Chapter 87 The War on Terror or the War on Oil?

If the Bush administration hadn't prepared for 9.11, they certainly wouldn't waste time fighting terrorism.Terrorism has replaced communism as the global public enemy.Terrorists are everywhere.Most importantly, in a war defined by Washington, terrorists are largely hiding in Muslim areas that happen to control the world's largest oil reserves. The 70-year-old Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, more than ever before, is at the center of world political power. He is old and ambitious. According to Washington Post editor Bob Woodward in his book "Bush's War" (for which he had access to sensitive National Security Council files), the day after the World Trade Center collapsed, On September 12, 2001, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz began to persuade the President to make Iraq the main target of the first round of the war on terrorism, although there was no definite evidence at this time. Confirmed the possibility of terrorist attacks in Iraq.

With Cheney's support, Secretary of State Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War, persuaded Bush to make the public aware that action against Iraq was necessary.Powell is no dove. In 1992, Powell declared that the United States needed sufficient strength to prevent any challenger to the United States on the international stage.More recently, the war to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan was only a warm-up for a larger campaign.While taking care of Afghanistan, Woodward's book mentions that Bush has been secretly planning to invade Iraq. Led by the fundamentalist Taliban, Afghanistan once offered sanctuary to a man named Osama bin Laden in Saudi Arabia.Bin Laden's organization, Al Qaeda, will be the first military target of Bush's latest declared war on terror. On September 18, 2001, the BBC interviewed former Pakistani Foreign Minister Niaz Niak.Niak told the BBC that at the Berlin conference in mid-July, he had learned from senior US officials that military operations against Afghanistan would begin in mid-October.

Initially, Washington considered the Taliban government as a possible partner in the oil pipeline transportation business. At the end of 1997, representatives of the Taliban went to Texas to negotiate at the invitation of the United Oil Company. The negotiations broke up badly and no agreement was reached in the end.Another Texas company that is very close to Bush and Cheney and is also quietly negotiating a possible pipeline to transport Caspian Sea oil and gas through Afghanistan is Enron.Yet Enron went bankrupt in November 2001, in one of the largest bankruptcy and fraud scandals in U.S. history.

At the invitation of Enron, the multibillion-dollar pipeline project in Afghanistan was undertaken by Cheney's original company, Halliburton.There are indications that secret conversations between Vice President Cheney and Enron CEO Kenneth Wray, a financial backer of Bush, involved Washington's support for Enron's pipeline through Afghanistan.Oddly, Cheney refused to provide Congressional GAO documents on his secret conversations with Enron, forcing a court showdown.By then, Enron's impractical and unrealizable financial plans were heading toward bankruptcy. In July 2001, the Taliban failed to please Washington.When U.S. negotiators set their terms on the pipeline, the U.S. told the Taliban leaders: "If you don't accept our help on a carpet of gold, we're going to bury you under a carpet of bombs. "The Taliban requested U.S. aid at the time to rebuild Afghanistan's infrastructure.They want the pipeline not just as a transport route to India and beyond, but also to serve Afghanistan's energy needs.Washington rejected the Taliban's demands. September 11, 2001 gave Washington an excuse to send a carpet of bombs to Kabul.

Negotiations between UOC and the Taliban over the oil pipeline collapsed.President Bush's national security adviser on Afghanistan and Central Asia at the time was Zalami Harizad, an Afghan with close ties to the exiled Afghan king.Later, Harizad served as Bush's special envoy to Afghanistan and Iraq.He also worked for the United Oil Company on the Afghan oil pipeline issue. In poetic and patriotic tones, the Pentagon called the bombing of Afghanistan Operation Enduring Freedom.Disappointed Afghans later pointedly sarcastically said that this freedom was actually the freedom of the American military to destroy whatever they thought necessary in Afghanistan, and how long that freedom would last was openly questioned.

Military operations in Afghanistan ended in skirmishes.The Taliban regime disintegrated in early 2002.The vast majority of soldiers surrendered after receiving generous CIA distributions of dollars.Harizad then recommended to Bush another former Unioil adviser, Hamid Karzai, who Bush appointed as interim president in the ruins of post-war Afghanistan. Several years ago, in February 1998, before the International Relations Committee of the US House of Representatives, John Mariska, a vice president of the United States Corporation, urged Washington to Support for the Afghan oil pipeline route.He mentioned possible routes and declared: "The route through Afghanistan seems to be the best option...it can supply the Asian market with oil from the Central Asian region".It will originate in Turkmenistan in the north, pass through Afghanistan, enter the territory of Pakistan, and then reach the Indian Ocean.It will thus supply the huge oil and gas markets of India, China and Japan."The territory through which the pipeline will pass is controlled by the Taliban," he stressed. After February 2002, the Taliban ceased to be an obstacle.

The military attack on Afghanistan is the first battle in the war on terrorism, which has greatly benefited Washington.It provides an excuse for the Pentagon's burgeoning budget of nearly $400 billion a year; for the establishment of a permanent chain of US military bases from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan to Kyrgyzstan in the region of the Soviet Union The hinterland (the brain trust around President Putin will not remain indifferent to this latter location).The United States overthrew the Taliban, which also brought about the global flood of heroin, because the old warlords suppressed by the Taliban can grow opium poppy again.

Wendy Chamberlain, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, met with Usman Aminuddin, Pakistan's oil minister, in January 2002.The talks were about how to continue the implementation of the oil pipeline plan from north to south directly to the oil terminal in Pakistan's Arabian Sea. In May 2002, the BBC reported that Karzai claimed that he planned to hold talks with Pakistan and Turkmenistan to discuss the construction of a $2 billion natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to India. The secret agreement was signed quietly in early January 2003, without any international press. No sooner had Washington installed Karzai in Kabul than Bush and Cheney sounded the clarion call to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Washington's new Adolf Hitler, Slobodan An evil tyrant like Milosevic.Although the Security Council did not agree, Washington simply ignored it and began to practice the Bush doctrine.