Wednesday’s SMNO is ready. I needed to do a little research into the neoconservative movement; from the looks of their website, the Project for the New American Century has gone into hiding.
One thing I don’t mention in tomorrow’s column is the Bush Doctrine. That builds on the others, and adds the policy of preventive war.
In 1989, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, George H.W. Bush used the Carter Doctrine (“an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force,” in the words of President Carter) to justify the First Iraq War. Force was used, but only to the degree that Kuwait was liberated and Iraq suitably defanged.
Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense under Bush 41. In 2000, he was given the responsibility of finding someone to run with George W. Bush as the Republican Vice Presidential candidate. Eventually, he found himself.
Shortly after taking office, Bush 43 made Vice President Cheney chairman of the Energy Task Force that was supposed to develop an energy policy for the Bush administration. Whatever the Energy Task Force did, much of it was never disclosed to the public. Democrats and environmental groups have tried unsuccessfully to find out who was involved and what was decided. Their concern was that the nation’s energy policy was being decided by corporate interests like Enron and Big Oil.
In 2002, the Commerce Department released some of the material. It includes maps and details of oil fields and projects in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Is it possible that the national energy policy decided upon by the Energy Task Force included a full understanding of Peak Oil and a long-term plan to establish a military presence in the Persian Gulf in order to secure our supply of oil?
The Bush Doctrine, which came about after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, stated that the US had the right to treat countries that harbored terrorists as terrorists themselves, and included a policy of preemptive war.
“I will not wait on events, while dangers gather,” Bush 43 said during his State of the Union speech in January, 2002. “I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”
Nor, apparently, will the US permit other nations to threaten the flow of our national interest. It could be that the most destructive weapon held by our enemies is oil.
Wow, your piece grazes the surface of a very long story that runs in many directions.
I’m researching a piece that deals with Manucher Ghorbanifar, and Pentagon, Larry Franklin, and Harold Rhode that ties into the Feith/Addington/Cheney (and Michael Ledeen) alternate intel shop which was primarily responsible for the bogus intel that excused our invasion of Iraq. As such it also ties to Italian SISMI and the Niger forgeries.
It gets pretty deep, Ghorbanifar worked with Ledeen on Iran/Contra, was tied into shady arms supplying, and was also working for Iran at the time (and probably still was during the march to war in Iraq.) It also ties to AIPAC and secret intel that was stolen from the US, given to AIPAC and from there given to Israel (and for which folks have now gone to jail.)
Clearly there are very strong ties between Israeli Likudniks and US Neo-Cons and the intel shop set up in the Pentagon by Cheney’s team was also working intel on Iran. It probably also ties (since it was a Cheney project all the way) to the Energy Task Force and may well fit into your speculation as to what happened during that meeting (personally I think they just wanted the oil and “Peak” was not a very big part of there motivating factor.)
Like I said its a big piece, gonna take a while, but its timely in that while it was buried long ago (a Pentagon counter-intell unit was looking at all this when their investigation was shut down in ’03 after only a month by Stephen Cambone, another Cheney agent, it has recently resurfaced in a Senate Intell Committee report.
The bomb shell in that report was that ““Pentagon officials might have been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service … to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government”. The implication here is that, while Cheney and the boys were gathering bogus intel to get us into war it now appears that there is a good chance that the guys they were getting the intel from were agents being run by Iran.
Interesting stuff! (and very impeachable)