Cheney "X'd" off the DC Madam's list by ABC/Disney

May 8, 2007 -- Cheney on DC Madam's list. Yesterday, WMR reported on the DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey's list: "WMR has been informed that the CEO of a major corporation is a former CEO but, nonetheless, the aforementioned extremely high-level official of the Bush administration. The individual, who is definitely "newsworthy," reportedly engaged the services of Palfrey's escort firm while he was the CEO and maintained a residence off Chain Bridge Road in the Ballantrae neighborhood in McLean, Virginia, a few blocks from the headquarters of the CIA."

Cheney "X'd" off the DC Madam's list by ABC/Disney.

WMR has confirmed with extremely knowledgeable CIA and Pentagon sources that the former CEO who is on Deborah Jeane Palfrey's list is Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney was CEO of Halliburton during the time of his liaisons with the Pamela Martin & Associates escort firm. Palfrey's phone invoices extend back to 1996 and include calls to and from Cheney. Ironically, in 2000 Cheney was appointed by Bush to head his Vice President selection committee, a task that enabled Cheney to gather detailed personal files on a number of potential candidates, including Bill Frist, George Pataki, John Danforth, Fred Thompson, Chuck Hagel, John Kasich, Chris Cox, Frank Keating, Tom Ridge, Colin Powell, and Jim Gilmore, before he selected himself as the vice presidential candidate.

The White House saw to it that ABC/Disney killed the DC Madam's story before yet another scandal swamped the Bush administration. Cheney is departing Washington today for a trip to the Middle East, where he will visit the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the USS John C. Stennis in the Gulf.

EXCLUSIVE: DC Madam Customer List: Head of Think Tank, Prominent CEO, Lobbyists and Military Brass

D.C. Madam Wants Washington Clients to Testify

April 30, 2007 9:36 AM

Brian Ross, Rhonda Schwartz & Justin Rood Report:

The woman charged in a federal indictment with running a high-class Washington, D.C. call girl service says she plans to call her prominent clients to testify at her trial.

Jeane Palfrey, dubbed the D.C. Madam, says among those she will call to testify are Randall Tobias, who resigned Friday as deputy secretary of state after confirming to ABC News that he had been a customer of Palfrey's escort service.

Tobias said he "had some gals come over to the condo for a massage" but denied any sex was involved.

Tobias is the second prominent man to be identified as a customer of the Palfrey's "sexual fantasy service." Two weeks ago, Palfrey alleged that military strategist Harlan K. Ullman, creator of the "shock and awe" combat theory and now a scholar with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was also a customer. Ullman has said that the claim was "beneath the dignity of comment."

Also on Palfrey's list of customers who could be potential witnesses are a Bush administration economist, the head of a conservative think tank, a prominent CEO, several lobbyists and a handful of military officials.

"I'm sure as heck not going to be going to federal prison for one day, let alone, four to eight years, because I'm shy about bringing in the deputy secretary of whatever," Palfrey told ABC News correspondent Brian Ross in an interview to be broadcast Friday on "20/20." "I'll bring in every last one of them in if necessary," she said.

Palfrey is due in federal court Monday morning to ask the judge to replace her current lawyer, a public defender, with a lawyer who she says "will be more aggressive in fighting the government."

The indictment of Palfrey alleges she used more than 100 women over a period of 13 years "for the purpose of engaging in prostitution activity with male clients, including sexual intercourse and oral sex in exchange for money." She made more than $2 million running the operation, known as Pamela Martin and Associates, according to the federal indictment.

Palfrey, who ran the service by phone from her home in Sonoma County, Calif., is the only person charged. None of her male customers is named by the government.

"That's very hypocritical," she says. "Why aren't these people under arrest? Why just me?"

Palfrey claims she ran a legal operation that offered sexual fantasy but not "illegal sex" of the kind described in the indictment.

She says she hopes her prominent clients will testify they did not engage in actual sex when they hired her escorts.

"This was a sexual fantasy service," Palfrey told "20/20." "Occasionally a client would want to go to the Kennedy Center or go to dinner, but generally speaking they went straight to the homes, or they went straight to the hotels," she said.

Palfrey provided ABC News with phone records from her business going back four years.

Vote: Do you think the clients of the D.C. Madam should resign?

April 30, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (63)

Washington hurting British bid to free crew

Editor's note: I am moving to post at the secondary blog(also see new articles below).
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Tough words from U.S. highlight rift between White House and Downing Street

DOUG SAUNDERS

From Monday's Globe and Mail

Doug Saunders

LONDON — The Iranian prisoner crisis revealed a widening schism between Britain and the United States Sunday as U.S. leaders called for tough action and British officials confirmed that they are trying to free their 15 imprisoned sailors by quietly reaching a compromise with Tehran.

British officials believe that Iran is not seeking a prisoner exchange or other further bounty in exchange for the sailors, who have been imprisoned for 10 days, and they are hoping the crisis can be resolved peacefully in the next few days.

As two more British sailors were shown Sunday night in another Iranian broadcast reading confessions and a small crowd of radical students in Tehran threw rocks and firecrackers at the British embassy there, British diplomats exchanged letters with the Iranian foreign ministry seeking a conciliatory end to the standoff.

Officials in London said that they believe their “confidence-building” operations, in which they offer to guarantee the Iranian government that British vessels will not stray into Iranian waters, offer the best hope of winning the freedom of the sailors and marines who have been in custody since they were seized by Iran's Republican Guards on March 23. Iran says the sailors had strayed into Iranian waters. Britain says they remained in Iraqi waters, where they are allowed to operate in support of the war in Iraq.

“We are anxious that this matter be resolved as quickly as possible, and that it be resolved by diplomatic means, and we are bending every single effort to that. ... We are in direct bilateral communication with the Iranians,” British Defence Minister Des Browne told reporters Sunday.

But Britain's delicate diplomatic efforts were set back by U.S. President George W. Bush, who made a statement Saturday in which he characterized the imprisoned sailors as “hostages” — a phrase that Britain has been carefully avoiding to prevent the crisis from becoming a broader political or military conflict.

“The British hostages issue is a serious issue because the Iranians took these people out of Iraqi waters, and it's inexcusable behaviour,” Mr. Bush said in response to a reporter's question during a press conference at the Camp David retreat.

He had reportedly promised not to raise the issue of the sailors, as British officials worry that the entry of the United States into this crisis could cause it to escalate into an irreconcilable confrontation.

Other U.S. officials have been even less amenable to the British approach. John Bolton, who until recently was Mr. Bush's ambassador to the United Nations, has appeared on British TV describing the British approach as “pathetic.”

Mr. Bush stressed that the United States would not turn over Iranian officials it had arrested in Iraq earlier this year on accusations that they were supporting insurgents, saying he supported Prime Minister Tony Blair's view that “there were no quid pro quos. The Iranians must give back the hostages. They're innocent, they were doing nothing, and they were summarily plucked out of water.”

But British officials say that a prisoner exchange has never been offered or suggested by Iran, and that Mr. Bush's words could cause harm by putting the Iranians in a position from which they cannot back down if it becomes a major confrontation with their long-time enemy, the United States.

British negotiators believe the Iranians have already won all the rewards they have been seeking — mainly by using several of the hostages for propaganda purposes by broadcasting videos and letters in which they admit, possibly under duress, to trespassing on Iranian territory and demand that their government withdraw from Iraq.

British officials are said to believe that a hard-line group of Republican Guards has been controlling the prisoners, possibly with the backing of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but that the imprisonment lacks a political goal beyond the humiliation of Britain and its allies, and that more moderate parties, including Iran's “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are not interested in a prolonged standoff, like the 444-day 1979 U.S. hostage crisis, that would isolate Iran.

Ayatollah Khamenei has not yet spoken publicly on this crisis, and there are some observers in Iran who believe that he has abandoned his support for Mr. Ahmadinejad over the way the President's radically anti-Western gestures have distanced Iran from the rest of the world and damaged the economy.

Iran's government is deeply divided into factions and parties, which often control their own police, justice systems and wings in the major prisons. British officials and many Iranian observers believe that Mr. Ahmadinejad's more radical supporters are unlikely to prevail in this dispute since it offers few opportunities for gain. Iranian media have reported that moderate factions, including some leaders in the Republican Guards, have advocated the release of the prisoners.

Many observers noted that most Iranians have been on their country's New Year's vacation since the crisis began. Newspapers have not been publishing there, more moderate Foreign Ministry officials have not been in their offices, and the Revolutionary Guards have had a monopoly on the issue in a holiday period that will end tomorrow.

“It's the Supreme Leader who has to make the ultimate decision,” said Mehrdad Khansari of London's Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies. “He has allowed each faction to air its grievances, present its positions. ... He has heard from the moderates — I mean, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards has expressed a desire for releasing these people — whereas other groups within the Revolutionary Guards have expressed a harder position.”

The essential corruption of the Washington press corps

Monday March 26, 2007 08:47 EST

The most revealing three-minute You Tube clip ever

I want to return to the video clip of the jovial and dismissive discussion of the U.S. attorneys scandal on yesterday's Chris Matthews Show (embedded below). In one sense, this clip is completely typical of how our national media thinks and talks about political matters. But there just is something about this particular discussion and the giggling, vapid participants that is extra vivid and instructive on a visceral level.

Whatever one thinks of how convincing the available evidence is thus far, nobody who has an even basic understanding of how our government functions could dispute that the accusations in this scandal are extremely serious. Presumably, even those incapable of ingesting the danger of having U.S. attorneys fired due to their refusal to launch partisan-motivated prosecutions (or stifle prosecutions for partisan reasons) at least understand that it is highly disturbing and simply intolerable for the Attorney General of the U.S. -- the head of our Justice Department -- to lie repeatedly about what happened, including to Congress, and to have done so with the obvious assent and (at the very least) implicit cooperation of the White House. Even the most vapid media stars should be able to understand that.

And yet so many of them do not. They continue to defend the administration by insisting that even if the accusations are correct, there was no real wrongdoing here. Add Fred Hiatt to that list, as he defends the Bush administration's prosecutor firings in his Washington Post Editorial today by insisting that Gonzales appears "to have tried to cover up something that, as far as we yet know, didn't need covering. U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president . . . ."

Just as was true for their virtually unanimous insistence that there was no wrongdoing worth investigating in the Plame case -- including the serial lying and obstruction of justice from the Vice President's top aide, one of the most powerful people in the White House -- they also see nothing wrong whatsoever with serial lying and corruption by the Attorney General in this case.

Think about this: there are only two instances in the last six years where real investigations occurred in any of the Bush scandals -- this U.S. attorneys scandal (because Democrats now have subpoena power) and the Plame case (due to the fluke of two Republican DOJ officials with integrity, James Comey and Patrick Fitzgerald). And in both cases, it was revealed conclusively that top Bush officials -- at the highest levels of the government -- repeatedly and deliberately lied about what they did. Isn't that pattern obviously extremely disturbing? And imagine what would be revealed had there been real investigations -- journalistic or Congressional -- of all the other scandals that ended up dying an inconsequential death due to neglect and suppression.

Beltway media stars really aren't bothered by any of this in the slightest. It's how their world works. Initially, they even refused to talk about the story at all, insisting that there was nothing worth seeing here, and were all but forced into writing about it as a result of the tenacious coverage in the blogosphere, led by TPM's Josh Marshall. Their instinct is to lash out at anyone who suggests real wrongdoing on the part of the Republican political machinery that has ruled their town for so long.

They respect and admire the Republicans who wield power in Washington -- media elites particularly love Karl Rove (Mark Halperin to Hugh Hewitt: "we say in the book about Karl Rove, who I respect and enjoy…I enjoy his company . . . Maybe he did the things he’s accused of, but to have this guy’s image portrayed and defined by things that are accusations that are unproven, we say in the book is really outrageous"). They admire and love Rove because he is the embodiment of the political power which they worship -- and they are angered by the notion that these figures who rule their world, a world which lavishly rewards them, should be accused of real wrongdoing, let alone threatened with subpoenas and prosecution and imprisonment. Fun and playful political tussles are fine, but anything truly disruptive or threatening is despised by them and considered out of bounds.

These are not journalists who want to uncover government corruption or act in an adversarial capacity to check government power. Rather, these are members of the royal court who are grateful to the King and his minions for granting them their status. What they want more than anything is to protect and preserve the system that has so rewarded them -- with status and money and fame and access and comfort. They're the ludicrous clowns who entertain the public by belittling any facts which demonstrate pervasive corruption and deceit at the highest levels of our government, and who completely degrade the public discourse with their petty, pompous, shallow, vapid chatter that transforms every important political matter into a stupid gossipy joke.

Here are several of our media elites from our nation's most influential journalistic outlets -- including from Time, U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times, and NBC News -- all sitting around on the Chris Matthews Show giggling for three and a half minutes straight about the silly U.S. attorneys scandal. The whole thing is just a fun game for them, and it's absurd to them that anyone could take things like this seriously.

And what is most notable is that they express outrage at one part, and one part only, of this whole story -- namely, they are furious over the fact that the foolish, unfair Democrats would even dare to try to force Karl Rove to testify. Why, firing U.S. attorneys and lying to Congress and the country about it is all fair game, but that -- trying to get Rove to answer questions -- is really beyond the pale. Just watch how the people who have done so much damage to our country think and behave:

VIDEO

Really, is it any wonder at all that our government is so fundamentally corrupt and broken when we have a press like this? Why wouldn't top government officials lie continuously when our national press corps finds such lying to be such a source of merriment and humor, and can summon the energy only to attack, mock and condemn those who find the lying objectionable, rather than the liars themselves?

And given that these are the people who are supposed to perform the function of checking government power and uncovering government corruption, is it really any wonder that the administration has felt comfortable engaging in six years worth of systematic lawbreaking? These media stars would never investigate any of it, because they don't think it's a problem, and if it ends up being exposed, they will belittle and mock any objections to the lawbreaking, defend the administration, and distract everyone from the issues raised. They obscure the consequences of corruption revelations with gossipy and giggly speculation about who is helped or hurt politically.

The same thing happened when it was revealed that the President was eavesdropping on the conversations of Americans in secret and without obtaining judicial warrants -- conduct which is a felony in this country and, worse still, revealed a broader theory whereby the administration believes it has the power to break the law. The national media could hardly have cared less about any of the profound implications of those revelations, but instead focused obsessively on laughing about how the Democrats could not object to the lawbreaking because to do so would make them look "weak" in fighting the Terrorists. They warned against investigations and echoed Karl Rove's talking points endlessly by insisting that Americans supported "eavesdropping on Terrorists."

The overriding goal of most of our national media elites is to preserve the prevailing Republican power system that rules Washington because of how beneficial that system is to them. As a result, they admire and want to protect those who rule that system, and thus reflexively view scandals which entail accusations of true corruption by our political leaders -- and especially unpleasant formal investigations and threats of criminal prosecution -- as frivolous and inherently false and unfair.

They will always lash out at those who prosecute the scandal but defend as unfair victims those who are accused of the wrongdoing. Look at how angry Time's Richard Stengel is about the Democrats' desire to make Rove testify: "I am so uninterested in the Democrats wanting Karl Rove because it is so bad for them" (emphasis in original). What if Rove really engaged in serious wrongdoing? Stengel, like virtually all of his Beltway media colleagues, really couldn't care less.

Journalists are supposed to be, by definition, eager for investigations of government misconduct. That is supposed to be their purpose, embedded in their DNA. Yet virtually across the board, the prevailing Beltway conventional wisdom has become that -- as always -- investigations are "bad for Democrats," that Americans don't want their Leaders investigated, that it's all a terrible distraction from the oh-so-important business of legislating.

On what do these media stars base these constant, emphatic claims about what Americans want and don't want? On nothing other than their own personal desires, which they cowardly and misleadingly attribute to what "Americans believe," even though such claims are baseless and false.

In the last election, anger over Republican corruption played a major role in why Americans threw Republicans out of power:

By a wide margin, Americans who voted Tuesday in the midterm election say they disapprove of the war in Iraq. But when asked which issue was extremely important to their vote, more voters said corruption and ethics in government than any other issue, including the war, according to national exit polls.

And as I recall (though cannot yet find, but will add as an update), polls before the election also demonstrated that clear majorities of Americans wanted more oversight and checks on the administration. Claims that "Americans don't want investigations" are just false and reflective of nothing other than their own desire to defend the administration.

These Beltway media figures are not only completely vapid, shallow, and devoid of any objective other than to defend government leaders, but they are completely out of touch with the "Americans" whom they constantly invoke as props in order to depict their own biases and beliefs as being shared by the American mainstream.

In virtually every instance over the last six years -- from realizing that the country was misled into the invasion of Iraq to realizing that administration claims of success there were false to opposing the pardon of Lewis Libby by a wide margin -- Americans end up realizing the truth long before the national press comes close to it.

While our media stars continue to defend the administration, Americans have come to realize on their own just how profoundly inept and corrupt this President is. The President's real "base" -- his most loyal followers -- are not red state Republicans, but instead, are Norah O'Donnell and Gloria Borger and the stable of media elite feeding at the Republican power trough, boundlessly worshipful of those who fill it, and eager to defend them at all costs.

-- Glenn Greenwald

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"The Surge of Baghdad Should Become the Surge on Washington" - Fmr. UN Iraq Mission Chief

Friday, March 23rd, 2007
"The Surge of Baghdad Should Become the Surge on Washington" - Fmr. UN Iraq Mission Chief Hans Von Sponeck

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Hans Von Sponeck - the former coordinator of the United Nations Humanitarian Mission in Iraq - joins us in our firehouse studio to talk about the troop surge in Baghdad, House and Senate bills on war funding, the 13-year sanction regime in Iraq and more. Von Sponeck is author of "A Different Kind of War: The UN Sanctions Regime in Iraq." [includes rush transcript]

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On Capitol Hill, a Senate committee has approved a one hundred twenty two billion-dollar war spending bill that calls for President Bush to pull combat troops out of Iraq by next spring. The House plans to vote on a similar bill later today. Bush has threatened to veto both bills if they contain a deadline for withdrawal. The legislation comes as the United States enters its fifth year of the occupation of Iraq.

Yesterday, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon made a surprise visit to Baghdad. During a joint news conference with Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, the UN chief said he might boost the United Nations" presence in Iraq because of improved security. Moments later the news conference was interrupted by a rocket that exploded just fifty yards away from the meeting. The blast shook the building and sent Ban Ki Moon ducking for cover behind a podium. The UN chief had earlier arrived on his first visit to Baghdad since he took office in January this year.

Today we are joined by a former UN official who lived in Iraq before the US invasion. Hans Von Sponeck has been a fierce critic of the war. In the late 1990s, he was the coordinator of the United Nations Humanitarian Mission in Iraq. He resigned in protest over the UN sanctions regime. He is also a former Assistant Secretary General of the UN. Hans Von Sponeck has new book is out titled "A Different Kind of War: The UN Sanctions Regime in Iraq."

• Hans Von Sponeck, a former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations. In the late 1990s, he was the coordinator of the United Nations Humanitarian Mission in Iraq. His new book is titled "A Different Kind of War: The UN Sanctions Regime in Iraq."

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RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: Today we’re joined by a former U.N. Official who lived in Iraq before the U.S. invasion. Hans Von Sponeck has been a fierce critic of the war. In the late 1990's he was the coordinator of the United Nations humanitarian mission in Iraq. He resigned in protest over the U.N. Sanctions Regime. He’s also Former Assistant Secretary General of the U.N. and has written a new book, it is called A Different Kind of War: The U.N. Sanctions Regime in Iraq. Welcome to Democracy Now!

HANS VON SPONECK: Good morning Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. First, the situation. You just saw--heard the explosion as the new U.N. Secretary General was announcing there seems to be increased stability, and maybe that a larger U.N. mission may come into Iraq.

HANS VON SPONECK: It gave him a first hand opportunity to understand how volatile the situation is in Iraq, and I hope it leads him to the conviction that less violence and more peace initiatives on the part of the United Nations might be the answer, rather than a surge in troop levels. I very strongly feel there should be a surge in the willingness in the U.S. Congress to insist that the United Nations, the role of the international community should be strengthened and the troops should come home with respect and honor, if that is still possible, as soon as possible.

JUAN GONZALEZ: What is the role of the U.N. right now in Iraq. Given, obviously it has to be very limited, anything can do, but what are U.N. personnel doing, if anything there?

HANS VON SPONECK: The United Nations staff, 55 of them, that’s all, are confined to the Green Zone and to Amman. From a distance they look at an Iraq that is crumbling. They can do very little. They do human-rights reporting. They have a small number of projects, but essentially they are confined to that limited space for reasons of security. In fact, most of the staff that Ban Ki-moon has allowed to be in Iraq is security-related staff. So it’s a holding operation. The U.N. Flag can fly, but it flies very timidly.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course the U.N. mission there was blown up. What was the effect of that?

HANS VON SPONECK: It was a massive demoralization for the United Nations, and Mr. Kofi Annan was right in taking the staff out, as painful as this is.

AMY GOODMAN: Sergio De Millo, the head of the mission killed.

HANS VON SPONECK: He was killed in my office. This is the office I occupied from the time I served in Baghdad. So I know the environment very well. It didn’t come as a surprise. It was the weak, the soft underbelly of the United Nations building area in Baghdad. And it’s a tragedy it happened, but out of that should be a United Nations that is more and more determined to encourage dialogue, rather than support an ill-fated attempt to solve problems in Iraq with military muscle.

JUAN GONZALEZ: In your book, A Different Kind of War, you actually get into the entire period of the sanctions in Iraq, and you document quite a bit of information, that I don’t think--certainly most Americans are not aware of. But I was especially interested -- we were talking before the show about the United Nations Compensation Committee, a commission that was set up to--after the Persian Gulf War. And you had quite a few examples there of what appear at least on the surface to be of questionable awards that were given out, plus it was a huge amount of money that was involved. Can you talk about that whole Compensation Commission?

HANS VON SPONECK: Well you know I don’t want to come across here as a vindictive person. The intention of this book was to shed light on a very dark chapter of United Nations by honestly identifying facts. And among these dramatic facts is one which is hardly known, certainly very little known in the U.S., and that is at a time when an increasing number of people were dying, particularly children, the United Nations agreed to pay out $18 billion U.S. dollars. That’s a lot of money. The total value of what came into Iraq during the entire Oil For Food Program, in terms of supplies, $28 billion. So, if you withhold $18 billion, that is a lot, that could have saved a lot of lives. That is bad enough.

What is worse is that many of these compensation claims were fraudulent. The U.N. discovered some, others were overlooked and paid out. There was a claim from the government of Jordan for having helped transiting guest workers to go home for $8.2 billion U.S. dollars, 8.2. The U.N. in the end awarded $79 million, less than a percent of what was asked for. The Iraqi money was like a cow that one could milk eternally in order to please governments that need the money while Iraqis back home were dying in large numbers. There are others examples, but maybe this would go to far on this occasion.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s very relevant to look at the Sanctions Regime against Iraq, given what is being proposed for Iran right now. Major powers have readied a draft resolution, to slap new punitive sanctions on Iran with the U.N. Security Council vote expected on Saturday, as Tehran remains defiant over its nuclear program. According to Agence France-Presse, a western diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity said the draft was expected to receive overwhelming support. Talk about the Regime of Sanctions and what it meant. I mean, people see what is happening in Iraq right now as horrific. You describe a very bad situation before the bombing of George Bush of 2003.

HANS VON SPONECK: You know, the sanction cheese in Iraq had many holes. The sanction cheese for Iran has bigger holes. It may look interesting on paper, but in terms of the reality for implementation, we are living today in a totally different situation. The world is more polarized than it ever was in the days of the sanctions against Iraq, but let me just pause here and say -- the comprehensive economic sanctions that Iraq endured isn’t what is proposed for Iran. It’s more a political—a political threat to the Iranians rather than a direct punishment of the people, as it was the case in Iraq.

Moreover, we must remember, the world of 2007 is not the world of the Iraq sanction time. There are new constellations, new organizations are springing up in protest over what I would call, as a friend of the U.S., I would call it the “Western One-way Street”, while in fact it is mainly an American highway on which we have traveled that the world is no longer to accept.

So the sanction package against Iran -- it may be a small -- I don’t think it is -- political victory for the U.S. to get a sanction resolution through the Security Council, but in terms of the implications for Iran as a whole, it will have limited, limited value.

AMY GOODMAN: You, in talking about Iraq today, are clearly saying that the U.N. is involved in supporting violent solutions. What exactly are you saying?

HANS VON SPONECK: The United Nations is painful for me as a person who believes in the U.N., who has served 32 years in that organization, was indeed an ally of bilateral policies that initially meant containing the country, and later in the last years of the Clinton Administration and very much since then, was a policy of punishment; punishing a people for enduring a dictator. A very strange logic here, but we could have in Baghdad, done whenever we wanted to do.

The government could have cooperated with the Security Council. It would have made no difference because the key word in this equation was regime change. So, as long as Saddam Hussein and his government were in power, no chance to do something else--Mr. Negroponte in a hearing in the U.S. Congress some time ago said, our first concern were weapons of mass destruction. We were interested with the peoples’ of welfare, but that was clearly a second priority.

That was the approach and the U.N. went along with this. And why am I mentioning it? Because I think it is very relevant in the debate about the kind of United Nations that we want to have, that we need, that the U.S. needs, as much as my country, Germany, or anyone else around the world, in these 192 member countries.

We need to take into account what happened in Iraq in debating the U.N. reform needs of today and tomorrow. And if we do this, then we do justice to the demand of political accountability. This is not looking to the future. Yes, we must look to the future. That’s demand from European politicians and American politicians is important, but not without looking back to understand what happened and to hold those on both sides of the fence. You have, I don’t want to talk too long here, but I want to say you have in Iraq a very strange reality. You have two perpetrators. You have Saddam Hussein, who has committed crimes against his people, but you also have, tragically enough, you have a United Nations that has equally become the perpetrator in harming, punishing, because of a faulty, I am afraid to say, U.S.-led, British-led, Spanish, Italian-led policy in the Security Council.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I am curious, in the period before you stepped down from your post, what kind of conversations you may have had with other leaders of the United Nations, or Kofi Annan directly about the concerns about the U.N.'s role and what their response was. Obviously they were aware that--of the negative role that the United States and Great Britain and some of the other great powers are playing. What kind of conversations did you have?

HANS VON SPONECK: Mr. Kofi Annan at all times has the heart in the right place, but he didn’t have enough muscle to succeed in convincing the Security Council that the rhetoric in the council that was always pro-people, that always recognized the plight of the Iraqi people, should translate and be provided equipped with the political will to bring about changes that would be more focused on the perpetrators, in this case the government of Iraq, rather than on innocent civilians. He knew that. Mr. Kofi Annan at no time forgot that. But, a multi-lateral diplomat is impotent vis-à-vis the powers of the day, if they have a different design. And the tragedy is that it is a 15-country security council that was overwhelmingly dominated by the United Kingdom and the United States, and the international community allowed this to happen.

AMY GOODMAN: You are here in United States. You return to Germany tomorrow. You have been here at a genocide conference at Columbia University in New York. As you watch the coverage of what happened—what is happening today, there is going to be a vote in congress for supplemental money, more than $100 billion, to--for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Your thoughts?

HANS VON SPONECK: I want to tell you that we are very carefully watching in Europe what is being debated in Washington. And we cannot fully comprehend why this courageous woman, Nancy Pelosi, isn’t making more progress among her colleagues on both sides of the fence. Why there are still republicans who can argue that it is a betrayal of the U.S. troops. I sympathize with these poor male and female G.I.s that have to serve in Iraq, but it is incomprehensible to me that there are still voices that insist that the way to go forward is to increase the troop levels, to maintain a policy that will leave in Afghanistan and in Iraq, to total disaster. This is not winnable. You cannot do what is intended to be done. Democracy and human rights and progress and development cannot be parachuted over Kabul or Iraq. And why is it? I don’t have an answer. Why is it that so many members of the U.S. Congress still maintain that the old policies can remain intact and should be implemented?

AMY GOODMAN: If the U.S. troops pulled out today?

HANS VON SPONECK: Can there be more chaos in Iraq than there is already? I am—I have links to people who have links to the resistance. The resistance says the Americans should talk to us. But if Ambassador Khalilzad in Baghdad talks to resistance people, the real resistance leaders start laughing. Because they say you are not talking to the right people. So, Condoleezza Rice should have her way. Mr. Cheney should not have his way. She should succeed in convincing her cabinet colleagues that the moment is to talk to each other. The moment is to talk to the resistance.

The moment is -- you mentioned the PKK sometime, a moment ago. And Hezbollah, Fatah, Hamas. They all belong around the table. You can no longer discuss an element of the Middle East crisis in isolation. It has to be -- I call it a strategy of a whole. Everybody belongs around the table and needs to be taken into account. We don’t recognize this, we will continue to waste money -- your money, our money, our good will, your people's lives, and I think that is a tragedy. And I hope that Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues will make headway in convincing republicans also to finally give up an un-winnable approach in dealing with the middle east.

JUAN GONZALEZ: You mentioned how in Europe people are watching very carefully what is happening here in the U.S. Congress. Obviously European governments -- several of them have gone through major changes since the start of the Iraq war. To what degree are the European nations doing what they should be doing in terms of standing up sufficiently? Clearly in Italy and Spain the climate has changed dramatically, but what can Europe do in terms of having an impact on American policy?

HANS VON SPONECK: The first order of priority in the European Union, of 27 countries, is to get our own act together, because we are very fragmented. There are many shades of opinion with regard to the Middle East situation, and there is no integrated foreign policy. And that plays into the very hands in the U.S. that should keep the hands off the political debate. The neoconservatives are trying hard to maintain this level of division in Europe, and the sooner our leaders in Europe recognize that, that they will play no role, that they will have a marginal impact at best, is--until they get their act together.

My own country in Germany, Mrs. Merkel, our chancellor is trying to repair the transatlantic damage. She tries very hard. But the fear that some of us have is that she tries at the expense of doing what needs to be done now and tell the friend across the Atlantic, tell Washington, as a friend, that the track, the road on which the U.S. Administration is traveling is leading to further disaster.

AMY GOODMAN: Hans Von Sponeck, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, was the Chief of the U.N. Humanitarian Mission in Iraq, quit over the Sanctions Regime. And has now written a book now translated into English, A Different Kind of War: The U.S. Sanctions Regime in Iraq.

Lawyer: news outlet has escort list

By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer Fri Mar 16, 7:54 PM ET

A federal judge ruled Friday that a former escort service owner cannot sell phone records and other documents that could be used to publicly identify thousands of her clients.

Deborah Jeane Palfrey, 50, has said she planned to sell the list of up to 15,000 client phone numbers and other records to a news organization to help raise money for her defense. The alleged "D.C. Madam" ran Pamela Martin and Associates, an upscale escort service in the Washington area, for 13 years before it closed in August.

Palfrey's civil attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, said Friday he does not believe the judge's order bars him from distributing copies of the phone records for free.

In any event, Sibley said it's a moot point because he has already given copies of the records to an undisclosed news organization. Sibley said the original records are preserved and nothing he has done will prevent prosecutors from inspecting all the materials.

Federal prosecutors allege that Palfrey ran a prostitution ring that yielded $2 million in assets, including cash and homes. In October, the federal government froze the assets after a 2 1/2-year investigation by the Internal Revenue Service. Palfrey is suing to have the assets returned.

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler issued a restraining order against Palfrey on Friday and ordered her not to sell any company records or assets. She set a hearing on the issue for Monday.

Sibley has said there were a dozen serious bidders for the 40 pounds of phone records. The bidders ranged from "checkbook journalists to the gold standard of American journalism," Sibley said. Attorneys for people who fear their names will become public have also been after the records, he said.

Under fire, Israel lobby rallies US backers

By Tony Czuczka Mar 10, 2007, 2:43 GMT

Washington - After a sustained attack by critics including former US president Jimmy Carter, the most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group in the US still boasts impressive political pull in Washington.

When the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) opens its annual conference Sunday, a high-powered group of politicians, academics and policy analysts - more than 6,000 people in all - is expected to pack the capital's glassy convention centre.

US Vice President Dick Cheney is due to give a keynote speech Monday stressing strong ties with Israel. The top four leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties will also speak, underscoring the tradition of bipartisan support for Israel in the US Congress.

'There's one issue - that is, support for the US relationship with Israel - that brings everyone together,' AIPAC spokesman Josh Block said.

AIPAC says the three-day conference will be its biggest ever - a signal of self-confidence and, in its own way, a rebuttal of unusually harsh questioning of the Israel lobby's influence.

Two US political scientists sparked a furious debate last spring with an essay that portrayed Washington as slavishly devoted to Israel and accused US President George W Bush's administration of launching the war in Iraq to help Israeli interests.

Harvard professor Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago's Walter Mearsheimer said their paper, published in the London Review of Books, aimed to bring a largely taboo topic into the open.

Critics condemned the essay as historically inaccurate and an opening for anti-Semitism. The authors insisted they were not suggesting a Jewish conspiracy to hijack US foreign policy.

The dust had barely settled when Carter, who brokered the 1978 Israel-Egypt peace deal, hit US bookstores in November with a broadside provocatively titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

Carter charges that a 'free and balanced discussion' of the Arab- Israeli conflict has been impossible in the US.

'This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American-Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices,' he wrote in the Los Angeles Times.

The book details 'the abominable oppression and persecution' of Palestinians, which in many ways 'is more oppressive' than apartheid was for black South Africans, Carter said.

Again, a storm erupted. Dennis Ross, a former US envoy to the Middle East, accused Carter of manipulating facts. Kenneth Stein, a Mideast scholar at Emory University's Carter Centre quit in disgust.

Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human rights group, accused Carter of hostility to Israel.

Carter's own centre-left Democratic Party also distanced itself. Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, one of the highest elected US officials, said it was 'wrong to suggest' that Jews would support 'ethnically based oppression.'

In the White House, Bush and his Republican administration have been one of the most staunchly pro-Israel governments of recent times, partly due to a religious affinity for Israel among Christian conservatives who strongly support Bush.

But public backing for Israel is also solid. A February poll on the Middle East conflict found 58 per cent of Americans sympathize with Israel and 20 per cent with the Palestinians. The Gallup survey had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

'All trends indicate that Americans ... understand quite clearly that the basic values we celebrate are reflected in only one country in the Middle East - our ally Israel,' AIPAC's Block said.

© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

Noam Chomsky: A predator becomes more dangerous when wounded

Washington's escalation of threats against Iran is driven by a determination to secure control of the region's energy resources

Noam Chomsky
Friday March 9, 2007
The Guardian

In the energy-rich Middle East, only two countries have failed to subordinate themselves to Washington's basic demands: Iran and Syria. Accordingly both are enemies, Iran by far the more important. As was the norm during the cold war, resort to violence is regularly justified as a reaction to the malign influence of the main enemy, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. Unsurprisingly, as Bush sends more troops to Iraq, tales surface of Iranian interference in the internal affairs of Iraq - a country otherwise free from any foreign interference - on the tacit assumption that Washington rules the world.

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In the cold war-like mentality in Washington, Tehran is portrayed as the pinnacle in the so-called Shia crescent that stretches from Iran to Hizbullah in Lebanon, through Shia southern Iraq and Syria. And again unsurprisingly, the "surge" in Iraq and escalation of threats and accusations against Iran is accompanied by grudging willingness to attend a conference of regional powers, with the agenda limited to Iraq.

Presumably this minimal gesture toward diplomacy is intended to allay the growing fears and anger elicited by Washington's heightened aggressiveness. These concerns are given new substance in a detailed study of "the Iraq effect" by terrorism experts Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, revealing that the Iraq war "has increased terrorism sevenfold worldwide". An "Iran effect" could be even more severe.

For the US, the primary issue in the Middle East has been, and remains, effective control of its unparalleled energy resources. Access is a secondary matter. Once the oil is on the seas it goes anywhere. Control is understood to be an instrument of global dominance. Iranian influence in the "crescent" challenges US control. By an accident of geography, the world's major oil resources are in largely Shia areas of the Middle East: southern Iraq, adjacent regions of Saudi Arabia and Iran, with some of the major reserves of natural gas as well. Washington's worst nightmare would be a loose Shia alliance controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the US.

Such a bloc, if it emerges, might even join the Asian Energy Security Grid based in China. Iran could be a lynchpin. If the Bush planners bring that about, they will have seriously undermined the US position of power in the world.

To Washington, Tehran's principal offence has been its defiance, going back to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and the hostage crisis at the US embassy. In retribution, Washington turned to support Saddam Hussein's aggression against Iran, which left hundreds of thousands dead. Then came murderous sanctions and, under Bush, rejection of Iranian diplomatic efforts.

Last July, Israel invaded Lebanon, the fifth invasion since 1978. As before, US support was a critical factor, the pretexts quickly collapse on inspection, and the consequences for the people of Lebanon are severe. Among the reasons for the US-Israel invasion is that Hizbullah's rockets could be a deterrent to a US-Israeli attack on Iran. Despite the sabre-rattling it is, I suspect, unlikely that the Bush administration will attack Iran. Public opinion in the US and around the world is overwhelmingly opposed. It appears that the US military and intelligence community is also opposed. Iran cannot defend itself against US attack, but it can respond in other ways, among them by inciting even more havoc in Iraq. Some issue warnings that are far more grave, among them the British military historian Corelli Barnett, who writes that "an attack on Iran would effectively launch world war three".

Then again, a predator becomes even more dangerous, and less predictable, when wounded. In desperation to salvage something, the administration might risk even greater disasters. The Bush administration has created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. It has been unable to establish a reliable client state within, and cannot withdraw without facing the possible loss of control of the Middle East's energy resources.

Meanwhile Washington may be seeking to destabilise Iran from within. The ethnic mix in Iran is complex; much of the population isn't Persian. There are secessionist tendencies and it is likely that Washington is trying to stir them up - in Khuzestan on the Gulf, for example, where Iran's oil is concentrated, a region that is largely Arab, not Persian.

Threat escalation also serves to pressure others to join US efforts to strangle Iran economically, with predictable success in Europe. Another predictable consequence, presumably intended, is to induce the Iranian leadership to be as repressive as possible, fomenting disorder while undermining reformers.

It is also necessary to demonise the leadership. In the west, any wild statement by President Ahmadinejad is circulated in headlines, dubiously translated. But Ahmadinejad has no control over foreign policy, which is in the hands of his superior, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The US media tend to ignore Khamenei's statements, especially if they are conciliatory. It's widely reported when Ahmadinejad says Israel shouldn't exist - but there is silence when Khamenei says that Iran supports the Arab League position on Israel-Palestine, calling for normalisation of relations with Israel if it accepts the international consensus of a two-state settlement.

The US invasion of Iraq virtually instructed Iran to develop a nuclear deterrent. The message was that the US attacks at will, as long as the target is defenceless. Now Iran is ringed by US forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey and the Persian Gulf, and close by are nuclear-armed Pakistan and Israel, the regional superpower, thanks to US support.

In 2003, Iran offered negotiations on all outstanding issues, including nuclear policies and Israel-Palestine relations. Washington's response was to censure the Swiss diplomat who brought the offer. The following year, the EU and Iran reached an agreement that Iran would suspend enriching uranium; in return the EU would provide "firm guarantees on security issues" - code for US-Israeli threats to bomb Iran.

Apparently under US pressure, Europe did not live up to the bargain. Iran then resumed uranium enrichment. A genuine interest in preventing the development of nuclear weapons in Iran would lead Washington to implement the EU bargain, agree to meaningful negotiations and join with others to move toward integrating Iran into the international economic system.

© Noam Chomsky, New York Times Syndicate

· Noam Chomsky is co-author, with Gilbert Achcar, of Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy

Due to copyright restrictions this article will only remain on the site for seven days

US expert on Russian intelligence shot in Washington

1 hour, 41 minutes ago

US authorities were Saturday investigating the shooting of a US expert on Russian intelligence who was shot outside his house in a Washington suburb, an FBI spokeswoman said.

Paul Joyal, 53, was hit several times as he returned home on Thursday evening, FBI spokeswoman Michelle Crnkovich told AFP.

The shooting came four days after Joyal alleged in a a major television network interview that the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin was involved in the radiation poisoning of a former KGB agent in London.

US media reported that Joyal was in a critical condition, but Crnkovich said she could not confirm his state of health although he was still alive.

"The Prince George's County Police Department is doing the investigation and the Baltimore FBI is just available to assist them if they need us to," she said, adding the case was so far being treated as an ordinary crime.

Joyal told NBC's Dateline program that he had struck up a friendship with former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko during trips to London.

Litvinenko died in a London hospital on November 23 and was found to have high levels of the radioactive isotope polonium 210 in his body.

He and his associates have accused Russia of carrying out the poisoning because of his fierce opposition to Putin.

Joyal repeated the accusations in his interview saying: "A message has been communicated to anyone who wants to speak out against the Kremlin: 'If you do, no matter who you are, where you are, we will find you and we will silence you -- in the most horrible way possible.'"

A former police officer, Joyal set up a consultancy in the 1990s specializing in intelligence information for companies wishing to invest in the former Soviet republics. He is often interviewed by US media as an expert on the region.

Encampment to Stop the War March 12+ Washington DC March 12+ Washington DC

Encampment to Stop the War
March 12+ Washington DC

The Washington insider's club and why they can't stand bloggers

Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake on U.S. v. Libby

Jane Hamsher of firedoglake.com, February 21, 2007:

1. The administration lied us into war and tried to abuse its power to punish the whistleblower who told the American public the truth.

2. Scooter is the firewall to Shooter.

3. Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby and other members of the administration conspired to keep federal investigators from uncovering their crimes.

4. The media was complicit in spreading administration propaganda rather than doing investigative journalism, and are now helping to set the table for a pardon.

5. The journalistic standards that have been exposed in the case (witness Tim Russert, Judy Miller, Andrea Mitchell, Robert Novak and others) are reprehensible, and have undermined the public trust in the media.

6. The degree to which this story about the lies that lead to war has been ignored by the media (relative to the feeding frenzy over [the Clinton/Lewinsky sexual scandal]) left a huge opening that the blogs have filled.

Of the paragraphs above, it is paragraph 6 that I find most to be both most clearly true and of longest reach. A lot of left bloggers ranging from the beige, staid TalkingPointsMemo.com to the wild and vulgar Jane Hamsher and the less vulgar Marcy Wheeler FireDogLake.com to community centers like DailyKos and its varied progeny to (to a lesser extent) Democratic strategy sites like MyDD.com have gotten a lot of their fuel and developed a lot of their talent out of the Wilson/Plame/Libby saga, and it is fair to say that this story and its galvanizing effect on the left blogosphere have provided the margin of victory in left netroots development.

Without Plameology, it is likely that the YearlyKos convention would not have happened last year (sidenote: Crablaw is 50-50 likely to attend YearlyKos 2007 in Chicago). For all the talk of the mainstream media being a liberal bastion, it seems to me that the press has bent over backwards to give Bush the benefit of the doubt. I think it's not a left-right issue so much as an insiders' club issue. I have come to perceive more and more while working in DC the strange, clubby environment of Potomac Fever. Georgetown is a university, a 10-block watering hole - AND a remarkably cheerful, extremely expensive and chummy neighborhood where everybody seems to know each other and neighbors become friends with remarkable easy, according to report after report. The neighborhood has subdivisions - the newspaper people live here, the senior lobbyists tend to live on that side of M Street. Alexandria has its own, strange clubby social network. So do McLean and the tonier neighborhoods in Arlington, where single family houses easily top $1 million dollars, more if within 6 blocks of a Metro station. Chevy Chase as well, for even more money.

What DC does not have is a lot of middle-class neighborhoods near the city. A few middle-class strongholds do exist in Northeast near Catholic University and near Eastern Avene in Deanwood. A very substantial majority-black middle-class lives in Prince George's County, but that County is perhaps 1/5 of the metropolitan area and even it has its very wealthy neighborhoods and some substantial poverty, though less than is commonly perceived. But in some cities, middle-class and lower-middle-class life dominate. In Baltimore, that's the case. Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Brooklyn and Queens - you see this. In DC, the concentration of wealth and power is absolutely staggering, especially when you realize that DC is less "showy" than cities like Los Angeles, i.e. the wealth is compiled beneath quiet, tasteful style. A multi-millionaire lobbyist for, say, the pharmaceutical industry is not likely to drive a sports car down K Street; a millionaire Hollywood agent doing similar work for similar money is more likely to show off his wealth.

In this clubbish, genteel Alice-in-Wonderland world a certain psychology sets in. It's not that the politicians get out of touch so much that much of this federal city comes to regard itself as a republic apart. They don't have a voting member in Congress, but who cares; they live down the street from 13 Congressmen so who needs a representative? The traditional news media, the lobbyists, the upper end of the non-profit sector, the upper-level government staffers just below secretary level, the salaried DNC and RNC apparatchiks, Congressmen, Senators and all of their major funders, connectors, contact brokers - they are of a social class and club. The USA?? - why would they want to go traveling in some foreign country like Baltimore or Cleveland?

To understand this world, listen to George Will and Cokie Roberts, read their books and ask yourself who they drink with, and who those people drink with. Then add in David Broder's Rolodex. You get the idea?

So of course it's reasonable to expect that if Vice-President Cheney and Scooter Libby dropped the dime on Valerie Plame to slap and humiliate her and her husband, or lied about hearing it from Russert first, or whatever, the entire Washington culture is likely to take care of this matter as an in-house issue. Not something to be handled by some sawed-off arrogant former mob prosecutor from Chicago. Special U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is not part of their world. Neither are the vulgar, keyboard-punching activists with strange names like "Emptywheel" and "Atrios" and "Majikthise." The contempt dripping from George Will and Cokie Roberts in their various discussions of the blogosphere as a concept - not for specific things said or done by specific bloggers, but its very existence as a hated, hostile phenomenon - is amazing, and deserves a full post in its own right. They have their culture, and they handle things their way. The U.S. Code and the FBI be damned; if the Washington insiders do it, then it is not illegal.

If Libby is convicted, I think the effect on Washington's chummy political culture will be devastating, perhaps far more devastating than it will be for Dick Cheney and President Bush. And bi-partisan long knives will come out for the dirty hippie bloggers like never before. THAT will be the longer legacy of Jane Hamsher and Marcy Wheeler's Plameology blogging.

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What's the big idea: Francis Fukuyama Interview

Francis Fukuyama jumped clear of the wreckage as neocon certainties crashed in Iraq. But his change of heart made him enemies in Washington, he tells Oliver Burkeman

Saturday February 3, 2007
The Guardian

If they were still on speaking terms, arch-neoconservative Charles Krauthammer and ex-neoconservative Francis Fukuyama might be able to thrash out exactly what happened on February 10 2004 at a dinner attended by rightwing thinkers at the Hilton hotel in Washington. Krauthammer remembers giving a "fairly theoretical" foreign policy address. Fukuyama, listening, seems to have experienced an epiphany. The speech "treated the war [in Iraq] as a virtually unqualified success", he remembered later. "I could not understand why everyone was applauding the speech enthusiastically, given that the United States had found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, was bogged down in a vicious insurgency and had almost totally isolated itself from the rest of the world."

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A crevasse seemed to be opening up, there in the Hilton's function room, with Fukuyama on one side and everyone else on the other. Days later, he publicly resigned from the neoconservative movement. The Washington policymaking world is a small one, and the two former friends bump into each other from time to time. "I did actually say 'Hello, Charles,'..." the 54-year-old Fukuyama says over tea in a London hotel. "But he just glared at me. So I assume from that he's not talking to me."

Since that night, as the catastrophe in Iraq has deepened, stony silences and backbiting have become standard procedure among the intellectuals once unanimous in urging George Bush to go to war. But neither thinkers nor White House have learned any lessons, Fukuyama argues in a new preface to his book, After The Neocons. America's support for Israel's strategy in Lebanon, he says, highlighted an obsession with old-fashioned overwhelming force in a world "where military power is just not a good instrument to use against non-state actors that are politically embedded". The same goes for the president's "surge" of troops in Iraq and murmurings in Washington in favour of attacking Iran. "Some [neoconservatives] insist that Iran poses an even greater threat than Iraq did," he writes, "avoiding the fact that their zealous advocacy of the Iraq invasion is what has destroyed US credibility, and undercut America's ability to take strong measures against Iran."

Fukuyama's repudiation of the neocon position is the more remarkable given his refusal to repudiate another position - one for which he's best known, and continues to defend in the face of ridicule. This is the notion that the collapse of communism heralded "the end of history", to quote the title of his 1992 book; an end to the clash of ideologies, in which western-style liberal democracy would reign as the natural endpoint for all humankind. It was a thesis so suited to the times, so audaciously expressed, that it brought Fukuyama instant fame. Until then, the Chicago-born, Manhattan-raised political scientist had kept largely below the radar, completing his PhD at Harvard, then serving in the State Department under Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush, specialising in Middle Eastern and European affairs.

A less tenacious mind than Fukuyama's might have conceded that 9/11 was a setback for the end-of-history idea. Instead, within weeks he was arguing that they proved his point - Islamist extremism was a rearguard action fought precisely because liberal democracy was so widely successful and desired. He put his name to a letter from the Project for a New American Century, the neocon group that incited paranoia among conspiracy theorists, but which has done little else except write retrospectively embarrassing letters, dripping with easy bravado, to President Bush. "Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack," it declared, "any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq."

He changed his mind in the year before the invasion, he says, though Krauthammer accuses him of "courageously" switching "after public opinion had turned against the war". What he never believed in, Fukuyama insists, was Bush's notion that all citizens of non-democracies possess a yearning for liberty that would flower into a functioning political system the moment the tyrant at the top was dispatched. "If anybody had been reading carefully what I said about the end of history, it was never that any given society today is capable of going through a democratic revolution ... economic development matters, culture matters, and if you've got a society with these extremely illiberal religious parties, you're obviously going to have trouble."

This kind of qualification is typical of Fukuyama in person. But he insists he never longed for the life of a celebrity thinker. "I don't accept many dinner-party invitations," he explains. Married with three children, today he has returned to his academic roots and teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, from where he enumerates the mistakes of the administration. But what of his own mistakes? Even if you grant that 9/11 itself didn't undermine the end-of-history thesis, hasn't the response done exactly that, by massively increasing hostility towards the west? "I'll make the following concession, which I don't think is a 180-degree turnaround," Fukuyama says. "When I wrote The End of History, I did not anticipate the degree to which mistakes on the part of American leaders, in their own stewardship of American power, could create such problems and undermine the legitimacy of the broader project. I don't think these are mistakes we'll never recover from ... but there's no question that because of decisions in Washington, the situation has become much worse than it would have been."

Part of the reason for these mistakes, Fukuyama contends, lies in tensions inherent in neoconservatism which didn't come to a head until the Iraq war. Neocon foreign policy starts from the idea that the exercise of US power abroad ought to have a moral dimension, in contrast to the realpolitik of Henry Kissinger. But neocons were also sceptical of social engineering or nation-building - after all, many were disillusioned leftists who believed big government had failed. Nonetheless, they seized their moment in the spotlight and, in the words of writer Paul Berman, yoked together "a stirring democratic oratory with a series of grotesque scandals involving American torture - [a] very weird and self-defeating combination of idealism and brass knuckles".

Having abandoned his former allies, the onus is on Fukuyama to come up with a better approach to foreign affairs. In After The Neocons he tries to do so. He is at pains, above all, to stop the Iraq disaster leading to the conclusion that the internal affairs of other countries are never, militarily speaking, the west's business. His approach "still takes humanitarian intervention seriously as an alternative for a place like Darfur," he says. "Not exclusively, not stupidly - but because you do care about how governments treat their citizens."

Hatred of the United Nations has blinded the American right to the role of international institutions, he says, though in his ideal world the weak and corrupt UN wouldn't take the leading role. He is frustratingly vague on detail. "This is what I tell my students all the time: we do not have a good set of international institutions to deal with a lot of emerging problems. And it's up to their generation to figure out what these are going to be." In this Fukuyama reflects the paucity of ideas in Washington: a static, pessimistic vagueness on all sides, as if everyone is waiting for a compelling vision for US foreign policy. Fukuyama edges towards one, but just when you find yourself longing for him to come up with a punchy new "end of history" the cautious professor takes over. ("Realistic Wilsonianism" is the mouthful of a term he gives to his approach.)

Fukuyama voted for John Kerry in 2004, but he doesn't think the likely candidates today have much to offer on foreign policy. So Washington waits for inspiration; Iraq spirals towards implosion; and former advocates of war keep themselves sane by avoiding the subject. "On the whole, I'd say I'm still friends [with many neocons]," Fukuyama says. "We manage this situation by not talking about Iraq."

· After The Neocons is published by Profile Books at £7.99

January 27 March on Washington Reports

28 Jan 2007 (Updated)

by Compilation

Reports on January 27, 2007 March on Washington, against the Iraq war, and related activity:

J27: Photos and video footage from the rush to the Capitol
Protestors lay seige to US Capitol, smash window at military recruiter
Hundreds of Thousands Put Impeachment Back On the Table, Capitol Hill Taken 3x
Interviews During UFPJ March on the Mall
Rep. John Conyers: “Congress Can Fire Bush!”
Peace Rally Wrap up
Radical Youth Contingent and Students for a Democratic Society March Overview
Photos & Videos1 2
America Marches and Goes Home Video
Protesters Surround Capital Hill

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Tens of Thousands in D.C. Protest War

Saturday January 27, 2007 5:01 PM

By LARRY MARGASAK

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Protesters energized by fresh congressional skepticism about the Iraq war demanded a withdrawal of U.S. troops in a demonstration Saturday that drew tens of thousands and brought Jane Fonda back to the streets.

A sampling of celebrities and busloads of demonstrators from distant states joined in a spirited rally under a sunny sky, seeing opportunity to press their cause in a country that has turned against the war.

``We see many things that we feel helpless about,'' said Barbara Struna, 59, of Brewster, Mass. ``But this is like a united force. This is something I can do.''

Struna, a mother of five who runs an art gallery, made a two-day bus trip with her 17-year-old daughter, Anna, to the nation's capital to represent what she said was middle America's opposition to President Bush's war policy.

Her daughter, a high school senior, said she has as many as 20 friends who have been to Iraq. ``My generation is the one that is going to have to pay for this,'' she said.

Showcased speakers in addition to Fonda included actors Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins and Danny Glover; the Rev. Jesse Jackson; National Organization for Women President Kim Gandy; and several members of Congress who oppose the war.

Fonda was a lightning rod in the Vietnam era for her outspoken opposition to that war, earning the derisive nickname ``Hanoi Jane'' from conservatives for traveling to North Vietnam during the height of that conflict 35 years ago. She has avoided anti-Iraq war appearances until now.

About 40 people staged a counter-protest, including military family members and Army Cpl. Joshua Sparling, 25, who lost his leg to a bomb in Iraq in November 2005.

He said the anti-war protesters, especially those who are veterans or who are on active duty, ``need to remember the sacrifice we have made and what our fallen comrades would say if they are alive.''

As protesters streamed to the Mall, Bush reaffirmed his commitment to the troop increase in a phone conversation Saturday with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a day when one or two rockets struck the heavily fortified Green Zone, home of the Iraqi government, thousands of Americans and the U.S. and British embassies.

Bush was in Washington for the weekend. He is often is out of town during big protest days. On Monday, for instance, he called anti-abortion marchers on the telephone from Camp David.

United for Peace and Justice, a coalition group sponsoring the protest, said there has been intense interest in the rally since Bush announced he was sending 21,500 additional troops to supplement the 130,000 in Iraq.

The rally was held as congressional opposition to the war is building. The Senate is considering nonbinding resolutions that would state opposition to Bush sending the extra forces to Iraq.

Frank Houde, 72, of Albany, N.Y., was a career Air Force pilot who served in Vietnam. Houde did not carry a sign, but said that his protest was on his hat, which said ``Veterans for peace.''

``The fact is war doesn't work,'' he said. ``Iraq is not going to work. The war was started for reasons that turned out to be false.''

Houde, retired from the antique restoration business, said he was never upset by protests at home while he was in Vietnam.

``I knew most were protesting on principle,'' he said. ``It was a democratic process.''

Houde said he came to this protest to be counted and added, ``You can't sit in the middle of the stink of war for a year and not be affected by it. We changed the balance of power in Congress.''

Active-duty military troops were featured in the protest. A Defense Department spokeswoman said members of the Armed Forces can speak out, subject to several restrictions. They must not do so in uniform, and they must make clear that they do not speak on behalf of their military unit, their service or the Defense Department, unless authorized to do so.

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Associated Press writer Kasie Hunt contributed to this report.

On the Net:

United for Peace and Justice: http://www.unitedforpeace.org/

Washington antiwar rally will be on C-SPAN

11:00 AM EST 2:00 (est.) LIVE

Rally Anti-War Rally United for Peace and Justice Jane Fonda Maxine Waters , D-CA The beginning and end of this live program may be earlier or later than the scheduled times.

Anti-War Groups Plan Surge on Washington

Related
SATURDAY'S GLOBAL PEACE MARCH
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POLITICS-US:

Aaron Glantz

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 24 (IPS) - Peace activists from around the United States will converge on Washington Saturday for what organisers hope will be the largest demonstration to date against the Iraq war.

"We expect a turnout in the six figures," said Tom Andrews, a former Democratic congressman who now runs the group Win Without War, which is organising the march along with True Majority, Working Assets, the RainbowPUSH Coalition, the National Organisation for Women and the national umbrella group United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ).

UFPJ's Leslie Cagan told IPS that the level of energy in the antiwar movement has spiked since the November election, when voters ended Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.

"The voters of this country figured out that they could use the November elections as a vehicle to voice their opposition to the war," Cagan said. "What happened there was that the voters gave Congress a mandate to end the war in Iraq and bring the troops home."

That success at the polls gave antiwar citizens more optimism that a large demonstration might make an impact, she said.

In mid-November, United for Peace and Justice called a demonstration for the nation's capital for Jan. 27, with other large mobilisations planned for Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco.

In addition, smaller actions are planned for more than 50 cities. In Bismark, North Dakota, the group Surge for Peace will be delivering petitions to members of the local congressional delegation. In Austin, Texas, the Stop the War coalition is hosting a march and rally featuring student activists, Green Party activists, and members of the group Veterans for Peace.

A full listing of all marches nationwide is on the group's website unitedforpeace.org.

"People started saying to us right after the election 'well, what is Congress going to do?'" Cagan said. "And we quickly realised the real question is 'what are we going to do to push this Congress to do what they said they were going to do to get elected'. So we figured we got to get people into Washington as soon as possible after the new session of Congress began."

Organisers said five or six Democratic lawmakers are expected to speak at the rally in Washington, and that Representative Barbara Lee will speak at the Los Angeles gathering.

"A lot more would be speaking but we simply don't have the time on stage," said former congressman Andrews. "If we had all day and there was unlimited time for members of Congress to speak we'd have many members of Congress."

Peace activists will have to fight hard if they want to end the war. In recent weeks, President George W. Bush has proposed escalating the war by sending 21,500 additional U.S. soldiers to Iraq. At least 3,000 troops are already on their way.

In his annual State of the Union address Tuesday night, Bush told a joint session of Congress he "chose this course of action because it provides the best chance of success."

"Many in this chambre understand that America must not fail in Iraq, because you understand that the consequences of failure would be grievous and far-reaching," he added.

While lawmakers from both political parties have put forward proposals condemning Bush's plan to escalate the war, none are binding.

In addition, the new Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, along with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, have already said they don't support efforts to cut funding for the war.

In the official Democratic response to Bush's state of the union address, freshman Senator Jim Webb of Virginia focused more on strategy and tactics than the merits of the war itself.

"We need a new direction," said Webb, whose son is currently deployed as a soldier in Iraq. "The majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is being fought, nor does the majority of our military."

In his speech, Sen. Webb favoured "regionally based diplomacy, a policy that takes our soldiers off the streets of Iraq's cities, and a formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq."

But he also opposed a "withdrawal that ignores the possibility of further chaos."

United for Peace and Justice's Leslie Cagan told IPS that the mixed message from the Democrats makes a large turnout at Saturday's demonstration particularly important.

"That's why it's critical to keep the pressure on," she said. "We are encouraging every single person who agrees with us who can possibly make the trip to Washington this coming weekend to be with us," adding that the antiwar movement is staging a lobby day on Capital Hill for Monday Jan. 29.

"Now we know it's a big country and everyone can't make the trip," she added. "That's why we've organised demonstrations for over 50 cities across the country including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle."

Professor says America seeks Afghanistan Oil Deal

Saturday 20. Jan 2007

Is Stephen Harper's Conservative minority government supporting another Oil War? This would yield enormous profits for greed-driven investors, and the atmosphere will continue to dangerously heat from the increasing use of those fossil fuels.

by David Michael Smith

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush declared that the United States would launch a "War on Terrorism." In early October, U.S. airplanes began bombing Afghanistan and providing assistance to the Northern Alliance and other groups opposed to the Taliban regime. Within a few months, U.S. troops and their Afghan allies had succeeded in ousting the Taliban and installing a new regime. Although Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants apparently escaped, U.S. officials proclaimed that a significant blow had been dealt to the al-Qa'ida network.

Traumatized and outraged by the horrific events of September 11, the majority of Americans supported the war in Afghanistan. Most people believed the U.S. Commander-in-Chief when he said that the replacement of the Taliban regime was required to safeguard our country against another catastrophic attack by al-Qa'ida forces. Even Princeton Professor Richard Falk, a longtime anti-war activist, wrote in The Nation ("Defining a Just War," Oct. 29, 2001) that the war in Afghanistan was "the first truly just war since World War II." But was it?

Since last October, thousands of people have participated in anti-war rallies, marches, and teach-ins in New York City, Washington, San Francisco, Houston, and other cities. People opposed to the war have made clear that they condemn the atrocity of September 11. But they also condemn the U.S. role in the deaths of thousands of Afghan people who had nothing to do with the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In the British Guardian ("The innocent dead in a coward's war," Dec. 20, 2001), journalist Seumas Milne estimated that about ten thousand Afghan soldiers may have died in the war and cited University of New Hampshire Professor Marc Herold's estimate that about four thousand civilians have also died.

Moreover, anti-war activists and progressive writers argue that the war in Afghanistan has been, in large part, another "oil war." The September 11 attacks provided a compelling pretext for military action against the al-Qa'ida forces in Afghanistan. But a growing body of research by journalists and scholars reveals that the Bush Administration's decision in favour of a regime change and all-out war in Afghanistan was significantly influenced by the desire to install a new government that would be more sympathetic to U.S. economic interests in Central Asia.

	Has Prime Minister Harper risked the lives of Canadians for an "Oil War" in Afghanistan under the guise of a "War on Terrorism"?

Although Afghanistan itself has no significant oil or natural gas reserves, it is strategically located in a region which does. As Eric Margolis observed in the Toronto Sun ("The U.S. is Determined to Dominate the World's Richest New Source," Jan. 13, 2002), Central Asia's Caspian Basin, over which sit the former Soviet states of Uzbekistan, Tajikstan, Kyrgystan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, is the world's "richest new source of oil." In the Jurist ("The Deadly Pipeline War," Dec. 8, 2001), Marjorie Cohn noted that some analysts have estimated the potential value of Caspian oil and natural gas reserves at four trillion dollars. Phil Gasper recalled in the Socialist Worker ("The Politics of Oil," Jan. 25, 2002) that the Middle East Economic Digest editors have described Central Asia as "the Middle East of the twenty-first century."

Even if this latter projection proves overly optimistic, Martha Hamilton concluded in a Washington Post article ("The Last Great Race For Oil Reserves," April 26, 1998) that the "largely untapped subterranean treasure" in the Caspian Basin may be "the third-largest reserve in the world, after the Persian Gulf and Siberia."

This planned pipeline would carry $3-5 trillion in oil and natural gas from the Caspian Sea basin via Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, where ships docked in Arabian Sea ports.

As Hamilton wrote, "The possibility of bringing those huge energy reserves to market has touched off a scramble by international oil and gas companies to get in on what may be one of the world's last great energy plays." As Cohn pointed out in "The Deadly Pipeline War," Dick Cheney, then chief executive officer of the energy company Halliburton, told a meeting of oil industry leaders in 1998: "I can't think of a time when we've had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian."

U.S. government officials and energy company executives have been anxious to exploit what Daniel Yergin, renowned energy expert and author of The Prize (1993), has called "the number-one prize in world oil." However, the transportation of oil and natural gas extracted from the region has posed a serious challenge for them. The Caspian Pipeline Consortium, led by the Chevron Corporation, opened a new oil pipeline from Kazakhstan to Russia in October, 2001. But, as George Monbiot reported in the Guardian ("America's pipe dream," Oct. 23, 2001), policymakers in Washington have generally opposed the construction of pipelines through Russia or Iran. This is why U.S. energy companies and government officials have been so interested in Afghanistan. As Ahmed Rashid explained in his book, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (2001), U.S. policy toward Afghanistan during the past decade has been largely driven by corporate interests in the region's resources. Rashid noted that in 1995, the California-based UNOCAL Corporation began negotiating with the government of Turkmenistan to build oil and gas pipelines from that country through Afghanistan to Pakistani ports on the Arabian Sea. Soon after the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan in 1996, UNOCAL executives initiated discussions with them in order to secure the pipeline agreement.

According to Rashid, the Taliban's religious fundamentalism and harsh repression precluded normal diplomatic relations at the time but did not pose an insurmountable obstacle to a potential business deal. Strikingly, neither did the relocation of Osama bin Laden and numerous al-Qa'ida fighters to Afghanistan in 1996 and 1997. As Rashid recounted, UNOCAL Vice President Marty Miller and other company executives even wined and dined Taliban representatives in Houston in November 1997. Mullah Mohammed Ghaus and his Afghan colleagues stayed at an expensive hotel and visited the Houston Zoo and the NASA Space Center during their visit. Miller offered the Taliban representatives a lucrative contract and thought a formal agreement was imminent.

The Clinton Administration quietly supported UNOCAL's efforts, but these negotiations eventually failed. Taliban leaders finally decided against the pipeline deal, and Washington's willingness to do business with them ended after the al-Qa'ida bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. President Clinton ordered cruise missile attacks on al-Qa'ida training camps in Afghanistan and even authorized efforts to assassinate bin Laden. At the same time, the U.S. tried to persuade Taliban officials to surrender bin Laden. As Monbiot has noted, notwithstanding these developments, U.S. business executives and government officials remained deeply interested in the potential of oil and gas pipelines through Afghanistan.

In May 2001, the mainstream media widely reported that the new U.S. Bush Administration had awarded the Taliban regime forty-two million dollars to support the eradication of opium production in Afghanistan. Less well known is the fact that, shortly after taking office, the Bush Administration had quietly resumed negotiations with the Taliban. In an important new book, Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth (2001), French authors Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie have revealed that the Bush Administration worked long and hard to "decouple" bin Laden from the Taliban and lay the foundations for U.S. diplomatic recognition and pipelines for oil and natural gas.

Brisard and Dasquie have drawn on numerous sources, including discussions with John O'Neill, the former FBI Deputy Director who retired in July 2001. Ironically, O'Neill then became security director for the World Trade Center, where he died in the September 11 attacks. According to the authors, O'Neill resigned from the FBI because the State Department had continually blocked his investigation into al-Qa'ida's roots in Saudi Arabia. The authors report that O'Neill bitterly complained about the ability of the U.S. oil companies and their State Department allies to thwart an investigation that might offend the Saudi royal family and jeopardize U.S. economic interests in that country.

Brisard and Dasquie's account of the negotiations between the Bush Administration and the Taliban between February and August 2001, provides a helpful framework for understanding the eventual U.S. decision to topple the Afghan regime after the tragedy of September 11. The authors have explained that Washington saw the Taliban as a potential partner who could provide stability in Afghanistan and benefit from the construction of pipelines by U.S. corporations. But, in a series of meetings in Washington, Islamabad, and Berlin, U.S. officials demanded that the Taliban surrender bin Laden and invite other Afghan political forces to join their government.

When the Taliban equivocated over and eventually refused these demands, U.S. officials threatened to take military action against them. As Brisard revealed in an interview in Paris, at one point in the negotiations, these officials told the Taliban, "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs." As Jonathan Steele and his colleagues reported in the Guardian ("Threat of US strikes passed to Taliban weeks before NY attack," Sept. 22, 2001), U.S. representatives told Russian, Iranian, and Pakistani diplomats at a mid-July meeting in Berlin that Washington was seriously contemplating this option. Although these U.S. officials have since denied making such a threat, former Pakistan Foreign Minister Niaz Naik, who was present at the meeting, confirmed their remarks in an interview with the Guardian reporters. Is it a coincidence that the deadliest terrorist attacks in U.S. history occurred just several weeks after negotiations with the Taliban broke down? Perhaps. But Brisard and Dasquie have speculated that the prospect of U.S. military action against Afghanistan may have led bin Laden to approve the massive assault on New York City and Washington. Similarly, Steele and his colleagues have raised the possibility that bin Laden "was launching a preemptive strike in response to what he saw as U.S. threats." Other analysts have suggested that bin Laden may have authorized such a "preemptive strike" because he feared that the Taliban might finally accede to Washington's demands and try to force him to leave Afghanistan.

Although such speculation cannot be confirmed, it seems clear that long-standing U.S. economic interests in pipeline construction played a major role in the U.S. government's decision in favor of a regime change and all-out war in Afghanistan. Notably, as Shaun Casey emphasized in the Boston Globe ("Ethics of This War Have Yet to be Spelled Out," Oct. 11, 2001) and Stephen Zunes pointed out in the San Jose Mercury News (" U.S. Military Response is Wrong -- And It Won't Work," Oct. 12, 2001), there has never been any evidence of the Taliban regime's involvement in the attacks on the U.S. As John Pilger remarked in the British Daily Mirror ("Hidden Agenda Behind War on Terror," Oct. 29, 2001), the Bush Administration knew well before the Pentagon's first bombs began falling on Afghanistan that the attacks of September 11 were planned in Britain and the United States, and that none of the actual perpetrators were Afghan nationals.

As Howard Zinn observed in The Progressive ("A Just Cause, Not a Just War," December 2001), the U.S. government rejected the alternative of turning to international law, diplomacy, and limited multinational military action in order to bring al-Qa'ida forces to justice. As Zinn has noted, the U.S. government also rejected the Taliban regime's offer to surrender bin Laden for trial in a third country after receiving evidence of his involvement in the September 11 atrocity. As Phil Gasper wrote in the International Socialist Review ("Afghanistan, the CIA, bin Laden, and the Taliban," November-December 2001), the Bush Administration's refusal to seriously consider these options revealed that the overthrow of the Taliban and the installation of a new, more business-friendly regime had already been designated as primary objectives of the impending war. In his book Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (2002), Professor Michael Klare of Hampshire College has acknowledged that one purpose of "Operation Enduring Freedom" was to "capture and punish those responsible for the September 11 attacks." But Klare has explained that a second objective was "to consolidate U.S. power in the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea area, and to ensure continued flow of oil." As Klare has emphasized, while this latter objective "may get far less public attention than the first, this does not mean it is any less important."

In a report released just days before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the U.S. Energy Information Administration described Afghanistan as a significant "potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea." However, the report noted that the potential construction of oil and natural gas pipelines has "been undermined by Afghanistan's instability." As Monbiot has written, "Given that the U.S. government is dominated by former oil industry executives, we would be foolish to suppose that such plans no longer figure in its strategic thinking." Indeed, the way in which the Bush Administration sought to "capture and punish" the al-Qa'ida forces in Afghanistan was significantly influenced by its commitment to promoting U.S. economic interests and power in the region.

Gore Vidal argues in his book entitled, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (2002), that the drive for profits and power are central to the Bush Administration's so-called "War on Terrorism." Vidal writes, "We need Afghanistan because it's the gateway to Central Asia, which is full of oil and natural gas... That's what it's all about. We are establishing our control over Central Asia."

Many Americans may not want to believe that such economic motives could play so important a role in U.S. foreign policy. But developments in the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan make it difficult to deny journalists Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer's observation that "War is politics by other means, and politics is business, and oil is very big business."

As Hightower and Frazer concluded in their book The Hightower Lowdown (January, 2002), the tragedy of September 11 and the subsequent war in Afghanistan "put the U.S. pipeline plans back on track." Hightower and Frazer cited a remarkable article in the Pakistani Frontier Post (Oct. 10, 2001). This article reported that, though the U.S. war against the Taliban had barely begun, U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlain had already informed the Pakistan government that, "in view of recent geopolitical developments," the negotiations for a pipeline through Afghanistan would be revived.

After the Taliban regime collapsed, the Bush Administration hand-picked Hamid Karzai to head the new Afghan government and named Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American, as its new special envoy to the Karzai government. As Richard Neville pointed out in the Australian Sydney Morning Herald ("Beyond Good and Evil," April 15, 2002), both Karzai and Khalilzad are former consultants to UNOCAL. Eric Margolis has disclosed in the Toronto Sun ("America's New War: A Progress Report," Dec. 9, 2001) that Karzai is also a former "asset" for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. As Salim Muwakkil wrote in the Chicago Tribune ("Pipeline Politics Taint U.S. War," March 18, 2002), the "rise to power" of these two former UNOCAL employees will "make things even smoother" for the resumption of the pipeline project in Afghanistan. As Daniel Fisher reported in Forbes Magazine (Feb. 4, 2002), "It has been called the pipeline from hell, to hell, through hell" but "now, with the collapse of the Taliban, oil executives are suddenly talking again about building it." To be sure, the giant U.S. energy corporations are unlikely to make major investments in the project until the new Afghan regime proves able to suppress the outbreaks of violence among the various warlords' forces and any military challenge from resurgent Taliban fighters. This is certainly one reason why U.S. and British troops in Afghanistan are struggling to piece together a viable Afghan national army that can defend the new regime.

In the meantime, Karzai has already made clear that his government fully intends to work closely with neighboring countries and U.S. oil companies to reap the immense profits from the transport of Caspian Basin oil and natural gas. On Feb. 8, 2002, Karzai visited Pakistan and joined with General Pervez Musharraf in pledging "mutual brotherly relations" and cooperation "in all spheres of activity." As the Irish Times reported on Feb. 11, 2002, Karzai announced that he and Musharraf had discussed the proposed Central Asian pipeline project "and agreed that it was in the interest of both countries."

The mounting U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries may enable Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, UNOCAL, and other giant corporations to lay claim to "the number-one prize in world oil." But the extension of U.S. military power and economic domination into this region comes with very grave risks. As hundreds of millions of people in Central Asia and the Middle East watch their oil and natural gas being extracted and transported for the profit of Western companies, the prospects for a massive, violent backlash against the U.S. and its client regimes are likely to grow. As horrific as the September 11 attacks were, they may only be the beginning.

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About the Author:

David Michael Smith is a professor of government at the College of the Mainland in Texas City, Texas , in the United States.