Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley
Posted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:13 am
PART 2 OF 2 (CH. 3 CONT'D.)
END OF DOLLAR HEGEMONY?
Perhaps most serious for the Anglo-American system of world domination was the impact of these events on the fate of the US dollar. By virtue of the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, the dollar had replaced the British pound as the world's reserve currency. The Bretton Woods system disintegrated in 1971-73, and we are now living among its rubble, but the primacy of the dollar has remained unchallenged. This means that most world trade was and still is conducted in dollars, including Eurodollars based in London. The prices for the main raw materials, and especially oil, are quoted in US dollars. If Europe wants Russian or Saudi oil, it must pay in dollars, thus creating demand for a currency which otherwise might find few buyers, since the US produces so little to sell. This allows the US-UK banking community to skim 5-10% off all world trade by providing import-export financing; this used to be called invisible earnings. More important still, if the dollar is the only way you can buy oil, then whoever controls the dollars -- meaning the US -- will in effect control the oil, no matter whether it is nationalized or not, no matter who formally owns it. The role of the dollar in the posted price for Gulf crude is thus the central symbol of the world dominance of the dollar. And the dollar is the nerve and fist of US world domination.
As an anonymous expert quoted by William Clark correctly pointed out in early 2003: "The Federal Reserve's greatest nightmare is that GPEC will switch its international transactions from a dollar standard to a euro standard. Iraq actually made this switch in November 2000 (when the euro was worth around 80 cents), and has actually made off like a bandit considering the dollar's steady depreciation against the euro. ( http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CLA302A.html ) The dollar declined 17% against the euro in 2002.
IRAQ
For Iraq, the decision to quit the dollar for the euro was an explicitly political one. Iraqi Finance Minister Hekmat Ibrahim al-Azzawi announced the move by saying: "The dollar is the currency of an enemy state, and must be abandoned for other currencies, including the euro," Azzawi said. The Iraqi central bank announced in October 2000 that it had begun to buy European currencies. (AFP via energy 24.com, October 12, 2000) Saddam Hussein stopped accepting dollars for oil in November 2000, and at the same time shifted ten billion dollars on deposit in the UN oil for food fund into the euro. Sure enough, the 2003 US occupation regime put Iraqi oil exports back on a dollar, rather than a euro, standard. The US invasion also helped to intimidate any nation which might have been considering switching to the euro. Since late 2001, the dollar was steadily declining and the euro was steadily gaining, with periodic plateaus, so those who chose the euro were rewarded to the tune of 20% or more. Bush's second axis of evil country, North Korea, switched to the euro on December 2, 2002. Here the economic impact was limited, but the political symbolism was still quite strong.
IRAN
The third of Bush bugaboos, Iran, which is also the number two OPEC producer, was also considering a move out of the dollar, and the arrival of US military forces next door was doubtless designed to dissuade the Iranians from such thoughts. The Iranian approach was less flamboyant and confrontational, but the threat to the dollar was there none the less. Iranian sources were quoted in September 2002 as remarking that "Iran's proposal to receive payments for crude oil sales to Europe in euros instead of U.S. dollars is based primarily on economics." Still, an anti-US political animus could not be denied, since dumping the dollar would be an "opportunity to hit back at the U.S. government, which recently labelled it part of an 'axis of evil. ' As this proposal was considered, Iran was moving currency assets out of the dollar anyway. Russian and China announced during 2003 that they were doing the same thing.
VENEZUELA
And what of Venezuela, the number four producer of oil? Here the CIA, with the help of Iran- contra veteran Otto Reich, attempted to overthrow President Chavez with a botched coup in Apri12002. Many saw this as a move to secure oil supplies in case the attack on Iraq got messy. But a year before the coup, Venezuela's ambassador to Washington, Francisco Mieres-Lopez, apparently floated the idea of switching the posted price for Venezuelan crude to the euro. Under Chavez, Venezuela also embarked on a policy of direct barter deals for oil, which had been concluded with about a dozen Latin American countries. In these cases the dollar was cut out of the oil transaction cycle, and the ability of the Wall Street banks to skim off these transactions was eliminated. Venezuela had for example a deal with Cuba under which Cuban doctors and health workers served in the Venezuelan countryside, while Castro got his crude oil needs covered in return, thus meeting a need that had been acute since the collapse of the USSR cut off oil deliveries to Cuba from Soviet fields.
INDONESIA
Pertamina, the Indonesia oil giant, showed every sign of jumping on the bandwagon. According to a Jakarta paper, in Apri12003, "Pertamina ... dropped a bombshell. It's considering dropping the US dollar for the euro in its oil and gas trades." The paper pointed to the "major implications for the world's biggest economy." ("Indonesia May Dump Dollar, Rest of Asia Too?" Jakarta Post, Apri1 22, 2003) In the same issue, two economists, Nur Azis and Jason Meade, from the Center for Indonesian Reform, Jakarta, urged that Indonesia cast off its dollar dependence. They argued that the dollar would "remain weak over the next decade at least, for a number of reasons."
MALAYSIA
The former Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahatir Mohamed, was perhaps the most outspoken against the dollar. He repeatedly called on oppressed Arabs to turn away from suicide bombing, and fight the US-UK combine with the far more potent weapon of dumping the dollar in favor of the euro. Mahatir was blunt about the need to replace the world dollar standard. In early 2003, Mahatir told a group of reporters that the international community needed to be encouraged to use other currencies or even gold as the benchmark in international trade. This was because the domination of the U.S. dollar in global transactions was distorting the world's economy. Mahatir suggested that the Euro, yen, or even gold should be used for transactions. "We should be given the choice to use whatever currency that we want," he said at a meeting with 31 foreign editors and senior journalists. He pointed to the greater danger of manipulation when international business is all conducted in one nation's currency. "For the purpose of trade, we shouldn't say that oil should be quoted only in U.S. dollars. Today, the oil price has gone up, but the value of the U.S. dollar has gone down, something that the people do not point out," he added. "The oil price today was not actually US $36 if this was compared with the value of the dollar a year or three years ago." Mahatir said he had read an article which pointed out that the United States was actually living on borrowed money and that it always faced a huge deficit. Despite that, he said, the u.s. economy continued growing at a tremendous rate for the past 10 years while Japan, which had made a lot of money and had very healthy reserves, was facing economic problems. "This is a contradiction. Why is this happening? It is simply because we are giving value to the U.S. dollar which it doesn't really have. There is nothing to back the U.S. dollar other than people's belief in it." (The Star, February 28,2003) Later in 2003, Mahatir, noting the fall of the dollar against the euro, told the Nikkei Forum in Tokyo: "The U.S. dollar is not a stable currency at all. We have to think of some other ways of determining exchange rates. We need to rethink whether we can depend on the U.S. dollar or not. Initially yes, we have to depend on the U.S. dollar, but we should move away from the U.S. dollar." (The Edge Daily, June 6, 2003)
SAUDI ARABIA: THE PARTING OF THE WAYS WITH THE US, AUGUST 2001
Most significant of all were the signs that even Saudi Arabia, long considered a client state or even a ward of the United States, was considering breaking away from the US system. Here the falling dollar, Bush's slavish support of Sharon, and preparations for new US attacks on Arab states were doubtless playing a role. According to the Wall Street Journal, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah sent a letter to Bush at the end of August 2001 -before the events of September 11 -- and warned him, in reference to the US- Saudi relationship, that "a time comes when peoples and nations part." The letter went on to say that "it is time for the United States and Saudi Arabia to look at their separate interests. Those governments that don't feel the pulse of the people and respond to it will suffer the fate of the Shah of Iran." Prince Abdullah read from this letter at a meeting of 150 prominent Saudis in October 2001, in an effort to convince them that the Saudi government is defending Arab and Muslim interests. During a phone call with Bush around the same time, Abdullah again called for the U.S. to restrain Israel. Diplomats said that there was considerable debate within the Saudi royal family over the U.S. war in Afghanistan and the cost of the U.S.-Saudi relationship. One Western diplomat said that the failure to resolve the Middle East conflict was going to make it harder for Saudi Arabia to continue its relationship with the U.S. in the same manner. (Wall Street Journal, Oct. 29, 2001) Saudi Arabia was a pillar of the US empire; without it, the empire would collapse. For the imperialists, action was imperative to prevent this critical defection.
The dubious Michael Moore and others parroted the Mossad line that Saudi Arabia was responsible for 9/11. It is more likely that the unproven allegations about Saudi hijackers were cooked up as a means of blackmailing the Saudis, who were evidently ready to distance themselves from Washington.
THE EUROPEAN UNION
Europe for its part was eager to eliminate the dollar. Jacques Santer, former president of the European Commission, called on Gulf Arab oil exporters to price their crude in the euro rather than the US dollar as a means to stabilize the oil market. "It could be the instrument to consolidate oil markets" and would be less affected by US foreign policy, he told a Gulf-Euro conference in Dubai. ("Santer calls for oil to be priced in euros," The Irish Times Gctober 8, 2000) The biggest issue here was whether Russia would phase out the dollar in favor of the euro, as the Germans and others were proposing. In addition, dumping the dollar was popular. Newspaper columnists and antiw'ar activists in countries from Morocco to Indonesia shared the sentiments expressed in a Nigerian street protest witnessed by a Wall Street Journal reporter during the run-up to the Iraq war: "Euro yes! Dollar no!" ( http://journeyman.1hwy.com/J-Big-OneIIIb.html ) US elites had long been painfully aware of the colossal vulnerability represented by the world's dollar overhang - the masses ofdollars held outside of the United States. Republican Senator Pete Dominici of New Mexico commented on May 18, 1995: "What would happen if the Saudi Arabians said they didn't want to be paid [for oil] in dollars anymore, but wanted instead, to be paid, say in yen. There would be inflation that would make the 15 to 20 percent inflation in the early '80s look good." (C- SPAN II, 18 May 1995)
The impact of a world move to dump the dollar can be deciphered from the following commentary from an insider newsletter: "The US dollar is 'over-owned.' 77. 7% of world central bank reserves are in US dollars. That's disproportionate to the US share of world trade. There'll now be some diversification, especially to the euro. Just as central banks sold gold, they'll now sell US dollars. A study revealed at a central bank confab at Jackson Hole by Professors Obstfeld and Rogoff suggests the US dollar could drop 24%- 40% if foreigners move quickly to exchange dollars. Foreigners own a record 38% of US Treasury market (44% excluding Federal Reserve holdings), 20% of US corporate bonds, 8% of US stocks. A change of sentiment, now suddenly in the air, could start a dollar brushfire." (The International Harry Schultz Letter, January 19, 2001)
If oil producers in general were to make the leap from the dollar to the euro, many central banks would have to shift reserves into the European currency. The value of the dollar might crash between 20 and 40%, as Clark's article points out. The impact of this inside the US might be hyperinflation of 1000% or more per year. As the expert cited by Clark summed up: "One of the dirty little secrets of today's international order is that the rest of the globe could topple the United States from its hegemonic status whenever they so choose, with a concerted abandonment of the dollar standard. This is America's pre- eminent, inescapable Achilles Heel for now and the foreseeable future. That such a course hasn't been pursued to date bears more relation to the fact that other Westernized, highly developed nations haven't any interest to undergo the great disruptions which would follow -- but it could assuredly take place in the event that the consensus view coalesces of the United States as any sort of 'rogue' nation. In other words, if the dangers of American global hegemony are ever perceived as a greater liability than the dangers of toppling the international order. The Bush administration and the neo-conservative movement have set out on a multiple-front course to ensure that this cannot take place, in brief by a graduated assertion of military hegemony atop the existent economic hegemony. The paradox I've illustrated with this one narrow scenario is that the quixotic course itself may very well bring about the feared outcome that it means to pre-empt. We shall see!" ( http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CLA302A.html )
The US economy was very sick indeed. Electrical infrastructure was at the breaking point, with major blackouts every summer. The air transportation system was bankrupt. Commuter and freight railroads were subject to constant breakdowns. The budget deficit was rising towards $500 billion - r $750 billion, and the merchandise trade deficit was rising towards $500 billion. The US public debt was headed towards $6.5 trillion, with over $4 trillion in foreign debt. The military forces were comprised often hollow infantry divisions -not an adequate force to conquer the world, except in a neocon fantasy.
THE CATASTROPHE OF GLOBALIZATION
After the fall of the East German communist regime in 1989, and 1:he extinction of the USSR in December 1991, the United States presided over the inauguration of a new era, that of the globalized world economy. I have discussed the main features of globalization in Surviving the Cataclysm (1999), my study of the world financial crisis. For our present purposes, it is enough to focus on the consequences of globalization. Globalization has completed the destruction of the United States as a political economy, and has substantially wrecked the entire world economy, as it was evident to clear-minded observers no later than 1992, when globalization began the demolition of the Russian economy. Together with globalization came the ascendancy of parasitical financier elites oriented exclusively towards short-term speculative gain in such areas as derivatives speculation, and perfectly incompetent in regard to the economic requirements of civilized progress. It was not September 11,2001 which destroyed the world as we had known it; it was the marauding and immiserating march of economic globalization.
The great lesson of the twentieth century was that financial disintegration and economic depression set the stage for world war. The same dynamic was at work during the 1990s. For most people in the United States, western Europe and Japan, this underlying dynamic was masked by currency arrangement centering on the dollar which tended to shield these parts of the world from the full fury of globalization, while inflicting intensified looting and impoverishment on the underdeveloped countries. But even so, the economic decline in the supposedly rich countries was breathtaking.
As the United States became financially more unstable and economically less viable, ruling elites began to exhibit greater readiness for military adventures abroad. This aggressivity was common to the Republican and Democratic wings of the oligarchy, but was somewhat alleviated by Bill Clinton 's personal distaste for foreign military adventures and keen awareness of the risks they posed for himself politically. But after the Monica Lewinsky crisis emerged at the beginning of 1998, executive authority was increasingly usurped by a group of high officials calling themselves the principals' committee, who carried out the bombing of Iraq (Operation Desert Fox) at the end of 1998, and who then turned to the bombing of Serbia in the spring of 1999. Not to be outdone, the neoconservative faction of the oligarchy attempted at the same time to stir up conflict with China, whose high rates of economic growth posed in their eyes the threat of the emergence of a new and competing superpower. Conflict with Russia, always latent, threatened at various junctures to erupt into more visible hostility.
The prevalent conception of Russia on the part of US foreign policy elites is that of a strategic adversary. Russia has retained significant parts of the strategic missile forces built during the Soviet era, and has supplemented them with new developments such as the Topol missile. Because of Russia's traditional strength in basic science, this country may be ahead of the US in certain key areas of military technology, although Russian engineering problems still hold this back. The Russian middle class has been bankrupted twice, once in the 1300% hyperinflation of 1992-93, and a second time in the banking panic associated with the Russian state default in August and September 1998. This fact alone is very ominous. The last time the middle class of a great power was subjected to two waves of bankruptcy was in Weimar Germany, when the middle class lost all its savings and investments through the combination of the hyperinflation of 1923, followed by the deflationary depression of 1929.
Under Yeltsin, Russia was the playground of a group of rapacious financiers who arrogantly called themselves the oligarchs -- these were figures like Berezvosky, Potanin, Smolensky, Friedman, and Khodorkhovsky. Khodorkhovsky seized control over most of the Siberian oil reserves, and appeared ready to sell them off to the Anglo-American oil cartel. The beginning of the end for the oligarchs came with the resignation of Yeltsin and the elevation of Putin to the Russian presidency on December 31, 1999. The KGB officer Putin tended to repress the oligarchs in conformity with the usual Russian statist model of political economy. Putin's arrival was punctuated by bombings of apartment houses in Moscow which were attributed to Moslem Chechen terrorists. This terror wave helped to consolidate Putin's power through the usual stampeding effect, but this may not be the whole story. The entire Chechen insurrection has been sponsored by the US and the British within the framework of what Brzezinski calls the "grand chessboard," and its leaders are reputed to be assets of the CIA. Perhaps the CIA and MI-6 had provided the terror wave upon which Putin rode to power.
US AS WEIMAR GERMANY
One of the favorite theses of the neocons is that the United States today can be directly compared to the Weimar Republic, that is to say, to Germany between 1919 and 1933. Here the neocons are correct, although it must be added that one of the main factors contributing to the similarity is the role of the neocons themselves. Weimar was financially unstable, as seen in the hyperinflation of 1923 and the deflationary depression of 1929. It was also politically unstable, with right-wing coup attempts (like the Kapp- Luttwitz putsch of 1920 on the part of army officers and top bureaucrats, the Hitler- Ludendorff Munich beer hall putsch of November 1923) alternating with attempts at communist insurrection (the Bavarian Soviet republic and the German Communist Party's coup attempts). This kind of instability finds a precise analogue in the globalized United States starting at the end of the 1990s. We have had at least one coup or coup attempt per year, starting in 1998.
ONE COUP PER YEAR: USA, 1998-2004
1998: Impeachment coup against Clinton -- successful
1999: Conviction coup against Clinton -- failed due to mass support for
Clinton
1999: Principals' committee coup; bombing of Serbia -- successful
2000: Bush stolen election coup -- successful
2001: 9/11 terror coup -- successful
2002: War powers coup by Bush -- successful
2003: Iraq war coup by Bush -- successful
2004: Threatened 2nd wave terror coup; stolen election coup; war with Iran, Sudan, Syria, Russia --
?
On September 11, 1994, Frank Eugene Corder crashed his Cessna 150 L into the White House lawn two floors below Clinton's bedroom, killing himself in the process. Clinton was not there. The dead pilot had spoken of his hatred for Clinton. These events marked an attempt by the permanent Washington oligarchy -- the Establishment -- to break the will of Clinton, a person for whom many of the Washington establishment felt a wholly irrational but intense hatred. So the White House lawn was hit by a plane on September 11, 1994.
In the late summer of 1995, the Gingrich Republicans attempted permanently to weaken the constitutional powers of the presidency by unilaterally dictating the federal budget. This was an attempted coup by the GOP congressional leadership. They announced their willingness to deny spending authority to the Treasury in such a way as to provoke the default of the United States -- an unprecedented event which would have meant national bankruptcy and chaos. Clinton held firm as the government shut down, and the population turned against Gingrich, permanently weakening him. The Republicans were forced to back down, and the budget was enacted according to the relevant constitutional norms.
During 1998, the impeachment of Bill Clinton was prepared and carried out by a coalition of oligarchical reactionaries. The pre-history of this coup goes back to the beginning of the Clinton presidency, when stories about sexual excesses in the White House were circulated by disgruntled pro-Bush elements in the Secret Service. After 12 years of feeding at the public trough, the Bush faction and its allies experienced loss of power as a kind of traumatic cold turkey, and their response was an aggressive rage against Clinton, which fed on the relatively minor positive achievements of the new president. The impeachment coup was promoted by the reactionary millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, and also by the Hollinger press empire of Conrad Black, with its flagship London Daily Telegraph and its star reported Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, a man known to be in contact with British intelligence. Another contributing group was the Barbara and Ted Olson salon in northern Virginia, which was attended by such reactionary gurus as Clarence Thomas, failed Supreme Court candidate Robert Bork, Lawrence Silberman of the DC circuit court of appeals, Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal, and others. The spearhead of impeachment in the House was Tom "the Hammer" Delay, a former pest exterminator. (See Tarpley in Hidell)
The scandal escalated in January 1998 as a result of Linda Tripp's illegal taping of her conversations with the pathetic Monica Lewinsky. Tripp had been encouraged by Lucienne Goldberg, a hardened Republican operative. Tripp was a GS-16 federal bureaucrat with a background in Army Intelligence. During the Iran-contra era, Tripp had served as personal secretary to General Richard Secord of the Army Delta Force; she had also been involved in one of the front companies on Oliver North's flow chart. When Tripp revealed the Clinton-Lewinsky story to GGP zealot special prosecutor Ken Starr, Starr redirected his probe from Whitewater to Monica, and the US presidency was paralyzed for two years.
The impeachment propaganda of the Republicans resonated deeply within the military, where the relatively new presence of female officers and enlisted personnel had led to a series of sexual abuse and sexual harassment scandals. Most famous of these was the 1991Tailhook affair, involving an orgy in which naval aviators and female officers participated, some under duress. Resentment grew over cases like that of Rear Admiral Ralph L. Tindal, who was ousted in December 1995 for sex harassment and adultery. Serving and retired military whose careers had been damaged or terminated by charges of sexual misconduct became enraged against Clinton, for whom they thought a double standard was being applied. Although such rage by itself might never add up to an attempted coup, it could help set the stage for one. Widespread hatred for President Kennedy in the CIA, its Cuban paramilitaries, and the US military after his failure to escalate the Bay of Pigs crisis and the Cuban missile crisis certainly helped to weaken the defenses of the presidency, and may have contributed something to the ease of recruitment of key officers to the plot and the above all to the cover-up.
In December 1998, with Clinton facing immediate impeachment by the House of Representatives, the principals' committee effectuated a minor coup within the White House bureaucracy. The visible expression of this was the bombing of Iraq just before Christmas under the code name of Operation Desert Fox. At the beginning of 1999, the attempted ouster of Clinton from the presidency was a coup that failed. Clinton's survival was the result of his continued strong public support, expressed in part as unusual off-year gains for Democratic congressional candidates. Pro-impeachment oligarchs registered foaming rage and resentment not just against Clinton, but against the US population as a whole, which they claimed had not paid enough attention to the moral rectitude of the impeachers. Paul Weyrich of the Mellon-Scaife funded Free Congress Foundation talked of withdrawing from political affairs altogether, without making clear what the alternative field of endeavor might be. This incident tended to heighten the bureaucratic-authoritarian and totalitarian tendencies inside the reactionary wing of the US oligarchy, since it was evident that the population was not convinced by arguments which seemed self-evident to them. One may say that through these events the oligarchy was being educated in the need for a fascist transformation of some sort. Furthermore, there are unsubstantiated rumors that around this time US military circles, especially in the Navy, considered plans for a coup d'etat with the goal of ousting Clinton and replacing him with Ross Perot. These plans were reportedly abandoned when the other services declined to go along.
Nevertheless, a successful coup d'etat did take place in 1999. It involved the seizure of power by an organism known as the principals' committee, which was composed at that time of Vice President Gore and his dubious national security adviser Leon Fuerth, Defense Secretary William Cohen, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, National Security Council director Samuel Berger, and Gen. Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. George Tenet of the CIA was sometimes present, and the bureaucratic eminence grise of the committee was terror czar Richard Clarke, the star of the Kean-Hamilton commission in 2004. The pretext for ascendancy of the principals' committee was the fighting in the former Yugoslavia, which had begin in June 1990, when Yugoslavia had started to break up. After massacres of Moslems by Serbs at Srebrenica in July 1995, the US and NATO undertook a bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serb positions around besieged Sarajevo. These air strikes lasted from August 28 to September 13, 1995, with about 3400 missions flown. These air strikes had the merit of putting an end to the Yugoslav civil war, which had claimed the lives of 250,000 dead, and had seen numerous war crimes by Bosnian Serb leaders Karadjic and Mladic, and by others. Ex-Yugoslavia was finally pacified when all parties signed the Dayton accords on November 21, 1995 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. US and other NATO peacekeepers entered Bosnia in December. Then, in 1997, Albania, which neighbors Serbia and the province of Kosovo, which has an ethnic Albanian and Moslem majority, collapsed as a result of an orgy of financial speculation and Ponzi schemes. Weapons which had been the property of the Albanian government were pilfered, and found their way into the province of Kosovo, where they were used to arm the emerging Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a US- backed organization which relied on drug running for much of its financing. Clashes between the KLA and the Serbian military and police started in February-March 1998, and were soon seized upon by Madeleine Albright as a means of making an example of Serbia and of intimidating the world community in general, and in particular Russia, the traditional Orthodox backer of the Serbs. Fighting in Kosovo intensified during the summer of 1998. Responding to the threat of NATO air strikes, the Yugoslav leader Milosevic pulled most Serb units out of Kosovo.
But in the spring of 1999 the fighting flared up again. Now a crisis summit was convened at Rambouillet, near Paris. Here the KLA half-accepted the solution demanded by Albright, while the Serbs rejected it outright, since it included a clause giving US and NA TG forces the right to go anywhere and everywhere in Serbia, while seizing buildings and commandeering supplies. The Serbian national identity was based on a fierce commitment to independence, which had been expressed as guerrilla warfare against the Nazis, and then in successfully facing down Stalin at the height of his power. In response to the predictable Serb refusal, Albright became hysterical, feeling her entire secretaryship was in danger of collapse. She then sent Richard Holbrooke to Belgrade to give Milosevic an ultimatum: capitulate or face NATO bombing. Milosevic, realizing that giving up Kosovo and letting NATO forces into his country would mean his own political doom, rejected the US ultimatum. At this point Russian Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov was en route to Washington, seeking to help mediate a negotiated solution for the crisis. There is good reason to believe that serious talks between the US and Primakov would have allowed a peaceful solution, since it was a Russian mediation that finally did bring a cessation of the bombing. But with Primakov over the Atlantic, Vice President Al Gore, acting on behalf of the principals' committee, insisted on giving the order to start the bombing. Seeing an affront, Primakov turned back and returned to Moscow. Now began 78 days of merciless bombing of Serbia, directed by General Wesley Clark, the NATO commander. Serbian civilian dead were estimated at 10,000 or more -at least three times the death toll of 9/11, all imposed as part of a proxy war designed to humiliate Russia and break the will of small countries who might want to resist the Anglo- American universal bullies.
APRIL 9, 1999: YELTSIN WARNS OF WORLD WAR
The bombing of Kosovo was a giant step towards the international anarchy that manifested itself during the Iraq war of 2003. Russia and China were opposed to the bombing, but their peace plan was vetoed by the US, Britain, and France. However, NATO bombed without the benefit of a UN security council resolution. US-Russian relations reached a post-1991 low, with militant demonstrations at the US embassy in Moscow every day. The bombing of Kosovo duplicated the cowardly "bomb now, die later" method pioneered in the first Iraq war of 1991, with civilian power stations, water systems, and sewage treatment plants all being targeted. The bridges over the Danube were destroyed, an act of despicable vandalism which paralyzed Europe's most important waterway.
As the bombing went on week after week without any Serb capitulation, NATO leaders were seized by the hysterical fear that if NATO's first war were to end in a draw, the now wholly artificial alliance would begin to collapse, The US needed NATO as a tool for out of area deployments, meaning attacks on developing countries. Tony Blair began proposing an invasion of Serbia with land forces, an option which Clinton had explicitly ruled out. Joining Blair in this insane proposal was General Wesley Clark. On April 9, 1999 Russian President Yeltsin predicted that an invasion of Serbia by land forces would lead to "European war for sure, and possibly a world war." Russian General Seleznyov reminded NATO that Russian nuclear missiles were still pointed towards the western powers. This was the first serious mention of world war by a major international figure during the 1990s. Not caring about Yeltsin ' s warnings, Blair attempted to use his visit to Washington for the NATO 50th anniversary on April 23 to convince Clinton to start the ground invasion, but he was rebuffed.
NATO tried to justify its bombing by citing the large numbers of Albanian refugees leaving Kosovo. There were also wild reports of Serb massacres of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Many of these exaggerations were conduited from US State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin to his wife, the meretricious CNN correspondent Christiana Amanpour. The US claimed that 100,000 Albanians had been massacred and placed in mass graves; postwar investigation showed that there were perhaps 3,000 -- a tragedy, but consistent with a guerrilla war of the type started by the KLA. The motivation for the bombing was therefore a big lie, manufactured by the US government and its media minions. ( http://www.antiwar.com/iustin/j082100.html )
How far was the aggressive clique within NATO prepared to go? According to Louis Sell, Milosevic was bludgeoned into capitulation by a threat by Finnish NATO spokesman Ahtisaari, who told the Serbs that "if he refused the deal, NATO was prepared to attack a much broader range of targets -including the remaining bridges across the Danube, the power and heating systems, and the telephone network." (Sell 311) This was a program of genocidal bombing with devastating delayed-action demographic impact - the "bomb now, die later" method employed in Iraq.
"I'M NOT GOING TG START WORLD WAR III FOR YOU"
Russia, now in the person of Chernomyrdin rather than ousted Primakov, was finally able to induce Milosevic to capitulate in early June. The Russian army, anxious to demonstrate solidarity with the Serbs, and resentful because of NATO attempts to deny Russia an occupation zone in Kosovo, on June 12 carried off a coup de main. They quickly shifted a couple of companies of armored vehicles to the airport in Pristina, a city in Kosovo not far from the border of Serbia proper. At this point General Wesley Clark (later Michael Moore's favorite presidential candidate in 2004) became frantic, and ordered the NATO ground commander, British General Sir Michael Jackson, to deny the Russians the use of the airport. There were reports that Russia was about to send a sky train of paratroopers to back up its demand. General Jackson flatly refused to carry out Clark's order, making the now-famous reply:
General Jackson later told the BBC: "We were [looking at] a possibility of confrontation with the Russian contingent which seemed to me probably not the right way to start off a relationship with Russians who were going to become part of my command." Clark planned to order British tanks and armored cars to block the runways to prevent any Russian transport planes from landing. Clark said he believed it was "an appropriate course of action." But the plan was again vetoed by Britain. Here was a second serious warning about world war. (BBC, March 9, 2000)
It is evident in retrospect that the Kosovo operation was a proxy war between the United States and Russia, in which the NATO mauling the Serb civilian population was supposed to illustrate to Russia the formidable military potential of the US-led alliance. The Pristina crisis cooled down, but US-Russian relations were dangerously strained. Milosevic had been indicted for war crimes in May 1999. As NATO troops streamed into defeated Serbia, they were accompanied by suitcases full of US dollars to be used by the National Endowment for Democracy to organize the overthrow of Milosevic, which duly followed in the spring of2000, when the dictator was toppled by a textbook CIA "people power" revolution. In mid-2001, a couple of months before 9/11, Milosevic was illegally kidnapped from Serbia and taken to stand trial at a kangaroo court in The Hague.
MAY 7, 1999: US BOMBS CHINESE EMBASSY
The Kosovo adventure ruined US relations with China as well. On May 7, a US stealth bomber destroyed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing a number of Chinese. This incident may have disrupted a potential agreement that might have ended the bombing a month earlier than turned out. The Chinese leadership orchestrated a vehement anti-US campaign, with mass demonstrations everywhere. Albright's deputy James Pickering flew to Beijing on June 16 to deliver the official US apology and claim the attack was an accident, but this was brusquely rejected by the Chinese government. Matters were complicated by the arrest of US scientist Wen Ho Lee, who had been charged in March with spying for China. On May 25, 1999, the Cox Committee of the: US House of Representatives delivered an exaggerated and provocative report about Chinese espionage in the US. US-Chinese relations were now dangerously strained.
This was followed by what some journalists saw as a possible brush with actual thermonuclear war between the US and Russia. The occasion was the mysterious sinking of the newest and most powerful Russian nuclear submarine, the Kursk, in the Barents Sea during maneuvers on August 12, 2000. Russian officials reported that there had been a NATO submarine in the area when the Kursk was lost. NATO denied any involvement. The Kursk had been launched in 1994. During the Cold War and well into the 1990s, the Barents Sea had been the scene of dangerous underwater cat-and-mouse games between the US and Russia, with hunter-killer subs trailing ballistic missile subs on each side. US and Russian subs had last collided in the Arctic Ocean on March 20, 1993, when the USS Grayling crashed into a Russian Delta III class ballistic missile sub carrying 16 SS-N18 submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) about 105 miles north of the Soviet fleet base at Murmansk, during what was alleged by the US to be a routine patrol. At that time the Russian Defense Ministry had stated that the "high command of the Russian military fleet expresses its extreme concern over the latest incident of dangerous maneuvering by foreign submarines in military training zones."
THE KURSK: "WORLD WAR III COULD HAVE BEGUN SATURDAY"
While American and European media have jumped the gun in attributing the Kursk sinking to onboard explosions, probably caused by a battery fire or torpedo detonation, the preponderance of evidence in fact suggests that the Kursk collided with another vessel -- a U.S. or British submarine, or drone vehicle -or, in the extreme case, was possibly hit by a torpedo. A commission of Russian Navy officers officially endorsed the finding that the Kursk had been destroyed by a collision with a foreign sub. The Kursk, with a crew of 118 sailors and officers, was found at the bottom of the Sea. The crew members were instantly killed in what Russian officials asserted was a collision with the second vessel. On August 21, the Russian news agency Interfax reported that Russian rescue workers had found a fragment of a submarine, "most likely British," near the Kursk. This followed earlier reports that emergency buoys, also identified as British, were seen floating near the collision site.
On August 22, 2000, Pravda.ru ran a story on the Kursk disaster under the headline: "World War III Could Have Begun on Saturday." According to this piece, "On Saturday, August 12, an incident occurred in the Barents Sea, where the Russian Federation's Northern Fleet was conducting exercises, which nearly led to the outbreak of full-scale combat--a third world war For several days the world hung by a thread, and one false political move could have led to an exchange of nuclear strikes." Citing hydroacoustical evidence of three explosions, "indicating the possibility that the Kursk had suffered a torpedo attack." Pravda.ru described the incident as a possible casus belli, but concluded, "Happily, the incident in the Barents Sea was successfully resolved by political means. Agreement to 'end the affair in peace' was reached during a telephone conversation between Vladimir Putin and Bill Clinton. The Presidents' conversation lasted 25 minutes, and nothing of its content was reported in the mass media." (New Federalist, August 28, 2000)
On August 22, John Helmer, a Moscow-based journalist who wrote for the Journal of Commerce and the Moscow Times, commented in the Singapore-based Straits Times that "the Russian sub drama looked like war at the start." Dismissing the hysterical Western media criticism of President Putin, who remained at the "vacation Kremlin" at Sochi, Helmer wrote, "If you were the ruler of Russia, and you were told late one night that one of your most powerful and secret submarine weapons had been hit bya mysterious explosion, and sent to the bottom without word from the crew, would it be prudent for you to suspect an attack? An attack by a nuclear superpower and old rival? And if it is your sworn duty to defend your country from attack, would it be reasonable for you to determine whether there was a cause for war, or an accident?" Also noteworthy was Putin's growing convergence with the former Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov, an advocate of a Eurasian perspective for Russia, who on August 23 delivered a strongly worded statement warning the West and the Russian oligarchs not to try to exploit the near-war crisis. (EIR, September 1, 2000)
The US claimed that an anti-submarine rocket fired from the Kursk had gotten jammed in a firing tube, causing the deadly explosion. But Russian authorities insisted that a foreign sub of the same general type as the Kursk had been present. As the US media were concerned, the Kursk crisis calmed down after a surprise visit to Moscow by CIA Director Tenet, but tensions between the two powers remained extreme. This is the immediate background to Vladimir Putin's telephone call to Bush on the morning of September 11, 2001.
THE NEOCONS ANTAGONIZE CHINA
The great neocon project of the late 1990s was that of a US confrontation with China. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations crisis cookbook had identified two challengers to Anglo-American world domination: the Moslems, because of their population growth, and China, because of its economic growth. Neocon thinking oscillates between these two as the more immediate threat. After the Taiwan straits confrontation of 1996, the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, the Wen Ho Lee case, the Cox report on alleged Chinese espionage, and the Chinagate accusations of Beijing funding for Clinton, US-Chinese relations were at a low ebb. As former US Ambassador to Beijing James Lilley pointed out, ":...there has been a dramatic change that is pervasive and, at times, ugly. After the Belgrade bombing accident in May of 1999, we saw the full face of anger, hostility, and even hate on the faces of the Chinese attacking our embassy." Lilley went on in a threatening tone: "If China continues to expand its military parameters, it will encounter our power. China can avoid this confrontation by buying into economic globalization, and lowering nationalistic tensions. To do otherwise is to risk tearing down the who le structure." (Newsweek, April 16, 2001)
The good will expressed towards the US by the Chinese students in Tien An Men Square in 1989 had completely dissipated, and was replaced by loathing -- well before 9/11 and Iraq. Something similar had happened in Russia and elsewhere -- also before 9/11.
Bush's first months in office were dominated by an incident involving the mid-air collision between a US EP-3E Aries II spy plane and a Chinese F-8 fighter jet just off the coast of China near the main base of the Chinese South Sea Fleet in Zhangjiang.. Here US planes on electronic surveillance missions had long been regularly buzzed and harassed by Chinese interceptors. During one such encounter the Chinese fighter collided with the larger and slower US plane; the Chinese jet crashed and the pilot was lost, while the US plane had to make an emergency landing at a Chinese airport on Hainan Island. The plane and its crew of 19 were detained for a couple of weeks before being returned to the US. The Chinese demanded a formal apology, which the pugnacious Bush administration was reluctant to make. The Chinese press ran pictures of the downed US spy plane with headlines reading "Proof of Bullying," and contemptuous attacks on "Little Bush." Chinese internet chatrooms buzzed with talk of imminent war; "Are you ready? This is war," said one posting. The neocon Weekly Standard headlined its story about the Hainan incident " A National Humiliation," and authors William Kristol and Robert Kagan, both prominent chickenhawk warmongers, accused the newly installed Bush 43 of "weakness" in handling the affair. The neocons were disturbed by Colin Powell's reliance on diplomacy to get back the plane and crew for the US, and especially by the attitude of the US business community, which was more interested in profitable deals than in seconding the neocons' distorted view of national honor. (Newsweek April 16, 2001) The whole experience was an object lesson to the neocon clique and the military provocateurs. For eight years they had writhed in bitterness because of Clinton's sane reluctance to resort to military force. Now, after the tremendous effort required to put Bush into the White House, the result was not much more satisfactory. We can safely assume that neocons and provocateurs drew the obvious lessons: that they must begin thinking along more grandiose lines, and planning for an outside event several orders of magnitude greater than any attempted thus far.
Tensions increased elsewhere as well. During the 1990s, Moscow and Beijing were repeatedly and pointedly reminded of the presence of an aggressive faction inside the US government and military which was intent on provoking periodic incidents to exacerbate tensions among the major powers. From Kosovo to Belgrade, from the Barents Sea to the South China Sea, from Iraq to Somalia, this aggressive faction had provoked clashes, manufactured pretexts for intervention, and fought a proxy war near the heart of Europe. The 1990s were anything but idyllic; they were a period of escalating economic and strategic crisis. The sympathetic interest in US life seen in 1989-1991 in Russia and China had by mid-2001 been replaced by overwhelming hostility. At the same time, the aggressive and adventurous network inside the US government was deeply dissatisfied with their own failure to achieve decisive results. Every passing year brought population increases throughout the Moslem world, and 10-15% economic growth rates to China, while the US real economy (apart from Wall Street's paper swindles) continued to stagnate. Like the British contemplating German economic growth in 1905-1907, the US war faction concluded that a long period of world peace could only result in the further relative decline of the US. To create the political preconditions for what they wanted to do, the US war party therefore began to feel an overwhelming need to become the party of synthetic terror.
The groundwork for the aggressive and terror-based consensus at the end of the 1990s had been laid starting in March 1992, when Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the Pentagon's Under Secretary for Policy submitted his long-term Defense Planning Guidance to then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. As the press wrote at that time, the Pentagon policy paper asserted "that America's political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the former Soviet Union." The role of the UN would dwindle to insignificance, the paper indicated, and US unilateral action would dominate the world. Wolfowitz's plan also stressed "using military force, if necessary, to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in such countries as North Korea, Iraq, some of the successor republics to the Soviet Union and in Europe." Direct nuclear blackmail of Russia was also prominent; the Wolfowitz document underlined that American strategic nuclear weapons would continue to target vital aspects of the former Soviet military establishment. The rationale for this targeting policy was that the United States "must continue to hold at risk those assets and capabilities that current -- and future -- Russian leaders or other nuclear adversaries value most" because Russia would remain "the only power in the world with the capability of destroying the United States." The essence of US policy was seen in intimidation, "convincing potential competitions that they need not aspire to a greater role," thus guaranteeing that no rival superpower would be allowed to emerge. (The New York Times, March 8, 1992)
Richard Perle later elaborated an aggressive strategy for Israeli politician Beniamin Netanyahu known as the "Clean Break" policy, which was based on rejecting a negotiated peace with Arabs and Palestinians in favor of endless war. Brzezinski's 1997 Grand Chessboard touted the benefits of US meddling central Asia for geopolitical reasons; this study was similar in spirit to the Karl Haushofer's 1934 Weltpolitik von heute, the manual of Nazi geopolitics. But how to manipulate the American people into accepting the burdens and human losses associated with such meddling? Brzezinski, a petty Polish aristocrat, replied: "The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor." (Brzezinski 24-25)
An even more explicit call for US world domination came from the Project for a New American Century, a neocon movement that provided most of the top officials for the Bush 43 administration. After discussing their imperialist plans, the PNAC authors, led by chickenhawk William Kristol, focused on the way of duping the American people into supporting the raft of new foreign adventures: "... the process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor." (PNAC, September 2000) It is in this restless mood, desirous of a new global conflict to pre-empt the emergence of challengers to a new Anglo-American world order, viewing the democratic system as unresponsive to their elitist warmongering, and eager for the assistance that a spectacular external attack would bring, that the roots of 9/11 are to be sought.
_______________
Notes:
2. US National Security Council, "Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests," National Security Study Memorandum 200, December 10, 1974. This document posited a "special US political and strategic interest" in population reduction or limitation in many developing sector nations because of potential competition with the US for access to natural resources and raw materials. This amounted to a strategy of thinly veiled genocide, and facilitated US support for the murderous Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.
END OF DOLLAR HEGEMONY?
Perhaps most serious for the Anglo-American system of world domination was the impact of these events on the fate of the US dollar. By virtue of the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, the dollar had replaced the British pound as the world's reserve currency. The Bretton Woods system disintegrated in 1971-73, and we are now living among its rubble, but the primacy of the dollar has remained unchallenged. This means that most world trade was and still is conducted in dollars, including Eurodollars based in London. The prices for the main raw materials, and especially oil, are quoted in US dollars. If Europe wants Russian or Saudi oil, it must pay in dollars, thus creating demand for a currency which otherwise might find few buyers, since the US produces so little to sell. This allows the US-UK banking community to skim 5-10% off all world trade by providing import-export financing; this used to be called invisible earnings. More important still, if the dollar is the only way you can buy oil, then whoever controls the dollars -- meaning the US -- will in effect control the oil, no matter whether it is nationalized or not, no matter who formally owns it. The role of the dollar in the posted price for Gulf crude is thus the central symbol of the world dominance of the dollar. And the dollar is the nerve and fist of US world domination.
As an anonymous expert quoted by William Clark correctly pointed out in early 2003: "The Federal Reserve's greatest nightmare is that GPEC will switch its international transactions from a dollar standard to a euro standard. Iraq actually made this switch in November 2000 (when the euro was worth around 80 cents), and has actually made off like a bandit considering the dollar's steady depreciation against the euro. ( http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CLA302A.html ) The dollar declined 17% against the euro in 2002.
IRAQ
For Iraq, the decision to quit the dollar for the euro was an explicitly political one. Iraqi Finance Minister Hekmat Ibrahim al-Azzawi announced the move by saying: "The dollar is the currency of an enemy state, and must be abandoned for other currencies, including the euro," Azzawi said. The Iraqi central bank announced in October 2000 that it had begun to buy European currencies. (AFP via energy 24.com, October 12, 2000) Saddam Hussein stopped accepting dollars for oil in November 2000, and at the same time shifted ten billion dollars on deposit in the UN oil for food fund into the euro. Sure enough, the 2003 US occupation regime put Iraqi oil exports back on a dollar, rather than a euro, standard. The US invasion also helped to intimidate any nation which might have been considering switching to the euro. Since late 2001, the dollar was steadily declining and the euro was steadily gaining, with periodic plateaus, so those who chose the euro were rewarded to the tune of 20% or more. Bush's second axis of evil country, North Korea, switched to the euro on December 2, 2002. Here the economic impact was limited, but the political symbolism was still quite strong.
IRAN
The third of Bush bugaboos, Iran, which is also the number two OPEC producer, was also considering a move out of the dollar, and the arrival of US military forces next door was doubtless designed to dissuade the Iranians from such thoughts. The Iranian approach was less flamboyant and confrontational, but the threat to the dollar was there none the less. Iranian sources were quoted in September 2002 as remarking that "Iran's proposal to receive payments for crude oil sales to Europe in euros instead of U.S. dollars is based primarily on economics." Still, an anti-US political animus could not be denied, since dumping the dollar would be an "opportunity to hit back at the U.S. government, which recently labelled it part of an 'axis of evil. ' As this proposal was considered, Iran was moving currency assets out of the dollar anyway. Russian and China announced during 2003 that they were doing the same thing.
VENEZUELA
And what of Venezuela, the number four producer of oil? Here the CIA, with the help of Iran- contra veteran Otto Reich, attempted to overthrow President Chavez with a botched coup in Apri12002. Many saw this as a move to secure oil supplies in case the attack on Iraq got messy. But a year before the coup, Venezuela's ambassador to Washington, Francisco Mieres-Lopez, apparently floated the idea of switching the posted price for Venezuelan crude to the euro. Under Chavez, Venezuela also embarked on a policy of direct barter deals for oil, which had been concluded with about a dozen Latin American countries. In these cases the dollar was cut out of the oil transaction cycle, and the ability of the Wall Street banks to skim off these transactions was eliminated. Venezuela had for example a deal with Cuba under which Cuban doctors and health workers served in the Venezuelan countryside, while Castro got his crude oil needs covered in return, thus meeting a need that had been acute since the collapse of the USSR cut off oil deliveries to Cuba from Soviet fields.
INDONESIA
Pertamina, the Indonesia oil giant, showed every sign of jumping on the bandwagon. According to a Jakarta paper, in Apri12003, "Pertamina ... dropped a bombshell. It's considering dropping the US dollar for the euro in its oil and gas trades." The paper pointed to the "major implications for the world's biggest economy." ("Indonesia May Dump Dollar, Rest of Asia Too?" Jakarta Post, Apri1 22, 2003) In the same issue, two economists, Nur Azis and Jason Meade, from the Center for Indonesian Reform, Jakarta, urged that Indonesia cast off its dollar dependence. They argued that the dollar would "remain weak over the next decade at least, for a number of reasons."
MALAYSIA
The former Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahatir Mohamed, was perhaps the most outspoken against the dollar. He repeatedly called on oppressed Arabs to turn away from suicide bombing, and fight the US-UK combine with the far more potent weapon of dumping the dollar in favor of the euro. Mahatir was blunt about the need to replace the world dollar standard. In early 2003, Mahatir told a group of reporters that the international community needed to be encouraged to use other currencies or even gold as the benchmark in international trade. This was because the domination of the U.S. dollar in global transactions was distorting the world's economy. Mahatir suggested that the Euro, yen, or even gold should be used for transactions. "We should be given the choice to use whatever currency that we want," he said at a meeting with 31 foreign editors and senior journalists. He pointed to the greater danger of manipulation when international business is all conducted in one nation's currency. "For the purpose of trade, we shouldn't say that oil should be quoted only in U.S. dollars. Today, the oil price has gone up, but the value of the U.S. dollar has gone down, something that the people do not point out," he added. "The oil price today was not actually US $36 if this was compared with the value of the dollar a year or three years ago." Mahatir said he had read an article which pointed out that the United States was actually living on borrowed money and that it always faced a huge deficit. Despite that, he said, the u.s. economy continued growing at a tremendous rate for the past 10 years while Japan, which had made a lot of money and had very healthy reserves, was facing economic problems. "This is a contradiction. Why is this happening? It is simply because we are giving value to the U.S. dollar which it doesn't really have. There is nothing to back the U.S. dollar other than people's belief in it." (The Star, February 28,2003) Later in 2003, Mahatir, noting the fall of the dollar against the euro, told the Nikkei Forum in Tokyo: "The U.S. dollar is not a stable currency at all. We have to think of some other ways of determining exchange rates. We need to rethink whether we can depend on the U.S. dollar or not. Initially yes, we have to depend on the U.S. dollar, but we should move away from the U.S. dollar." (The Edge Daily, June 6, 2003)
SAUDI ARABIA: THE PARTING OF THE WAYS WITH THE US, AUGUST 2001
Most significant of all were the signs that even Saudi Arabia, long considered a client state or even a ward of the United States, was considering breaking away from the US system. Here the falling dollar, Bush's slavish support of Sharon, and preparations for new US attacks on Arab states were doubtless playing a role. According to the Wall Street Journal, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah sent a letter to Bush at the end of August 2001 -before the events of September 11 -- and warned him, in reference to the US- Saudi relationship, that "a time comes when peoples and nations part." The letter went on to say that "it is time for the United States and Saudi Arabia to look at their separate interests. Those governments that don't feel the pulse of the people and respond to it will suffer the fate of the Shah of Iran." Prince Abdullah read from this letter at a meeting of 150 prominent Saudis in October 2001, in an effort to convince them that the Saudi government is defending Arab and Muslim interests. During a phone call with Bush around the same time, Abdullah again called for the U.S. to restrain Israel. Diplomats said that there was considerable debate within the Saudi royal family over the U.S. war in Afghanistan and the cost of the U.S.-Saudi relationship. One Western diplomat said that the failure to resolve the Middle East conflict was going to make it harder for Saudi Arabia to continue its relationship with the U.S. in the same manner. (Wall Street Journal, Oct. 29, 2001) Saudi Arabia was a pillar of the US empire; without it, the empire would collapse. For the imperialists, action was imperative to prevent this critical defection.
The dubious Michael Moore and others parroted the Mossad line that Saudi Arabia was responsible for 9/11. It is more likely that the unproven allegations about Saudi hijackers were cooked up as a means of blackmailing the Saudis, who were evidently ready to distance themselves from Washington.
THE EUROPEAN UNION
Europe for its part was eager to eliminate the dollar. Jacques Santer, former president of the European Commission, called on Gulf Arab oil exporters to price their crude in the euro rather than the US dollar as a means to stabilize the oil market. "It could be the instrument to consolidate oil markets" and would be less affected by US foreign policy, he told a Gulf-Euro conference in Dubai. ("Santer calls for oil to be priced in euros," The Irish Times Gctober 8, 2000) The biggest issue here was whether Russia would phase out the dollar in favor of the euro, as the Germans and others were proposing. In addition, dumping the dollar was popular. Newspaper columnists and antiw'ar activists in countries from Morocco to Indonesia shared the sentiments expressed in a Nigerian street protest witnessed by a Wall Street Journal reporter during the run-up to the Iraq war: "Euro yes! Dollar no!" ( http://journeyman.1hwy.com/J-Big-OneIIIb.html ) US elites had long been painfully aware of the colossal vulnerability represented by the world's dollar overhang - the masses ofdollars held outside of the United States. Republican Senator Pete Dominici of New Mexico commented on May 18, 1995: "What would happen if the Saudi Arabians said they didn't want to be paid [for oil] in dollars anymore, but wanted instead, to be paid, say in yen. There would be inflation that would make the 15 to 20 percent inflation in the early '80s look good." (C- SPAN II, 18 May 1995)
The impact of a world move to dump the dollar can be deciphered from the following commentary from an insider newsletter: "The US dollar is 'over-owned.' 77. 7% of world central bank reserves are in US dollars. That's disproportionate to the US share of world trade. There'll now be some diversification, especially to the euro. Just as central banks sold gold, they'll now sell US dollars. A study revealed at a central bank confab at Jackson Hole by Professors Obstfeld and Rogoff suggests the US dollar could drop 24%- 40% if foreigners move quickly to exchange dollars. Foreigners own a record 38% of US Treasury market (44% excluding Federal Reserve holdings), 20% of US corporate bonds, 8% of US stocks. A change of sentiment, now suddenly in the air, could start a dollar brushfire." (The International Harry Schultz Letter, January 19, 2001)
If oil producers in general were to make the leap from the dollar to the euro, many central banks would have to shift reserves into the European currency. The value of the dollar might crash between 20 and 40%, as Clark's article points out. The impact of this inside the US might be hyperinflation of 1000% or more per year. As the expert cited by Clark summed up: "One of the dirty little secrets of today's international order is that the rest of the globe could topple the United States from its hegemonic status whenever they so choose, with a concerted abandonment of the dollar standard. This is America's pre- eminent, inescapable Achilles Heel for now and the foreseeable future. That such a course hasn't been pursued to date bears more relation to the fact that other Westernized, highly developed nations haven't any interest to undergo the great disruptions which would follow -- but it could assuredly take place in the event that the consensus view coalesces of the United States as any sort of 'rogue' nation. In other words, if the dangers of American global hegemony are ever perceived as a greater liability than the dangers of toppling the international order. The Bush administration and the neo-conservative movement have set out on a multiple-front course to ensure that this cannot take place, in brief by a graduated assertion of military hegemony atop the existent economic hegemony. The paradox I've illustrated with this one narrow scenario is that the quixotic course itself may very well bring about the feared outcome that it means to pre-empt. We shall see!" ( http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CLA302A.html )
The US economy was very sick indeed. Electrical infrastructure was at the breaking point, with major blackouts every summer. The air transportation system was bankrupt. Commuter and freight railroads were subject to constant breakdowns. The budget deficit was rising towards $500 billion - r $750 billion, and the merchandise trade deficit was rising towards $500 billion. The US public debt was headed towards $6.5 trillion, with over $4 trillion in foreign debt. The military forces were comprised often hollow infantry divisions -not an adequate force to conquer the world, except in a neocon fantasy.
THE CATASTROPHE OF GLOBALIZATION
After the fall of the East German communist regime in 1989, and 1:he extinction of the USSR in December 1991, the United States presided over the inauguration of a new era, that of the globalized world economy. I have discussed the main features of globalization in Surviving the Cataclysm (1999), my study of the world financial crisis. For our present purposes, it is enough to focus on the consequences of globalization. Globalization has completed the destruction of the United States as a political economy, and has substantially wrecked the entire world economy, as it was evident to clear-minded observers no later than 1992, when globalization began the demolition of the Russian economy. Together with globalization came the ascendancy of parasitical financier elites oriented exclusively towards short-term speculative gain in such areas as derivatives speculation, and perfectly incompetent in regard to the economic requirements of civilized progress. It was not September 11,2001 which destroyed the world as we had known it; it was the marauding and immiserating march of economic globalization.
The great lesson of the twentieth century was that financial disintegration and economic depression set the stage for world war. The same dynamic was at work during the 1990s. For most people in the United States, western Europe and Japan, this underlying dynamic was masked by currency arrangement centering on the dollar which tended to shield these parts of the world from the full fury of globalization, while inflicting intensified looting and impoverishment on the underdeveloped countries. But even so, the economic decline in the supposedly rich countries was breathtaking.
As the United States became financially more unstable and economically less viable, ruling elites began to exhibit greater readiness for military adventures abroad. This aggressivity was common to the Republican and Democratic wings of the oligarchy, but was somewhat alleviated by Bill Clinton 's personal distaste for foreign military adventures and keen awareness of the risks they posed for himself politically. But after the Monica Lewinsky crisis emerged at the beginning of 1998, executive authority was increasingly usurped by a group of high officials calling themselves the principals' committee, who carried out the bombing of Iraq (Operation Desert Fox) at the end of 1998, and who then turned to the bombing of Serbia in the spring of 1999. Not to be outdone, the neoconservative faction of the oligarchy attempted at the same time to stir up conflict with China, whose high rates of economic growth posed in their eyes the threat of the emergence of a new and competing superpower. Conflict with Russia, always latent, threatened at various junctures to erupt into more visible hostility.
The prevalent conception of Russia on the part of US foreign policy elites is that of a strategic adversary. Russia has retained significant parts of the strategic missile forces built during the Soviet era, and has supplemented them with new developments such as the Topol missile. Because of Russia's traditional strength in basic science, this country may be ahead of the US in certain key areas of military technology, although Russian engineering problems still hold this back. The Russian middle class has been bankrupted twice, once in the 1300% hyperinflation of 1992-93, and a second time in the banking panic associated with the Russian state default in August and September 1998. This fact alone is very ominous. The last time the middle class of a great power was subjected to two waves of bankruptcy was in Weimar Germany, when the middle class lost all its savings and investments through the combination of the hyperinflation of 1923, followed by the deflationary depression of 1929.
Under Yeltsin, Russia was the playground of a group of rapacious financiers who arrogantly called themselves the oligarchs -- these were figures like Berezvosky, Potanin, Smolensky, Friedman, and Khodorkhovsky. Khodorkhovsky seized control over most of the Siberian oil reserves, and appeared ready to sell them off to the Anglo-American oil cartel. The beginning of the end for the oligarchs came with the resignation of Yeltsin and the elevation of Putin to the Russian presidency on December 31, 1999. The KGB officer Putin tended to repress the oligarchs in conformity with the usual Russian statist model of political economy. Putin's arrival was punctuated by bombings of apartment houses in Moscow which were attributed to Moslem Chechen terrorists. This terror wave helped to consolidate Putin's power through the usual stampeding effect, but this may not be the whole story. The entire Chechen insurrection has been sponsored by the US and the British within the framework of what Brzezinski calls the "grand chessboard," and its leaders are reputed to be assets of the CIA. Perhaps the CIA and MI-6 had provided the terror wave upon which Putin rode to power.
US AS WEIMAR GERMANY
One of the favorite theses of the neocons is that the United States today can be directly compared to the Weimar Republic, that is to say, to Germany between 1919 and 1933. Here the neocons are correct, although it must be added that one of the main factors contributing to the similarity is the role of the neocons themselves. Weimar was financially unstable, as seen in the hyperinflation of 1923 and the deflationary depression of 1929. It was also politically unstable, with right-wing coup attempts (like the Kapp- Luttwitz putsch of 1920 on the part of army officers and top bureaucrats, the Hitler- Ludendorff Munich beer hall putsch of November 1923) alternating with attempts at communist insurrection (the Bavarian Soviet republic and the German Communist Party's coup attempts). This kind of instability finds a precise analogue in the globalized United States starting at the end of the 1990s. We have had at least one coup or coup attempt per year, starting in 1998.
ONE COUP PER YEAR: USA, 1998-2004
1998: Impeachment coup against Clinton -- successful
1999: Conviction coup against Clinton -- failed due to mass support for
Clinton
1999: Principals' committee coup; bombing of Serbia -- successful
2000: Bush stolen election coup -- successful
2001: 9/11 terror coup -- successful
2002: War powers coup by Bush -- successful
2003: Iraq war coup by Bush -- successful
2004: Threatened 2nd wave terror coup; stolen election coup; war with Iran, Sudan, Syria, Russia --
?
On September 11, 1994, Frank Eugene Corder crashed his Cessna 150 L into the White House lawn two floors below Clinton's bedroom, killing himself in the process. Clinton was not there. The dead pilot had spoken of his hatred for Clinton. These events marked an attempt by the permanent Washington oligarchy -- the Establishment -- to break the will of Clinton, a person for whom many of the Washington establishment felt a wholly irrational but intense hatred. So the White House lawn was hit by a plane on September 11, 1994.
In the late summer of 1995, the Gingrich Republicans attempted permanently to weaken the constitutional powers of the presidency by unilaterally dictating the federal budget. This was an attempted coup by the GOP congressional leadership. They announced their willingness to deny spending authority to the Treasury in such a way as to provoke the default of the United States -- an unprecedented event which would have meant national bankruptcy and chaos. Clinton held firm as the government shut down, and the population turned against Gingrich, permanently weakening him. The Republicans were forced to back down, and the budget was enacted according to the relevant constitutional norms.
During 1998, the impeachment of Bill Clinton was prepared and carried out by a coalition of oligarchical reactionaries. The pre-history of this coup goes back to the beginning of the Clinton presidency, when stories about sexual excesses in the White House were circulated by disgruntled pro-Bush elements in the Secret Service. After 12 years of feeding at the public trough, the Bush faction and its allies experienced loss of power as a kind of traumatic cold turkey, and their response was an aggressive rage against Clinton, which fed on the relatively minor positive achievements of the new president. The impeachment coup was promoted by the reactionary millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, and also by the Hollinger press empire of Conrad Black, with its flagship London Daily Telegraph and its star reported Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, a man known to be in contact with British intelligence. Another contributing group was the Barbara and Ted Olson salon in northern Virginia, which was attended by such reactionary gurus as Clarence Thomas, failed Supreme Court candidate Robert Bork, Lawrence Silberman of the DC circuit court of appeals, Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal, and others. The spearhead of impeachment in the House was Tom "the Hammer" Delay, a former pest exterminator. (See Tarpley in Hidell)
The scandal escalated in January 1998 as a result of Linda Tripp's illegal taping of her conversations with the pathetic Monica Lewinsky. Tripp had been encouraged by Lucienne Goldberg, a hardened Republican operative. Tripp was a GS-16 federal bureaucrat with a background in Army Intelligence. During the Iran-contra era, Tripp had served as personal secretary to General Richard Secord of the Army Delta Force; she had also been involved in one of the front companies on Oliver North's flow chart. When Tripp revealed the Clinton-Lewinsky story to GGP zealot special prosecutor Ken Starr, Starr redirected his probe from Whitewater to Monica, and the US presidency was paralyzed for two years.
The impeachment propaganda of the Republicans resonated deeply within the military, where the relatively new presence of female officers and enlisted personnel had led to a series of sexual abuse and sexual harassment scandals. Most famous of these was the 1991Tailhook affair, involving an orgy in which naval aviators and female officers participated, some under duress. Resentment grew over cases like that of Rear Admiral Ralph L. Tindal, who was ousted in December 1995 for sex harassment and adultery. Serving and retired military whose careers had been damaged or terminated by charges of sexual misconduct became enraged against Clinton, for whom they thought a double standard was being applied. Although such rage by itself might never add up to an attempted coup, it could help set the stage for one. Widespread hatred for President Kennedy in the CIA, its Cuban paramilitaries, and the US military after his failure to escalate the Bay of Pigs crisis and the Cuban missile crisis certainly helped to weaken the defenses of the presidency, and may have contributed something to the ease of recruitment of key officers to the plot and the above all to the cover-up.
In December 1998, with Clinton facing immediate impeachment by the House of Representatives, the principals' committee effectuated a minor coup within the White House bureaucracy. The visible expression of this was the bombing of Iraq just before Christmas under the code name of Operation Desert Fox. At the beginning of 1999, the attempted ouster of Clinton from the presidency was a coup that failed. Clinton's survival was the result of his continued strong public support, expressed in part as unusual off-year gains for Democratic congressional candidates. Pro-impeachment oligarchs registered foaming rage and resentment not just against Clinton, but against the US population as a whole, which they claimed had not paid enough attention to the moral rectitude of the impeachers. Paul Weyrich of the Mellon-Scaife funded Free Congress Foundation talked of withdrawing from political affairs altogether, without making clear what the alternative field of endeavor might be. This incident tended to heighten the bureaucratic-authoritarian and totalitarian tendencies inside the reactionary wing of the US oligarchy, since it was evident that the population was not convinced by arguments which seemed self-evident to them. One may say that through these events the oligarchy was being educated in the need for a fascist transformation of some sort. Furthermore, there are unsubstantiated rumors that around this time US military circles, especially in the Navy, considered plans for a coup d'etat with the goal of ousting Clinton and replacing him with Ross Perot. These plans were reportedly abandoned when the other services declined to go along.
Nevertheless, a successful coup d'etat did take place in 1999. It involved the seizure of power by an organism known as the principals' committee, which was composed at that time of Vice President Gore and his dubious national security adviser Leon Fuerth, Defense Secretary William Cohen, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, National Security Council director Samuel Berger, and Gen. Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. George Tenet of the CIA was sometimes present, and the bureaucratic eminence grise of the committee was terror czar Richard Clarke, the star of the Kean-Hamilton commission in 2004. The pretext for ascendancy of the principals' committee was the fighting in the former Yugoslavia, which had begin in June 1990, when Yugoslavia had started to break up. After massacres of Moslems by Serbs at Srebrenica in July 1995, the US and NATO undertook a bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serb positions around besieged Sarajevo. These air strikes lasted from August 28 to September 13, 1995, with about 3400 missions flown. These air strikes had the merit of putting an end to the Yugoslav civil war, which had claimed the lives of 250,000 dead, and had seen numerous war crimes by Bosnian Serb leaders Karadjic and Mladic, and by others. Ex-Yugoslavia was finally pacified when all parties signed the Dayton accords on November 21, 1995 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. US and other NATO peacekeepers entered Bosnia in December. Then, in 1997, Albania, which neighbors Serbia and the province of Kosovo, which has an ethnic Albanian and Moslem majority, collapsed as a result of an orgy of financial speculation and Ponzi schemes. Weapons which had been the property of the Albanian government were pilfered, and found their way into the province of Kosovo, where they were used to arm the emerging Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a US- backed organization which relied on drug running for much of its financing. Clashes between the KLA and the Serbian military and police started in February-March 1998, and were soon seized upon by Madeleine Albright as a means of making an example of Serbia and of intimidating the world community in general, and in particular Russia, the traditional Orthodox backer of the Serbs. Fighting in Kosovo intensified during the summer of 1998. Responding to the threat of NATO air strikes, the Yugoslav leader Milosevic pulled most Serb units out of Kosovo.
But in the spring of 1999 the fighting flared up again. Now a crisis summit was convened at Rambouillet, near Paris. Here the KLA half-accepted the solution demanded by Albright, while the Serbs rejected it outright, since it included a clause giving US and NA TG forces the right to go anywhere and everywhere in Serbia, while seizing buildings and commandeering supplies. The Serbian national identity was based on a fierce commitment to independence, which had been expressed as guerrilla warfare against the Nazis, and then in successfully facing down Stalin at the height of his power. In response to the predictable Serb refusal, Albright became hysterical, feeling her entire secretaryship was in danger of collapse. She then sent Richard Holbrooke to Belgrade to give Milosevic an ultimatum: capitulate or face NATO bombing. Milosevic, realizing that giving up Kosovo and letting NATO forces into his country would mean his own political doom, rejected the US ultimatum. At this point Russian Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov was en route to Washington, seeking to help mediate a negotiated solution for the crisis. There is good reason to believe that serious talks between the US and Primakov would have allowed a peaceful solution, since it was a Russian mediation that finally did bring a cessation of the bombing. But with Primakov over the Atlantic, Vice President Al Gore, acting on behalf of the principals' committee, insisted on giving the order to start the bombing. Seeing an affront, Primakov turned back and returned to Moscow. Now began 78 days of merciless bombing of Serbia, directed by General Wesley Clark, the NATO commander. Serbian civilian dead were estimated at 10,000 or more -at least three times the death toll of 9/11, all imposed as part of a proxy war designed to humiliate Russia and break the will of small countries who might want to resist the Anglo- American universal bullies.
APRIL 9, 1999: YELTSIN WARNS OF WORLD WAR
The bombing of Kosovo was a giant step towards the international anarchy that manifested itself during the Iraq war of 2003. Russia and China were opposed to the bombing, but their peace plan was vetoed by the US, Britain, and France. However, NATO bombed without the benefit of a UN security council resolution. US-Russian relations reached a post-1991 low, with militant demonstrations at the US embassy in Moscow every day. The bombing of Kosovo duplicated the cowardly "bomb now, die later" method pioneered in the first Iraq war of 1991, with civilian power stations, water systems, and sewage treatment plants all being targeted. The bridges over the Danube were destroyed, an act of despicable vandalism which paralyzed Europe's most important waterway.
As the bombing went on week after week without any Serb capitulation, NATO leaders were seized by the hysterical fear that if NATO's first war were to end in a draw, the now wholly artificial alliance would begin to collapse, The US needed NATO as a tool for out of area deployments, meaning attacks on developing countries. Tony Blair began proposing an invasion of Serbia with land forces, an option which Clinton had explicitly ruled out. Joining Blair in this insane proposal was General Wesley Clark. On April 9, 1999 Russian President Yeltsin predicted that an invasion of Serbia by land forces would lead to "European war for sure, and possibly a world war." Russian General Seleznyov reminded NATO that Russian nuclear missiles were still pointed towards the western powers. This was the first serious mention of world war by a major international figure during the 1990s. Not caring about Yeltsin ' s warnings, Blair attempted to use his visit to Washington for the NATO 50th anniversary on April 23 to convince Clinton to start the ground invasion, but he was rebuffed.
NATO tried to justify its bombing by citing the large numbers of Albanian refugees leaving Kosovo. There were also wild reports of Serb massacres of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Many of these exaggerations were conduited from US State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin to his wife, the meretricious CNN correspondent Christiana Amanpour. The US claimed that 100,000 Albanians had been massacred and placed in mass graves; postwar investigation showed that there were perhaps 3,000 -- a tragedy, but consistent with a guerrilla war of the type started by the KLA. The motivation for the bombing was therefore a big lie, manufactured by the US government and its media minions. ( http://www.antiwar.com/iustin/j082100.html )
How far was the aggressive clique within NATO prepared to go? According to Louis Sell, Milosevic was bludgeoned into capitulation by a threat by Finnish NATO spokesman Ahtisaari, who told the Serbs that "if he refused the deal, NATO was prepared to attack a much broader range of targets -including the remaining bridges across the Danube, the power and heating systems, and the telephone network." (Sell 311) This was a program of genocidal bombing with devastating delayed-action demographic impact - the "bomb now, die later" method employed in Iraq.
"I'M NOT GOING TG START WORLD WAR III FOR YOU"
Russia, now in the person of Chernomyrdin rather than ousted Primakov, was finally able to induce Milosevic to capitulate in early June. The Russian army, anxious to demonstrate solidarity with the Serbs, and resentful because of NATO attempts to deny Russia an occupation zone in Kosovo, on June 12 carried off a coup de main. They quickly shifted a couple of companies of armored vehicles to the airport in Pristina, a city in Kosovo not far from the border of Serbia proper. At this point General Wesley Clark (later Michael Moore's favorite presidential candidate in 2004) became frantic, and ordered the NATO ground commander, British General Sir Michael Jackson, to deny the Russians the use of the airport. There were reports that Russia was about to send a sky train of paratroopers to back up its demand. General Jackson flatly refused to carry out Clark's order, making the now-famous reply:
I'm not going to start the Third World War for you.
General Jackson later told the BBC: "We were [looking at] a possibility of confrontation with the Russian contingent which seemed to me probably not the right way to start off a relationship with Russians who were going to become part of my command." Clark planned to order British tanks and armored cars to block the runways to prevent any Russian transport planes from landing. Clark said he believed it was "an appropriate course of action." But the plan was again vetoed by Britain. Here was a second serious warning about world war. (BBC, March 9, 2000)
It is evident in retrospect that the Kosovo operation was a proxy war between the United States and Russia, in which the NATO mauling the Serb civilian population was supposed to illustrate to Russia the formidable military potential of the US-led alliance. The Pristina crisis cooled down, but US-Russian relations were dangerously strained. Milosevic had been indicted for war crimes in May 1999. As NATO troops streamed into defeated Serbia, they were accompanied by suitcases full of US dollars to be used by the National Endowment for Democracy to organize the overthrow of Milosevic, which duly followed in the spring of2000, when the dictator was toppled by a textbook CIA "people power" revolution. In mid-2001, a couple of months before 9/11, Milosevic was illegally kidnapped from Serbia and taken to stand trial at a kangaroo court in The Hague.
MAY 7, 1999: US BOMBS CHINESE EMBASSY
The Kosovo adventure ruined US relations with China as well. On May 7, a US stealth bomber destroyed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing a number of Chinese. This incident may have disrupted a potential agreement that might have ended the bombing a month earlier than turned out. The Chinese leadership orchestrated a vehement anti-US campaign, with mass demonstrations everywhere. Albright's deputy James Pickering flew to Beijing on June 16 to deliver the official US apology and claim the attack was an accident, but this was brusquely rejected by the Chinese government. Matters were complicated by the arrest of US scientist Wen Ho Lee, who had been charged in March with spying for China. On May 25, 1999, the Cox Committee of the: US House of Representatives delivered an exaggerated and provocative report about Chinese espionage in the US. US-Chinese relations were now dangerously strained.
This was followed by what some journalists saw as a possible brush with actual thermonuclear war between the US and Russia. The occasion was the mysterious sinking of the newest and most powerful Russian nuclear submarine, the Kursk, in the Barents Sea during maneuvers on August 12, 2000. Russian officials reported that there had been a NATO submarine in the area when the Kursk was lost. NATO denied any involvement. The Kursk had been launched in 1994. During the Cold War and well into the 1990s, the Barents Sea had been the scene of dangerous underwater cat-and-mouse games between the US and Russia, with hunter-killer subs trailing ballistic missile subs on each side. US and Russian subs had last collided in the Arctic Ocean on March 20, 1993, when the USS Grayling crashed into a Russian Delta III class ballistic missile sub carrying 16 SS-N18 submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) about 105 miles north of the Soviet fleet base at Murmansk, during what was alleged by the US to be a routine patrol. At that time the Russian Defense Ministry had stated that the "high command of the Russian military fleet expresses its extreme concern over the latest incident of dangerous maneuvering by foreign submarines in military training zones."
THE KURSK: "WORLD WAR III COULD HAVE BEGUN SATURDAY"
While American and European media have jumped the gun in attributing the Kursk sinking to onboard explosions, probably caused by a battery fire or torpedo detonation, the preponderance of evidence in fact suggests that the Kursk collided with another vessel -- a U.S. or British submarine, or drone vehicle -or, in the extreme case, was possibly hit by a torpedo. A commission of Russian Navy officers officially endorsed the finding that the Kursk had been destroyed by a collision with a foreign sub. The Kursk, with a crew of 118 sailors and officers, was found at the bottom of the Sea. The crew members were instantly killed in what Russian officials asserted was a collision with the second vessel. On August 21, the Russian news agency Interfax reported that Russian rescue workers had found a fragment of a submarine, "most likely British," near the Kursk. This followed earlier reports that emergency buoys, also identified as British, were seen floating near the collision site.
On August 22, 2000, Pravda.ru ran a story on the Kursk disaster under the headline: "World War III Could Have Begun on Saturday." According to this piece, "On Saturday, August 12, an incident occurred in the Barents Sea, where the Russian Federation's Northern Fleet was conducting exercises, which nearly led to the outbreak of full-scale combat--a third world war For several days the world hung by a thread, and one false political move could have led to an exchange of nuclear strikes." Citing hydroacoustical evidence of three explosions, "indicating the possibility that the Kursk had suffered a torpedo attack." Pravda.ru described the incident as a possible casus belli, but concluded, "Happily, the incident in the Barents Sea was successfully resolved by political means. Agreement to 'end the affair in peace' was reached during a telephone conversation between Vladimir Putin and Bill Clinton. The Presidents' conversation lasted 25 minutes, and nothing of its content was reported in the mass media." (New Federalist, August 28, 2000)
On August 22, John Helmer, a Moscow-based journalist who wrote for the Journal of Commerce and the Moscow Times, commented in the Singapore-based Straits Times that "the Russian sub drama looked like war at the start." Dismissing the hysterical Western media criticism of President Putin, who remained at the "vacation Kremlin" at Sochi, Helmer wrote, "If you were the ruler of Russia, and you were told late one night that one of your most powerful and secret submarine weapons had been hit bya mysterious explosion, and sent to the bottom without word from the crew, would it be prudent for you to suspect an attack? An attack by a nuclear superpower and old rival? And if it is your sworn duty to defend your country from attack, would it be reasonable for you to determine whether there was a cause for war, or an accident?" Also noteworthy was Putin's growing convergence with the former Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov, an advocate of a Eurasian perspective for Russia, who on August 23 delivered a strongly worded statement warning the West and the Russian oligarchs not to try to exploit the near-war crisis. (EIR, September 1, 2000)
The US claimed that an anti-submarine rocket fired from the Kursk had gotten jammed in a firing tube, causing the deadly explosion. But Russian authorities insisted that a foreign sub of the same general type as the Kursk had been present. As the US media were concerned, the Kursk crisis calmed down after a surprise visit to Moscow by CIA Director Tenet, but tensions between the two powers remained extreme. This is the immediate background to Vladimir Putin's telephone call to Bush on the morning of September 11, 2001.
THE NEOCONS ANTAGONIZE CHINA
The great neocon project of the late 1990s was that of a US confrontation with China. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations crisis cookbook had identified two challengers to Anglo-American world domination: the Moslems, because of their population growth, and China, because of its economic growth. Neocon thinking oscillates between these two as the more immediate threat. After the Taiwan straits confrontation of 1996, the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, the Wen Ho Lee case, the Cox report on alleged Chinese espionage, and the Chinagate accusations of Beijing funding for Clinton, US-Chinese relations were at a low ebb. As former US Ambassador to Beijing James Lilley pointed out, ":...there has been a dramatic change that is pervasive and, at times, ugly. After the Belgrade bombing accident in May of 1999, we saw the full face of anger, hostility, and even hate on the faces of the Chinese attacking our embassy." Lilley went on in a threatening tone: "If China continues to expand its military parameters, it will encounter our power. China can avoid this confrontation by buying into economic globalization, and lowering nationalistic tensions. To do otherwise is to risk tearing down the who le structure." (Newsweek, April 16, 2001)
The good will expressed towards the US by the Chinese students in Tien An Men Square in 1989 had completely dissipated, and was replaced by loathing -- well before 9/11 and Iraq. Something similar had happened in Russia and elsewhere -- also before 9/11.
Bush's first months in office were dominated by an incident involving the mid-air collision between a US EP-3E Aries II spy plane and a Chinese F-8 fighter jet just off the coast of China near the main base of the Chinese South Sea Fleet in Zhangjiang.. Here US planes on electronic surveillance missions had long been regularly buzzed and harassed by Chinese interceptors. During one such encounter the Chinese fighter collided with the larger and slower US plane; the Chinese jet crashed and the pilot was lost, while the US plane had to make an emergency landing at a Chinese airport on Hainan Island. The plane and its crew of 19 were detained for a couple of weeks before being returned to the US. The Chinese demanded a formal apology, which the pugnacious Bush administration was reluctant to make. The Chinese press ran pictures of the downed US spy plane with headlines reading "Proof of Bullying," and contemptuous attacks on "Little Bush." Chinese internet chatrooms buzzed with talk of imminent war; "Are you ready? This is war," said one posting. The neocon Weekly Standard headlined its story about the Hainan incident " A National Humiliation," and authors William Kristol and Robert Kagan, both prominent chickenhawk warmongers, accused the newly installed Bush 43 of "weakness" in handling the affair. The neocons were disturbed by Colin Powell's reliance on diplomacy to get back the plane and crew for the US, and especially by the attitude of the US business community, which was more interested in profitable deals than in seconding the neocons' distorted view of national honor. (Newsweek April 16, 2001) The whole experience was an object lesson to the neocon clique and the military provocateurs. For eight years they had writhed in bitterness because of Clinton's sane reluctance to resort to military force. Now, after the tremendous effort required to put Bush into the White House, the result was not much more satisfactory. We can safely assume that neocons and provocateurs drew the obvious lessons: that they must begin thinking along more grandiose lines, and planning for an outside event several orders of magnitude greater than any attempted thus far.
Tensions increased elsewhere as well. During the 1990s, Moscow and Beijing were repeatedly and pointedly reminded of the presence of an aggressive faction inside the US government and military which was intent on provoking periodic incidents to exacerbate tensions among the major powers. From Kosovo to Belgrade, from the Barents Sea to the South China Sea, from Iraq to Somalia, this aggressive faction had provoked clashes, manufactured pretexts for intervention, and fought a proxy war near the heart of Europe. The 1990s were anything but idyllic; they were a period of escalating economic and strategic crisis. The sympathetic interest in US life seen in 1989-1991 in Russia and China had by mid-2001 been replaced by overwhelming hostility. At the same time, the aggressive and adventurous network inside the US government was deeply dissatisfied with their own failure to achieve decisive results. Every passing year brought population increases throughout the Moslem world, and 10-15% economic growth rates to China, while the US real economy (apart from Wall Street's paper swindles) continued to stagnate. Like the British contemplating German economic growth in 1905-1907, the US war faction concluded that a long period of world peace could only result in the further relative decline of the US. To create the political preconditions for what they wanted to do, the US war party therefore began to feel an overwhelming need to become the party of synthetic terror.
The groundwork for the aggressive and terror-based consensus at the end of the 1990s had been laid starting in March 1992, when Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the Pentagon's Under Secretary for Policy submitted his long-term Defense Planning Guidance to then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. As the press wrote at that time, the Pentagon policy paper asserted "that America's political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the former Soviet Union." The role of the UN would dwindle to insignificance, the paper indicated, and US unilateral action would dominate the world. Wolfowitz's plan also stressed "using military force, if necessary, to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in such countries as North Korea, Iraq, some of the successor republics to the Soviet Union and in Europe." Direct nuclear blackmail of Russia was also prominent; the Wolfowitz document underlined that American strategic nuclear weapons would continue to target vital aspects of the former Soviet military establishment. The rationale for this targeting policy was that the United States "must continue to hold at risk those assets and capabilities that current -- and future -- Russian leaders or other nuclear adversaries value most" because Russia would remain "the only power in the world with the capability of destroying the United States." The essence of US policy was seen in intimidation, "convincing potential competitions that they need not aspire to a greater role," thus guaranteeing that no rival superpower would be allowed to emerge. (The New York Times, March 8, 1992)
Richard Perle later elaborated an aggressive strategy for Israeli politician Beniamin Netanyahu known as the "Clean Break" policy, which was based on rejecting a negotiated peace with Arabs and Palestinians in favor of endless war. Brzezinski's 1997 Grand Chessboard touted the benefits of US meddling central Asia for geopolitical reasons; this study was similar in spirit to the Karl Haushofer's 1934 Weltpolitik von heute, the manual of Nazi geopolitics. But how to manipulate the American people into accepting the burdens and human losses associated with such meddling? Brzezinski, a petty Polish aristocrat, replied: "The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor." (Brzezinski 24-25)
An even more explicit call for US world domination came from the Project for a New American Century, a neocon movement that provided most of the top officials for the Bush 43 administration. After discussing their imperialist plans, the PNAC authors, led by chickenhawk William Kristol, focused on the way of duping the American people into supporting the raft of new foreign adventures: "... the process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor." (PNAC, September 2000) It is in this restless mood, desirous of a new global conflict to pre-empt the emergence of challengers to a new Anglo-American world order, viewing the democratic system as unresponsive to their elitist warmongering, and eager for the assistance that a spectacular external attack would bring, that the roots of 9/11 are to be sought.
_______________
Notes:
2. US National Security Council, "Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests," National Security Study Memorandum 200, December 10, 1974. This document posited a "special US political and strategic interest" in population reduction or limitation in many developing sector nations because of potential competition with the US for access to natural resources and raw materials. This amounted to a strategy of thinly veiled genocide, and facilitated US support for the murderous Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.