MISTRESS
OF THE WORLD
Notoriously
fickle, capricious to a fault, imperious mistress of all she
surveys: America, the sole superpower, takes seriously her
role as global arbiter: which one will she choose? Anyone
who pretends to know is likely as not deluded: the lady does
not know herself. As long as the Democrats are in power, Kosovo,
that jewel of the Balkans, will be first in her affections;
the US is pledged to a committed relationship, which should
last the next fifty years or so. Billions in treasure and
thousands of American soldiers will be lavished on our beloved
Kosovo – but the mistress of the world is not the monogamous
type, and her eye is already roving.
SO
MANY WARS, SO LITTLE TIME
Her
promiscuity in the era of Clinton has been prodigious, indulging
in some 30 interventions in the course of a mere 7 years.
(Compared to 10 during the Cold War era.) Torn between East
and West, between Europe and Asia, America pauses for a moment,
resting between conquests. She will not tarry long. Restless
and eager to prove her stature as global hegemon (or is that
hegemoness?), the mistress of the world is being wooed by
several potential suitors, and their rivalry is fierce. Each
has his lobby in Washington, his immigrant amen corner, his
friends in the media, his allies among the various business
groups that compete for government contracts and other subsidies.
A veritable rogues' gallery of gentlemen callers, a motley
bunch of obsequious supplicants, all clamoring for attention
and US tax dollars.
BETTING
ON BAKU
For
sheer clout in Establishment circles, the Azeri and Georgian
lobbies are hard to beat. Several prominent figures in the
Bushian wing of the Republican party stand to make a substantial
profit through their investments in companies doing business
in the region, among them: James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, Dick
Cheney and John Sununu; the Secretary of State, National Security
Adviser, Secretary of Defense and chief of staff respectively
for George (Herbert Walker) Bush.
THE
CASPIAN LOBBY
But
this is not a club for Republicans only: other prominent profiteers
in the Caspian oil sweepstakes include Lloyd Bentsen and Zbigniew
Brzezinski. With a $5 trillion pool of oil sitting in the
middle of the Caspian Sea, all the nations that border it
have been staked out by the various oil companies, with Amoco,
Exxon, Unocal, and Mobil all vying for franchises and favors
from the chieftains of the Caucasian "republics."
On the home front, the Caspian oil lobby is shepherding legislation
through Congress to ensure that the Export-Import Bank and
other federal slush funds for Wall Street come through with
a lush package of loan guarantees and other government subsidies.
They are working day and night to repeal Section 907 of the
"Freedom Support Act," which forbids military or
economic aid to one-party "republics" such as Azerbaijan,
the richest prize of the Caucasus.
THE
RETURN OF CASPAR WEINBERGER
In
testimony before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee last
February, Clinton's special ambassador to the Caspian region,
Richard Morningstar, reiterated the position of the US State
Department on Section 907, which has been trying to get rid
of this pesky provision for years. In league with the Clintonistas
on this question is Caspar Weinberger and the Center for Security
Policy. In an op ed piece, Weinberger argued that "Open
access to the Caspian is critical if the United States is
to diversify its energy sources and reduce its dangerous reliance
on Middle Eastern supplies. Oil in the Caspian region is now
channeled principally through pipelines to Russian Black Sea
ports, and Moscow wants to keep it that way, because that
means it controls the flow." In other words, the Caspian
pipeline must be guarded by US gendarmes, and if this means
war with Russia then so be it. Amazingly enough, the battle-cry
of the Caspian lobby is "free markets" and "free
trade" but there is nothing "free" about the
markets that Big Oil is scheming to dominate. As is customary
in the "Open Door" school of American diplomacy,
the costs of these mega-projects (like the Caspian Sea oil
pipeline) are socialized, in the form of loan guarantees,
Ex-Im Bank subsidies, and foreign aid (including military
aid), while the profits to be had are "privatized."
This is not capitalism of the laissez-faire variety, but mercantilism
pure and simple.
THE
GAMBINOS OF THE CAUCASUS
Setting
up post-Soviet Russia as the principal enemy of the US, Weinberger
avers that "at the center of the new Great Game is Moscow's
effort to put the squeeze on Azerbaijan, a secular Muslim
state whose President, Heydar Aliyev, once a member of the
Soviet Politburo, welcomes Western investment." This
about a man who, as David Remnick put in his "Lenin's
Tomb," "ruled Azerbaijan as surely as the Gambino
family ran the port of New York. The Caspian Sea caviar mafia,
the Sumgait oil Mafia, the fruits and vegetables Mafia, the
cotton Mafia, the customs and transport Mafia – they
all reported to him, enriched him, worshipped him."
APOLOGISTS
FOR ALIYEV
The
Azeri lobby is nothing if not star-studded: Brent Scowcroft
pulls in $130,000 dollars for advising Pennzoil and the multinational
Azerbaijan consortium. Sununu's management consulting firm,
JHS Associates, has also generated considerable business in
Azerbaijan. Lloyd Bentsen recently compared Azerbaijan's struggle
for independence to that of his home state of Texas, implicitly
likening the neo-Stalinist Aliyev to Sam Houston – a
bizarre analogy if ever there was one. Perhaps Bentsen's enthusiasm
for Aliyev's authoritarian regime is explainable at least
in part by his financial holdings: he is a shareholder in
Frontera Resources, an oil services company working in Azerbaijan.
THE
BAKER-SCHEVARDNADZE CONNECTION
The
personal and professional relationship between James Baker
and Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, the last Foreign
Minister of the USSR, is a key link in the Caspian network.
Baker now has his own law practice, with his clientele heavily
weighted with Houston oilmen; his Georgian buddy comes in
real handy, and vice versa. Georgia is instrumental in the
scheme to transport Caspian oil to market. With Shevardnadze
beset by separatist rebels in Abhazia, and Russian troops
policing the spreading conflict, the Georgian President has
called on NATO to intervene, and compared Belgrade's aggression
against the Kosovars to Georgia's refugee problem after the
war with insurgent Abkhazia."Genocide and ethnic cleansing
are unacceptable and should be punished," Shevardnadze
recently declared. The Abhazians rose up and threw off the
regime in Tbilisi, and nearly chased Shevadnadze out of his
own capital city: naturally he wants them punished, but lacks
the military resources and prowess, and that is where NATO
comes in.
"HUMANITARIAN"
AID TO THE OIL COMPANIES
In
the name of "humanitarianism," Schevardnadze demands
that NATO intervene, and his call is echoed by the government
of Azerbaijan: "I believe that a NATO operation in the
Caucasus would be desirable," says Azeri foreign policy
aide Vafa Gulizade. "Azerbaijan has undergone its own
ethnic cleansing. Thanks to a NATO operation, the Kosovo refugees
are returning home. I think that if NATO forces were brought
into the region, the Armenians would be forced to leave our
occupied territories." Yes, and the oil pipeline could
then be run safely through the Caucasus, with NATO troops
guarding the oil company's profits and propping up Schevardnadze's
shaky regime: a sweet deal for everyone but the Russians,
the Abhazians, and the Armenians, who will sit still for this
massive appropriation of territory and resources or else face
NATO's bombs. Perhaps the International Tribunal for the Investigation
of War Crimes in the Caucasus could be organized in time for
the planned invasion, and CNN brought in to sniff out any
"ethnic cleansing" in the disputed regions of Abhazia
and Nagorno-Karabakh.
THE
WISE MEN
While
Secretary General Javier Solana, in consultations with Armenian
President Robert Kocharian, denied that NATO had any such
intention, the Azeris confidently predict that the West will
soon come to realize the justice of their cause. "I know
that today, a NATO troop deployment is not real. I know that
tomorrow it isn't real. But to say that it will never happen
would be stupid," said Gulizade. "We should be speaking
not of beliefs, but of principles. If the conflict isn't resolved,
NATO needs to get involved. We don't have to speak of how
long it will take." With the Washington "wise men"
of both parties like Baker and Bentsen pushing for US intervention
in the region, Gulizade may not have long to wait.
THE
CHINA-HATERS
While
the Caspian lobby has plenty of clout inside the Establishment,
the more populist wing of the War Party has its heart set
on the coming conflict with China, as the title of a recent
book summarizes their argument. The recent announcement by
the Chinese government alleging that it can now make neutron
bombs has the Hate China lobby in a frenzy. The gleefulness
with which they hail the news as a confirmation of their conspiracy
theories makes one wonder how seriously they take their own
accusations.
As
David Horowitz, whose role as chief agitator for war with
China I have previously detailed in these pages, triumphantly
rants: "While the Chinese claim that they developed the
technology themselves, the Cox Report makes it clear
that Beijing's protracted espionage campaign resulted in the
theft of neutron-bomb secrets, among others, from the Lawrence
Livermore laboratory in the late 1970s. If this latest development
is not clear proof to President Clinton's leftist defenders
of significant damage to America's nuclear advantage, then
only a nuclear blast from a Chinese ballistic missile will
do the job. Let's hope it never comes to that." Typically,
the idea that the Chinese could have produced something akin
to a neutron bomb without stealing the technology from the
US is dismissed out of hand by Horowitz: how could those Chinks
have done it by themselves? His visceral hostility to the
Chinese is underscored in his bromidic manifesto, The
Art of Political War, in which he argues that the
Republican party must "reach out" to blacks and
Hispanics, who, we are told, must be "empowered."
Somehow, he neglects to mention Asian-Americans, and one can't
help thinking that this is because he believes their "empowerment"
might endanger national security.
DEFINE
THE CRIME TO FIT THE SUSPECT
Also
typically, Horowitz characterizes all skeptics of the "Chinagate"
espionage allegations as "President Clinton's leftist
defenders." But what about the Cox Report's right-wing
critics, such as Jack Kemp? In a report
widely distributed by Kemp's office and authored by Dr. Gordon
Prather, a nuclear weapons expert with long experience
in the field, the theory that the neutron bomb "secret"
was "stolen" by the Chinese is thoroughly and convincingly
debunked. It turns out that the Taiwan-born scientist accused
of passing alleged "nuclear secrets" to the Chinese,
Peter Lee, was not even involved in research that had anything
remotely to do with neutron bomb research. Prather writes:
"As in the case of Wen Ho Lee, it appears that the Security
[DOE & FBI] officials have attempted to define the crime
to fit their suspect. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
scientists at the ICF facility where Peter Lee worked were
surely attempting to achieve 'zero-fission fusion,' but not
to make a weapon. [In any case, accusing Peter Lee of stealing
the "secret" of the neutron bomb at the ICF facility
where he worked is a bit like accusing the grounds keeper
at Wimbledon of 'stealing' the 'secret' of Pete Sampras' serve.]"
THE
PSEUDO-SCIENCE OF THE COX REPORT
Peter
Lee was involved in "clean fusion" research, a realm
not even tangentially related to neutron bomb technology.
The Cox Report's charge that the Chinese stole the
alleged "secret" of the neutron bomb is a technologically
implausible – the huge systems and power grid required
for fusion experiments could not be miniaturized to fit in
the tip of a missile's warhead – and politically motivated
fantasy. As Prather puts it: "The Cox Committee (p.86)
and others have identified the W-70 as both 'enhanced radiation
warhead' and the 'neutron bomb.' In my lexicon, those are
not the same things at all. An 'enhanced radiation' warhead
is just what it says, a nuclear weapon where the design has
been 'tweaked' so that a larger fraction of the energy release
from fission/fusion comes out of the bomb case as radiation.
And, although scientists at Livermore and elsewhere were hard
at work at it, so far as I know we have never developed a
true 'neutron bomb,' that is, a 'zero-fission fusion' weapon."
Not only did the Chinese not rip off the blueprint for making
neutron bombs from the US, but these dreaded weapons do not
even exist except in the imaginations of the Cox Committee
– and Chinese government propagandists who hope to scare
Taiwan away from separatism.
PSEUDO-SCIENCE
In
short, Cox, Horowitz, and the rest of the professional Sinophobes
don't know fusion from fission or their asses from their elbows
– and, what's more, they could care less. They don't
care that their charges have no basis in science, or in fact;
they don't care that innocent Americans of Chinese descent
are being hounded out of their jobs; and far from caring about
the possibility of war, they positively revel in predicting
a military confrontation with China. Horowitz (or one of his
clones) opines that "only a nuclear blast from a Chinese
ballistic missile will" wake America up to the great
Truth contained in the Cox Report, but "let's
hope it never comes to that." Yet clearly they believe
and hope it does come to that – or else how will
they ever "wake up" their fellow citizens to the
Yellow Peril's plans to nuke Los Angeles? There is the ugly
secret of the Hate China lobby: they pine for war the
way others pine for love, or money.
LOOK
ON THE BRIGHT SIDE
Look
on the bright side: if those damned Chink spies succeeded
in stealing the technology that will give them pinpoint accuracy,
perhaps they could be persuaded to nuke Hollywood. In taking
out the producers of "Ellen," "Bill Maher's
Politically Incorrect," and other "cultural pollution
" – as the Chinese like to put it – they will
have done us all a favor.
NEXT
STOP, MONTENEGRO?
The
debate between the two parties in the foreign policy realm
– especially if George Dubya Bush is the GOP nominee
– will not be over whether we ought to go to war
but where. If the Republican "Asia-lationists"
prefer to throw their weight around in the straits of Taiwan,
and the Brahmins of both parties prefer the steppes of the
Caucasus, the Clintonian Democrats are still fixated on the
Balkans. A recent
article by the respected New York Times reporter Chris
Hedges [July 10, 1999] opens with this ominous sentence:
"The government of Montenegro, once careful not to provoke
Big Brother Serbia in Yugoslavia, appears to be moving swiftly
toward independence and seems ready to fight for it if necessary."
I will not go into the details, since they have been covered
in this column before, and elsewhere on this site: suffice
to say that, if true, this prognosis means that phase two
of the Balkan war is imminent.
THE
BALKAN WAR: PHASE II
The
prospects for success in the ongoing negotiations between
the Milosevic government and the Montenegrins do not look
good, and both sides are already mobilizing their forces.
A
recent poll shows most Montenegrins oppose independence
– this is because the economic viability of tiny Montenegro
is highly doubtful. But President Djukanovic is adept at fixing
elections, as shown in the contest that brought him to power,
and with NATO's help he would have little trouble doing a
similar job on the proposed referendum on independence scheduled
to take place in a few months. If and when push comes to shove
in Montenegro, get ready for the bombs to fall on Belgrade
yet again – and the possibility of the war on the ground
that John McCain and the Weekly Standard were so cruelly
deprived of last time.
FOREIGN
POLICY AND PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS
The
importance of foreign policy in the domestic politics of this
country is underscored by the fact that the three main political
groupings are divided and defined over their choice of foreign
enemies. The Democrats' favored villain is Slobodan Milosevic;
they hold out the prospect of a crusade against fascism resurgent,
with Slobo as Hitler II and the Serbian people as his "willing
executioners." They "idealistically" look forward
to a postwar "reconstruction" of Serbia along the
lines of post-World War II West Germany, complete with show
trials, bans on "hate speech," and massive reeducation
campaigns. The more practical moderate Republicans of the
Bushian faction look to the Caucasus as the next battlefield
in the war for the "New World Order," for reasons
detailed above. Led by such luminaries as James Baker, whose
rationale for the Gulf war was "jobs, jobs, jobs,"
these are the foreign policy "realists" who openly
advocate using the armies of the United States and NATO as
a police force to enforce regional stability and – not
incidentally – reap huge profits out of the Caspian Sea
oil bonanza. The Hate China lobby, while hoping to influence
Bush, has no real candidate at the moment, unless you count
Bob Smith, who may go after the US Taxpayers' Party nomination,
and Pat Buchanan, who may seek the Reform Party nod but has
no chance in the GOP primaries. (I note with sadness that
no candidate, aside from the nominee of the minuscule Libertarian
Party, upholds the noninterventionist position.)
A
PRISONER OF HISTORY
If
I had to put money on where and when the forces of the Empire
will next see combat, I would pick Montenegro, if only because
Clinton is still in the White House and the unfinished business
in the Balkans looms large. But the War Party does not always
get to choose the field of battle: as the rulers of a global
empire, the American government could be confronted by a "crisis"
in any part of the world at any time. From the straits of
Taiwan to the shores of the Caspian, the tripwires and flashpoints
proliferate as America's alleged "national interests"
expand to encompass the globe. As the great Old Right polemicist
Garet Garrett put it in his trenchant pamphlet, Rise of
Empire: "We are no longer able to choose between
peace and war. We have embraced perpetual war. We are no longer
able to choose the time, the circumstances or the battlefield."
Writing in 1952, Garrett saw our fate and stated it with eerie
clarity: "A time comes when Empire finds itself –
a prisoner of history." Moving zombie-like toward the
abyss of world "hegemony," into the bottomless pit
of Empire, wading knee-deep among the noble bones of Romans,
Spaniards, and Brits, we are the prisoners not only of history
but of our own delusions.
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