October 14, 2005
In Nalchik, a Caucasus backwater situated in Kabardino-Balkariy, a
southern Russia province, "Islamic militants launched a major attack on
police and government buildings… turning the city into a war zone
wracked by gunfire and explosions. At least 49 people, including 25
militants, were killed… [and] Chechen rebels claimed responsibility for
the offensive," according to the St. Petersburg Times.
Last year Islamic "Chechen rebels" attacked police armories and killed
nearly a hundred people in the Caucasus republic of Ingushetia and
"separatists and extremists" nearly assassinated Murat Zyazikov, the
pro-Kremlin president of the region bordering Chechnya.
On
the surface, this would appear to be more horrific Islamic violence,
hardly uncommon in Russia’s Islamic provinces, yet another incident of
jihadist madness. However, when the neocons stake their interest in the
world, particularly in the Middle East and Asia, Muslim violence
invariably follows.
Consider, for instance, the American
Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC), billed as "the only private,
non-governmental organization in North America exclusively dedicated to
promoting the peaceful resolution of the Russo-Chechen war," explains
the ACPC website.
"Chaired by former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski [a
former CFR board of directors member], former Secretary of State
Alexander M. Haig, Jr. and former Congressman Stephen J. Solarz, the
committee is composed of more than one hundred distinguished [neocon
and neolib] Americans representing both major political parties and
nearly every walk of life," including no shortage of Straussians from
the American Enterprise Institute, the Freedom House (chaired by the
"world war four" proponent and former CIA director, James Woolsey), the
neolib Jamestown Foundation, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (a
long-time CIA psychological warfare outfit), and the perennial
warmongering RAND Corporation (a confluence of Ford, Rockefeller, and
Carnegie foundation money and conniving globalist agendas).
In
other words, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s ACPC is no friend to besieged
Chechens or the ethnically diverse people of the Caucasus region. ACPC,
however, is a friend to multinational corporations hankering to build
"a variety of pipelines traversing various countries" in the region, as
Brzezinski
writes, a project that would "involve some accommodation among the
principal neighboring states," Iran in particular. It should also be
noted that Brzezinski was at one time a paid Amoco consultant,
"advising the firm on Caspian oil matters," according to Lenora Foerstel.
It is not strictly peace and harmony that piques Brzezinski’s interest.
"The Eurasian Balkans hold an enormous concentration of natural gas and
oil reserves as well as important minerals, including gold," notes
Foerstel. For Brzezinski, "the Eurasian Balkans" encompasses a huge
area between the Eastern shore of the Black Sea to China, which
includes the Caspian Sea and its petroleum resources.
Brzezinski’s
apparently life-long animosity directed against Russia is no secret and
he sketches out his plan to free (or open up for exploitation) "the
Eurasian Balkans" in his "geopolitical" treatise, The Grand Chessboard.
In the book, Brzezinski portrays Russia and China as adversaries who
are likely to get in the way of exploiting the oil and mineral rich
region for the sake of western multinationals. "[I]t is imperative that
no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus
of also challenging America," writes Brzezinski. "For America, the
chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia… Now a non-Eurasian power is
preeminent in Eurasia—and America’s global primacy is directly
dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the
Eurasian continent is sustained." But for Brzezinski and the oil-hungry
neolibs and their neocon kissing cousins, the American people are too
wimpish for "global primacy" and the militarization and sacrifice such
hegemonic behavior requires:
America is too
democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of
America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation.
Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy.
But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion,
except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s
sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is,
defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among
professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to
democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.
Since
the "Eurasian Balkans" are "infinitely more important as a potential
economic prize," considering the "enormous concentration of natural gas
and oil reserves… in addition to important minerals, including gold"
waiting to be exploited, and democracy "is inimical to imperial
mobilization" (as Iraq has sufficiently demonstrated), Brzezinski’s war
must be fought on another, somewhat less obvious front—through the
increasing application of Islamic terrorism.
Brzezinski is
hardly a neophyte when it comes to employing Muslims to do his dirty
work. As U.S. National Security Adviser during the Carter
administration, Brzezinski was in large part responsible for the
"propaganda campaign and… covert action campaign to help the [Afghan]
rebels" fight against the Soviets, who entered the country to assist
their puppet regime in Kabul in response to "rebel" attacks against the
government (see U.S. Memos on Afghanistan: From Brzezinski to President Carter).
In fact, Brzezinski stirred up "geopolitical" trouble in Afghanistan
well before the Soviet intervention. "According to the official version
of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to
say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979," Brzezinski bragged
to the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur on January 15-21, 1998.
"But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise:
Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first
directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in
Kabul. And that very day, I 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." A decision to expand the project
followed a meeting of the NSC Special Coordinating Committee on
December 17, 1979. As John Prados
notes, "the inception of the CIA project in Afghanistan preceded the
Soviet intervention, with three motorized and airborne divisions and
other units, that came on December 25, 1979."
"For 17 years,
Washington poured $4bn into the pockets of some of the most brutal men
on earth—with the overall aim of exhausting and ultimately destroying
the Soviet Union in a futile war," John Pilger
writes. "One of them, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord particularly
favored by the CIA, received tens of millions of dollars. His
speciality was trafficking opium and throwing acid in the faces of
women who refused to wear the veil. In 1994…" Brzezinski’s plan to take
down the Soviet Union in Afghanistan resulted in the amassing of a
large and motley army of Islamic fanatics from various countries.
Pilger continues:
CIA
director William Casey had given his backing to a plan put forward by
Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, to recruit people from around
the world to join the Afghan jihad. More than 100,000 Islamic militants
were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992, in camps overseen by
the CIA and MI6, with the SAS training future al-Qaida and Taliban
fighters in bomb-making and other black arts. Their leaders were
trained at a CIA camp in Virginia [Camp Peary, the CIA’s spy training
camp]. This was called Operation Cyclone and continued long after the
Soviets had withdrawn in 1989.
Of course, the
official history of this massive operation—billed as the CIA’s most
successful—contends that Osama bin Laden was incidental, a small and
insignificant player at best. "Since September 11, CIA officials have
been claiming they had no direct link to bin Laden," explains Phil Gasper,
a professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame de Namur University. "These
denials lack credibility. Earlier this year [2001], the trial of
defendants accused of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombing in Kenya disclosed
that the CIA shipped high-powered sniper rifles directly to bin Laden’s
operation in 1989. Even the Tennessee-based manufacturer of the rifles
confirmed this," as did a report published in the Boston Globe:
Some military analysts and specialists on the weapons trade say the CIA
has spent years covering its tracks on its early ties to the Afghan
forces…. Despite the ClA’s denials, these experts say it was inevitable
that the military training in guerrilla tactics and the vast reservoir
of money and arms that the CIA provided in Afghanistan would have ended
up helping bin Laden and his forces during the 1980s.
More
to the point, as Abdel Monam Saidali, of the al-Aram Center for
Strategic Studies in Cairo, notes, Osama bin Laden and the so-called
"Afghan Arabs" received "very sophisticated types of training that was
allowed to them by the CIA" (See Weekend Sunday (NPR); Eric Weiner, Ted
Clark; 16 August 1998; also see Michel Chossudovsky,
Who Is Osama Bin Laden?) "The Americans were keen to teach the Afghans
the techniques of urban terrorism—car bombing and so on—so that they
could strike at the Russians in major towns… Many of them are now using
their knowledge and expertise to wage war on everything they hate," Tom
Carew, a former British SAS soldier who secretly fought for the
mujaheddin, told the British Observer on August 13, 2000 (see Norm Dixon,
How the CIA created Osama bin Laden). "In an August 28, 1998, report
posted on MSNBC, Michael Moran quotes Senator Orrin Hatch, who was a
senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee which approved US
dealings with the mujaheddin, as saying he would make 'the same call
again’, even knowing what bin Laden would become," writes Dixon.
In
fact, as the evidence reveals, the U.S. did make "the same call again"
and used "al-Qaeda" for various operations in the Balkans and Chechnya
(see Marina Domazetovska,
Al Qaeda and NATO Join Hands in supporting NLA Terrorists in Macedonia,
Aktuel Weekly, Skopje, 3 March 2002). "Mujahideens of all sorts, Jihad
fighters, bin Laden’s followers and similar mercenaries of the
distorted and abused Islam are not news on the Balkans," reported
Nevenka Mitrevska (Who Imported Hesbolah in Macedonia, Start, volume
113, March 23, 2001. pp. 6-9; see previous link). "They fought in
Bosnia, on the side of Alija Izetbegovic’s army, trained in bin Laden’s
camps in Tropoja and Bajram Curi in northern Albania and made
incursions in Kosovo to help their KLA 'brothers’ in the fight against
'infidels’" in Macedonia. "Osama bin Ladens’s terrorist groups most
easily encroached on the Balkans through Albania and today they are
present in Kosovo and Macedonia," the former Macedonian interior
minister Pavle Trajanov revealed in an interview with A1 Television
(again, see previous link).
"Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda
terrorist network has been active in the Balkans for years, most
recently helping Kosovo rebels battle for independence from Serbia with
the financial and military backing of the United States and NATO," Isabel Vincent
reported for the National Post. "The arrival in the Balkans of the
so-called Afghan Arabs, who are from various Middle Eastern states and
linked to al-Qaeda, began in 1992 soon after the war in Bosnia.
According to Lenard Cohen, professor of political science at Simon
Fraser University, mujahedeen fighters who travelled to Afghanistan to
resist the Soviet occupation in the 1980s later "migrated to Bosnia
hoping to assist their Islamic brethren in a struggle against Serbian
[and for a time] Croatian forces…. The United States, which had
originally trained the Afghan Arabs during the war in Afghanistan,
supported them in Bosnia and then in Kosovo. When NATO forces launched
their military campaign against Yugoslavia three years ago to unseat
Mr. Milosevic, they entered the Kosovo conflict on the side of the KLA,
which had already received ’substantial’ military and financial support
from bin Laden’s network, analysts say."
According to Yossef
Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congress’s Task Force on Terrorism and
Unconventional Warfare, "al-Qaeda," the ISI-CIA-MI6-NATO terrorism
contrivance is well-established in Chechnya and "goes far beyond
supplying the Chechens with weapons and expertise: the ISI and its
radical Islamic proxies are actually calling the shots in this war"
(Levon Sevunts, Who’s calling the shots?: Chechen conflict finds
Islamic roots in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 23 The Gazette, Montreal, 26
October 1999, ibid. Chossudovsky, link above). "Russia’s main pipeline
route transits through Chechnya and Dagestan. Despite Washington’s
perfunctory condemnation of Islamic terrorism, the indirect
beneficiaries of the Chechen war are the Anglo-American oil
conglomerates which are vying for control over oil resources and
pipeline corridors out of the Caspian Sea basin," notes Chossudovsky.
In
Chechnya, "the main rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab were
trained and indoctrinated in CIA sponsored camps in Afghanistan and
Pakistan," according to Chossudovsky. As Basayev told Mikhail Shevelev
of the Moscow Times, he "will not spare anyone and will be ready to
cooperate with the [Russian] GRU or the CIA or the devil himself….
Basayev is not a person but a function. If he is killed, his place will
be taken by other Chechens or Ingush—it does not matter who. They will
be less bright but just as ambitious and therefore even more brutal,"
as the horror of the Beslan school hostage crisis on the first of
September, 2004, revealed. As Jim Lobe
writes, "Moscow’s counterinsurgency efforts should be reassessed in
light of alleged ties between Chechen rebels and the Al-Qaeda network,"
a connection noted by the Christian Science Monitor when it reported
"Ties between Chechen rebels and [Mujihadeen forces] stretch back to
the first Chechen war (1994 to 1996)" (Al-Qaeda among the Chechens,
Christian Science Monitor, 7 September 2004). "By 1999, when Chechen
warlord Shamil Basayev invaded Russian territory in Dagestan—prompting
a second war—it became clear that Islamic radicals dominated Chechen
rebel groups."
In the current context, where there is
Islamic terrorism, there are shadowy indications of the CIA or
affiliated (or possibly competing) intelligence operatives and
operations. For instance, On March 23 of this year, "Field commander
Rizvan Chitigov [was]… killed in Chechnya during a raid carried out by
pro-Moscow security forces and the republic’s Interior Ministry troops,
the Itar-Tass news agency cited the republic’s first deputy prime
minister Ramzan Kadyrov," reported MosNews.
"The FSB, Russia’s domestic security service, suspected that Chitigov
had been maintaining ties with foreign intelligence services and was
himself a CIA agent, former FSB spokesman Aleksandr Zdanovich said in
April 2001…. According to some reports, Chitigov had a green card—a
permanent residence permit in the U.S."
Of course, it would
be foolish to put all our eggs in one basket, so to speak, and believe
everything the Russian FSB (Federal Security Bureau) tells us. However,
this is not the only rumored (and demonstrated) incident of CIA, ISI,
MI6, etc., involvement in terrorist activity, as noted and documented
above and elsewhere, information relatively easy to come by if one
wants to spend an afternoon searching various sources on the web,
including "mainstream" news and information sources.
Certainly,
the sudden outburst of violence in and surrounding Nalchik,
Kabardino-Balkaria, will "raise fears that the militancy once confined
to Chechnya has spread across the region," as the Guardian
reports. "Kavkaz.org, a Chechen militant website, said it had been
emailed by Chechen separatists called the Caucasus Front who claimed
responsibility for the operation alongside a local jamaat—militant
Islamic council—called Yarmuk" (note: as of this writing, the mentioned
web site returns an "under construction" page).
As appears
obvious, the Brzezinski Terror Doctrine is at work in the Caucasus,
where large reserves of oil and gas (including the Caspian basin) wait
to be exploited in a replay of the "Great Game," the 19th-century
imperial rivalry between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia for
control of the Eurasian landmass and its oil and mineral wealth. It
should be noted that the neocons have taken sides, and have for some
time—in "August [2004], the ACPC welcomed the award of political asylum
in the US, and a US-government funded grant, to Ilyas Akhmadov, foreign
minister in the opposition Chechen government, and a man Moscow
describes as a terrorist. Coming from both political parties, the ACPC
members represent the backbone of the US foreign policy establishment,
and their views are indeed those of the US administration," the Guardian reported.
In
addition to destabilizing the region, the recent violence once again
sends the message, broadcast with sensational imagery and dramatic
reports by way of the corporate media, that fanatical Muslims continue
to pose a threat, from London to Bali and the Caucasus and beyond,
violence we are told by our rulers will eventually reach our shores,
thus reminding us that if we remain "too democratic at home," as
Brzezinski observed, we risk the possibility of losing the "war against
terrorism" and our freedom—never mind that Bush and crew are busy at
work decimating the latter.
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