DRUG-FINANCED SALAFI JIHADISM: The Afghan Drug Trade, threat to Russia and U.S.-Russian Relations
What particularly concerns me is the relative absence of public response in America to a long-term Pentagon-CIA agenda of aggressive military expansion... No doubt many Americans may think that a global pax Americana will secure a period of peace, much like the pax Romana of two millennia ago. I myself am confident that it will not: rather, like the imperfect pax Britannica of a century ago, it will lead inevitably to a major conflict, possibly another nuclear war... few in America seem to care about Washington’s global domination project. We have seen critical examination of why America fought in Vietnam, and even the American involvement in the Indonesian massacre of 1965. Chomsky and Bill Blum have chronicled America’s criminal acts since World War II. But only a few, like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich, have written about the consolidation of a war machine that now dominates America’s political processes...
The U.S. dollar, weakening as it is, still depends largely on the OPEC policy of demanding U.S. dollars for payment of OPEC oil. Just how strongly America will enforce this OPEC policy can be seen by the fate of those countries that have chosen to challenge it. “Saddam Hussein in 2000 insisted Iraq's oil be sold for euros, a political move, but one that improved Iraq's recent earnings thanks to the rise in the value of the euro against the dollar."[9] Three years later, in March 2003, America invaded Iraq. Two months after that, on May 22, 2003, Bush by executive order decreed that Iraqi oil sales would be returned from euros to dollars. Shortly before the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, Qaddafi, according to a Russian article, initiated a movement, like Saddam Hussein’s, to refuse the dollar for oil payments. Meanwhile Iran, in February 2009, announced that it had “completely stopped conducting oil transactions in U.S. dollars.” The full consequences of Iran’s daring move have yet to be seen...
I repeat: every recent U.S. and NATO intervention has served to prop up the waning dominance of western oil companies over the global oil and petrodollar system. But I believe that oil companies themselves are capable of initiating or at least contributing to political interventions. As I say in my book. There are recurring allegations that US oil companies, either directly or through cutouts, engage in covert operations; in Colombia (as we shall see) a US security firm working for Occidental Petroleum took part in a Colombian army military operation "that mistakenly killed 18 civilians.” More relevant to Russia was a 2002 covert operation in Azerbaijan, a classic exercise in deep politics. There former CIA operatives, employed by a dubious oil firm (MEGA Oil), “engaged in military training, passed ‘brown bags filled with cash’ to members of the government, and set up an airline…which soon was picking up hundreds of mujahideen mercenaries in Afghanistan.”These mercenaries, eventually said to number 2000, were initially used to combat Russian-backed Armenian forces in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh; but they also backed Muslim fighters in Chechnya and Dagestan. They also contributed to the establishment of Baku as a transshipment point for Afghan heroin to both the Russian urban market and also the Chechen mafia.
In 1993 they also contributed to the ouster of Azerbaijan’s elected first president, Abulfaz Elchibey, and his replacement by Heidar Aliyev, who then agreed to a major oil contract with BP, including what eventually became the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline to Turkey. Note that the U.S. background of the MEGA Oil operatives is unmistakable. However who financed MEGA is unclear; and may have been the oil majors, many of which have or have had their own covert services. There are allegations that major oil corporations, including Exxon and Mobil as well as BP, were “behind the coup d’état” replacing Elchibey with Aliyev. It is clear that Washington and the oil majors have a common perception that their survival depends on maintaining their present dominance of international oil markets. In the 1990s, when it was widely believed that the world’s largest unproven reserves of hydrocarbons lay in the Caspian basin of Central Asia, this region became the central focus for both corporate U.S. petroinvestment and also for U.S. security expansion. Clinton’s close friend Strobe Talbott, speaking as Deputy Secretary of State, attempted to put forward a reasonable strategy for this expansion. In an important speech of July 21, 1997.. Read more:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31008
The U.S. dollar, weakening as it is, still depends largely on the OPEC policy of demanding U.S. dollars for payment of OPEC oil. Just how strongly America will enforce this OPEC policy can be seen by the fate of those countries that have chosen to challenge it. “Saddam Hussein in 2000 insisted Iraq's oil be sold for euros, a political move, but one that improved Iraq's recent earnings thanks to the rise in the value of the euro against the dollar."[9] Three years later, in March 2003, America invaded Iraq. Two months after that, on May 22, 2003, Bush by executive order decreed that Iraqi oil sales would be returned from euros to dollars. Shortly before the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, Qaddafi, according to a Russian article, initiated a movement, like Saddam Hussein’s, to refuse the dollar for oil payments. Meanwhile Iran, in February 2009, announced that it had “completely stopped conducting oil transactions in U.S. dollars.” The full consequences of Iran’s daring move have yet to be seen...
I repeat: every recent U.S. and NATO intervention has served to prop up the waning dominance of western oil companies over the global oil and petrodollar system. But I believe that oil companies themselves are capable of initiating or at least contributing to political interventions. As I say in my book. There are recurring allegations that US oil companies, either directly or through cutouts, engage in covert operations; in Colombia (as we shall see) a US security firm working for Occidental Petroleum took part in a Colombian army military operation "that mistakenly killed 18 civilians.” More relevant to Russia was a 2002 covert operation in Azerbaijan, a classic exercise in deep politics. There former CIA operatives, employed by a dubious oil firm (MEGA Oil), “engaged in military training, passed ‘brown bags filled with cash’ to members of the government, and set up an airline…which soon was picking up hundreds of mujahideen mercenaries in Afghanistan.”These mercenaries, eventually said to number 2000, were initially used to combat Russian-backed Armenian forces in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh; but they also backed Muslim fighters in Chechnya and Dagestan. They also contributed to the establishment of Baku as a transshipment point for Afghan heroin to both the Russian urban market and also the Chechen mafia.
In 1993 they also contributed to the ouster of Azerbaijan’s elected first president, Abulfaz Elchibey, and his replacement by Heidar Aliyev, who then agreed to a major oil contract with BP, including what eventually became the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline to Turkey. Note that the U.S. background of the MEGA Oil operatives is unmistakable. However who financed MEGA is unclear; and may have been the oil majors, many of which have or have had their own covert services. There are allegations that major oil corporations, including Exxon and Mobil as well as BP, were “behind the coup d’état” replacing Elchibey with Aliyev. It is clear that Washington and the oil majors have a common perception that their survival depends on maintaining their present dominance of international oil markets. In the 1990s, when it was widely believed that the world’s largest unproven reserves of hydrocarbons lay in the Caspian basin of Central Asia, this region became the central focus for both corporate U.S. petroinvestment and also for U.S. security expansion. Clinton’s close friend Strobe Talbott, speaking as Deputy Secretary of State, attempted to put forward a reasonable strategy for this expansion. In an important speech of July 21, 1997.. Read more:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31008
