Political Crossfire Forums

[Norrin Radd]

MG1962 wrote: Quote: I have been sick for the last week, actually longer, but I am starting to get better.



Welcome back dude - Was wondering where my favorite jousting partner was. See ya when ya gets bettter

Thanks, I will try to be less childish with you as well.

[Norrin Radd]

MG1962 wrote: Quote: The government might've been the shadow hand behind al Qaeda for all we know. It's common knowledge that at one point Osama worked for and was funded by CIA

And that common knowledge is wrong as has been proven endlessly. Bin Laden's group was not financed

There were 11 groups in Afghanistan opperating against the Soviets. Only 9 recieved funding

So where is your evidence?

Here is one little tidbit you might find interesting........

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Salad Days with the Muj

Having done such a bang up job at the Trilaterals, Jimmy Carter appointed Zbig National Security Advisor in 1977. He was reliably the most hawkish member of Carter's foreign policy team. For the sake of brevity and impact, we'll touch on Zbig's under-appreciated foreign policy legacy in Afghanistan in the late 1970s.

Robert Gates, career spook and Bush I's CIA Director, in his memoir From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insiders Story of How Five Presidents Won the Cold War, relates a few interesting anecdotes. As many Democrats now love to point out, the Reagan administration is generally 'credited' with 'liberating' Afghanistan from the vile, secular, deterrence-minded forces of Allah-less Communism. In actual fact, Osama's Army got up and running under the watchful eye of Mr. Habitat for Humanity and Zbig. Per an approving Gates:

"The Carter administration began looking at the possibility of covert assistance to the insurgents opposing the pro-Soviet, Marxist government of President Taraki at the beginning of 1979… [i.e. nearly a year prior to the Soviet invasion]

From Pakistan, [where he paid an infamous visit, as we will see below, in February 1980] Brzezinski went on to Saudi Arabia, where he cemented the arrangement that the Saudis would match the U. S. contribution to the Mujahedin…

The last act on Afghanistan in the Carter administration was a meeting between [CIA Director Stansfield] Turner and Brzezinski on October 19, where the latter complained 'over and over' that he didn't think CIA was providing enough arms to the insurgents and wanted the Agency to increase the flow. Back at the Agency, the Director of Central Intelligence said that he sympathized with this point of view and wanted to be able to reassure Brzezinski when they next met that CIA was pushing everything through the pipeline that the Pakistanis were willing to receive."

One CIA colleague of Mr. Gates was Milton Bearden, who served as station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, where he was the point man for providing military and training support to Osama & Co. He quotes Zbig in a lengthy 2001 piece for the periodical of the Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Affairs.

"We know of their deep belief in God and we are confident that their struggle will succeed. That land over there is yours. You will go back to it one day, because your fight will prevail and you'll have your homes and your mosques back again, because your cause is right and God is on your side."

Bearden further relates the atmospherics of this pep talk for the proto-Northern Alliance, Taliban and al Qaeda.

"In January 1980, Carter sent his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, for consultations with Pakistani leaders who were already supporting the Afghan resistance. On a side trip from Islamabad, Brzezinski traveled the length of the Khyber Pass to the outpost at Michni Point, where he was photographed squinting along the sights of a Soviet AK-47 assault rifle, its muzzle elevated and pointing into Afghanistan. In that moment, the president's national security adviser became the symbol of the impending U.S. phase of involvement in Afghanistan's endless martial history."

Having had the benefit of nearly two decades of hindsight, Zbig gave an uncharacteristically exuberant interview to Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998. This widely reported exchange will be concisely related here. Not only did Zbig cop to presiding over the start of American collaboration with the evildoers, he further "wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention…we didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would." The interview concluded thus:

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

Zbig: Regret what? That the secret operation was an excellent idea? It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic radicals having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Zbig: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

Zbig: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries."

Zbig's flippancy is breathtaking considering that he is describing the intentional manufacture of a war which eventually devastated an entire country, killed over 1 million people and by 1998 had unambiguously turned Afghanistan into a fundamentalist hell hole and terrorist haven. (This repugnant rhetoric recalls Kissinger's remark concerning the Iran-Iraq War; another bloody conflict costing over 1 million lives whose launch by Saddam Hussein was not condemned and likely tacitly backed by the Carter Administration. "Can't they both lose?" was Kissinger's cheeky aside once the war had stalemated in the mid-1980s.) There are, let us not kid ourselves, millions of Muslims and Arabs, some of them potential al-Qaeda recruits perhaps, who remember such things and many other American government-sponsored duplicities besides.

The Oracle of Empire…

In 1997 Zbig wrote his a fascinating foreign policy analysis called The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. It is here that Zbig lays out American claims to the "Eurasian Balkans." This "global zone of percolating violence," comprises the Middle East and Central Asia, precisely the 27-country region in which American troops and materiel are now deployed in fully fourteen states (Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and Pakistan). We may rest assured that our troops were sent to the latter six lands only to fight terrorism after 9/11.

In Chapter 5, Zbig starts off by noting that, certainly in the post-Cold War world, in Turkey, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula "American power is the ultimate arbiter." The Eurasian Balkans, however, differ "in one particularly significant way: they are a power vacuum...and a power suction." Lying as they do "astride the inevitably emerging transportation network meant to link more directly Eurasia's richest and most industrious western and eastern extremities…they are [also] of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to…Russia, Turkey and Iran."

Meanwhile, in the background stand China and the United States. That said, the Eurasian Balkans "are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves…dwarf[ing] those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea." Given that world energy consumption "will rise by more than half between 1993 and 2015…massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy" is bound to mount. When considering the stakes, "access to that resource and sharing in its potential wealth represent objectives that stir national ambitions, motivate corporate interests, rekindle historical claims, revive imperial aspirations, and fuel international rivalries." Plus, we've got to get the evildoers.

Zbig then returns to one of his favorite topics: Afghanistan. This abettor of the modern political jihad remarks blandly, "Afghanistan's current state of disarray is likewise a Soviet legacy…" We find that "the jihad against the Russians occupiers" somehow resulted in "an Islamic revival" which will be "determined to oppose any reintegration under Russian [one might imagine, in the current context, the same might be said for American] control."

As clearly and brazenly as Zbig articulates his position, it is imperative to realize that for the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus, his vision is actually less ambitious than that of the Bush administration. He concludes the chapter with this. "It follows that America's primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it." This "geopolitical pluralism" would assure that the United States would preside over a system in which a variety of multinational corporations would exploit the regional energy supply, although not necessarily backed by military muscle on the ground. In short, Zbig and his realist liberal friends want to dominate with a multilateral veneer while Bush and his neoconservative backers have no problem dominating unilaterally. This distinction without a difference is also known as "democratic choice."

…And His Neoconservative Fellow Travelers

In September of 2002, based on the excellent reporting of Neil Mackay, writing in Scotland'sSunday Herald, we find the following.

"A secret blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure 'regime change' even before he took power in January 2001.

"The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a 'global Pax Americana' was drawn up for Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, George W Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources For A New Century," was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

"The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says: 'The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.'

"The PNAC document supports a 'blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.'"

This line of thought is further confirmed by a September 4th CBS News report by David Martin.

"CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq — even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks…

"With the intelligence all pointing toward bin Laden, Rumsfeld ordered the military to begin working on strike plans. And at 2:40 p.m., the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted 'best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H.' - meaning Saddam Hussein - 'at same time. Not only UBL' - the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden.

Now, nearly one year later, there is still very little evidence Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. But if these notes are accurate, that didn't matter to Rumsfeld.

'Go massive,' the notes quote him as saying. 'Sweep it all up. Things related and not.'"

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