Page 4 of 5 RUSSIA AND
THE NEW COLD WAR When
cowboys don't shoot straight By F William Engdahl
fragile, we will need bases
and fly-over rights in the Balkans to protect
Caspian Sea oil." Camp Bondsteel was but the first
of a vast chain of US bases that have been built
during this decade. The US military went on to
build military bases in Hungary,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania and Macedonia.
One of the most important and least
mentioned new US bases
was in
Bulgaria, a former Soviet satellite and now a new
NATO member. In a conflict - and in Pentagon-speak
there are only "conflicts", not wars, which
involve issues of asking the US Congress to
declare them officially, and provide just reason -
the US military would use the Bezmer base to surge
men and materiel toward the front lines. Where? In
Russia?
The US has been building bases in
Afghanistan, too. It built three major US bases in
the wake of its occupation of Afghanistan in
winter of 2001, at Baghram north of Kabul, the
United States' main military logistics center;
Kandahar Air Base, in southern Afghanistan; and
Shindand Air Base in the western province of
Herat. Shindand, the largest US base in
Afghanistan, was built some 100 kilometers from
the border with Iran.
Afghanistan was
historically the heart of the British-Russia Great
Game, the struggle for control of Central Asia
during the 19th and early 20th centuries. British
strategy was to prevent Russia at all costs from
controlling Afghanistan and thereby threatening
Britain's imperial crown jewel, India, and
advancing toward a warm-water port for its navy.
Afghanistan is also seen by Pentagon
planners as highly strategic. It is a platform
from which US military might could directly
threaten Russia and China as well as Iran and
other oil-rich Middle Eastern lands. Little has
changed in that respect over more than a century
of wars.
Afghanistan is in a vital
location, straddling South Asia, Central Asia and
the Middle East. Afghanistan also lies along a
proposed oil-pipeline route from the Caspian Sea
oilfields to the Indian Ocean, where the US oil
company Unocal had been in negotiations, together
with Halliburton and the since-bankrupt Enron, for
exclusive pipeline rights to bring natural gas
from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan
to the huge natural-gas power plant at Dabhol near
Mumbai.
At that same time, the Pentagon
came to an agreement with the government of
Kyrgyzstan to build a strategically important base
there, Manas Air Base at Bishkek's international
airport. Manas is not only near Afghanistan; it is
also in easy striking distance to Caspian Sea oil
and gas, as well as to the borders of both China
and Russia.
As part of the price of
accepting him as an ally in the "war on terror"
rather than a foe, Washington extracted an
agreement from Pakistan's military dictator,
President General Pervez Musharraf, to allow the
airport at Jacobabad, about 400km north of
Karachi, to be used by the USAF and NATO to
support their campaign in Afghanistan. Two other
US bases were built at Dalbandin and Pasni.
This all is merely a small part of the
vast web of US-controlled military bases
Washington has been building globally since the
"end" of the Cold War.
It's becoming clear
to much of the rest of the world that Washington
might even itself be instigating or provoking wars
or conflicts with nations across the world, not
merely to control oil, though strategic control of
global oil flows had been at the heart of the
American Century since the 1920s. That's the real
significance of what Vladimir Putin said in
Munich. He told the world what it did not want to
hear: the American emperor's new clothes did not
exist. The emperor was clothed in the naked
pursuit of global military control.
During
the early 1990s, at the end of the Cold War, the
government of Russian president Boris Yeltsin had
asked Washington for a series of mutual reductions
in the size of each superpower's nuclear missile
and weapons arsenal. Russian nuclear stockpiles
were aging, and Moscow saw little further need to
remain armed to its nuclear teeth once the Cold
War had ended.
Washington clearly saw in
this a golden opportunity to go for nuclear
primacy, for the first time since the 1950s, when
Russia first developed an intercontinental-missile
delivery capability for its growing
nuclear-weapons arsenal.
Nuclear primacy
is an aggressive offensive policy. It means that
one superpower, the US, would have the possibility
to launch a full nuclear first strike at Russia's
nuclear sites and destroy enough targets in the
first blow that Russia would be crippled from
making any effective retaliation.
With no
credible threat of retaliation, Russia would have
no credible nuclear deterrent. It would be at the
mercy of the supreme power. Never before in
history had the prospect of such ultimate power in
the hands of one single nation seemed so near at
hand.
This stealthy move by the Pentagon
for nuclear primacy has, up until now, been
carried out in utmost secrecy, disguised amid
rhetoric of a USA-Russia "Partnership for Peace".
Rather than take advantage of the
opportunity to climb down from the brink of
nuclear annihilation after the end of the Cold
War, Washington turned instead to upgrading its
nuclear arsenal, at the same time that it was
reducing its numbers.
While the rest of
the world was still in shock over the events of
September 11, 2001, the Bush administration
unilaterally moved to rip up its earlier treaty
obligations with Russia not to build an
anti-missile defense.
On December 13,
2001, President Bush announced that the US
government was unilaterally abandoning the ABM
Treaty with Russia, and committing $8 billion of
the 2002 budget to build a national
missile-defense system. It was pushed through
Congress, promoted as a move to protect US
territory from rogue terror attacks, from states
including North Korea or Iraq.
The "rogue"
argument was a fraud, a plausible cover story
designed to sneak the policy reversal through
without debate in the wake of the September 11
shock.
The repeal of the ABM Treaty was
little understood outside qualified military
circles. In fact, it represented the most
dangerous step by the United States toward nuclear
war since the 1950s. Washington is going at a fast
pace to the goal of total nuclear superiority
globally, nuclear primacy.
Washington had
dismantled its highly lethal MX missiles by 2005.
But that's misleading. At the same time, it
significantly improved its remaining
intercontinental ballistic missiles by installing
the MX's high-yield nuclear warheads and advanced
re-entry vehicles on its Minuteman ICBMs. The
guidance system of the Minuteman has been upgraded
to match that of the dismantled MX.
The
Pentagon began replacing aging ballistic missiles
on its submarines with far more accurate Trident
II D-5 missiles with new larger-yield nuclear
warheads.
The US Navy shifted more of its
nuclear-missile-launching SSBNs (ships,
submersible, ballistic, nuclear) to the Pacific to
patrol the blind spot of Russia's early-warning
radar net as well as patrolling near China's
coast. The USAF completed refitting its B-52
bombers with nuclear-armed cruise missiles
believed invisible to Russian air-defense radar.
New enhanced avionics on its B-2 stealth bombers
gave them the ability to fly at extremely low
altitudes avoiding radar detection as well.
A vast number of stockpiled weapons is not
necessary to the new global power projection.
Little-publicized new technology has enabled the
US to deploy a "leaner and meaner" nuclear strike
force. A case in point is the navy's successful
program to upgrade the fuse on the W-76 nuclear
warheads sitting atop most US submarine-launched
missiles, which makes them able to destroy very
hard targets such as ICBM silos.
No one
has ever presented credible evidence that
al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah or any other
organization on the US State
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