This was written for Peace Researcher 26, August 2002. We believe that it deserves a wider audience.

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Since the US declared its "war on terror", international media attention has focused almost exclusively on Afghanistan. That benighted country has been occupied by a plethora of Western military forces (including those of New Zealand, primarily our Special Air Service); the fundamentalist Taliban crackpots have been replaced by the same murderous, opium growing warlords that used to run the place and who spent all their energies, in the pre-Taliban days, in fighting each other (with horrendous civilian casualties). These are the guys who are, once again, running "liberated" Afghanistan, with the added ingredient of an octogenarian King who had been unwanted in his own country for 30 years. The warlords and thugs are fighting each other again, human rights abuses are rampant, poverty is universal, Afghan opium poppies are once again being grown for the huge Western heroin market but, hey, these guys are on our side. Never mind the embarrassing fact that neither Osama bin Laden, the ostensible cause of it all, nor Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, has been killed or captured. Indeed fighters from bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and the Taliban have continued to battle the American-led forces in various parts of Afghanistan.

After the enormous shock of September 11 2001, the Bush Administration has become obsessed by bin Laden and "terrorists". The American people are constantly being alarmed by warnings of more imminent attacks (none have transpired); the homegrown terrorists responsible for the anthrax deaths and mass hysteria that immediately followed September 11 have never been caught. All that is known is that whoever was responsible, it was not bin Laden’s suicidal/homicidal fanatics. Paying ironic homage to Hollywood culture, they go for the biggest possible bang for their buck, not piddling around posting letters with germs in them.

Bush’s entire world view has mirrored this obsession. Everything has been judged by how it fits into "the war on terror". Thus, the 2002 Palestinian uprising and the murderous Israeli response is seen as distracting potential Arab allies from supporting the US, specifically in the planned Gulf War 11 (Bush is very keen to use "the war on terror" to finish the job that his Presidential father failed to do in 1991, namely get rid of Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein). The 50 year old Indo-Pakistani confrontation over Kashmir, which has led to two wars and regularly threatens to drag these nuclear States into the abyss, is likewise seen as a distraction. The Pakistani military dictatorship, which was the prime backer of the Taliban until September 11, has been transformed into a key American ally, with a vital role to play in securing Afghanistan’s eastern border. The Kashmiri confrontation on Pakistan’s eastern border draws troops away from the vital job of doing America’s work. It is extremely ironic that the US Central Intelligence Agency was, and is, the key partner of Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency, a state within a State, which is the prime backer of the Islamic fighters attacking India from across the Line of Control dividing Indian and Pakistani Kashmir. If Saddam Hussein was likewise sponsoring "freedom fighters" mounting deadly attacks across the borders of Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, the Cruise missiles would be raining down on Baghdad before you could say "war on terror".

Every since the US suffered its crushing defeat in Indochina, in the 1970s, with more than 50,000 American deaths, it had been loath to ever commit ground forces to its numerous imperial wars (unless they enjoyed overwhelming superiority and losses could be kept to an absolute minimum, as in Iraq and Yugoslavia, in the 90s). Even a minor event such as the 1993 deaths of 18 Special Forces troops in Mogadishu (glorified in the recent movie "Black Hawk Down") led to the US abandoning its military mission in Somalia. So all US wars since Vietnam have relied heavily on air power (including the B52, the dark emblem of that war). Bush followed the same path in Afghanistan, relying on the Northern Alliance (the Taliban’s Afghan enemies) and Western allies to actually do the dirty work on the ground. Thus the Americans learned, the hard way, that Afghan wars revolve around defections, bribes and betrayal and that notions of conventional military victory are meaningless. Enemies, including America’s Most Wanted, melted away, to fight another day. Eventually the US sent its Special Forces into the forbiddingly high mountains to do their own fighting, but they encountered fierce resistance (as the Russians had, in the 1970s and 80s), took casualties and the results were unclear. The US has also made it plain that it has no interest in nation building – other allies can clean up the mess of Afghanistan; America’s only interest is in defeating and punishing those responsible for attacking it. This punishment includes the usual mass murder of innocent civilians who happen to be in the wrong place when US aircraft attack, and the indefinite inhumane detention of unidentified captives in the dog pound for people that the US has built at its Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba (itself a symbol of American imperial arrogance for the past century).

This obsession has been applied globally. The US has suddenly developed an interest in countries that it had previously never heard of, let alone known how to spell their names. Any tenuous link to bin Laden or Al Qaeda has been enough for the US to send in "advisers" (shades of how they got sucked into Vietnam in the 1960s). There is a renewed major American military presence in its ex-colony, the Philippines (detailed in a separate article in Peace Researcher 26. Ed.). But the US military is now spread throughout the world, looking for the network set up by the elusive bin Laden. They have made contact with various Somali factions (Somalia, the world’s first "failed State", has only the most marginal of governments); they’ve checked out Sudan, bin Laden’s pre-Afghanistan home and the target for one of Bill Clinton’s most embarrassing Cruise missile attacks (it destroyed a major pharmaceutical factory rather than the "bin Laden germ warfare plant" that it was purported to be). 100 US "advisers" have gone into Yemen, to help the Government there against fundamentalist militants (the USS "Cole" was bombed in Aden; bin Laden himself is of Yemeni descent). The mere rumour of Al Qaeda fighters hiding out in a remote valley in Abkhazia, a breakaway republic of Georgia, was enough for 200 US Special Forces "advisers", backed by Huey helicopters, to be sent in to train the Georgian military (and to get directly involved in the very murky wars of the Caucasus, wars directly resulting from the break-up of the Soviet Union a decade ago). Just as cunning Afghan warlords have got the naive US military to do their dirty work, by killing their enemies that they wrongly label as Taliban or Al Qaeda, so the authorities in some of these tinpot countries get Uncle Sam in to help fight their wars by inventing and/or exploiting some spurious connection between bin Laden and their internal opponents.

When Bush won (read "stole") the 2000 Presidential election, he was correctly perceived as an isolationist, and his first few foreign policy initiatives (such as scrapping the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia and quitting the Kyoto Treaty process on global warming) confirmed that view. September 11 swung him from isolationist to global unilateralist, involved with the world but only insofar as it suited an obsessively narrow US agenda, and an involvement that consisted of State violence and terror. In the wake of the end of the Cold War, the US military had been cutting back its military presence in Europe and involuntarily having to leave countries such as the Philippines, where a massive people’s movement ended a century of US bases, in the early 1990s.

September 11 2001 ended the US military retreat from the world. In the months since those atrocities on US soil, Bush has started building a network of forward bases from the Middle East right across Asia, from the Red Sea to the Pacific. The focus has been on the "stans" of Central Asia. Obviously Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also some of the "stans" that used to be an integral part of the former Soviet Union – Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Previously there had been no US presence in those countries. For example, in March 2002, the Pentagon announced a forward base in Kyrgyzstan, close to the Chinese border, to house 3,000 personnel – troops, communications specialists and technical support – and combat aircraft. The idea is that these permanent forward bases in the "stans", each manned by 3,000 troops, can provide support for huge reinforcements as required. The US has no military presence in Kazakhstan but has been offered the use of airfields there, and has been negotiating for Kazakh troops to go into Afghanistan. US Senator Joseph Lieberman said: "We learned at a very high and painful price the cost of a lack of involvement in Central Asia on 11 September and we’re not going to let it happen again" (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 11/1/02; "Central Asia: US Military Buildup Shifts Spheres Of Influence"; Jean-Christophe Peuch). The US has negotiated confidential Status of Forces Agreements with these "stans" (the very same SOFAs that have caused such grief to the people of countries such as Japan and South Korea) and there is no mention of any withdrawal date for these brand new US bases.

This dramatic US penetration of Central Asia has not gone unremarked by the traditional Powers in that region, namely Russia and China. It’s only a decade ago that these countries were part of the Soviet Union. Russia continues to have its own troops in the region. For example, it has an estimated 20,000 troops in Tajikistan, primarily to secure the border with Afghanistan against incursions by Islamic insurgents. Tajikistan, Krygyzstan and Kazakhstan are members of the Commonwealth of Independent States’ (CIS) Collective Security Treaty, a Russian-led military alliance that also includes Armenia and Belarus. The Speaker of the Russian Parliament, Gennady Seleznyov, said that Russia "would not approve of permanent United States military bases in Central Asia" (ibid). But the "stans" are not particularly impressed by this, pointing out that Russia had not helped them fight the likes of the IMU. Indeed there are allegations that as recently as two years ago Russia was helping the IMU, in a Machiavellian policy to foster destabilisation and persuade the "stans" to accept the Russian military alliance.

For its part, China has reacted by sending delegations to the Central Asian republics and by convening a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Krygyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) to discuss this development. General Fu Quanyou, Chief of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army, said that reports of an imminent American military presence in Kazakhstan posed "a direct threat to China’s security" (ibid). China is particularly concerned about Islamic radicals creating instability among the Uighur Muslims on its western borders.

Central Asia is not the only place where the US is building bases. By January 2002, 13 new forward bases had been established in nine countries, from Bulgaria to Turkey and Kuwait (plus the "stans", of course), with more than 60,000 US military personnel stationed at them.

Most attention has focused on Saudi Arabia and six Persian Gulf States, which have been saddled with "temporary" US bases since the 1991 Gulf War. Reaction to this substantial military presence has been most marked in Saudi Arabia, an Islamic society every bit as militantly reactionary and obscurantist as Afghanistan under the Taliban. In the decade since the Gulf War this US military presence has itself become the target of terrorist attacks, such as the fatal bombings of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and the USS "Cole" in Yemen. Osama bin Laden is himself a Saudi, the scion of a billionaire family; 15 of the 19 suicide hijackers on September 11 were Saudis – not one was an Afghan. The famous video purporting to show bin Laden boasting about how unexpectedly successful the attacks had been featured him talking with a Saudi mullah. 200 Saudis have been captured in Afghanistan fighting alongside the Taliban or Al Qaeda. Bin Laden has stated that: "There is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the Holy Land (of Arabia)" (Guardian, 19/1/02; "Saudis tell US forces to get out"; Ewen MacAskill). That goal has been consistently presented as the motivation for Bin Laden’s entire international campaign.

And that goal has plenty of support in Saudi Arabia. The ruling royal family refused to provide any military help for the US in Afghanistan, which led to great resentment in the US. The Pentagon is reluctant to withdraw its 4,500 personnel from the huge Prince Sultan Air Base, near Riyadh, fearing that this would hand a propaganda victory to bin Laden. But Senator Carl Levin, who heads the Armed Services Committee, said: "We need a base in that region, but it seems to me we should find a place that is more hospitable" (ibid). The media have been running reports for some time now of a growing rift between the US and Saudi Arabia, its most important ally in that part of the world, with the Saudis wanting the US military to get out (both publicly deny it, of course). In July 2002 the Western media began to prominently report widespread anti-regime demonstrations in Saudi Arabia, protests which the feudal monarchy had tried to brutally suppress and hush up. The demonstrators were protesting the regime’s pro-American, pro-Western policies.

There is, of course, a common denominator in all this. Oil. I’ll give you a new word to describe the Bush Administration – it is an oiligarchy. Oil is the heroin of capitalism (much more important than money), so control of the world’s oil is a must for those wishing to both run and profit from the American Empire. The Gulf War was fought over oil – Saddam Hussein, whom the US had backed to the hilt in the 1980-88 Iran/Iraq War, had blotted his copybook by occupying Kuwait (reclaiming it as a former province of Iraq, alienated from the motherland by the British) and threatening US oil supplies from the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia. Despite that devastating defeat and enduring more than decade of sanctions, Iraq is still a major oil producer and the US would dearly love to add that to its captive suppliers.

Much has already been written about the role of oil in the Afghan crisis. Major US oil transnationals wanted a pipeline from Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan and on to the Indian Ocean. This was much more desirable than having to pipe oil through Iran or Russia. Until well into 2001 the US oil companies and Government were happily courting the Taliban to be the guardians of their interests; September 11 put paid to that business partnership and a much more pliable Afghan regime has been put in place to see things right for the oil barons. The government headed by Hamid Karzai has signed up for a trans-Afghanistan pipeline, pumping oil from the Caspian Sea through to a Pakistani port. The US oil company is Unocal – it is worth mentioning that both Karzai and Zalamay Khalilzad, the US special envoy to Afghanistan, worked as Unocal consultants in the 1990s.

The same motivation applies to the US military expansion into Central Asia. Richard Butler, the former United Nations arms inspector in Iraq, wrote a January 2002 letter to the New York Times, warning that the 19^th Century’s Great Game between Britain and Russia for control of Afghanistan was now being replayed, with the US and Russia as the players. Butler said: "Now the prize is oil – getting it and transporting it – and Afghanistan is again the contested territory" (New Zealand Herald, 26/1/02; "Now begins the real American invasion: The consequences of US engagement in Central Asia are becoming clear"; Edward Helmore). Kazakhstan’s oil reserves could be the world’s third largest, a rich prize indeed. A Kazakh government source said: "It is clear that the continuing war in Afghanistan is no more than a veil for the US to establish political dominance in the region. The war on terrorism is only a pretext for extending influence over our energy resources" (ibid).

Vice President Dick Cheney (a former energy industry executive) released the national energy policy paper in May 2001. In the chapter headed "Strengthening Global Alliances", the report recommends "that the President make energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy" (Progressive, June 2002; "Oil Moves The War Machine", Michael T Klare). The closeness of the US/Saudi relationship is entirely due to oil – Saudi Arabia has 25% of the world’s known oil reserves. The presence of US Special Forces "advisers" in Georgia is as much about protecting pipelines carrying oil from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea as it is about training the local military to fight Abkhazian separatists and their alleged Al Qaeda allies. This is being positioned to be the supply route for the huge volumes of Central Asian oil that the US hopes to secure as it moves into the "stans", pipelines that will be outside of the control of either Iran or Russia. This dual focus on securing oil and fighting "terrorists" also manifests itself in Colombia, where the US is getting more and more heavily involved in South America’s largest, longest and most intractable civil war. The US is now committed to help protect vital oil pipelines in that country, pipelines which have been regular targets of Leftist guerillas.

"…With the American public fixated on the threat of terrorism, however, the Administration is understandably reluctant to portray its foreign policy as related primarily to the protection of oil supplies. Thus the third reason for the merger of the war against terrorism and struggle for oil: to provide the White House with a convenient rationale for extending US military involvement into areas that are of concern to Washington primarily because of their role in supplying energy to the United States.

"For all of these reasons, the war against terrorism and the struggle for oil are likely to remain connected for the indefinite future. This will entail growing US military involvement in the oil-supplying nations. At times, such involvement may be limited to indirect forms of assistance, such as arms transfers and training programs. At others, it will involve the deployment of significant numbers of US combat troops.

"The Bush Administration has a right and an obligation to take the necessary steps to protect the United States against further acts of terrorism. Such efforts have been given unequivocal support by the public and Congress. But such support does not extend to an open-ended campaign to procure additional oil from overseas suppliers and to protect these supplies from hostile forces.

"Before committing additional military resources to such an effort, we should consider if America's energy requirements could be better provided through conservation and alternative energy systems, which would reduce the risk of US involvement in an endless series of overseas conflicts" (ibid).

Which brings us to the rapidly escalating preparations for another war on Iraq. Bush has already authorised the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to organise a coup and get rid of Saddam, by assassination if necessary. Nothing new in this, it has been US policy since the Gulf War. So now both the US and Britain (led by prize lapdog, Tony Blair) are proceeding full speed ahead with plans for a massive invasion and the overthrow of Saddam, with the psychological warfare having already started in the major Western media. Australia has distinguished itself by declaring that it supports America’s newly articulated policy of striking first at countries supporting terrorism (a bogus claim, as there is not one shred of evidence linking Iraq to the September 11 attacks. Saddam Hussein may be many things but suicidally stupid is not one of them). To its credit, New Zealand has made it plain that it will not support a war on Iraq. And America’s usually servile European allies are also not supporting Bush on this one.

Bush and Blair both say that the justification is that Saddam allegedly has, or will soon have, weapons of mass destruction (no such criteria are applied to the equally dangerous Pakistani government, to give but one example). Bush Jr probably also feels a Freudian need to complete Dad’s "unfinished business" from the Gulf War. But the real reason fits the pattern already established in Afghanistan and Central Asia. It is put most succinctly by the incomparable John Pilger: "The reason is that America wants a more compliant thug to run the world’s second greatest source of oil" (Observer, 14/7/02). What happens after this war, assuming that it succeeds in its goals? "…the White House has offered no post–Saddam vision for a country which contains 9% of the world’s known oil reserves and, let’s not forget, some of the most abused and terrorised people on Earth. No-one in Mr Bush’s Administration thinks beyond the slogan, which means that in the event of Saddam being toppled, another despot will probably fill the void and the whole process will begin again" (Observer; Henry Porter, "Hey, Dubya, you gotta listen up a little, pal"; reprinted in the Press, 31/5/02).

It should not be assumed that all Americans are spoiling for a war against Iraq. John Pilger quotes an open letter from almost 100 distinguished Americans, saying: "Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their Government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression. We believe that questioning, criticism and dissent must be valued and protected. Such rights are always contested and must be fought for. We, too, watched with shock the horrific events of September 11. But the mourning had barely begun when our leaders launched a spirit of revenge. The Government now openly prepares to wage war on Iraq – a country that has no connection with September 11. We say this to the world. Too many times in history people have waited until it was too late to resist. We draw on the inspiration of those who fought slavery and all those other great causes of freedom that began with dissent. We call on all like-minded people around the world to join us" (Observer, 14/7/02).

The post-September 11 mood has changed in the US, from one of terrified outrage demanding worldwide vengeance, to a questioning of why the Government and the vast Intelligence apparatus couldn’t detect, let alone prevent these murderously spectacular terrorist attacks. The answers are embarrassing for the Bush Administration and alarming for the American people. For a considerable period before the attacks, the US was warned by foreign allies and by insiders within its own national security agencies, that some sort of attack involving aircraft was highly likely, based on information received. For instance, when Bush joined other world leaders at the notorious Group of Eight (G8) summit in Genoa, in 2001, the Italian authorities installed anti-aircraft missiles at the airport. In 2002, evidence has emerged that the National Security Agency (NSA) had actually intercepted vital clues the day before September 11 but didn’t get them translated and processed in time, let alone share them with other agencies. US Federal Bureau of Investigations agents have gone public to say that, pre-September 11, they had alerted the highest levels of the FBI to their suspicions about Middle Eastern men taking flight training courses in the US, with no interest in learning how to take off or land, only in how to actually fly a passenger jet. They were ignored. All of this has been obsessively analysed in the mainstream US media (for example, see Time, 27/5/02; "Special Report: How The US Missed The Clues").

It’s worth reiterating – this was the single biggest Intelligence failure in American history, and several thousand people paid for it with their lives. The fact of the US being the world’s undisputed military super-Power and kingpin of a global electronic spying network all counted for nought. What use was the NSA with its Echelon keyword spying programme? What use was its global network of spybases, including Waihopai? After the event, all manner of pundits (including Mike Frost, the Canadian ex-spy that Anti-Bases Campaign toured through New Zealand a month after the attacks) proclaimed the answer to be more money and manpower for the spies. But one hundred times zero is still zero, and that is the likely outcome of beefing up a system built for the last war, namely that with "world Communism". Bin Laden’s kamikaze pilots didn’t use e-mail or satellite phones; they lived and worked unobtrusively in the US, training to carry out their mission; and they beat airport security and simultaneously hijacked four aircraft with very lowtech weapons that can be found in every office or home.

Of course, Bush and the reactionary ideologues in his government – men such as Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft – seized on the opportunity to significantly roll back two centuries of civil liberties in the US. They passed laws such as the infamous Patriot Act; they have allowed indefinite mass detention without charge or trial of hundreds of captured "enemy combatants" at the Guantanamo Bay dog pound for humans, in Cuba; American citizens have been detained without charge or trial in mainland military prisons; any number of "suspect foreigners" have been disappeared into prisons and Immigration detention centres without charge or trial. In the biggest shake-up to the national security empire since the birth of the CIA in 1947, Bush has created the Department of Homeland Security, merging the domestic security responsibilities of 22 Federal agencies, with a staff of 170,000 and a combined budget of $US37.5 billion, into one super department. But it doesn’t include the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and the other Intelligence agencies, and they have been racked with internecine rivalry, duplication and refusal to cooperate, so the prognosis is not great for this new bloated bureaucratic monstrosity.

Bush has had all sorts of other bright ideas to turn the US into a bigger, better East Germany – for instance, the Department of Justice proposed to recruit millions of Americans into the Terrorism Information Prevention System (with the catchy acronym of TIPS), which would have left in the shade the former East German Stasi secret police and its army of civilian informers. In July 2002 this particular section of the Homeland Security Bill was rejected by the House of Representatives (but the rest of the Bill passed). There is also a plan to operate a Department of Lying, utilising the newly created Office of Strategic Influence within the Pentagon. Its brief will be to distribute news items, including false ones, to foreign media organisations as part of a campaign to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries (particularly in the Muslim world).