How do you win a "War On Terror"?

What he said.

OK
Yes, I agree that the USA cannot totally win the war with Al Q. but certain steps can be taken to decrease the venom. Some of those steps have been stated.

Ironicaly David Frum andRichard Pearle in the new book, "End of Evil, How To Win the War On Terror,said one of the things that the US should do is crack down on Saudi Arabia. Most likely he states much more than that. I will try to get that book from a local library and read it.

The book is here on the Net.

http://www.aei.org/publications/bookID.650/book_detail.asp

Re: OK


How is that ironic? Just curious.

Anywhoo - "cracking down" on Saudi Arabia is tricky proposition. Exactly how do they propose to do this?

Perhaps a positive move the US might make towards the end of reducing 'terrorism' would be to actually become the sort of force in the world which it deludely believes it is...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/scheer/2004/01/02/hussein/index_np.html

I'm pretty much in agreement with George Soros here:



OK, so....here's the deal:

al-Qaeda is not a state power. In fact, taking the Bush adminstration at its word, the most recent code Orange we're still under was triggered by the concern that al-Qaeda would hijack an airliner (or two).

What more proof does one need that these guys don't have any weaponry?

Sure, they are a menace with truck bombs, but BushCo has been treating al-Qaeda as if they had submarines and jet fighters and laser-guided bombs. They don't. The core is about 2,000 guys, mostly in Afghanistan. They were not killed or captured when there was the opportunity (immediately after 9/11), and now, two years later, it will be much harder to get them, mostly because of the Iraq invasion, partly because the global (and especially Islamic) community is unlikely to go along.

Bush wasted an opportunity to soundly defeat al-Qaeda, and instead used 9/11 to advance other agendas (Total Information Awareness, PATRIOT Act, bigger military budget, invading Iraq).

I think we all agree that Bush has fumbled the 'War on Terror' beyond belief. However, I fail to see how Bush could has "wasted an opportunity to soundly defeat al-Qaeda." It seems to me that the defeat of Middle Eastern terrorism, at least in the forseeable future, is an unattainable goal. What exactly do you propose he should have done to "soundly defeat" terrorism?

I'd just like to give credit, where credit is due. IronLionZion: Your list of answers to pistoff's question is the best such list of non-violent steps I've seen anywhere. As far as your implied question at the end of point 4;"I can elaborate further if anybody is interested in my opinion on this particular issue." I answer that I would gratefully read as much elaboration as you are willing to write. I am a bit surprised that you don't think Turkey should take steps to remove themselves from Amnesty International's list of bad guys, prior to being accepted by the world community, but that is a minor fault in your philosophy. Unlike you; I believe violence should be met with an overwhelmingly violent response. I believe vivid demonstrations of superior force have to, at least, be considered by enemies, regardless of their ideology.
Your well articulated points make it clear, at least to me, that there are other equally important steps that must be taken. I find you infinitely more credible than those who let their partisan loyalty (or more specifically their disgust of current leadership) obscure there point of view. I thank you for your insight and look forward to reading more of what you have to say.

UH...
I apologize that the following is a bity off topic but you asked how the the "End the Evil" book is ironic. If you go to a search engine and type in "Richard Pearle" you may know why I find it ironic.

It is really sad that the majority of the American public have been duped by the present regime. Soros is 100% correct.

The Bush-Saudi Connection

By Michelle Mairesse

Ancestral Voices

In 1920, under a League of Nations mandate, officials from France and Great Britain carved up vast tracts of warlord-dominated territories in Arabia into what they imagined would be nation states devoid of the complex historical, cultural, and tribal realities of the Mideast.

Instead of establishing European-style nation states, the strongest warlords quickly entrenched themselves with the aid of standing armies and spy networks. In much of the Mideast, fealty is often accorded to tribal overlords and the Islamic sects they favor rather than to the territory and people within the boundaries of the nation state. Jonathan Rabin succinctly defines the reality, past and present, of the desert sheikdoms: "The systems of government that have evolved in Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia are paranoid family dictatorships with ancestral roots in a single city or village." (1)

Islamic fundamentalists like Osama bin Laden make their appeals to the nation or community of believers, not to any particular nation state, although the rich and powerful among the Muslims have founded Western-style businesses and formed corporations both inside and outside the boundaries of their native countries. Because Osama himself is a scion of a rich Saudi family with wide-ranging business interests throughout the world, the split Saudi personality is most evident in him and the bin Laden clan. Osama, who calls America "The Great Satan," has done business with the infidel Americans whenever it suited him.

Throughout the eighties, when the United States assisted the Saudis in a giant military buildup of airfields, ports, and bases throughout the kingdom, many of the contracts were awarded to the largest construction company in Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Binladen Group, founded by Osama bin Laden's father.

At the same time, the United States trained and armed troops in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. The United States and Saudi Arabia spent about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan, recruiting, supplying, and training nearly 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among the recruits were Osama bin Laden and his followers. (2)

With C.I.A. funding, Osama bin Laden imported engineers and equipment from his father's Saudi construction company to build tunnels for guerrilla training centers and hospitals, and for arms dumps near the Pakistan border. After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the C.I.A. and the Pakistani intelligence agency sponsored the Taliban organization, a government composed of the fanatic Wahhabi Islamic sect, the same sect that is the state religion in Saudi Arabia. Although followers of the Wahhabi sect do not refer to themselves as Wahhabis, the label is useful because it applies to a single Muslim group with a set of beliefs peculiar to them alone: Wahhabis maintain that Shi'ites and Sufis are not Muslims, and that Muslims should not visit shrines or celebrate Mohammed's birthday. (3)

The Saudi sheiks have been Wahhabis since they intermarried with the family of a puritanical Muslim scholar, Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab, in 1774. Supported first by Britain and later by the United States, the Saudis captured the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, easily gaining control of the entire Arabian peninsula.

Wherever they ruled, the Wahhabis imposed their medieval code on their hapless subjects, making public spectacles of stoning adulterers to death and maiming thieves, destroying decorated mosques and cemeteries, prohibiting music, sequestering women, and promoting war on infidels. The Saudi sheiks have lavished funds on anti-American and anti-Israeli terrorists-in-training while indoctrinating other Muslims through its worldwide network of religious schools, mosques, newspapers, and presses.

Jihad

The Wahhabi Taliban in Afghanistan had the blessings of the Saudi royal family and of The Big Three--the bin Laden family, the al Ahmoudi family, and the Mahfouz family--the richest clans in that medieval kingdom. (A C.I.A. official testified to Congress that Khalid bin Mahfouz is bin Laden's brother-in-law). The desert oligarchs profited from world-wide investments as well as sleazy banking schemes such as the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

Osama's brother, has conducted all his American affairs through James Bath, a Houston crony of the Bush family. Bath's former business partner Bill White testified in court that Bath had been a liaison for the C.I.A. In 1979 Bath invested $50,000 in Arbusto, George W. Bush's first business venture. Rumor had it that Bath was acting as Salem bin Laden's representative. "In conflicting statements, Bush at first denied ever knowing Bath, then acknowledged his stake in Arbusto and that he was aware Bath represented Saudi interests." (4)

In addition to doing aviation business with Saudi sheiks, Bath was part owner of a Houston bank whose chief stockholder was Ghaith Pharaon, who represented the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), a criminal global bank with branches in 73 countries. BCCI proceeded to defraud depositors of $10 billion during the ?'80s, while providing a money laundry conduit for the Medellin drug cartel, Asia's major heroin cartel, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and Islamist terrorist organizations worldwide. (5)

Big Three wheeler-dealer Khalid bin Mahfouz, one of the largest stockholders in the criminal bank, was indicted when the massive BCCI banking scandal blew apart in the early 1990s. The Saudi royal family placed him under house arrest after discovering that Mahfouz had used the royal bank to channel millions of dollars through fake charities into bin Laden's organizations, but Mahfouz was not so much punished as inconvenienced. (6)

members of the Wahhabist Saudi oligarchy are driven by the sometimes conflicting emotions of power lust and religious fervor. Their support of radical Islamists follows from their ambition to dominate the Muslim world, but their fear that radical Islamists might overthrow the Saudi regime at home motivates them to fund and encourage holy warriors in countries other than their own.

As Daniel Pipes points out, jihad (holy war) is a central tenet of Muslim belief . "According to one calculation, Muhammad himself engaged in 78 battles, of which just one (the Battle of the Ditch) was defensive. Within a century after the prophet's death in 632, Muslim armies had reached as far as India in the east and Spain in the west. " (7)

es traces the bloody advance of fundamentalist jihadists against their twentieth century co-religionists. "Islamists, besides adhering to the primary conception of jihad as armed warfare against infidels, have also adopted as their own Ibn Taymiya's call to target impious Muslims. This approach acquired increased salience through the 20th century as Islamist thinkers . . . promoted jihad against putatively Muslim rulers who failed to live up to or apply the laws of Islam. The revolutionaries who overthrew the Shah of Iran in 1979 and the assassins who gunned down President Anwar Sadat of Egypt two years later overtly held to this doctrine. So does Osama bin Laden."

In 1989, bin Laden established al Qaida (the Base) in Afghanistan to organize extremist Wahhabis and disperse their networks throughout the country. A year later, he returned to Saudi Arabia and founded a welfare agency for Arab-Afghan veterans. Bin Laden hoped to mobilize the veterans as a kind of religious-military army, but King Faud discouraged the venture. When King Faud invited 540,000 American troops to the kingdom to fight in the Gulf War, bin Laden lambasted the royal family and urged religious authorities to issue fatwahs (religious rulings) condemning the American infidels.

In 1991, Osama bin Laden and a band of Afghan veterans agitated in Sudan for a holy war against the enemies of Islam. In 1992, he claimed responsibility for the attack on American soldiers in Yemen, and again for attacks in Somalia in 1993. He was mum about the terrorist truck bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the explosion that killed six people and injured more than a thousand, but investigators knew bin Laden had donated heavily to the religious "charity" that financed the bombing operation.

Spiked Investigations

n February 1995, when he was appointed chief of the F.B.I.'s counter-terrorism section in Washington, John O'Neill immediately assembled and coordinated a team to capture Ramzi Yousef, who was en route from Pakistan to Afghanistan. Yousef was strongly suspected of planning and directing the World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

In three days, the kingpin of the World Trade Center bombing was in custody, and O'Neill went on to accumulate damning evidence against the 1993 World Trade bombers that led to their conviction in American courts. For the next six years, John O'Neill tirelessly investigated terrorist strikes against Americans and American interests in Saudi Arabia, East Africa, and Yemen, often encountering American officials' roadblocks on the way. Even in 1996, after Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl turned himself in at the American Embassy in Eritrea and divulged details of bin Laden's and al Qaeda's organization and operations, the State Department refused to list al Qaeda as a terrorist organization.

In February 1998, bin Laden assembled a number of terrorist groups, including Islamic Jihad, and issued a fierce fatwa calling for the deaths of all Americans. On August 7, 1998, 226 people died in the simultaneous bombing of American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Investigators blamed bin Laden for the attacks. On August 20, 1998, President Clinton amended Executive Order 12947 to add Osama bin Laden and his key associates to the list of terrorists, thus blocking their US assets--including property and bank accounts--and prohibiting all U.S. financial transactions with them. The United States conducted a missile attack against bin Laden's facilities in Afghanistan.

On October 12, 2000, two suicide bombers ignited their boatload of explosives next to the USS Cole, an American destroyer refueling in Aden, off the coast of Yemen. The blast killed seventeen sailors and wounded thirty-nine others. O'Neill and his crack investigating team were dispatched to Yemen and hit a stone wall. He had hoped satellite intercepts of phone calls between an al Qaeda operative in Aden and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan would lead him to the mastermind of the Cole attack, but the American ambassador and the Yemeni officials blocked the investigation at every turn.

O'Neill resigned from the F.B.I. in July 2001 and signed on as security chief for the World Trade Center in September. He died in the WTC attack on September 11, 2001.Oil Diplomacy

In Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for bin Laden, two French intelligence analysts, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, claim that the Clinton and Bush administrations impeded investigations of bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist group in order to maintain good relations with Saudi Arabia and to maintain the stability of the oil market. "As the late John O'Neill told one of the authors [Brisard] of this book, ?'All of the answers, all of the clues allowing us to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organization, can be found in Saudi Arabia.'" (8)

In articles and interviews, Brisard has expanded on this statement, pronouncing the official story about bin Laden's exile from his native Saudi Arabia in 1994 and his frozen assets to be a canard. Not only did O'Neill and the F.B.I. have extensive information concerning the finances of bin Laden and al Qaeda, but the business connections between the bin Ladens, the Mahfouzes, the al Ahmoudis, the Saudi royal family, and the Bush family kept turning up in their investigations.

Mahfouz, who owns Nimir Petroleum, has conducted joint ventures with the al Amoudi family, which owns Delta Oil. Delta Oil and Unocal planned to build a pipeline through Afghanistan before the Taliban backed away. These Saudi companies are still partnered with bigger oil companies (such as Texaco and Unocal) in developing Central Asian oil projects.

Although Brisard's interpretation of events has been disputed, the documentation of Forbidden Truth is impeccable. Clearly, the finances and fortunes of the Saudi oligarchs and the Bush family have been intertwined for many years, and oil has been the lubricant of choice, even non-existent oil.

In The Conspirators, Al Martin describes an instance of the latter. He says that the Gulf Oil Drilling Supply, of New York, Miami, and Bahrain, was Jeb Bush's favorite artifice for oil and gas frauds:
"The fraud was rather simple. Richard Secord arranged through then Vice President George Bush Sr.'s old friend, Ghaith Pharaon, the then retired head of Saudi intelligence, for Gulf Oil and Drilling to purchase from the Saudi government oil and gas leases in the Gulf which were effectively worthless."
The leases would be embellished to appear extremely valuable and then used as loan collateral. Great American Bank and Trust of West Palm Beach subsequently failed under the weight of unpaid Iran-Contra loans.

"Also, in the case of Gulf Oil Drilling Supply, there was some moderately large international lending to that company. As you would suspect, it was principally out of the old George Bush friendly banks--Credit Lyonnais and Banque Paribas, which, combined lent $60 million dollars to Gulf Oil Drilling Supply, which, of course, was defaulted on later." (9)

Special Saudis

Michael Springmann, formerly chief of the visa section at the US Embassy in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, claims that he rejected hundreds of suspicious visa applications, but the C.I.A. officer overruled him and ordered the visas to be issued. Springmann protested to the State Department, the Office of Diplomatic Security, the F.B.I., the Justice Department and congressional committees, but in vain. (10)

Springmann observed that 15 of the 19 people who allegedly flew airplanes into buildings in the United States got their visas from the same CIA-dominated consulate in Jeddah. As a special favor to residents of Saudi Arabia (including non-Saudi citizens), applicants for non-immigrant visas can apply at private travel agencies and receive their visa through the mail. During the months following the 9-11 attack, 102 applicants received their visas by mail, 2 more were interviewed, and none were rejected.

The Saudis always got special treatment. In a November 6, 2001 BBC broadcast Greg Palast revealed just how special that treatment was. Even after Pakistan expelled the World Association of Muslim Youth (WAMY) and India claimed that the organization was linked to terrorist bombings in Kashmir and the Philippines military accused WAMY of funding Muslim insurgency, the F.B.I. got orders to leave the "charitable association" alone.

The bin Laden family members got extra special treatment. Palast says that days after the hijackers took off from Boston aiming for the Twin Towers, " a special charter flight out of the same airport whisked 11 members of Osama Bin Laden's family off to Saudi Arabia. That did not concern the White House. Their official line is that the Bin Ladens are above suspicion --apart from Osama, the black sheep, who they say hijacked the family name. That's fortunate for the Bush family and the Saudi royal household, whose links with the Bin Ladens could otherwise prove embarrassing. But Newsnight has obtained evidence that the FBI was on the trail of other members of the Bin Laden family for links to terrorist organisations before and after September 11th." (11)

October 2001, the Treasury Department identified the Muwafaq Foundation, largely endowed by Khalid bin Mahfouz, as an al Qaeda front that had funneled millions of dollars to bin Laden. Some families of the 9/11 victims have named Mahfouz and dozens of prominent Saudis, including members of the royal family, in a lawsuit that accuses the Saudis of funding the 9/11 terrorists. Bush administration officials stated that they would seek to have the suit dismissed or delayed. (12)

Senators Bob Graham and Richard C. Shelby, leaders of the congressional panel ending an investigation of the 9/11 attacks, said the administration should declassify information concerning Saudi funding of terrorists.
"Citing ?'their people and a lot of their leaders and probably even the royal family,' Shelby said: ?'I believe [the Saudis] cannot support so-called charities that support terrorism on a big scale, and then pretend that they're our friends or our allies.

?'As we get into the money trail, it might be embarrassing, but the American people need to know; the victims and their families need to know,' he added. Shelby and Graham said avoiding embarrassment and maintaining good relations with Saudi Arabia are not legitimate reasons to withhold information from the public.

?'The question is,' Graham said after the news conference, ?'will we get [the information declassified] in 30 years when the archives are open, or will we get it in time, before the next attack?'" (13)

Doubtless one of the connections the senators referred to was the Princess Haifa, the wife of Prince Bandar, Saudi ambassador to the United States for the last twenty years, the longest serving ambassador in Washington. Princess Haifa had been making monthly transfers, $130,000 in all, from her Washington bank account to a needy woman who relayed some of the checks to her husband and another man who assisted and funded the two hijackers who were based in San Diego. (14)

"The money moved into the family's bank account beginning in early 2000, just a few months after hijackers Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi arrived in Los Angeles from an Al Qaeda planning summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, according to the sources. Within days of the terrorists' arrival in the United States, Al Bayoumi befriended the two men who would eventually hijack American Flight 77, throwing them a welcoming party in San Diego and guaranteeing their lease on an apartment next door to his own. Al Bayoumi also paid $1,500 to cover the first two months of rent for Al Midhar and Alhazmi, although officials said it is possible that the hijackers later repaid the money." (15)

Prince Bandar and Princess Haifa professed their ignorance of the whole affair.
Mark Stein speculates about the recent visit Prince Bandar and Princess Haifa paid to George and Laura at the Crawford ranch, where they were received with the accolades usually reserved for heads of state. Bush must have known about the money transfers and Bandar must have known Bush knew, but apparently a good time was had by all.
"Meanwhile, Majeda Ibrahin, the woman the princess was sending all that money to, turns out to be married to Osama Basnan, another buddy of the al-Qa'eda duo, and one who subsequently celebrated 11 September as a ?'wonderful, glorious day'. But here's an odd little thing: Mr Basnan is known to have been in Texas in April when Crown Prince Abdullah and his entourage flew in to the state to see Bush at the ranch. Just another coincidence? Well, sorta: he's supposed to have had a meeting in Houston with some big-time Saudi prince who deals with ?'intelligence matters.' This seems an unusual degree of access for some schlub from San Diego who's in the US illegally, as it transpires. He is variously described as a Saudi government agent and al-Qa'eda sympathiser, as if these positions are mutually exclusive. The Saudi embassy say they've only received queries about this matter from the media, not from the FBI. Odd that. The federal government claims it needs vast new powers to track every single credit-card transaction and every single email of every single American, yet a prima facie link between the terrorists and Prince Bandar's wife isn't worth going over to the embassy to have a little chat about." (16)

Apparently it is not only the Saudis' oil riches that insulates them from criticism, but also their calculated distribution of largesse. The Saudis have contributed to every presidential library in recent decades. Not surprisingly, former ambassadors to Saudi Arabia from the United States end up being apologists for the corrupt, despotic Saudi regime. The Saudis have arranged that American ambassadors to their country not speak Arabic. The American embassy in Saudi Arabia gets all its information about the reactionary regime from the rulers.

Some of the Washington politicians who found the Saudi connection lucrative include Spiro Agnew, Frank Carlucci, Jimmy Carter, Clark Clifford, John Connally, James Baker, George H. W. Bush, William Simon and Caspar Weinberger. (17)

Profits before Patriotismhe Bush dynasty has always been comfortable putting profits before patriotism. Prescott Bush, Bush Senior's father, extended credit to Adolph Hitler and supplied him with raw materials during Word War II. The U. S. seized his assets under the Trading with the Enemy Act, but grandfather Bush found other ways to replenish the family coffers.
Bush Senior struck it rich in oil and in the defense industry. Mahfouz (yes, that Mahfouz), Prince Bandar and Prince Sultan (Bandar's father) were also heavily invested in the defense industry through their holdings in the Carlyle Group, where Bush Senior served on the board of directors. Founded in 1987 as a private investment group with strong connections to the Republican Party establishment, Carlyle increased its original investment of $130 million to $900 million when it went public in 2001.
"In recent years, Carlyle has been successful both at raising and making money. It has raised $14 billion in the last five years or so, and its annual rate of return has been 36 percent. Its 550 investors consist of institutions and wealthy individuals from around the world including, until shortly after September 2001, members of the bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia. The family ?- which has publicly disavowed links with Osama bin Laden ?- had been an investor since 1995." (18)

"As the eleventh largest US defence contractor, Carlyle is involved in nearly every aspect of military production, including making the big guns used on US naval destroyers, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle used by US forces during the Gulf War and parts used in most commercial and military aircraft. United Defense has joint ventures in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, two of the United States' closest military allies in the Middle East." (19)

It's passing strange that even as the hijacked planes smashed into the World Trade Center, the Carlyle Group was holding its annual investor conference. Shafig Bin Laden, brother of Osama Bin Laden, attended.

Bush Junior once served as an executive with Caterair, one of hundreds of companies Carlyle has bought and sold over the past 15 years, but he removed the record of this period from his resume.

In 1986, Bush Junior, to date a flop as a businessman, joined Harken Energy Corporation as a director and was awarded 212,000 shares of stock and other plums.
In 1987, Khalid bin Mahfouz arranged for BCCI investor Abdullah Bakhsh to purchase 17% of Harken. A Harken official acknowledged that Bush's White House connections had everything to do with the appointment. Somehow, the inexperienced, obscure firm was awarded a prime drilling contract by Bahrain, and Harken's stock price soared.

In June 1990, Bush Junior sold his Harken stock for a juicy $848,000, enabling him to pay off the loan he had assumed on buying shares in the Texas Rangers. Never mind that the Harken stock promptly tanked when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, for Abdullah Bakhsh, a major Harken shareholder and an investor in BCCI, who had purchased 17% of Harken Energy in 1987, got his money's worth. By 1990, Bakhsh's representative on Harken's board, Talet Othman, began attending Middle East policy discussions with President Bush Senior.

Now that Bush Junior occupies the White House, Bush Senior receives frequent CIA briefings (his prerogative as a former president). "In July 2001, Bush personally contacted Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah to ?'clarify' his son's Middle East policies. Also during the summer of 2001, Bush forwarded his son a North Korea policy plan penned by ?'Asia expert' and former ambassador to Korea, Donald Gregg. Gregg is a 31-year CIA veteran and the elder Bush's former national security adviser whose expertise involved participation in the Vietnam-era Phoenix Program (death squads), Air America heroin smuggling, ?'pacification' efforts in El Salvador and Guatemala, the ?'October Surprise,' and the Iran-Contra operation (for which Gregg received a Bush pardon in 1992)." (20)

Bush Junior has received more than advice from his father. He has taken on the team of hustlers and criminals that worked with George Herbert Walker Bush when he was Vice President and President of the United States of America.
Just as his father did, he invokes executive privilege to hide all evidence of collusion with the petroleum pashas who have enriched the Bushes and intimidated the rest of us.


Sandy Tolan, an I.F. Stone Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, asserts that what the Bush administration really wants in Iraq is a remapping of the Mideast. "The plan is, in its way, as ambitious as the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement between the empires of Britain and France, which carved up the region at the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The neo-imperial vision, which can be ascertained from the writings of key administration figures and their co-visionaries in influential conservative think tanks, includes not only regime change in Iraq but control of Iraqi oil, a possible end to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and newly compliant governments in Syria and Iran -- either by force or internal rebellion."

In January 2003, Iraqi exiles met in England at a conference sponsored by the Center for Global Energy Studies and chaired by Sheik Zaki Yamini, the former Saudi Oil minister. The former Iraqi Oil Minister estimates that total oil reserves in Iraq could exceed Saudi Arabia's. "Hence, on the center's conference agenda is a discussion of Iraq as a ?'second Saudi Arabia,' and the prospect of a world without OPEC. Oil executives and analysts heading to the country retreat will also be able to purchase the center's 800-page analysis of the prospects for exploration in Iraq. The cost: $52,500." (21)

The Bush family, one way or another, is sure to have a piece of the action.
The Bushes are carriers of the deny-destroy-and-be-damned virus. Prescott Bush never apologized for trading with the Nazis. George Bush Senior professed ignorance of the drug and arms dealing that funded the bloody, illegal Iran-Contra operations, although Richard Secord testified that Bush Senior was indeed a conspirator. He and his sons enriched themselves through shady real estate deals and financial manipulations that brought down entire banking and savings and loan institutions.

They are all consummate inside traders, looting and leaving ruin in their wake.
President-Select George Bush is no exception. He has no scruples about exploiting his office for personal and family gain. The Texas governor who could joke about frying prisoners in the electric chair will not, as president, agonize over the decision to send young men and women into battle--or over denying them medical care when they are injured.

There is irrefutable evidence that highly-placed Saudis aided and supported the terrorists who murdered over 3000 American citizens on September 11, 2001. Yet George Bush persists in protecting and colluding with those who sponsor terrorists. Is this not an an act of treason?
George Bush should be impeached.

War?
BREAKING THE CYCLES OF VENGEANCE

By Paul Rogat Loeb

It's hard to look deep into our souls. It's harder still when we feel profoundly violated, when the boundaries of our world have instantly crumbled. But we need to look deep if we want more than revenge for the crimes that killed several thousand innocent people. As citizens, we must help prevent these kinds of horrors from continuing, generation after generation, in the United States or any other place on this earth.

Our president has called this "a war between good and evil." He vows to "rid the world of evildoers." Overwhelmed with outrage and loss and wanting to feel united, most Americans cheer him on. The attacks were evil, unequivocally so. Nothing could ever justify them. And it's good to see Afghanistan free of the Taliban. Yet U.S. policies sowed some of the seeds for the terrible day of September 11, not to mention the brutal recent history of Afghanistan. We can't afford to fuel the cycles of indiscriminate violence. To help prevent still more innocent deaths, we need to use the lessons of what happened to chart a different path. The future depends not only on our government's actions, but also on our own, as individual citizens.

For all our anger and sorrow, and for all the monstrous and inexcusable deeds of the hijackers, we still need to ask what made them so bitterly despairing that they were willing to murder thousands in the name of their cause. Even as we work to bring to justice those who helped perpetrate these crimes, it's not naïve to ask what has made them act as they did. It's essential for breaking the endless cycles of vengeance.

A few months before Sept 11, I read a newspaper article about a Palestinian terrorist. He crossed the Israeli border and blew himself up along with a group of Israelis. Originally an apolitical man, he worked as a jailor, assigned to guard a top official from one of the militant West Bank groups. The two became friends, but the jailor remained uninterested in politics. Then an Israeli bomb blew up his friend. The jailor lost hope, abandoning everything but retribution. He took his own life?-and as many innocent Israeli lives as he could. They could have been my cousins in Tel Aviv.

Just as something turned this man, something turned the hijackers and their Al Qaeda cohorts. Maybe it was watching corrupt dictatorships like Saudi Arabia inviting U.S. bases onto their soil. Maybe it was seeing Palestinians shot and bombed by Israeli soldiers with American backing. Maybe it was the Gulf War and the one million Iraqis who have died because the war and our continuing embargo have destroyed their most basic health and sanitation systems. Or our bombing of Sudan's only pharmaceutical factory, on what turned out to be false charges that it was producing biological weapons and was tied to Osama bin Laden.

There's more troubling history. Our leaders, including Bush senior, created the Mujahideen as a force to make Afghanistan a Vietnam-style quagmire for the Russians, spending over $3 billion and working with Osama bin Laden in the process. They backed Saddam Hussein and his Baathist Party as a counterweight to Iran, whose Ayatollah came to power as leader of the only force capable of overthrowing the brutal Shah. The United States had supported the Shah since our CIA installed him in 1953, after overthrowing an elected prime minister who'd dared to talk of nationalizing oil. Coincidentally, September 11 was the anniversary of the CIA-backed coup overthrowing Chile's elected Allende government, launching nearly twenty years of Pinochet's brutal dictatorship.

The ordinary Americans whose inexcusable deaths rend our hearts may have died in part because of our own government's past actions. As always, the sins of the fathers are visited upon the innocents. Unless we create a more just world, desperate men from voiceless communities will continue to destroy more innocent lives, here and abroad.

How then, as citizens, do we respond? In a crisis of this magnitude, people understandably want to unite. I see flags and red, white, and blue ribbons on houses and cars, purses, and bodies. The flags have been a way for people to say their spirits won't be cowed, and to do something tangible, along with donating blood, supplies, and money. But they can also promote a crusade of good versus evil, one where we bury root questions in self-righteous anger.

I saw this on a beach near my Seattle neighborhood, where people had surrounded our local 10-foot-tall version of the Statue of Liberty with an impromptu shrine commemorating the dead. They'd left candles and flowers, crosses and American flags, peace signs, a New York City firefighter's shirt, and messages of mourning. But then a fundamentalist megachurch descended to hold a rally, overwhelming the original circle of diverse messages with new ones proclaiming "An eye for an eye," and "Kill a terrorist for Jesus!"

If we feel like wearing or flying the flag, we should. But maybe we need to display it next to banners or buttons asking for global justice. And ribbons of mourning that recognize our common humanity?-even with the men who lost theirs by being so tangled with rage that they didn't care who they killed.

It's tempting to say that in a time like this, we need to trust our national leaders. But now administration hawks are already arguing to follow up our war against the Taliban with attacks on Iraq, Iran, Syria, the Sudan, and radical groups in Lebanon and the West Bank. So ordinary citizens need to speak out more than ever, arguing for America to proceed in a way that gives our responses the broadest possible legitimacy, including in the communities from which the bombers were recruited. Think of Iran, and the delicate path toward democratization pursued by reformer Mohammad Khatami. Bomb enough Islamic civilians, and his already-beleaguered regime will surely fall, replaced by the Ayatollahs. Think of Pakistan, with its nuclear capabilities. If we don't proceed with caution, acknowledging past misdeeds, we'll only incite more terrorists.

No one, in contrast, could argue with the trial of the bombers who destroyed the Pan Am jet, near Lockerbie, Scotland. They blew up innocent people. They were tried with full due process after being turned over by Libya's Khaddafi, a leader we once demonized as our ultimate enemy. Their jailing created no more martyrs or cycles of hatred. They were brought to justice in a way that only strengthened our security.

This crisis would daunt any national leader. Yet the president who now commands our responses has spent his life sheltered by wealth, indulged by friends in high places, and scripted in his every public appearance. In his first six months alone, Bush turned his back on our interconnected world by rejecting, or proposing backing out of, so many international treaties: on banning chemical, biological, and toxic weapons; prosecuting war crimes; banning land mines; limiting the international small arms trade (where weapons we sell as the world's largest arms dealer have already been turned against us); and even beginning to address global warming. His missile defense system would shatter 25 years of arms control treaties. With a few exceptions, like Colin Powell, his appointees have a history of doing everything possible to sunder common responsibilities and common ties: a Vice President who repeatedly voted against Head Start, school lunches for low-income children, and even the mildest sanctions on South Africa; an Attorney General who's repeatedly attacked African-American voting rights; a Secretary of the Interior who's scorned our need to protect the earth; and a Secretary of Defense obsessed with missiles that do not defend.

I cite this history not to encourage self-righteousness among those of us who question our government's response (God knows we all need humility now), but to describe the real context in which we act. For it's going to be up to ordinary citizens to raise the hard issues, including which crises we consider urgent.

Congress recently authorized $40 billion to rebuild New York and beef up anti-terrorist security. Much of this investment is appropriate. But why have we chosen not to make other investments addressing crises equally real? According to Bread for the World, six million children die every year of hunger-related causes in developing countries?-the equivalent of three World Trade Center attacks every day. For an annual appropriation of $13 billion?-that's a third of what our Congress just authorized, five percent of our existing $260 billion dollar defense budget, or less than twice the $8 billion just authorized for missile defense?-we could meet the basic health and nutrition needs of the world's poorest people every year. Yet we've chosen not to. Nearly 50 million Americans lack health insurance, but we've chosen to be the only advanced industrialized country not to provide it to our citizens. Guns kill 30,000 of us a year, yet we choose to do little to control them or address the poverty and rage among our own desperate and marginalized. I cite these examples not to diminish the horror of these unjustifiable attacks, but to stress that all shattered lives are just as real, and to ask why some cataclysms disturb us so little.

I fear that this tragedy will pave the way for needless and provocative military buildups and interventions that will spawn further spirals of vengeance. Already, the Bush administration is using the crisis as an excuse to despoil the environment, lavishly subsidize wealthy corporate backers, and erode the very liberties that let us challenge destructive actions of state.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Imagine if these terrible events inspired us all to take on the difficult work of creating a more just world, and making the necessary common investments so indiscriminate violence and needless suffering do not prevail.

The crisis has already produced a wealth of individual acts of courage and compassion. We saw tremendous heroism among the firefighters, police officers, and ordinary citizens who gave their lives trying to help others live. We've seen an outpouring of personal generosity: people giving blood, comforting their neighbors, collecting supplies. American Christians and Jews have held vigils to help protect threatened mosques, and a Jewish family volunteered to walk with a Muslim woman who felt threatened just stepping outside. We still feel a bit like common mourners: Beneath the jingoism, people have seemed a bit more careful, vulnerable, and kind to each other. These events just might be able to break us away from our gated communities of the heart.

But by itself, individual compassion won't create a just world. To do that requires asking what common choices would respect the humanity of all human beings?-and then working to make those choices a reality.

This means acting in common, raising our voices, continuing to speak out no matter how hard it becomes. We need to be kind to ourselves, and nurture our souls while we act: whether through walking in nature, playing with children, dancing to music, or communing with our God and the people we love. We also need to take public action?-including reaching out to those who disagree with us on how to respond to this brutal cataclysm. Because from what I've observed, there's ample common ground once we make clear we share the goal of preventing these horrors from continuing to be visited on innocent humans again. We need to act with enough faith and strength to keep on raising the difficult questions, demanding paths that are both just and wise.

If we really raise the hard questions, we'll take some heat and be called some names. That's already begun to happen. It might help to carry flags at our vigils and protests, or call ourselves Patriots for Peace when people try to silence us, as in Bush Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer's bullying warning that Americans "need to watch what they say, watch what they do." But with the stakes so high, we can't afford to be silent. If we have reservations against responding to these unconscionable attacks with our own indiscriminate violence, we need to speak out now, to prevent our government from embarking on paths that will bring neither security nor justice. For true patriotism means taking responsibility for the choices of our nation--all the more in the most difficult times.

We can never know every facet of this situation, nor every detail of how our government responds. We may not know whether our actions will prevail. But we need to speak out, whever the obstacles or costs, for our own human dignity. And also because this is the only way that the cycles of vengeance have a chance of finally ending.

Paul Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time [St Martin's Press, www.soulofacitizen.org] and three other books on citizen involvement with war, peace, and social justice issues. A version of this appeared in From the Ashes: A Spiritual Response to America's Tragedy (Beliefnet/Rodale Press, Nov 2001).

Interesting way of saying: We are our own worst enemy.

Blaming the victim or the friends of the victim for the horrors perpetrated by the victimizer is at best irrational and at worst evil.

Blaming the victim or the friends of the victim for retaliating in self-defense in an effort to minimize future horrors anticipated to be perpetrated by the victimizer is at best irrational and at worst evil.


What are the major moral, ethical, and practical differences among the following American Actions?

A. Bosnia:
(1) Murder? Thousands of Muslims (e.g., Bosnians) murdered by Serbians;
(2) Threatened Murder? Thousands more Muslims threatened to be murdered by Serbians;
(3) American Troops on the Ground? Yes;
(4) UN Approval of Americans in Bosnia? No;
(5) Purpose of American Troops on the Ground? Minimize additional murders by Serbians by separating Serbians from Muslims;
(6) Financial/Weapons Support of Murderers? Russians supported Serbians.

B. Afghanistan
(1) Murder? Thousands of Americans (e.g., occupants of World Trade Buildings, Pentagon, three airliners) murdered by al Qaeda;
(2) Threatened Murder? Thousands more Americans threatened to be murdered by al Qaeda;
(3) American Troops on the Ground? Yes;
(4) UN Approval of Americans in Afghanistan? No;
(5) Purpose of American Troops on the Ground? Minimize additional murders of Americans by minimizing al Qaeda;
(6) Financial/Weapons Support of Murderers? Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Libia, Egypt, North Korea, Iraq etc. supported al Qaeda.

C. Iraq
(1) Murder? Thousands of Muslims (e.g., Shiites, Kurds, Kuwaities) murdered by Saddam Husseiners;
(2) Threatened Murder? Thousands more Muslims threatened to be murdered by Saddam Husseiners;
(3) American Troops on the Ground? Yes;
(4) UN Approval of Americans in Iraq? No;
(5) Purpose of American Troops on the Ground? Minimize additional murders of people worlwide by minimizing Saddam Husseiners;
(6) Financial/Weapons Support? France, Germany, Russia supported Saddam Husseiners.

D.Israel
(1) Murder? Thousands of Israelies murdered by Arafaters;
(2) Threatened Murder? Thousands more Israelies threatened to be murdered by Arafaters;
(3) American Troops on the Ground? No;
(3a) American Financial/weapons support? Yes;
(4) UN Approval of American Financial/Weapons support of Israelies? No;
(5) Purpose of American Troops on the Ground? No American troops are on the ground in Israel;
(5a) Purpose of American Financial/Weapons Support of Israelies? Minimize additional murders of Israelies by Arafaters by maximizing Israeli ability to defend itself against Arafaters;
(6) Financial/Weapons Support? Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Syria support Arafaters.

Blaming the victim or the friends of the victim for the horrors perpetrated by the victimizer is at best irrational and at worst evil.

Blaming the victim or the friends of the victim for retaliating in self-defense in an effort to minimize future horrors anticipated to be perpetrated by the victimizer is at best irrational and at worst evil.


What are the major moral, ethical, and practical differences among the following American Actions?

A. Bosnia:
(1) Murder? Thousands of Muslims (e.g., Bosnians) murdered by Serbians;
(2) Threatened Murder? Thousands more Muslims threatened to be murdered by Serbians;
(3) American Troops on the Ground? Yes;
(4) UN Approval of Americans in Bosnia? No;
(5) Purpose of American Troops on the Ground? Minimize additional murders by Serbians by separating Serbians from Muslims;
(6) Financial/Weapons Support of Murderers? Russians supported Serbians.

B. Afghanistan
(1) Murder? Thousands of Americans (e.g., occupants of World Trade Buildings, Pentagon, three airliners) murdered by al Qaeda;
(2) Threatened Murder? Thousands more Americans threatened to be murdered by al Qaeda;
(3) American Troops on the Ground? Yes;
(4) UN Approval of Americans in Afghanistan? No;
(5) Purpose of American Troops on the Ground? Minimize additional murders of Americans by minimizing al Qaeda;
(6) Financial/Weapons Support of Murderers? Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Libia, Egypt, North Korea, Iraq etc. supported al Qaeda.

C. Iraq
(1) Murder? Thousands of Muslims (e.g., Shiites, Kurds, Kuwaities) murdered by Saddam Husseiners;
(2) Threatened Murder? Thousands more Muslims threatened to be murdered by Saddam Husseiners;
(3) American Troops on the Ground? Yes;
(4) UN Approval of Americans in Iraq? No;
(5) Purpose of American Troops on the Ground? Minimize additional murders of people worlwide by minimizing Saddam Husseiners;
(6) Financial/Weapons Support? France, Germany, Russia supported Saddam Husseiners.

D.Israel
(1) Murder? Thousands of Israelies murdered by Arafaters;
(2) Threatened Murder? Thousands more Israelies threatened to be murdered by Arafaters;
(3) American Troops on the Ground? No;
(3a) American Financial/weapons support? Yes;
(4) UN Approval of American Financial/Weapons support of Israelies? No;
(5) Purpose of American Troops on the Ground? No American troops are on the ground in Israel;
(5a) Purpose of American Financial/Weapons Support of Israelies? Minimize additional murders of Israelies by Arafaters by maximizing Israeli ability to defend itself against Arafaters;
(6) Financial/Weapons Support? Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Syria support Arafaters.

Just one of many places, where Muslim fundamentalism (and thus its most extreme appearance, terrorism) might get an upswell soon, if the cycle of dictatorship and corruption pushing the populace to frustration and exasperation isn't broken: Azerbajjan.



TNR: Eclipse of the Son

War On Terrorism
May 2001 - VOLUME 22 - NUMBER 5 T H E B U S H Y E A R S B E G I N


Cheney & Halliburton:
Go Where the Oil Is


By Kenny Bruno and Jim ValetteProbably the most entertaining exchange in the vice-presidential debate last year occurred when Joe Lieberman, referring to the millions of dollars Dick Cheney had made as CEO of Halliburton Co., noted that Cheney was considerably "better off" than he had been eight years earlier.

Cheney, refusing to give the Clinton administration any credit for his own prosperity, or the nation's, replied that his new wealth "had nothing to do with the government."
The assertion was disingenuous, as in fact Halliburton's growth and Dick Cheney's own $37 million stock and option windfall were directly related to profits made with the help of foreign aid packages and military contracts. Cheney's own connections from a long career in government clearly played a role in the company's success. Moreover, the chuckling after this understated paean to private sector superiority helped to obscure the fact that Dick Cheney's Halliburton has succeeded by partnering or engaging with governments around the world -- including some of the most repressive regimes in the world -- and its complicity with egregious human rights violations.

HALLIBURTON IN BURMA
"We don't do business in Burma," claims Halliburton spokesperson Wendy Hall. But while the company may have no current direct investments in Burma, it has participated in a number of energy development projects there, including the notorious Yadana and Yetagun pipelines.

Natural gas deposits, later named the Yadana field, were first discovered offshore near Burma in the Andaman Sea in 1982. Beginning in the late 1980s, the Burmese government sought investors for a pipeline planned from the Yadana field across Burma to Thailand. In 1991, the government reached a preliminary agreement, formalized later, to deliver gas to the Petroleum Authority of Thailand (PTT). In 1992,

Total, a French oil corporation, agreed to develop the field with Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE). Unocal, a U.S. oil company, joined the venture in 1993. Finally, the Yadana field consortium -- known as the Moattama Gas Transportation Company -- was incorporated in December 1994. Its stakeholders include Total (31.24 percent), Unocal (28.26 percent), PTT (25.5 percent) and MOGE (15 percent).
Spie Capag of France completed the 62-kilometer onshore section of the Yadana pipeline to Thailand in 1998. Prior to the pipeline's construction, the Burmese military forcibly relocated towns along the onshore route. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, "credible evidence exists that several villages along the route were forcibly relocated or depopulated in the months before the production-sharing agreement was signed."

EarthRights International (ERI) has charged in a lawsuit that the Yadana and Yetagun pipeline consortia ?- Unocal, Total and Premier ?- knew of (especially from their own consultants) and benefited from the crimes committed by the Burmese military on behalf of the projects.

An ERI investigation concluded that construction and operation of the pipelines has involved the use of forced labor, forced relocation and even murder, torture and rape. In addition, as the largest foreign investment projects in Burma, the pipelines will provide revenue to prop up the regime, perhaps for decades to come.

Halliburton failed to respond to repeated requests for comment on these allegations and other issues raised in this article.
Shortly before the election, Dick Cheney admitted on the Larry King Live! show that Halliburton had done contract work in Burma. Cheney defended the project by saying that Halliburton had not broken the U.S. law imposing sanctions on Burma, which forbids new investments in the country. "You have to operate in some very difficult places and oftentimes in countries that are governed in a manner that's not consistent with our principles here in the United States," Cheney told Larry King. "But the world's not made up only of democracies."

Halliburton's engagement in Burma predates Dick Cheney's tenure as CEO. Halliburton had an office in Rangoon as early as 1990, two years after the military regime took power by voiding the election of the National League for Democracy, the party of Aung San Suu Kyi. In the early 1990's, Halliburton Energy Services joined with Alfred McAlpine (UK) to provide pre-commissioning services to the Yadana pipeline.

In 1997, after Dick Cheney joined Halliburton, the Yadana field developers hired European Marine Services (EMC) to lay the 365-kilometer offshore portion of the Yadana gas pipeline. EMC is a 50-50 joint venture between Halliburton and Saipem of Italy. From July to October 1997, EMC installed the 360-inch diameter line using its pipelaying barges.

The route followed by Halliburton and Saipem was chosen by the Burmese government to minimize costs, even though the onshore pipeline path would cut through politically sensitive areas inhabited by ethnic minorities in the Tenasserim region of Burma. Given the Burmese military's well-documented history of human rights violations and brutality, human rights groups say the western companies knew or should have known that human rights crimes would accompany Burmese troops into the onshore pipeline region. They say there was ample evidence in the public domain that such violations were already occurring when Halliburton chose to lay pipe for the project. As Katie Redford, a lawyer with EarthRights International puts it, "To be involved in the Yadana pipeline is to knowingly accept brutal violations of human rights as part of doing business."

This was not the last time that a Halliburton company did business with Burma. In 1998, a subsidiary of Dresser Industries called Bredero-Price (now Bredero Shaw) manufactured the coating for the Yetagun pipeline, the onshore portion of which runs parallel to the Yadana pipeline. Dresser was purchased by Halliburton that same year.)

For years, ERI has worked to document an extensive pattern of forced relocation and forced labor associated with the Yadana pipeline. Earthrights International has used the evidence mounted to build its legal case against the western multinationals involved. Halliburton, which only worked on the offshore portion of the pipeline, is not a defendant in the case.

ERI believes a consistent pattern of human rights and economic rights violations in the pipeline region are a predictable and direct result of the investments made by western multinationals.

In August 2000, a U.S. federal district court concluded that the Yadana pipeline consortium "knew the military had a record of committing human rights abuses; that the Project hired the military to provide security for the project, a military that forced villagers to work and entire villages to relocate for the benefit of the Project; that the military, while forcing villagers to work and relocate, committed numerous acts of violence; and that Unocal knew or should have known that the military did commit, was committing and would continue to commit these tortious acts."
Although the judge eventually dismissed the case -- Doe et. al. v. Unocal et. al. -- because, in his opinion, Unocal did not control the Burmese military, which committed the abuses, the case is being appealed. (ERI is co-counsel in the case.)

HALLIBURTON'S GLOBAL REACH

Founded by Earl Halliburton in Texas in 1919, Halliburton now provides a wide range of engineering services, technology and equipment for oil and gas fields, platforms, pipelines, refineries, highways and military operations around the world. In the Cheney years, the company's revenues rose from $5.7 billion in 1994 to $14.9 billion in 1999, fueled primarily by growth outside the United States. During Cheney's tenure as CEO, Halliburton's overseas operations went from 51 percent of revenue to 68 percent of revenue.

"You've got to go where the oil is. I don't think about it [political volatility] very much," Cheney told the Panhandle Producers and Royalty Owners Association annual meeting in 1998.

Halliburton is now the world's largest diversified energy services, engineering, construction and maintenance company, with some 100,000 employees and 7,000 customers in more than 120 countries.

While most of Halliburton's revenues come from contracted oil and gas industry services, it also earns considerable income from major civil and military projects, such as building roads and deploying infrastructure for overseas U.S. operations. Halliburton ranked as the seventeenth leading recipient of U.S. defense contracts in 1999. Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown & Root subsidiary brought in all but $1 million of Halliburton's $657.5 million military loot.

GOING WHERE THE OIL IS
Burma is not the only country in which engagement by Halliburton has been controversial.

During Cheney's tenure, Halliburton created or continued partnerships with some of the world's most notorious governments -- in countries such as Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Nigeria.
In order to do business with dictators and despots, Halliburton has skirted U.S. sanctions and made considerable efforts to eliminate those sanctions. Halliburton's pattern of doing business with U.S. enemies and dictators started before Dick Cheney joined the company, and may well continue after his tenure as CEO.
Halliburton's dealings in six countries -- Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Nigeria -- show that the company's willingness to do business where human rights are not respected is a pattern that goes beyond its involvement in Burma:

• Azerbaijan. Dick Cheney lobbied to remove Congressional sanctions against aid to Azerbaijan, sanctions imposed because of concerns about ethnic cleansing. Cheney said the sanctions were the result only of groundless campaigning by the Armenian-American lobby. In 1997, Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root bid on a major Caspian project from the Azerbaijan International Operating Company.

• Indonesia. Halliburton had extensive investments and contracts in Suharto's Indonesia. One of its contracts was canceled by the post-Suharto government during a purging of corruptly awarded contracts. Indonesia Corruption Watch named Kellogg Brown & Root (Halliburton's engineering division) among 59 companies using collusive, corruptive and nepotistic practices in deals involving former President Suharto's family.

• Iran. Dick Cheney has lobbied against the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act. Even with the Act in place, Halliburton has continued to operate in Iran. It settled with the Department of Commerce in 1997, before Cheney became CEO, over allegations relating to Iran for $15,000, without admitting any wrongdoing.

• Iraq. Dick Cheney cites multilateral sanctions against Iraq as an example of sanctions he supports. Yet since the war, Halliburton-related companies helped to reconstruct Iraq's oil industry. In July 2000, the International Herald Tribune reported, "Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser Pump Co., joint ventures that Halliburton has sold within the past year, have done work in Iraq on contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq's oil industry, under the United Nations' Oil for Food Program." A Halliburton spokesman acknowledged to the Tribune that the Dresser subsidiaries did sell oil-pumping equipment to Iraq via European agents. • Libya. Before Cheney's arrival,

Halliburton was deeply involved in Libya, earning $44.7 million there in 1993. After sanctions on Libya were imposed, earnings dropped to $12.4 million in 1994. Halliburton continued doing business in Libya throughout Cheney's tenure. One Member of Congress accused the company "of undermining American foreign policy to the full extent allowed by law."

• Nigeria. Local villagers have accused Halliburton of complicity in the shooting of a protester by Nigeria's Mobile Police Unit, playing a similar role to Shell and Chevron in the mobilization of this ?'kill and go" unit to protect company property.
Dick Cheney has been a strong advocate for preventing or eliminating federal laws that place limits on Halliburton's ability to do business in these countries.

DICK CHENEY AND USA*ENGAGE
The strands of Dick Cheney's business and policy interests come together in his support of a corporate coalition called USA*Engage. The mission of this coalition, with some 50 active companies and 600-plus total members, is to promote business "engagement" and prevent U.S. sanctions for human rights or other kinds of violations. Dick Cheney's position on sanctions has been virtually identical to that of USA*Engage, and Halliburton has been an active member of USA*Engage and its campaigns against almost all forms of sanctions.

For example, Cheney signed an amicus brief against the Massachusetts Burma law. Modeled on successful anti-apartheid legislation of the 1980s, the law would have prevented Massachusetts from doing business with companies doing business in Burma. The Massachusetts law was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court last June.

Similarly, Cheney has opposed sanctions against almost all the countries that Halliburton does business in, including Iran, Libya and Azerbaijan. The one exception is Iraq.

Now that Dick Cheney is back in government, his position on sanctions is likely to become more influential. Secretary of State Colin Powell has already echoed the sentiment of Cheney and USA*Engage, saying he wanted to reduce the use of sanctions as a foreign policy tool. This would leave Cheney's ex-colleagues back at Halliburton freer than ever to pursue profits even where environmental and human rights norms are disregarded.

Among the sanctions USA*Engage seeks to eliminate are those against the pariah regime of Burma, even though the leader of the democratically elected party, Aung San Suu Kyi, has expressed her support for the sanctions. If USA*Engage is successful, Halliburton may resume dealings with the Burmese military dictatorship, a destructive engagement that could extend Burma's nightmare.
Dick Cheney's pro-engagement, anti-sanctions policies have remained consistent whether he is in government or business. These policies might be summarized as, "what's good for Halliburton is good for the world, and vice versa."
It is one thing for the CEO of Halliburton to hold such a view. It is quite another for the Vice President of the United States. Kenny Bruno is campaigns coordinator with the Washington, D.C.-based EarthRights International. Jim Valette is an investigative reporter based in Seawall, Maine. This article is based on "Halliburton's Destructive Engagement: How Dick Cheney and USA*Engage Subvert Democracy at Home and Abroad," a report by EarthRights International.

THE WELFARE KING

Contrary to his claim that the government "had nothing to do with" his financial enrichment in his private sector stint, Halliburton under Dick Cheney was a major beneficiary of bilateral and multilateral government aid toward fossil fuel industry developments in developing countries and the former countries of the Soviet Union. The company is a contractor on projects that have been financed by some $6 billion in government aid packages since 1992. These packages include loans, credit, guarantees and insurance on projects for which Halliburton has supplied services and equipment.
Government aid and assistance that led to Halliburton contracts has come from a variety of agencies including the U.S. Export-Import Bank (at least $2.71 billion); World Bank ($1.11 billion); Overseas Private Investment Commission (OPIC -- $611 million); and others ($1.56 billion).
Countries included in these calculations include Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Cameroon, Chad, Colombia, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Mozambique, Qatar, Russia and Uzbekistan.
Halliburton projects supported by public funding include some harshly criticized by human rights and environmental groups, including the Chad-Cameroon pipeline [see "Fueling Strife in Chad and Cameroon," Multinational Monitor, May 1997] and the Bolivia-Brazil pipeline. ?- K.B. & J.V.


http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2001/01may/may01corp10.html

As for the original question - how to win the war on terror, or more in generally, how to take the wind out of the sails of the extremists; my answers would focus on democratisation, transparency, socio-economic opportunities, fair deals. I mean, of course you need to deploy whatever means necessary to take out the terrorist leaders who are targeting your folk. That's one. But if you leave it at that, you're "mopping with the tap turned open", as we say. So: democratisation, transparency, socio-economic opportunities, fair deals. Stop propping up corrupt, ruthless dictatorships that foster a popular resentment and exasperation that will sooner or later translate into more footsoldiers for the fundamentalist leaders. Dont believe Karimov and his like if they're saying their totalitarianism serves to protect against fundamentalism and extremism - it is fostering them. Idealistic though it might sound - promoting fair and open societies is the only feasible long-term answer against any political or religious extremism.

But I already pretty made my case in the Guantanamo thread, discussing with ILZ on democratisation in the ME and in the "Terrorism, Crime: how does poverty factor in?" thread on the Roundtable. See the quotes below - one from each thread.

Oh, and sorry for just barging in on this thread, not reading the discussion so far but simply only responding to the original question - will read up and perhaps react some later time!



[quote="in the "terrorism, crime, poverty" thread I"]Most all of us here have said it - terrorist and extremist leaders and ideologues are often men of means. But they need footsoldiers to fight for them, blow themselves up for them. The Casablanca bombing may have been directed by Osama's Al-Qaeda - but the men who carried the bombs were from the local slums. The footsoldiers are often people who do live in a poverty that, as Sofia put it so nicely. "leeches hope and possibility for future happiness out of their lives".

Or, as Howard Dean put it yesterday,

"Today, billions of people live on the knife's edge of survival, trapped in a struggle against ignorance, poverty, and disease. Their misery is a breeding ground for the hatred peddled by bin Laden and other merchants of death."

You need a strategy to hit out at those "merchants of death", often quite wealthy people - and you need a strategy to drain the reservoir of people desperate enough to see joining their "troops" as the only way to achieve a better life, if not here than in the afterlife. That means fighting poverty - or more precisely, fighting desperation.

Desperation is a powerful force that doesn't hinge just on poverty without prospects - that just breeds resignation - but on the combination of poverty and fear, as Roger pointed out. On the [..] sense that even that which they have is acutely threatened, or the frustration at opportunities they have come to see - but are barred from reaching.

At the moment, in the ME, its just the extremists who are capitalising on this desperation. You need a strategy to tackle the situation where the extremists are the only ones offering schools and social help to those who would otherwise be without - and who thus accept in gratitude what are basically instruments of indoctrination. There are so many people there who've come to want serious schools, like they've come to want serious politics, but who are faced with indifferent, corrupt, (semi-)dictatorial state bureaucracies - and only the fundamentalists have the network in place to jump in the gap and cater to their needs and desires.

To counter the fundamentalists, you need to offer more than a fight - you need to offer an alternative.

In a way the neo-cons are therefore to be praised for steering at something far beyond the mere pacification/stablisation of establishing a "friendly regime" in Iraq - to aspire to remake the country, so to say. Its just that the target they chose was highly odd: in a region awash with fundamentalist agitation, Saddam's Iraq was not among the places where the terrorists came from. [..]

Basically, it should have been (and still is) a question of putting one's money where one's mouth is.

One - fighting terrorism means hitting at the terrorists - focus on Al-Qaeda, dont let yourself be diverted into other tempting ME causes. "Osama" should have remained the prime target from day one.

Two - draining the extremists' reservoirs of support (and keep them from filling back up) means providing an alternative to what the fundamentalists are offering. If you cant, obviously, go in there yourself (because you'd be seen as imposing your imperialist will) - and the governments of the region can't be trusted, find other ways. Be like Soros in Eastern Europe: find the local actors that do aim to offer a modernist alternative - and swamp the region with support and funding for good schools, independent media, community initiatives. Bypass the corrupt governments and boost a civil society that simultaneously provides an alternative to the fundamentalist networks and pressures those governments to reform. And I mean a lot of money - almost as much as fully-fledged war costs. See it as a bottom-up Marshall Plan. It worked wonders in Central Europe.

Idealistic? Perhaps. But as long as I don't see the Bush administration make even the smallest move in this direction - being stingy about it if not outright hostile to the very notion - and pour all its money instead into military action (aimed, to wit, at a place that wasn't involved in jihadist terrorism in the first place), I see us losing the war on terrorism.[/quote]

Murky, complicated, worrisome ...

It appears to me that Iraq is in deed the best place in the middle east to begin the rectifications you rightly propose. Iraq possessed a regime most murderous of its own population and at the same time most easily overthrown by the US. Pacification will continue to be difficult until the US makes it clear that the US and not the Baathists and Al-Qaeda terrorists offer the people of Iraq a real alternative to servitude, hunger and death. I say focus on rectification of Iraq because the Iraqi people are best acquainted with the probable consequences of returning to state tyranny and murder, and are most likely to be wary and alert to any attempts to return them to that state.



Osama could be captured and/or killed tomorrow and new and perhaps worse Osamas would replace him immediately (perhaps this has already hapened). The key to ending Osama terrorism is destruction of their financial/weapons support. End US aid to all those states that are providing this support or possess inhabitants providing this support.



The recipients of such aid must first feel that their survival is secured before they will risk investing their time, energy and other resources in improving their own lives. The terrified reaction of UN people to the terrorist bombing of their facility in Bagdag is both natural and very instructive. The terrorist threat has got to be at least reduced to the point where the people perceive that constructive efforts can proceed long enough to achieve success. For that reason, the US must first succeed in Iraq before it will be perceived as a credible force for good and can succeed elsewere. It is an excellent way for the US to make up for past failures, terrible judgments, and horrific consequences. Bush may not be the best man for the job, but right now he is least worse. Hopefully, if we do replace him in November, his repacement is no less capable.

Now that's one thing I'll sadly agree with you on ...

where we differ is that I think that the war in Iraq - a place where al-Qaeda had no popular foothold, whatsoever - may well already have provoked this.



Why the black & white, either/or thinking? If current socio-cultural-economic conditions potentially have new Osamas springing up all the time, isn't it both necessary, right now, to track down the current bunch of terrorist leaders and clamp down on them and infuse the area with the kind of investments that would help prevent their replacement with ever new successors?

Of course one can't do much social work in a state of full war, it's true (though, as the experience of British peacekeepers versus that of US peacekeepers shows, some training in preventing local conflicts as well as winning them once they break out, comes in handy). But much of the region is not in a state of full war - Iraq's just one puzzlepiece. Whats to stop the States from investing in a "Marshall Plan" for independent media, educational opportunities, civil society groups, etc, in countries around the region, while fighting the war in Iraq?

I'd say we have to. Osama is not from Iraq; most of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi-Arabia. Al-Qaeda attacks this past year have hit at countries as far-flung as Morocco in the West to Indonesia in the East. To stop this cancer from growing, it needs to be stopped where it appears - both by repression of the actual terrorist leaders and the fostering of alternative vistas for those who now are tempted by what the fundamentalists are conjuring up.

A model state on the Euphrates, even if it does materialise after, I'm sure, years of struggle and complications (compare Bosnia), won't in itself stem the popular frustration in Egypt, Yemen or Pakistan that has people there now turning to extremist movements. It may offer some help, in terms of showing what a feasible alternative would look like, but to y'r average shopkeeper or unemployed youth in Luxor or Casablanca, Iraq is far away, and the Muslim Brotherhood is close by. And since you can´t invade the entire region - and military clampdowns have in any case a nasty habit of backfiring as often as not, in terms of popular support - there must at least be a flanking strategy to that focused on Iraq - one looking a little bit beyond the immediate military victory over this year's Osama.

It should be possible. Wars are damn expensive, as any comparison between the costs of one B-2 bomber (2,2 billion $) and the annual global budget of the UNHCR (1,1 billion $) would show. For that money - good for providing food, shelter and health care to many tens of thousands of refugees around the world - one could buy just over 5 F-22's. If a government is willing to spend extreme sums on a military victory, when it's aimed purely at the rather abstract goal of creating some model state that future generations around the region might one day want to emulate, surely it should want to consider a similar investment in the very populations that are, right now, most preyed on by the fundamentalists?

There's no reason to say that, because we're fighting a war in Iraq right now, we can't really do anything much about investing in the prospects of an open society anywhere else - in fact, it would be really stupid, cause if you don't fund, foster and support the alternatives to fundamentalism and totalitarianism now in, say, Egypt or Jordan, you might one day have your model state on the Euphrates - surrounded by newly fundamentalist countries.

Meanwhile, Robert Lane Greene of the Economist.com makes the impopular argument for multilateralism as a way to help win the war on terror ... quite convincingly, I think.

Tracking down the current bunch of Al Qaeda terrorists is probably a long term process. That current bunch is steadily growing with new recruits in several countries as we discuss this. They are now terrifying populaces in those same countries. Yes, effective investment in Iraq will make terrorist recruiting less effective there, but it won't prevent it. Also, as you subsequently pointed out, many of these recruits have come from outside Iraq and outside of Afghanistan.




Only the will to do it can stop us and them! Both the US populace and the middle east populace must possess the will to do it. For understandable reasons, much of the populace of the countries around the region trust neither US or themselves.




I agree!



I agree!



I agree! It is currently almost like that right now. Current tyrant-ruled states in the region have been and are currently financing terrorism worldwide. They don't have to be fundamentalists themselves to aid and abet the destruction of any model state anywhere that threatens their own power.

We must figure out a way to neutralize these tyrants in order to rescue the people they rule. At least we must decrease their skimming off our aid. These tyrants are very good at skimming off our aid intended to help the people they rule and investing it outside their own countries to help themselves.