'Fight Smart' Update - 23 May 2004

Don't Take the Bait - Fight Smart
ANIMATED 911 SUMMARY - CLICK HERE
Who is the enemy?

The Desperate World of James Woolsey
Ex-CIA Chief Predicted 'Peak' Oil Crisis
In 1999 CFR Paper
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/WATwoolseypeakoil.htm
Iraq Hawk Who Saw The Energy Strife Coming
And Then Joined In

"The United States cannot afford to wait for the next energy crisis to marshal its intellectual and industrial resources.... Our growing dependence on increasingly scarce Middle Eastern oil is a fool's game—there is no way for the rest of the world to win. Our losses may come suddenly through war, steadily through price increases, agonizingly through developing-nation poverty, relentlessly through climate change—or through all of the above."
James Woolsey, US Director of Central Intelligence, 1993 - 1995
Bush II Administration Adviser and Envoy, 2001 - Present

"Iraq can be seen as the first battle of the fourth world war. After two hot world wars and one cold one that all began and were centered in Europe, the fourth world war is going to be for the Middle East."
Former Director of the CIA, James Woolsey
NATO conference, Prague, November 2002

"... the mideast will increasingly become the source of the world's oil, and this is a strategic problem for us and for many other countries."
James Woolsey, Former Director of the CIA
Interview with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Washington Post: June 7, 2000

"Optimists about world oil reserves, such as the Department of Energy, are getting increasingly lonely. The International Energy Agency now says that world production outside the Middle Eastern Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) will peak in 1999 and world production overall will peak between 2010 and 2020. This projection is supported by influential recent articles in Science and Scientific American. Some knowledgeable academic and industry voices put the date that world production will peak even sooner—within the next five or six years. The optimists who project large reserve quantities of over one trillion barrels tend to base their numbers on one of three things: inclusion of heavy oil and tar sands, the exploitation of which will entail huge economic and environmental costs; puffery by opec nations lobbying for higher production quotas within the cartel; or assumptions about new drilling technologies that may accelerate production but are unlikely to expand reserves. Once production peaks, even though exhaustion of world reserves will still be many years away, prices will begin to rise sharply. This trend will be exacerbated by increased demand in the developing world..... The recent report by the President's Committee of Advisers on Science and Technology... concluded  'A plausible argument can be made that the security of the United States is at least as likely to be imperiled in the first half of the next century by the consequences of inadequacies in the energy options available to the world as by inadequacies in the capabilities of U.S. weapons systems.  It is striking that the Federal government spends about 20 times more R&D money on the latter problem than on the former.'... The nearly $70 billion spent annually for imported oil represents about 40 percent of the current U.S. trade deficit.... Research is essential to produce the innovations and technical improvements that will lower the production costs of ethanol and other renewable fuels and let them compete directly with gasoline. At present, the United States is not funding a vigorous program in renewable technologies.... The United States cannot afford to wait for the next energy crisis to marshal its intellectual and industrial resources....Our growing dependence on increasingly scarce Middle Eastern oil is a fool's game—there is no way for the rest of the world to win. Our losses may come suddenly through war, steadily through price increases, agonizingly through developing-nation poverty, relentlessly through climate change—or through all of the above."
Richard G. Lugar and R. James Woolsey (Former Director of the CIA)
The New Petroleum - Foreign Affairs January/February 1999

"Energy is vital to a country's security and material well-being. A state unable to provide its people with adequate energy supplies or desiring added leverage over other people often resorts to force. Consider Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, driven by his desire to control more of the world's oil reserves, and the international response to this threat. The underlying goal of the U.N. force, which included 500,000 American troops, was to ensure continued and unfettered access to petroleum...."
Richard G. Lugar and R. James Woolsey (Former Director of the CIA)
The New Petroleum - Foreign Affairs January/February 1999

"The key holdout is Saudi Arabia -- and it is indeed aggravating that even though we went to war in 1991 principally to protect its oil, they are unwilling to let us launch air strikes [on Iraq] from their country."
James Woolsey - The Former CIA Director Speaks on Iraq
TIME, 18 February 1998

"Even some of the people and countries are the same. And the methods - particularly the pursuit by a network of well-placed individuals of a covert, parallel foreign policy that is at odds with official policy - are definitely the same. Boiled down to its essentials, the Iran-Contra affair was about a small group of officials based in the National Security Agency (NSC) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that ran an 'off-the-books' operation to secretly sell arms to Iran in exchange for hostages. They used the proceeds to sustain the Nicaraguan contras - U.S. sponsored rebels fighting Managua's left-wing government - in defiance of both a congressional ban and of official U.S. policy as enunciated by the State Department and President Ronald Reagan. It was never clear whether Reagan understood, let alone approved, the operation. The picture emerging from the latest reports about the manipulation of intelligence in the drive to war with Iraq, as well as efforts by administration hawks to deliberately aggravate tensions with Syria, Iran, and North Korea in defiance of official State Department and U.S. policy, suggest a similar but much more ambitious scheme at work. As with Reagan, in this case, too, it is difficult to determine whether Bush  or even his NSC director, Condoleezza Rice - fully understands, let alone approves, of what the hawks are doing.  There was some hint of a parallel policy apparatus dating back just after the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001. It was known early on, for example, that the Pentagon leadership, without notice to the State Department, the NSC, or the CIA, convened its advisory Defense Policy Board (DPB), headed by Richard Perle, to discuss attacking Iraq within days of the attacks. The three agencies were also kept in the dark about a mission undertaken immediately afterward by former CIA director and DPB member James Woolsey to London to gather intelligence about possible links between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, as if the CIA or the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) could not be trusted."
  Iran-Contra, Amplified
Inter Press Service News Agency, 9 August 2003

"And did this report of a trip to London by Woolsey represent a brief public surfacing of a transatlantic link between Operation Rockingham (the subversive British intelligence massaging exercise alleged by former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter) and the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon, a new US bureaucracy established by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to fulfil a similar purpose?... it would be interesting to learn whether or not Woolsey had a hand in the promotion of the Niger uranium forgeries. This is particularly so taking into account the length of the overseas errand Woolsey was sent on post-911, not long after which the Niger forgeries first emerged. Did Woolsey make any visits, for example, to Italy in addition to London and Prague?"
Iraqgate 2003
'Fight Smart', Special Report, October 2003

"If you want to figure out whether the administration of President George W. Bush intends a crusade to 'remake the Middle East' in the wake of Washington's presumed military victory in Iraq, watch what happens with R. James Woolsey. A former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Woolsey is being pushed hard by his fellow neoconservatives in the Pentagon to play a key role in the post-Saddam Hussein U.S. occupation.... At a NATO conference in Prague last November, Woolsey declared 'Iraq can be seen as the first battle of the fourth world war,' in rhetoric that he has practiced and honed virtually since the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. 'After two hot world wars and one cold one that all began and were centered in Europe,' he said, 'the fourth world war is going to be for the Middle East.' .... in January 1998 [he] signed a public letter to Clinton by the newly formed Project for the New American Century (PNAC) calling for the adoption of a 'regime change' as the main U.S. policy goal toward Iraq. In that same year, he lobbied hard for passage of the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA), which not only formalized regime change as the policy but allocated up to 100 million dollars for the Iraqi opposition, mainly the Iraq National Congress (INC), headed by Ahmed Chalabi. That lobby went into high gear immediately after Sep. 11. Within just a few days, [Richard] Perle convened the DPB [Defense Policy Board] to discuss how Washington could use the incidents as justification for attacking Iraq, and Woolsey was tasked to go to Europe to collect evidence that Hussein was linked to al Qaeda."
Woolsey's Role Crucial to Impact of Occupation
'Foreign Policy in Focus', 8 April 2003

"[Woolsey] spent many weeks on that mission, emerging with the story that an unnamed informant had told Czech intelligence that he had seen the leader of the Sep. 11 skyjackers meet with an Iraqi agent in Prague in the April before the attack. Even though the report was dismissed as not credible by U.S., British, French, and Israeli intelligence agencies, it became the basis--endlessly repeated by Woolsey and other neocons on television talk shows and in op-ed pages of major newspapers--of a major propaganda campaign against Iraq, even as Washington carried out its military campaign in Afghanistan in late 2001. Woolsey even suggested that Saddam was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center towers and the anthrax-bearing letters sent to various lawmakers after 9/11, and that U.S. intelligence agencies could not find the connection because they lacked sufficient imagination. The campaign largely worked: by late last year, well over half of respondents in one key poll believed that Saddam was somehow linked to the September 11 attacks."
Woolsey's Role Crucial to Impact of Occupation
'Foreign Policy in Focus', 8 April 2003

Ignoring some of the more mendacious comments of US Vice President Cheney, never during the build up to last year's Gulf war were Britain and America able to claim that Saddam Hussein had developed nuclear weapons.

The best America could manage was to submit forged documents to the UN. And by September 2003, six months after the invasion of Iraq, the British government was forced to admit to the Intelligence and Security Committee that MI6 was "still awaiting the clarification of the documentary evidence from one of the sources" used to support its claim that Iraq had been trying to acquire uranium from Africa.

During the Hutton inquiry it became clear that the only chemical and biological weapons that the British intelligence services were were willing to claim Saddam Hussein possessed were battlefield munitions. And even that claim was made against the advice of its most senior WMD experts.

Those battlefield weapons had a range of a mere 20 to 40 kilometres which, even if in serviceable condition, were of no strategic threat to Iraq's immediate neighbours, let alone to Israel, Britain or the United States. Intelligence sharing arrangements between Britain and America as part of the 'special relationship' mean that both countries will have known this. But that was not the end of it. Prime Minister Blair was warned by his own intelligence advisers that an invasion of Iraq would increase the risk of terrorist attacks.

Yet neither was it established that there was any link under the status quo between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda. The BBC reported on 5 February 2003, just weeks before the start of the war, that "There are no current links between the Iraqi regime and the al-Qaeda network, according to an official British intelligence report seen by BBC News".

Moreover, and perhaps most tellingly, the Bush administration got around to making its own professional assessment of intelligence on the alleged threat from Iraq only after the decision to go to war had already been taken. Last month former senior CIA analyst Ray McGovern disturbingly pointed out in a comment piece for the 'Common Dreams' online news service that "the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction – used with Congress to hype the threat - was written several months after the administration decided to make war on Iraq." McGovern had himself chaired National Intelligence Estimates during his time with the CIA.

So why did we go to war with Iraq?

Some claim that Saddam's alleged challenge to the authority of the UN was unacceptable. However, there is still much debate about whether Iraq was in substantive breach of Security Council resolution 1441 under whose ambit Britain and America claimed the use of force against Iraq was justified.

Yet, by contrast, there is no doubt that Israel has been in blatant breach of numerous UN resolutions over a much longer period of time. It has covertly developed weapons of mass destruction and it is also in illegal occupation of land belonging to others. But there has never been a proposal from the United States or Britain to invade Israel.

If so many facts do not match up to the political rhetoric emanating from the leaders of the 'coalition of the willing' then there has to be another agenda.

Sophisticates certainly don't like the argument that the real issue behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq was oil. That is simply too trite an explanation for those who earn a living from politically correct academic and media punditry. Moreover to acknowledge the existence of an undisclosed rationale for war based primarily on the economic aspirations of large parts of the English speaking world - notably the US, Britain, and Australia - is to be forced to peer over the precipice into the darkness of a bottomless moral abyss.

Yet it was just such a prospect that one former head of the CIA was already anticipating when he co-authored a paper in 1999 on future global energy requirements. The paper was published by no less than the influential US policy think tank, the Council On Foreign relations (CFR).

Since his days at the CIA James Woolsey has not become a fringe figure in US foreign policy circles. He remains ubiquitous having previously held Presidential appointments in two Democratic and two Republican administrations.

Indeed Woolsey is now part of a powerful circle responsible for promoting an extremist agenda known as the 'Project For The New American Century' (PNAC)' - an aggressive 'defense' and foreign policy strategy developed since 1997 by a group backed by the same neo-conservatives who are now peppered around the Bush administration. It is a strategy whose implementation in practice is lead by Vice President Cheney.

Woolsey's role as Clinton's Director of Central Intelligence may have come to an end in 1995, but when the Bush administration decided to go to war against Saddam Hussein it was Woolsey who was dispatched overseas to try and dig up incriminating links between the Iraqi president and al Qaeda.

According to an Inter Press Service News Agency report 9 August 2003 "It was known early on, for example, that the Pentagon leadership, without notice to the State Department, the NSC, or the CIA, convened its advisory Defense Policy Board (DPB), headed by Richard Perle, to discuss attacking Iraq within days of the [911] attacks. The three agencies were also kept in the dark about a mission undertaken immediately afterward by former CIA director and DPB member James Woolsey to London to gather intelligence about possible links between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, as if the CIA or the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) could not be trusted."

As well as sitting on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Woolsey was also involved, along with Pakistani-American businessman Mansur Ejaz (Mansoor Ijaz), in attempted negotiations with the Taliban post 911 according to Mariane Pearl, the widow of Wall St Journal reporter Daniel Pearl who was murdered in Pakistan in 2002 (an article published in India's Bharat Rakshak Monitor October 2002 entitled 'Musawer Mansoor Ijaz – America's Secret Emissary' reported that Ijaz at one time worked for Van Eck Associates, a mutual fund company, where he developed "models of how world geo-political events affected market conditions .... and he was soon entrusted to run a large mutual fund that anticipated changes in foreign policy....". According to the Monitor Ijaz subsequently started his own company, Crescent Investment Management, where his work has included advising "President Haidar Aliev of Azerbaijan on investment of the revenues from Caspian oil reserves". Lt. Gen. James Abrahamson, former director of President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, is one of Ijaz's partners at Crescent, whilst James Woolsey serves as vice chairman of Crescent's Advisory Board of Governors).

In 'A Mighty Heart', her book on the life and death of her husband published last year, Mariane Pearl says that Ejaz and Woolsey (and a friend of Bin Laden's called Khalid Khawaja who was previously a Pakistani intelligence agent and who fought with the Afghan resistance) "tried to hammer out an agreement that would have averted the war between the United States and the Taliban. The effort failed". But in reality it seems a broader agenda was also running.

According to the Financial Times 6 March 2003 "Taliban officials who opposed the Islamist fundamentalist regime's readiness to protect al-Qaeda after the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington told an unofficial US delegation led by a New York financier that they were prepared to discuss what they knew of Iraq's relations with al-Qaeda.... The Taliban officials, several of whom are now in US custody, told the US delegation they were prepared to discuss what they knew of these ties. But a meeting scheduled to be held in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar about October 8 2001 was cancelled after the bombing started. The unofficial US delegation was led by Mansour Ijaz, an American hedge fund manager of Pakistani origin. James Woolsey, the former CIA director, agreed to go as an observer.... Two others - a senior American journalist and an influential member of Pakistan's Islamist movement - were also to be part of the delegation.... In a letter to Mr Ijaz and Mr Woolsey dated October 7 2001, seen by the FT, Alhaj Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, agreed to the terms of a meeting discussed earlier on the telephone and in faxed correspondence. These written terms made it clear that the Taliban would be prepared to 'expand on your expressed interest to provide us with information about the nature and extent of relationships between Iraq and terror groups in the region, including potentially to bin Laden's al-Qaeda organisation'. The terms of the discussions agreed by the Taliban would also give the Americans an insight into whether allegations of Iraqi support for terrorist groups 'represents a uniform opinion within the Taliban leadership or a factional view'".

Given his other endeavours in this area it is reasonable to assume from this account that Woolsey was interested in the Taliban as a potential source of information that would link Saddam to al Qaeda in the minds of the American public. Certainly we now know that he held little information of any use on this subject that he could pass the other way.

The very existence of this 'unofficial' improvised effort to prise information from the Taliban moments before war is a further indicator that Woolsey knew he didn't have the necessary evidence of an al Qaeda-Saddam linkage, even though the Pentagon Policy Board on which he sat had already met to plan an attack on Iraq.

However, there must have been significant doubt about the Taliban's willingness or ability to deliver useful information once it became clear that the US delegation had merely received an offer to discuss whether the alleged linkage "represents a uniform opinion within the Taliban leadership or a factional view". According to the Financial Times that offer was contained in a letter of October 7 faxed to the American delegation while it was in Copenhagen en route to Afghanistan. The bombing of Afghanistan began that day.

This set-back did not seem to diminish plans for Woolsey's on going influence in relation to Iraq. Later he was listed by the Pentagon to head the Ministry of Information in Iraq as part of an apparently brazen bid to ensure US propaganda control over the country following the invasion in the spring of 2003 - although it was a move the Pentagon did not succeed in pulling off.

Ultimately Woolsey failed in his mission to tar Saddam with the Bin Laden brush. But this was not for want of his trying in as many directions as possible.

A report in the Observer 11 May 2003 entitled 'Bush ally set to profit from the war on terror' primarily describes Woolsey's directorship of a private equity firm formed post 911 whose first priority was to put investment into companies supplying the expanding 'homeland security' market. However, the report also points out that Woolsey was "one of the main proponents of the theory that the anthrax letter attacks in America were supported by Iraq's former dictator".

These attacks were eventually traced to a US military laboratory in Maryland - a somewhat unhappy and embarrassing end to an FBI detective trail which ultimately proved to be more suggestive of a home grown effort to deliberately escalate the level of public fear in America than of any foreign sponsored effort.

According to the BBC 18 August 2002 "An FBI forensic linguistics expert believes the US anthrax attacks were carried out by a senior scientist from within America's biological-defence community. Professor Don Foster - who helped convict Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and unveiled Joe Klein as the author of the novel Primary Colors - says the evidence points to someone with high-ranking military and intelligence connections..... However, he fears the investigation is now being hampered in its gathering of vital documents that could lead to the killer.... 'My two suspects both appear to have CIA connections. These two agencies, the CIA and the FBI, are sometimes seen as rivals. My anxiety is that the FBI agents assigned to this case are not getting full and complete co-operation from the US military, CIA and witnesses who might have information about this case.'"

So what made Woolsey so desperate in his efforts to nail Saddam to the al Qaeda/911 post when it is clear that there was no solid evidence to go on? The outline of an answer to this unavoidable question is remarkably simple.

There is one factor in particular that represents a central ingredient in the background thinking of this highly influential figure, but which has been largely overlooked by the media. And it is this. No later than 1999 Woolsey himself knew that  'peak oil' (the point when the aggregate ability of the world's oil producers to pump 'gas' passes into irreversible decline) had most likely already arrived - or was just over the horizon. He also knew that no one had made any serious contingency plans to deal with this watershed moment in human history.

All this is absolutely clear from the 1999 CFR paper that he co-authored with Republican Senator, Richard Lugar of Indiana.

Extracts from the paper are reproduced below. But in short the contents set out Woolsey's explicit recognition of some fundamental and disturbing issues concerning the sustainability of the oil centred foundations underpinning the way of life of the modern industrialised world. Amongst other things Woolsey states that:

1. Well over two-thirds of the world's remaining oil reserves lie in the 'Middle East' (a term he used to also include the Caspian Sea basin)
2. The modern world is dependent on access to this oil
3. This dependence "keeps U.S military forces tied to the Persian Gulf"
4. The underlying goal of the Gulf war of 1991 "was to ensure continued and unfettered access to petroleum"
5. New global demand for oil will be filled largely by the Middle East
6. Dependence on the Middle East "entails the risk of a repeat of the international crises of 1973, 1979, and 1990—or worse"
7. Optimists about world oil reserves, such as the US Department of Energy, "are getting increasingly lonely."
8. The International Energy Agency "now says that world production outside the Middle Eastern Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) will peak in 1999 and world production overall will peak between 2010 and 2020".
9. Some knowledgeable academic and industry voices even put the date of peaking as early as 2004 - 5
10. Optimistic projections for world oil supply tend to be based on one of three factors which are questionable:
    1. inclusion of heavy oil and tar sands which entail huge economic and environmental costs
    2. exaggerated claims by OPEC members about their reserves in order to secure high production quotas
    3. the use of new drilling technologies which will accelerate production but are unlikely to expand reserves
11. The advent of peak oil will be exacerbated by increased demand in the developing world
12. The Middle East is likely to control nearly three-quarters of the world's oil in the 21st century
13. US policies in the Middle East have been guided more by a need to protect oil supplies and accommodate oil-producing regimes than by "a respect for democracy"
14. A move away from dependence on fossil fuels would
    1. reduce America's "intrusive military presence in the region"
    2. reduce "anti-American tensions"
    3. make war in the Middle East less likely
15. Otherwise US oil imports are predicted to approximately double between 1996 and 2030 to 16 million barrels a day, even though investment in renewable technologies could reduce this to 6 million barrels
16. The nearly $70 billion spent annually by America on imported oil represents about 40 percent of the current (1999) U.S. trade deficit
17. A report by the President's Committee of Advisers on Science and Technology concluded that "the security of the United States is at least as likely to be imperiled in the first half of the next century by the consequences of inadequacies in the energy options available to the world as by inadequacies in the capabilities of U.S. weapons systems"
18. The Federal government spends (1999) about 20 times more R&D money on the latter problem than on the former
19. The United States is not funding a vigorous program in renewable technologies
20. The United States cannot afford to wait for the next energy crisis to marshal its intellectual and industrial resources
21. And finally "Our growing dependence on increasingly scarce Middle Eastern oil is a fool's game—there is no way for the rest of the world to win. Our losses may come suddenly through war, steadily through price increases, agonizingly through developing-nation poverty, relentlessly through climate change—or through all of the above."

So by 1999 Woolsey could see what was coming. He had a pretty good idea what the problem was and what the solution ought to be - not war, but technological investment in renewable energy (albeit that his particular focus on ethanol production from biomass as the pre-eminent alternative approach can be seen as open to challenge).

Yet even by then Woolsey probably knew that almost no one was going to listen to him; that the energy situation was already critical; and that along with others he would therefore have to push for war.

Indeed by 1998 Woolsey had already signed a PNAC backed letter to President Clinton along with many of the now familiar Bush administration neo-conservatives (Rumseld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Armitage etc) urging action against Iraq. Whilst ostensibly pushing the weapons of mass destruction argument, despite years of crushing sanctions against a militarily and economically crippled Iraq, the letter admitted to oil as a key concern in the Iraq equation.

The letter proclaimed that "It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard".

By the time of the second Gulf war in 2003 Woolsey had clearly given up all expectations that his proposal for a combined foreign, national security, and energy policy focused on renewables was going to be implemented. By then he was giving the strong impression of a man that had decided that 'if you can't beat them', you may as well join them. Indeed Woolsey no longer saw the scope of the proposed US aggression as being merely confined to Iraq and its alleged weapons of mass destruction. Now in his mind the war was to be the first in a fight for the whole of the Middle East.

According to 'Foreign Policy in Focus', 8 April 2003 "At a NATO conference in Prague last November, Woolsey declared 'Iraq can be seen as the first battle of the fourth world war,' in rhetoric that he has practiced and honed virtually since the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. 'After two hot world wars and one cold one that all began and were centered in Europe,' he said, 'the fourth world war is going to be for the Middle East.' ".

From the content of his 1999 essay there can be little doubt about why Woolsey thought that should be so.

Despite the constructive suggestions laid out in that paper Woolsey, it would seem, had thrown in the towel completely by the time the Bush administration came to power. It is clear from his stark statement in Prague during November 2002 that he had totally succumbed to the corrosive fog enveloping the national thinking of a once much respected country which by now had drastically lost its way.

That the principal economic commentator and Associate Editor of the London Times was moved to speculate on 20 May 2004 that "A global contest for 'public enemy No 1'  would probably be a photo-finish between Osama bin Laden and Mr Bush" gives some measure of how great that loss has become within less than three years of the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York.

The most disturbing manifestation of this leadership disaster is a spiralling Pentagon budget which has reached over $1 billion a day - as much or more as the whole of the rest of the world put together.

This is a monster which a long succession of administrations has fed over many years, and it is a danger about which Eisenhower warned the American people in his Presidential retirement speech in 1961: "My fellow Americans....This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.... we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes...."

When supplemental expenditures for Afghanistan and Iraq are taken into account US 'Defense' spending in fiscal year 2004 will approach half a trillion dollars.

Yet never has the 'American dream' been more vulnerable or as close to collapse.

Only a brief review of where American troops are currently most concentrated around the world is required to identify the relationship between this military 'investment', and the location of overseas oil and gas resources and the pipeline routes which provide access to them. Not for nothing were plans for wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq on the Bush White House hidden agenda before 911 - as we now know from former US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and from former Pakistan Foreign Secretary Niaz Niak.

Indeed, the largest conflict zone troop deployments are concentrated on the very area that Woolsey identified in 1999 as being pivotal to the world's oil supply. The Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea regions. A correlation as clear as it is terrible.

But imagine, for a moment, if America were to suddenly undergo some kind of extraordinary transformation in its collective consciousness. Imagine that it picked up something like Woolsey's original suggestion for a strategic energy security plan.

Imagine how the picture would look if America redeployed more creatively and responsibly only half of that 'Defense' budget, a roaring bloated monster which has manifestly failed to provide genuine security for the 'American way of life' at home and US troops abroad.

Imagine if that profligately wasted tax revenue was invested instead in the research, development and deployment of renewable energy systems.

Well over $500 million every single day.

Think what additional private sector investment would inevitably follow on the coat tails of such a programme. Imagine the new jobs created.

And contemplate this astonishing report from CBS News, 29 January 2002: "Just last week President Bush announced, 'my 2003 budget calls for more than $48 billion in new defense spending.'   More money for the Pentagon, CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports, while its own auditors admit the military cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends. 'According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions,' Rumsfeld admitted. $2.3 trillion — that's $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America. To understand how the Pentagon can lose track of trillions, consider the case of one military accountant who tried to find out what happened to a mere $300 million. 'We know it's gone. But we don't know what they spent it on,' said Jim Minnery, Defense Finance and Accounting Service...."

On 30 January 2003, in the build up to the invasion of Iraq, the London Times published some poignant comments from a female sailor on the 90,000 ton USS Nimitz. She complained that “Nobody really wants to go to war. I’m getting out of the Navy as soon as I can. My Mom’s really nervous. I’m just out of high school and now I’m off to fight a war. I wanted to go to college, but my family didn’t have enough money."

How many disadvantaged young men and women have gone into the US armed services simply because of the lack of other job opportunities, all the while hoping in their hearts that they will never see 'action'?

How many more will join them in living with the dread of combat in the months and years ahead if the military draft is re-introduced once the 2004 Presidential election is over, all as part of an on-going desperate and degenerating global search for oil and gas whose name few politicians dare speak?

So if you were a courageous but frightened, lonely, and exhausted American soldier in Iraq today, and you were offered a job working in that kind of programme, a renewable energy programme designed to provide real, not illusory, national security ....

If you were offered the chance to participate in that kind of transformation as an alternative to patrolling the threatening streets of Baghdad and Kabul .....

If you were offered that chance instead of being posted thousands of miles away from a family you worry you might never see again, when all the while the President and his War Secretary are sitting comfortably in their air conditioned offices smiling at the pictures on their desks of their own families who are also tucked away far from the suffering and misery of Basra and Bagram ....

Well, wouldn't that sound attractive to you? And to your children.

NATURAL LAW PARTY WESSEX
nlpwessex@btinternet.com
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex

Easter Reflections On Iraq - Bombing Mosques - Is There Really No Other Way? - 11 April 2004

"The Bush administration announced plans to help Colombia protect a strategic oil pipeline that has been a frequent target of guerrilla attacks, a dramatic departure from a policy that had previously limited aid to wiping out drug crops. The plan, outlined Tuesday by a U.S. delegation to Bogota, calls for $98 million to train and equip a Colombian army brigade to protect the 480-mile Cano-Limon oil pipeline, which ferries oil to the Caribbean coast for Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum and other companies.... By arming and training Colombian soldiers, the United States would be taking a significant leap into the country's 38-year civil war, which pits two rebel groups and an outlawed right-wing paramilitary against the government. About 3,500 people die every year in the conflict, which has choked the economic potential of this resource-rich South American country. Rebel sabotage of U.S. and Colombian oil operations prevented the production of more than 24 million barrels of crude last year, according to state oil company Ecopetrol. Colombia is the 10th-biggest supplier of oil to the United States.... But the plan to protect the pipeline could face opposition in Congress. The $1.3 billion Plan Colombia package passed in 2000 limited military aid to fighting drugs. Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., said lawmakers should scrutinize any attempt to expand military assistance. 'This was not what was debated in Congress when Plan Colombia was passed. We are getting deeper into this conflict,' said Wellstone, who opposed the previous Colombian aid proposals. ....  A State Department official said the proposal is 'entirely consistent with existing policy.' The Bush administration may also argue that the United States needs to assure a reliable flow of oil from Colombia, closer to U.S. shores than the volatile Middle East, U.S. officials said."
U.S. Officials Unveil Colombia Plans
Associated Press, 6 February 2002

“How much should we spend on the armed services? ... My view is we don’t spend on you, we invest in you. The men and women in the armed services are not a drain on our economic strength. Indeed you safeguard it. You’re not a burden on our economy, you are the critical foundation for growth.”
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, 5 June 2001
addressing US troops at Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo,
situated near a major pipeline corridor planned for bringing Caspian Sea oil into the Mediterranean
US Defense Department Press Release

"Just last week President Bush announced, 'my 2003 budget calls for more than $48 billion in new defense spending.'   More money for the Pentagon, CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports, while its own auditors admit the military cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends. 'According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions,' Rumsfeld admitted. $2.3 trillion — that's $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America. To understand how the Pentagon can lose track of trillions, consider the case of one military accountant who tried to find out what happened to a mere $300 million. 'We know it's gone. But we don't know what they spent it on,' said Jim Minnery, Defense Finance and Accounting Service...."
The War On Waste
CBS News, 29 January 2002

"A map produced by Harvard, Unocal and others in the spring of 2002
shows the first stages in the encirclement of OPEC. Added in August, additional troop deployment identified by FTW, show that OPEC is not only surrounded, but about to be divided for peicemeal consumption"
One Foot Off the Cliff
From The Wilderness Publications, 21 Aug 2002

"These advance deployments indicate that the Bush Administration likely committed itself to the invasion many months ago."
One Foot Off the Cliff
From The Wilderness Publications, 21 Aug 2002

"Why is Bob Woodward’s latest book, 'Plan of Attack,' is being promoted by the administration?   Because it portrays an in-charge President Bush and presents him as genuinely concerned (and seemingly misled) over the threat posed by Iraq’s 'weapons of mass-destruction.' Unfortunately, the nation’s most-famous investigative reporter got it wrong. You would not know from Woodward’s book that the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction – used with Congress to hype the threat - was written several months after the administration decided to make war on Iraq.  That decision had little to do with WMD or with supposed ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda. It had everything to do with the imperative seen by Bush’s neoconservative advisers to gain dominant influence over strategic, oil-rich Iraq and to eliminate any possible threat to Israel’s security.  With that twin aim, the rationale was generally consistent with several decades of U.S. policy objectives in the Middle East. Where the Bush administration broke new ground was in its decision to launch a preemptive war when there was nothing to preempt."
Court Historian Woodward Disguises Bush Aims in Invading Iraq
Ray McGovern - Common Dreams, 23 April 2004

(Ray McGovern’s responsibilities during his 27-years as a CIA analyst included chairing National Intelligence Estimates.  He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. McGovern has worked near the very top of his profession, giving direct advice to Henry Kissinger during the Nixon era and preparing the President's daily security brief for Ronald Reagan.)