U.S. Policy On Iran and Southwest Asia
by John Tirman

Oil, Drugs and Blood
by Ben Clarke

excerpted from the book

September 11 and the U.S. War

Beyond the Curtain of Smoke

Edited by Roger Burbach and Ben Clarke

City Lights Books, 2002

p36

U.S. Policy On Iran and Southwest Asia
by John Tirman

All wars have unintended consequences. No matter how cautious generals and political leaders are, war sets in motion waves of change that can alter the currents of history. More often, generals and political leaders are not troubled by long-term side effects; they are sharply focused on achieving a victory and war's aims. The result is that the unseen and unintended occur, at times as a bitter riptide which overwhelms the original rationales for engaging in armed combat.

This unpredictable cycle of action and reaction has thwarted U.S. policy in southwestern Asia for 50 years. It began with attempts to contain the Soviet Union and control the oil-rich fields of the Persian Gulf, and continues today in the popular assault in Afghanistan to destroy the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that half century, nearly every major initiative led to an unexpected and sometimes catastrophic reaction, for which new military remedies were devised, only again to stir unforeseen problems. The cycle, regrettably, may be repeating again.

The half-century history begins with CIA intrigue in Iran. The original spigot of Middle Eastern oil, Iran was long dominated by Britain and its oil company, British Petroleum. During World War II, strongman Reza Kahn, a Nazi sympathizer, was deposed by the British in favor of his son, Reza Shah, who in turn was shunted aside by the increasingly assertive parliament, the Majlis. In 1951, the Majlis elected as premier Mohammed Mossedegh, a nationalist reformer who quickly sought control over Iran's oil wealth. The British, aghast at seeing 50 percent of BP's stake in Iran nationalized, sought his ouster, which the CIA provided in 1953. The Shah was reinstated and ruled with an iron fist, enabled by lavish American military aid.

The overthrow of Mossedegh remains a bitter memory for Iranians, and for Muslims more widely. While he was mainly a secular nationalist, even Islamic militants bewail his fate as another instance of Western interference and violence. In the years of the Shah's rule, many of the beleaguered reformers gravitated toward the ulama, the clerical class, who were relatively independent of the regime. So U.S. policy, which targeted the left as possible Soviet sympathizers or threats to oil interests, had the unintended effect of strengthening the political power and sophistication of the ulama.

By the 1970s, the Shah had become a self-styled regional power, flush with an unfettered flow of weaponry from the United States. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, neither a wallflower when it came to arming allies against perceived Soviet expansionism, had bluntly dismissed the Shah's pleas for military supremacy, but President Nixon embraced the Shah without restraint. Not only were the newest jet fighters and other advanced weaponry made available, but endless commercial ties were created, bringing thousands of Americans to Teheran. In 1971, the Shah's oil minister launched a cascade of price increases that rocked the American economy for nearly a decade, but it was American guns and products that the ever-richer Shah and his cohort really sought. A widely perceived decadence eroded whatever support the regime maintained, and by the late 1970s, the Shah was struggling against the now-familiar Muslim "street" that detested the westernized elite and resented their fabulous oil riches in the midst of poverty. In 1979, the Shah abdicated and left Iran in a stew of disarray. It was only a matter of months before the Islamic Revolution came to full flower.

The Devastating Aftermath

Apart from the war in Vietnam, where millions died, the U.S. role in imposing and sustaining the Shah in Iran is perhaps the most invidious episode in America's foreign policy. The consequences are colossal, and malignancies continue to appear. Among the first of these was the change in Soviet policy toward the region, and specifically in Afghanistan.

The Soviets had meddled in Afghanistan for years, supporting its on-again, off-again communist party. A mildly pro-Soviet regime in Kabul was under intense pressure from Islamic radicals in the late 1970s, however, and Moscow kept a wary eye on the chaotic events in neighboring Iran. As Islamic militancy gained in the post-Shah governments in Teheran, the Kabul regime became less and less tenable. In the Kremlin, the Soviet leadership opposed intervention until the Afghan regime was in complete turmoil. A high-level Russian, Georgy Kornienko, notes it was Defense Minister D.F. Ustinov who finally convinced the others to intervene:

"The push to change his former point of view," he recalls in a memoir, "came from the stationing of American military ships in the Persian Gulf in the fall of 1979, and the incoming information about preparations for a possible American invasion of Iran, which threatened to cardinally change the military-strategic situation in the region to the detriment of the interests of the Soviet Union. If the United States can allow itself such things tens of thousands of kilometers away from their territory in the immediate proximity from the USSR borders, why then should we be afraid to defend our positions in the neighboring Afghanistan?-this was approximately Ustinov's reasoning."

Politburo minutes from the entire previous year, now available, make clear the Soviet leaders' view that the Islamic militants were responsible for major attacks on government forces in Herat and elsewhere, and posed a threat, particularly with the active aid of the new Khomeini regime in Iran. The USSR, after all, included five Central Asia republics that were predominantly Muslim and bordered both Afghanistan and Iran. So the Shah's decades-long brutality gave rise to a broad Islamic movement in the region that, once in power in Teheran, not only alarmed Washington but also worried the much nearer Moscow.

The U.S. response to the collapse of the Shah, the triumph of Khomeini, and the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was to be played out tragically over the coming dozen years. Beginning with the Carter administration in the summer of 1979-months before the Soviets invaded-the CIA provided arms and training to the Afghan opposition, the now infamous mujahideen, first to provoke the Soviets to ill-considered action (as Carter advisor Zbigniew Bzrezinski has since revealed), and, after the December 1979 invasion, to make the Soviet stay in Afghanistan as inhospitable as possible. The large flow of arms and high-tech weapons like shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles did not come until 1986, by which time the Soviet leadership was firmly committed to departure. But a steady supply of Chinese-made AK-47s and Soviet-made weapons sent via Egypt provided the Islamic rebels with ample firepower to cripple the Soviets' aims in Afghanistan. It was, at the time, heralded as the wondrous victory of the "Reagan Doctrine," the strategy to arm "freedom fighters" against Soviet-leaning regimes in places like Angola and Nicaragua.

In all its venues and applications, the Reagan Doctrine had no qualms about the human costs of fomenting warfare, and most important for the present predicament, had no post-conflict strategy. The wages of war were high for all. Angola is still in a civil war more than 20 years later, with the Reagan-backed Savimbi fueling a self-aggrandizing conflict. Nicaragua is devastated, impoverished; the Contras, who battled the Sandinista regime, engaged in a drug trade that now swamps the region.

So, too, with Afghanistan: the Soviets left in 1989, defeated, but their departure also left Afghanistan a political minefield (to go along with the 10 million real land mines left by both sides in the war). Warlords battled with each other for nearly a decade until the most extreme faction, the Taliban, gained ascendency in the late l990s and provided the home to the terrorists the United States now seeks to rout. In the meantime, the 3 million AK-47s sent to the mujahideen have been located as far away as Liberia and Mozambique, the fodder for other wars and misery. Professor Fred Halliday of the London School of Economics wrote at the end of the 1980s:

"The most striking feature of the Reagan Doctrine was the way in which Washington itself came to be a promoter and organizer of terrorist actions. The mujahideen in Afghanistan, UNITA in Angola and the Nicaraguan Contras were all responsible for abominable actions in their pursuit of "freedom"-massacring civilians, torturing and raping captives, destroying schools, hospitals and economic installations, killing and mutilating prisoners... Reagan was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people through terrorism."

At about the same time the Afghan resistance was being organized with U.S. aid, the Iraq regime of Saddam Hussein launched an attack on Iran to gain the oil fields on the gulf. This unprovoked act of war followed a period of quiet rapprochement with Washington (Bzrezinski again), and throughout the ensuing eight years of carnage-in which one million people died-the U.S. government increasingly helped Iraq, supplying it with more than $5 billion in financial credits, intelligence data, heavy equipment and political respectability. In most estimates, the U.S. "tilt" toward Baghdad was indispensable in saving Saddam from defeat.

The reason for the "tilt" was to frustrate the Islamic radicals in Teheran. This counter-Khomeini strategy extended beyond Iraq to countries like Turkey (where the U.S. approved a military coup in 1980 and suppression of Kurds, resulting in a civil war that has taken 30,000 lives) and Saudi Arabia (the keystone of U.S. oil policy, which led the U.S. to cast a blind eye on Saudi corruption and human-rights abuses). But Iraq, during the 1980s, was the centerpiece of this gambit.

After the catastrophic war of 1980-88, the new president, George Bush, embraced a policy of accommodation with Iraq. Within a few months of taking office, National Security Directive (NSD) 26 set the policy: "Access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in the area" were the two rationales of a strategy that would "pursue, and seek to facilitate, opportunities for U.S. firms to participate in the reconstruction of the Iraqi economy... Also, as a means of developing access and influence with the Iraqi defense establishment, the United States should consider sales of nonlethal forms of military assistance." Said a senior official of NSD 26: "The concern over Iranian fundamentalism was a given." The Reagan-Bush accommodationist policy toward Iraq meant that Saddam received only a slap on the wrist for the murder, with chemical weapons, of 5,000 Kurds in the north at the end of the war with Iran.

But when Iraq occupied Kuwait in August 1990, the tilt fell over. The anti-Iran strategy, itself a response to the ruinous policy of supporting the Shah, now had unavoidable consequences: the long and devastating war in Afghanistan; intensified bloodshed in the Iran-Iraq war; the Kurdish massacres in Turkey and Iraq; an acceleration of Islamic militancy in Pakistan and civil war in Kashmir; and the subjugation of Kuwait and the threat to oil fields of Saudi Arabia. It has had other corollary effects, such as a tolerance of Syrian misdeeds, as well as devotion to the perversely corrupt and fragile House of Saud, as Seymour Hersh so chillingly reports in the New Yorker (Oct. 22, 2001}.

*****

p45

Oil, Drugs and Blood
by Ben Clarke

The U.S. government can't openly admit its own history of involvement in the creation of al Qaeda nor can it acknowledge its true objectives in Southwest Asia.

The mobilization of international legal resources to identify and punish persons guilty of crimes against humanity-such as the horrific attack on the World Trade Center-would clearly have been a more effective and just course toward the capture and prosecution of guilty parties than the military actions undertaken by the United States. The bombing of civilians in Afghanistan and the enabling of massacres by the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance are war crimes themselves. Of course, the U.S. administration is adamant in its resistance to any diplomatic steps that might lead to authentic legal proceedings. While the U.S. governments overt justification for the attacks on Afghanistan is the capture "dead or alive" of former U.S. ally Osama bin Laden, its major economic objective is to expand U.S. military presence in a key region in the ongoing planetary war for petroleum.

Middle Eastern oil reserves are well known to readers and have obviously driven U.S. policy and practices over the last half a century. Less well known is the existence of vast quantities of oil and natural gas in the area of the Caspian sea. But oil beneath a sea is useless if it can not be fed into the thirsty maw of the multinational oil companies to feed the SUV's, jets and electrical grids of the "developed and developing" world.

On November 29, as the war in Afghanistan reached a blood-soaked peak, the Assistant Secretary of Energy, Vicky Baily, was in the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk celebrating the first Chevron pipeline out of the Caspian region. The inauguration of the pipeline through Russia to the Black Sea marks the first real success for the multinational oil companies following a ten-year struggle to bring the oil to market. The key problem with the current pipeline routes is that they bring the oil to the Western European market that is already well supplied by the Middle East and Russia. The global shortfall is in the Asian and Southeast Asian countries such as India and Japan. But in order to head south or east the route must pass through Iran or Afghanistan.

The Taliban's inability to deliver a stable pro-capitalist economy in Afghanistan has stalled the Afghan route. U.S. hostility toward Iran has blocked the other path.

The key U.S. economic interest in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan is developing enough political, military and economic presence to successfully transport these resources. At the November 2001 international conference called to develop a reconstruction plan for post-Taliban Afghanistan, Japan and the U.S. played host at a State Department meeting with the IME When the reconstruction package is announced, there is little doubt that oil and gas pipelines will be identified as critical to creating the new Afghan economy. According to oil industry estimates, the development and export of Southwest Asian oil and gas reserves will be enough to keep the petroleum economy running at its current pace for an additional 30 years.

On ecological grounds alone, this is a frightening prospect. Current rates of global warming threaten to dramatically shift the world climate within this century. The successful doubling of oil and natural gas reserves available to the petroleum economies will almost inevitably hasten this process. In the short term however, the "Western" attempt to monopolize this resource is likely to lead to ever more violent repression of even mildly democratic or pro-national movements that seek to equalize the international distribution of resources by enabling the "underdeveloped" world some measure of control over the resources of its own lands and people.

Regardless of the political, religious or ethnic basis of any governmental system in the region, the one characteristic that the U.S. government and multinational corporations can not tolerate is local control of resource exploitation. The WTO, the IMF and the international banking system are adept at restraining governments that stray into the forbidden territory of developing natural resources for their own populations, but if these measures of financial control fail, the traditional U.S. response has been to use military force to intimidate, terrorize, destabilize overthrow or co-opt. Because it is difficult to openly justify such immorality and bullying greed, real or phantom enemies are conjured up to mask the fundamental policy. The "cold war" struggle with the Soviet Union, the Gulf War demonization of Saddam Hussein, the "drug war" in Colombia, all have in common the over-inflation of an alleged enemy to demonic proportions while the calculated evils of support for totalitarian dictatorships, death squads, human rights abuses and actual enabling of the international drug trade ensure economic domination.

Drug War Terrorism

Documentation of the growth in heroin production in Afghanistan and Pakistan during and after the U.S. proxy war against the Soviet Union is abundant. (A recent U.N. study finds a growth from 0 tons to 4600 metric tons annually between the years 1989 and 1999.) Leaving aside the fundamental incentive of the illegality of the drugs within the U.S., the primary condition under which such operations flourish is corrupt dictatorships that join in public anti-drug proclamations while raking in huge drug profits, and which cover up counterinsurgency campaigns in drug war rhetoric while leaving the core of the drug trade untouched.

In one of the stranger bits of theater in this horrible and surreal drama the Taliban was probably the only government that declared a war on drugs and then succeeded in prosecuting it. In January 2000, Mullah Mohammed Omar ordered the opium producing areas under Taliban control to cease production. Fourteen months later, the U.N. recorded an astonishing 97% drop in cultivation. While the U.S. administration has made several recent attempts to blame the Taliban for the drug trade in Afghanistan, these accusations have been muted by the embarrassing fact that the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy itself also recognized the success of the Taliban in reducing opium cultivation. As recently as May 2001, the U.S. awarded the Taliban over 40 million dollars toward its drug control efforts.

Despite this public anti-drug stance, covert agencies of the U.S. government, such as the CIA, are known for using drug profits to finance irregular armies to accomplish foreign policy or economic objectives that are too ugly for the U.S. government to openly support. In the Iran Contra scandal Oliver North and other members of the Reagan administration circumvented a congressional ban on financing the Contra rebel terror squads by skimming drug profits and selling arms to Iran. Already the triumphant Northern Alliance forces have begun replanting the opium poppy fields that the Taliban had uprooted, and the U.S. administration has made it clear that drug interdiction in Afghanistan has dropped off its priority list.

Dead or Alive

Despite U.S. assurances that they have the evidence that Osama bin Laden is the guilty party, they have refused to turn it over, even to a United States district attorney for presentation to a U.S. judge, much less an international tribunal. (The U.S. government has repeatedly blocked the establishment of an international criminal court to try persons guilty of crimes against humanity.) The resort to broadcast of blurry, semi-audible boasting by an alleged bin Laden, as well as the Bush administration executive order creating military tribunals (allowing secret evidence, and trial by military judges) is further evidence that the Bush-Cheney-Ashcroft regime can't tolerate an open review of the facts. The U.S. spurned earlier offers by the Taliban to have Osama bin Laden tried in a third country on presentation of evidence because the U.S. administration "knew he was guilty" yet was somehow not obligated to show any proof of such guilt.

U.S. administration reluctance to present hard evidence is claimed to originate from fear that intelligence methods might be compromised. At this point, one can only wonder where an investigation of the stock manipulations that preceded the September 11 attack in which pre-warned investors made millions in profits on the drop in stock prices of United and American Airlines or serious examination of the sources for the visas that allowed tagged agents of the al Qaeda network to enter the U.S. might lead. But the intertwined history of the Pakistani intelligence services, the CIA and al Qaeda are clearly not matters that the U.S. government is willing to subject to meaningful judicial review.

This is not to say that the U.S. ever actually controlled bin Laden. The use of surrogate "freedom fighters" financed by drug networks is a notoriously inaccurate weapon. Given the murky nature of drug dealing terror networks the actual order for the attack on the U.S. could have come from any fragment of the CIA-spawned al Qaeda, from Egypt, Saudi Arabia or even from drug and arms merchants who will surely benefit from the "new" war.

Regardless of the exact perpetrators of the crime against humanity of Sept. 11, 2001, if the U.S. continues to back terrorists, such as the Northern Alliance and elements in the Pakistani governments that engage in international drug smuggling and mercenary warfare, another crop of ruthless and unprincipled thugs will be the beneficiaries of U.S. weapons, training and financial support. And while the State department might occasionally sign off on a human rights report indicating one of their own allies (such as the AUC in Colombia) is guilty of drug dealing, torture, massacres and more, U.S. aid will flow in ever larger quantities. Periodic proclamations against the war on terrorism will more and more come to resemble the proclamations surrounding the war on drugs. The more the U.S. ships weapons, advisors and money in an attempt to protect its economic interests, the larger the problem grows.

Fundamentally, it appears that the U.S. administration, afraid to subject itself to the rule of international treaties that would allow non-military solutions to crimes against humanity, is unsure that the U.S. people would support a military buildup in Southwest Asia on the grounds of naked U.S. geopolitical and economic interests. Hence the spiral of doublethink is increasing exponentially. Secretary of State Colin Powell announces U.S. coalition building with Stalinist style dictatorships and massacring mercenaries as an "alliance for freedom." A bombing campaign that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of Afghan civilians and which puts millions at risk of starvation is put forth as an act of justice. Even academic consideration of alternatives to U.S. foreign policies are labeled treasonous by some allies of the administration. Professors at City College of New York have been attacked by the New York Post and members of the Board of Trustees, and Vice-President Cheney's wife, Lynne released a hit list of over 100 academics whose public statements aren't to her liking.

The totalitarian approach to media revealed by National Security Advisor Condeleeza Rice's calls for more censorship by the major networks' news executives (who are already cheerleaders for the war effort) shows the fragility of the worldview from which the current regime draws its power. If truthful reporting, the rule of law, open debate, and support for international institutions that increase equal justice and economic and social equality are beyond the bounds of public discussion, the U.S. administration is clearly fighting for a nation that few Americans will willingly recognize as their own.

Ben Clarke is the editor of MediaFile, a journal of media analysis published by San Francisco-based Media Alliance.

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