afghanistan, where the U.S. recruited former
drug traffickers to join in its 2001 invasion.[32] Later the U.S.
announced a drug reduction strategy that was explicitly limited
to attacking those drug traffickers supporting the insurgents.[33]
Thus those
concerned (as I am) with reducing Afghan drug flows are faced with
a dilemma. Effective strategies against international drug trafficking
must be multilateral, and in Central Asia they will require increased
U.S.-Russian cooperation. On the other hand the energies of the
principal pro-U.S. forces currently on the ground there – notably
the CIA, U.S. armed forces, NATO, and the DEA – have in the
past been intent primarily not on cooperation but on U.S. hegemony.
The answer
I believe will lie in team efforts using the expertise and resources
of both countries, housed in bilateral or multilateral agencies
not dominated by either. A successful drug strategy will also have
to be multi-faceted, like the successful campaign in northern Thailand,
and will probably require both countries to consider people-friendly
strategies not yet adopted by either.[34]
Russia and
America share many features and concerns. They are both still superstates,
even if now losing preeminence in the face of a rising China. As
superpowers both were tempted into Afghan adventures that many wiser
heads regret. Meanwhile Afghanistan, now a ravaged country, presents
urgent problems for all three superstates: the menace of drugs,
and the related menace of terrorism.
The whole planet
has a stake in seeing Russia and America deal with these menaces
constructively and not exploitatively. And any progress made in
reducing these shared threats will hopefully be another step in
the difficult process of learning to consolidate peace.
The last century
saw a Cold War between the US and the USSR, two superstates which
both armed heavily in the name of defending their people. The USSR
lost, leaving an unstable Pax Americana much like the Pax Britannica
of the 19th century: that is, a dangerous mix of globalizing commerce,
increasing disparity of wealth and income, and wildly excessive
and expansive militarism, leading to increasing conflict (Somalia,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya), and increasing danger of a possible
new world war (Iran).
To preserve
its perilous dominance the US today is arming against its own people,
not just in defense of them.[35] All the peoples of the world, including
the American, have a stake in seeing that expansive dominance reduced,
towards a less militarist and more multipolar world.
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