GEORGIA: THE OLD ORDER

SHEVARDNADZE AND GEORGIA'S PLACE ON THE CHESSBOARD


The former Soviet republic of Georgia, birthplace of Josef Stalin, is a fractious little land in the volatile and strategically important Caucasus - a ridge of mountains between the Caspian and Black Seas shoehorned between Russia, Turkey and Iran (and, yes, the origin of the word “Caucasian.”) Georgia shares borders with former SSRs Armenia and Azerbaijan, in a near-constant war over disputed territory. Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge is just across the border from the conflict-torn Russian republic of Chechnya, and frequently absorbs Chechens hiding from Russia’s reach. Georgia itself is torn by internal divisions; separatist struggles between ethnic Russians and Georgians in Abkhazia killed thousands and marred the country’s transition to independence in the early 1990s. A United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) was set up in 1993 to monitor the cease-fire, its mandate renewed by the UN Security Council every six months. UNOMIG remained for a decade before being expanded in 2003, and in 2006 is still in place, awaiting a final settlement thirteen years later.

Russians were among the UNOMIG observers but were excluded from its military security force. However peace-keepers under Russian command were also deployed in Abkhazia alongside the UN, part of the overall pattern of domination Moscow reserved in Georgia, part of the southern outpost of Moscow’s withered Empire. Though an agreement to pull the troops out was reached with the OSCE-brokered Istanbul Accords of 1999, a controversial rotating force of Russian troops and heavy weaponry remains in Abkhazia into 2006, with smaller forces and Russian-sponsored militias remaining in the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Ajaria.

As late as 2001 Russian troops had been sent into the Pankisi Gorge to ferret out Chechen rebels, but the Russian role there was taken over by Georgian troops, trained since May 2002 by American Special Forces as part of its “War on Terror.” In addition to fighting Chechen bad guys, Political analyst Matthew Riemer succinctly explained, the U.S. policy was “to strengthen an independent, Moscow-free Georgia that would eventually become a member of NATO and the European Union,” a shift that would be enabled by privatization and Western capital injections. [1]

The most obvious investment was in westbound Caspian oil pipelines; Georgia’s capital Tbilisi was attractive to Western investors as the middle link in at least two ambitious Europe-bound pipelines through the Caucasus alley. Both originate in Baku, Azerbaijan and pass through Tbilisi before diverging. The more famous of the two is set to end at Ceyhan, on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. A consortium of companies headed by British Petroleum backed this Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, and President Bush has endorsed it by name as furthering his energy policy as work began on laying it in May 2003. [2] The Baku-Tbilisi-Supsa (BTS) pipeline was set to end at Georgia’s coast to feed 120,000 to 150,000 barrels a day of Azerbaijani oil into an underground pipeline beneath the Black Sea to Europe. Soros’ EurasiaNet described how these pipelines “will allow both Georgia and Azerbaijan to more effectively resist geopolitical pressure exerted by Russia.” [3] The flip side, of course, is the ability they could give the West to exert such leverage against Russia.

President Shevardnadze, problematic US ally and target of the Rose Revolution

In these efforts the West worked closely - or tried to - with long-term Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze. He was a former Soviet heavyweight: KGB officer, Chairman of Georgian Communist Party, and Soviet Foreign Minister from Gorbachev’s ascendancy in 1985. In December 1990 he dramatically resigned both his post and his Party membership, complaining of a resurgence of hard line military types. “Boys in colonels’ epaulettes are pushing the country to dictatorship,” he declared in a speech from the floor of the Supreme Soviet on his resignation, eight months before those boys would try to overthrow his ally Gorbachev. [4]

After the USSR collapsed, Russian President Yeltsin sent Shevardnadze to reign in the chaos in his native Georgia, where President Zviad Gamsakhurdia had been deposed in a coup while the region of Abkhazia had moved to split and civil war broke out. He took effective control in Tbilisi in mid-1992, and when stability allowed was finally elected president in mid-1995. While somewhat dictatorial by Western standards, Shevardnadze was no Milosevic. He had charted a path amenable to the US, generally playing Russia and the West against each other as so many other nations did during the Cold War. In 1994-1995, he collaborated with Azerbaijan’s leadership on a Western-backed transportation and energy corridor the Europeans dubbed Transportation Corridor Europe-Caucasus-Asia (TRASECA). The BTS oil pipeline was the first phase of this ambitious endeavor that Ariel Cohen noted “will create relatively few jobs and relatively little transit-tariff revenue for Georgia.” [5]

As Soviet Foreign Minister “Shevy,” as the Americans came to call him, had been a great help in the prelude to the 1991 Gulf War; he grew so close to Secretary of State James Baker, the Texan once sang the standard Georgia on My Mind to him in one of their less formal meetings in Wyoming. [6] The Georgian leader also proved a workable ally in the post-9/11 world; in addition to allowing American special forces in 2002, he also offered enthusiastic support for the controversial 2003 Iraq War. Georgia was a proud member of the “Coalition of the Willing” (with 400 troops as of mid-2005, including special forces, medics and engineers, at least seven wounded so far.) [7] President Shevardnadze addressed his countrymen as the war opened, explaining that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was “a totalitarian regime […] which poses a threat to the whole region.” He reiterated the Washington line that the coalition was forced to take on the role that the UN Security Council should have fulfilled (Recall Russia’s resounding “Nyet” vote). He also noted that a Georgian-US partnership “could help Georgia resurrect its territorial integrity and resolve a number of economic issues.” [8]

Yet while useful to Washington, Shevardnadze was ever more unpopular with his own people, whose patience was wearing thin on territorial integrity and those economic issues as well as widespread official corruption, which the president seemed incapable of stopping. Presented in 1999 by his old friend James Baker with the esteemed “Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service,” by 2003 Shevardnadze’s government was increasingly seen as plagued with corruption, mismanagement, and secrecy. [9] These problems steadily drained Shevardnadze’s power like a hole in his gas tank and strategically vital Georgia began to look rather vulnerable to another round of instability and violence, sure to put the brakes on any pipeline with a “T” in the middle. Major protests had been staged off-and-on since 2001; criticism from the media was squashed with raids on the opposition stations, while political protest was met with dismissal of the government. US Secretary of State Colin Powell announced at one point “an unstable Georgia automatically results in an unstable Caucasus,” a statement some took to mean that rather than expend more political capital propping Shevy up, the Americans should “ditch him to ensure stability.” [10]

ZAYER AND HELVEY: NO TO SADDAM, NO TO WAR

Adam Larson
Caustic Logic/Guerillas Without Guns
Posted April 11 2007

Ultimately weaponized nonviolence failed to replace outright war in Iraq, but that doesn’t mean some people didn’t push to give peace a chance to bring down the Butcher of Baghdad. As the long-suffering citizens of Iraq turned out for the October 2002 Presidential “election,” it was clear that there was little chance of change by that route. Banners across the country urged Iraqis to vote “Yes, yes, yes for Saddam,” a message reinforced by both outright State power and by state radio repetition of Hussein’s campaign song – reportedly I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston, another sign of his relentless cruelty. [1] As with previous elections, marked ballots were used so those who voted no, no, no against Saddam would be known, and thus the Iraqi dictator hoped to match the 99.96 percent affirmation he had previously claimed. Exiled opposition leader Ismail Zayer described the election as “a forced pledge of loyalty […] The whole practice is a fiasco, orchestrated by a regime that does not believe in the people's voice. […] Their real voices, if given the choice, will say no to Saddam loud and clear.” [2]

Iraqi dissident and No to Saddam founder Ismael Zayer in 2004

Zayer had already been saying it himself for a while, and working with other Iraqi exiles had formed his own organization actually called “No to Saddam.” The organization was patterned to some extent on Otpor and was committed to severing Saddam’s dictatorship with massive strikes and other nonviolent civil insurgent tactics. [3] He proposed that the world should neither tolerate Saddam’s Tyranny nor resort to carpet bombing – Zayer called his approach “The Third Choice.” [4] “We have already succeeded in establishing a small network within the country and are planning a clandestine media campaign,” promised Zayer, a journalist by trade. [5]

One demonstration he seems to have organized early on “really opened people's eyes.” Demonstrators in Baghdad shouted pro-Saddam chants as cover for taking over the streets, refusing to allow their patriotic display to be dispersed even by warning gunshots. Saddam was not looking for an excuse to crack down as the US war machine loomed, and so no one died. “Many thought such protests were not possible,” Zayer said, but they had been emboldened by the positive example. [6]

He had hoped initially to forge a millions-strong civil insurgency, and approached US decision-makers about helping him. While overall support remained muted and Zayer’s group received almost no media coverage even after the war, some influential people in the regime change industry did answer the call. John Bacher reported in Peace magazine that a seminar was held in 2001 to discuss the possibility of such a campaign. Hosted by Peter Ackerman’s Center for Nonviolent Conflict, Woolsey’s Freedom House, and the US Institute for Peace, this reported gathering occurred “almost a year after the successful nonviolent Serbian Revolution of 2000,” so right around the time of the September 11 attacks, one would presume before. Details like exact date, location, speakers and itinerary remain unclear, but it seems to have been in Western Europe.

This 2001 seminar was followed by a two-day workshop in Washington called “Prospects for Democratic Change in Iraq,” held at American University on May 24 and 25 2002. It was organized by the Iraq Institute For Democracy, based in “Iraqi Kurdistan” and sponsored by Freedom House. A tentative itinerary I located online listed the legendary Robert Helvey as set to speak right before lunch during session two, “Civilian-based Resistance and Regime Change in Iraq.” Jack DuVall and Peter Ackerman from the Center for Nonviolent Conflict were also to present in this session; collectively they were to address three topics: “1. The record of nonviolent conflict in bringing down a dictator 2. Developing a strategy for Iraqi civilian resistance 3. International assistance for civilian-based action in Iraq.” [7] At this session as in his earlier venture in Burma, Bacher explained, “Helvey's military experience helped persuade skeptical Iraqi exiles that nonviolence is a viable approach.” [8]

Helvey's strongest supporter at the May strategy session was reportedly Ismael Zayer, and for the next year Helvey proceeded to help him pursue the Third Choice, delivering preliminary training to 50 leaders of No to Saddam. [9] Presumably the group was considered a central element of any such planned upheaval, but “unfortunately,” Bacher reported, “[Zayer’s] effort was not assisted by other countries and only thousands of Iraqis took part - far short of the millions he had hoped for.” He diligently continued the crusade, asking European supporters to send monitors to future Iraqi elections. In a phone interview on the eve of the Iraq War’s commencement, Zayer pleaded that “to achieve the third choice, we need help. Not with armies or with money,” he explained from his home in the Netherlands. “We need help in the form of nonviolent training to protect ourselves from Saddam and his agents. We can do it, but we need help now.” [10]

Next: Washington’s answer: No to Zayer, Yes to Force Presence

Sources:
[1], [2] “In Iraqi vote today, choice is Hussein or ... Hussein.” St. Petersburg Times (Florida). Compiled from Times wires - published October 15, 2002. http://www.sptimes.com/2002/10/15/Worldandnation/In_Iraqi_vote_today__.shtml
[3], [4], [8], [9], [10] Bacher, John. “Robert Helvey's Expert Political Defiance”
Peace Magazine. Apr-Jun 2003, p.10. http://www.peacemagazine.org/archive/v19n2p10.htm
[5], [6], Bacher, John. “The Price for Peace: How a Cool $45 million could solve Saddam problem.” http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2002-12-05/news_story4.php
[7] Partial Schedule of event, found at: http://www.kurd.org/events/SinjariConf.html

IRAQ AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER AT THE END OF HISTORY

Adam Larson
Caustic logic/Guerillas Without Guns
Posted March 7 2007
updated and edited a bit, 11/11/09

The USSR’s demise came not a minute too soon for Washington’s grandest ambitions of world power. Near the end of his tenure, Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev was setting himself up to assume a major continued role in the world. His domestic legacy of Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (economic restructuring) had greatly softened the Soviet image in a world that he noted was growing more interconnected and self-aware. He apparently fancied himself a bit of a latter-day Woodrow Wilson, and publicly laid his utopian plans for an end to the Cold War and its replacement with something called a “new world order,” to be led by the USSR and the US working in harmonious tandem. He first announced this on December 7 1988 at a UN assembly: “further world progress is now possible only through the search for a consensus of all mankind, in movement toward a new world order.” [1]

He wasn’t the first to use the phrase; it’s been a perennial favorite of idealist rhetoric since at least World War I and is even on our US currency. But his specific formulation was unprecedented in that it came from a Soviet leader and that it was taken serious by many worldwide, premised deftly on the concerns of the day. He offered a partial Soviet surrender as it were, an end to economic blocs and creation of one global capitalist economy if with local variations. He foresaw beyond this a gentler world of great power cooperation, wider democracy and social justice, environmental protection, nonviolent conflict resolution and of course nuclear disarmament. Gorbachev’s proposal was seen by many as a rambling pipe dream, but his idealism boosted Soviet influence in Europe, and in 1990 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Of course there were motives other than pure high-minded Pollyannaism at work; with a mismanaged economy in decline and a military drained by the eight-year war in Afghanistan, Gorbachev’s plan seems to have been to replenish Soviet power with his bold injection of intellectual capital. When you’re short on both guns and butter, a good enough idea may help fill the gap. The premier explained that despite the disagreements that had held the past in a chokehold, mutual respect was the to be the new paradigm. “For a new type of progress throughout the world to become a reality, everyone must change,” he stressed in June 1990. “Tolerance is the alpha and omega of a new world order.” [2]

Bush and Gorbachev meet at Malta to discuss the shape of the New World Order, December 2-3, 1989

Washington and the newly elected president Bush were left on the defensive by this visionary approach, accepting the Soviet leader’s basic premise but dithering on committing to it in a definitive way. In their memoir of power A World Transformed, Bush and his national security adviser Brent Scowcroft explained their concern about losing leadership to Gorbachev if they followed his lead, and the counterbalancing fear that the Europeans might stop following Washington if it seemed to drag its feet on the yellow brick road to the future. [3] The Malta Conference of December 2-3 1990 was supposed to re-open the East-West discussion of the shape of the new world, but the results were disappointing, with Bush again criticized for a lack of commitment to Gorbachev’s ambitious divination. Famously weak on “the vision thing,” in retrospect it almost seemed Bush was waiting for something to point him in the right direction to chart his own map towards a new world - one with Washington taking the lead.

As the tougher-minded in Washington saw it, partnership with Moscow was less necessary by the end of 1989; the writing was on the wall and the hawks were preparing for a different new world order - one without the Soviet Union. Gorbachev’s soft attitude and the general Soviet weakness freed their hand to pursue hot war over their own interest with less reservation than in the past. The initial test of this freedom of movement was the US conflict with Panama of December 1989, just weeks after Malta. With charges of drug dealing by president Noriega as justification, this easily-won, small-scale neighborhood war began the “reluctant sheriff” phase of America’s self-appointed post-Cold War military role.

But that “reluctant sheriff” called his next high-noon showdown within less than a year. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had just escaped a draining eight-year war with Iran, and in August 1990 responded to a string of apparently American-sponsored provocations by ordering a full invasion and annexation of his tiny, oil-rich neighbor Kuwait. The Americans had first told him they had “no opinion” on such “Arab-Arab disputes” as the border disagreement with Kuwait, but once carried out, this brazen act was taken as the first real challenge to the nascent and ill–defined new world order. [4] At this point Bush finally took the linguistic offensive, tapping into Gorbachev’s vein of optimistic ideals in a speech on September 11 1990:

“Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective - a new world order - can emerge: a new era - freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. […] Today that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we've known. […] [Gorbachev] and other leaders from Europe, the Gulf, and around the world understand that how we manage this crisis today could shape the future for generations to come.”

Bush stressed in his speech “this is the first assault on the new world that we seek, the first test of our mettle.” America rose to the occasion with its ready and eager military and an increasing momentum of international resolve. Gorbachev was reportedly torn between his desire for purely peaceful ends and the obvious (linguistic) similarity of Washington’s approach to his own vision of cooperation. [5] Working with Secretary of State James Baker, Bush pulled every trick in the book, not least flattery, to swing Soviet opinion behind the war plan in hopes of unanimity in the UN Security Council.

Permanent member China was persuaded to abstain, voting neither way, Yemen and Cuba (then two of the ten rotating members) were the only no votes (repaid with more sanctions) and the USSR followed Washington’s lead, joining 11 other yes votes on Security Council Resolution no. 678 in November 1990. Saddam was thus given a deadline of January 15 to withdraw or face UN forces, and so Bush, Baker, Shevardnadze, et al. had forged the first Security Council-approved military action since the fluke of approval for the Korean conflict at the UN’s dawn in 1950. This sudden usefulness of the UN was new, it was all about world order, and would go down as Bush’s legacy, not Gorbachev’s.

All it took was some serious follow-through, and the forces were already built up in neighboring Saudi Arabia – ostensibly neither to attack Iraq nor to liberate Kuwait, but only to defend the Saudi Kingdom from what the Americans insisted was a realistic threat of an Iraqi invasion. The military machine that assembled itself during late 1990 in sprawling bases in the Saudi desert were primarily American and British, no Soviet troops took part. Bush offered to have Soviet troops in the coalition, as noted by then National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, but Gorbachev apparently declined the honor. [6] It was the largest American military buildup since the Vietnam War, and designed to finally wash that war’s bad taste from America’s maw. By the end of the year, over a half-million soldiers and a mind-boggling arsenal of advanced weaponry was announced as offensive capable and ready to enforce Security Council Resolution 678.

For whatever reason, Saddam failed to withdraw by the deadline. Air strikes began a few days after and through late January and all of February pounded targets across Iraq with a bombardment that rivaled anything since World War II. On February 22, Iraq agreed to a Soviet-sponsored cease-fire agreement calling for a withdrawal in three weeks to be overseen by the Security Council. The US rejected the proposal and kept bombing, two days later launching the final phase with coalition ground forces pushing through Kuwait and into Iraq. Saddam finally surrendered and the US shot up some of the (retreating? withdrawing?) columns. But Bush refused to push on to Baghdad. Saddam was left in power though locked in a “box” of sanctions and weapons inspectors, to be policed by the world community.

Immediately after the war was finished, President Bush lauded the cooperative spirit of world community – the US and USSR were on the same side! He declared in a speech on March 6, 1991:

“The Gulf war put this new world to its first test. And my fellow Americans, we passed that test. […] Even the new world order cannot guarantee an era of perpetual peace. But enduring peace must be our mission. Our success in the Gulf will shape […] the new world order we seek.”

In this process, Gorbachev had followed hopefully, but the war had been an American game and by now so was the Cold War. 1990 saw a weaker Moscow granting more autonomy to the constituent republics, and 1991 was mired in deeper crisis yet with Russia’s role in the USSR itself coming into question. Just six months after the end of the Gulf war, a coup by Communist hardliners had the premier sidelined for three days in August amid a nationwide “emergency.” This spurred strong international condemnation and threats, massive strikes and protests from the Russian public, and deft moves by an emerging new class of West-friendly leaders like Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin.

The liberal Gorbachev was thus restored but the final slide had been entered. Half the Republics took the chance provided by the coup’s chaos in Moscow to declare independence, and the USSR’s final dissolution was recognized by all parties in December. As 1992 dawned, the Pro-West Yeltsin was in power in the new Russian Federation, by far the largest of the newly independent constituent republics. Where there had been one massive, monolithic nation there now stood massive Russia (with its south Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad) and fourteen smaller republics.

Some semblance of a regional cooperation framework was maintained with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The creation of the CIS in December 1991 is what officially marked the end of the USSR. It was agreed to by Russia, Ukraine and Belarus to ensure a “civilized divorce” of the republics, yet it continues on to the present time, eventually including all the former SSRs minus the Baltic states: Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, who sought to escape Russia’s sphere as totally as possible.

The Cold War was over and the West officially emerged victorious. It was a heady time in Washington and a bit of a dreamland. Influential American thinker Francis Fukuyama even wrote about the “end of history,” first in a 1989 article and later in a 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama explained “a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism.” Fukuyama defines history narrowly as the development of political ideologies, and so the emergent liberal democracy constitutes the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and as such marked the termination of the historic process. [7] History is over because we had won, Fukuyama’s case seems to run. We put the period at the end of the sentence because all of history has leading up to the perfection we are. We the liberal Democratic New World Order, we the Last Men of the West.

Next:
Euro-NATO: How the West was Run
Sources:
[1], [2], Wikipedia. “New world order.” last modified 21 July 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_world_order
[3] George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft. A World Transformed, ISBN 0679752595, pp. 42-43.
[4] Clark, Ramsey. The Fire This Time: US War Crimes in the Gulf. New York. Thunder’s Mouth Press. First edition, First Printing. 1992. Page 12-19.
[5] Aldrich-Moodie, Benjamin. “Negotiating Coalition: Winning Soviet Consent to Resolution 678 Against Iraq”
Woodrow Wilson school of Public and International Affairs. WWS Case Study 1/98
http://www.wws.princeton.edu/cases/papers/negotiating.html
[6] see [3], pp. 361-364.
[7] Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History and the Last Man. (intro) Penguin. 1992.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/fukuyama.htm

ZIMBABWE/IRAQ 2003

THE LIMITS OF NON-VIOLENCE
ADAM LARSON
CAUSTIC LOGIC / GUERILLAS WITHOUT GUNS
Posted 2/27/07

American support like that offered in Serbia was not universally supported – there were exceptions. In Africa, for example, Zimbabwe was in its own turmoil at the same time; strongman Robert Mugabe had spawned his own opposition, the leaders of which were inspired by other revolutionary struggles around the world. They immediately acted after seeing the dramatic success of Otpor in Belgrade. Laura Rozen wrtote for Salon in February 2001:

“Hours after Milosevic fell in October, anti-government protests swept through Zimbabwe as parliamentary elections approached. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai vowed to stop ‘Africa's Milosevic.’ “Mugabe has committed genocide against a minority, rigged elections, ignored the rule of law, and created a state which is internationally isolated," Tsvangirai said Oct. 6, just as Milosevic was conceding defeat in Belgrade. “We have given Mugabe a warning. A similar situation to Yugoslavia cannot be avoided.” [1]

But of course such a thing could be avoided and was. Nothing like the Bulldozer Revolution happened in Zimbabwe at that time. There are opposition leaders on the scene, Tsvangirai foremost among them, and by early 2005 he was finally receiving help from Colonel Helvey and others, according to the Christian Science Monitor. [2] But the public has not rallied behind the opposition to a large enough degree and as of mid-2006 Mugabe is still in power.

This citizen “apathy” has been blamed on many factors, but two that Helvey pointed out as key obstacles were hunger and AIDS. “When people are starving, it's awfully hard to promote democracy,” he explained. Roughly 40% of the nation’s 12 million people are near starvation, according to a recent report. In such circumstances, “you can't have 1 million people sitting in the streets of the capital for 17 days,” Helvey elaborated. “There's not going to be food for them.” Then there's AIDS. In 2002, the official HIV infection rate was 27 percent, one of the world's highest and thought to have gone up since then. Helvey wondered in such a climate, “who's got the energy to protest?” [3] Thus it seems Helvey’s tactic falls flat in places like Zimbabwe, where reforms are most urgently needed.

But perhaps the apathy regarding reform there lies elsewhere. It could be that Zimbabwe simply offered too few riches to be seen as worthwhile in Washington. This possibility indicates one key moral weakness of the strategy – while promising to remove a reviled dictator without resort to violent war, like war it tends to work only where the US is looking to invest; no type of conflict is waged if a target nation hasn’t enough to offer.

However, and for other reasons, Sharp’s nonviolent conflict also got no real support against Saddam Hussein in Iraq which clearly does have massive resources – primarily one of the world’s largest supplies of petroleum in an age of shrinking supplies. The U.S. was already in a state of war against a reviled dictator there; after the fierce bombardment of its infrastructure in 1991, Iraq continued to marinade in economic sanctions through the Clinton years, punctuated with occasional air strikes whenever Saddam was perceived as trying to sneak out of his “box.” No fly zones enforced by the U.S. ostensibly to protect Kurds in the North and Shiites in the South left most of Iraq beyond Baghdad’s effective control. Iraq was thus progressively weakened; even as Saddam himself retained his elaborate network of grandiose palaces, the nation’s people were wracked with malnutrition, water-borne disease, and epidemic deformities possibly caused by US-deposited Depleted Uranium munitions. On top of this the sanctions and inadequate oil-for-food program held fast. Madeleine Albright even told 60 Minutes in 1996 (she was UN Ambassador at the time, soon-to-be Secretary of State) that the reported 500,000 children who had died from the sanctions were “worth it,” although it was a “hard” calculation. (She later explained that she regretted making this admission and should instead have deflected the question by blaming the peoples’ suffering on Saddam, as was standard.) [4]

The sanctions regime thus dragged on into the twilight of the Clinton years as the Serbian situation unfolded. But one way or another it was set to change. It was the re-emerging superpower rival Russia that started leading the charge to end sanctions and bring Iraq, even with Saddam Hussein in charge, back into the mainstream oil economy. Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov explained to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in mid-2000 that the Russian government was “in favor of mitigating the limitations imposed on Russia by the sanctions.” This position was supported by French president Jaques Chirac, who further called the sanctions “dangerous, inhumane, and inappropriate.” [5] The London Financial Times reported on September 12 2000 “the Russian and French positions are giving Iraq hope that the sanctions, if not lifted, will soon become meaningless.” Deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz explained in an interview with the magazine “Iraq's practically becoming more like Cuba vis a vis the US. […] Everyone else is trading with Cuba, this is going to be the future of the matter.” [6]

A different course to ending sanctions was coalescing in the US, crafted by neoconservative Republican power hopefuls as part of a plan to preserve “the global Pax Americana.” The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the by-now infamous think tank featuring names like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and Woolsey, had formed in 1997 to promote a strong, bold, well-funded military and unapologetic globe-molding neo-imperialism informed by “American values” and “American interests.” The PNAC’s guiding document for making the 21st century a New American one was its September 2000 report Rebuilding America’s Defenses. The report took a belligerent tone towards Iraq, outlined along with Iran and North Korea (soon Bush’s “axis of evil”) as the three biggest troublemakers in the global system. Russia and China were listed as competitors to contain. Tensions with Russia, China and France would lead to deadlock in the UN Security Council, specifically over Iraq, so the report focused on willingness to take unilateral action or rely on ad-hoc coalitions.

The described high-tech high-cost military “process of transformation,” and its geopolitical aims including in Iraq, would be difficult to achieve, the report noted, without the realization of “a catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl harbor.” This report was released and utterly ignored in September 2000, a year before that precise event was delivered and just months before a large PNAC contingent took the reins of power along with George W Bush in the deeply troubling 2000 Election. Among the signatories of that report were Paul Wolfowitz, who would be Deputy Defense Secretary, no. 2 to fellow PNACer Rumsfeld, and Scooter Libby, who would be Chief of Staff to fellow PNACer Cheney; that is, the top aides the top PNACER’s at both the Pentagon and White House.

The dust had just settled in Serbia after the bulldozer revolution when Bush was sworn-in. For the next eight months, as widely noted, Bush’s foreign policy just sort of drifted about amid growing domestic problems – to much of the world this seemed a lull, as if they were waiting for something to show them the way. After the September 11 attacks and the announcement of a worldwide “War on Terror,” Rebuilding America’s Defenses was for all intents and purposes adopted by the administration as the master strategy for the new generational struggle. Defense secretary Rumsfeld and his team got their direction, coordinating with Cheney at the White House, and began pushing events towards Iraq. Bush delivered a speech at the wounded Pentagon on October 11, 2001, announcing his firm dedication to the PNAC vision, and that 9/11 was indeed the fulfillment of their “new Pearl Harbor” prophecy. In response to the report’s call for increased Pentagon budgets, Bush assured them “in the missions ahead for the military, you will have everything you need, every resource, every weapon, every means to assure full victory for the United States and the cause of freedom.” [7]

But when it came to Iraq, this did not include the Sharp-Helvey nonviolent “post-military weapons system” so recently proven in Serbia. The PNAC had in 1999 targeted Milosevic for downfall and urged Clinton and Congress to take the actions they finally did. [8] One would think they’d be aware of and pleased with Colonel Helvey’s work with Otpor, which had finished the job. Likewise, the PNAC had their sights set on Saddam Hussein, but of course, there was no such utopian revolution in Baghdad, only war and occupation.

The PNAC’s 2000 report said the US had long wanted a “more permanent role in Gulf regional security,” backed up by a “substantial American force presence” in the region, a need which they emphasized “transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” [9] Such a military presence was then extant but threatened in Saudi Arabia; in August 2001 Crown Prince Abdullah in fact quietly and informally requested US forces to leave so he could avoid “the fate of the Shah of Iran.” [10] To get a new force presence, an internal revolution was not what was needed. It was not Otpor and their revolution that left NATO troops in Yugoslavia after all, but the earlier military conflict. And after more than a decade of brutal sanctions and bombs, it was unlikely that any internally produced new regime in Iraq would invite American basing there if given the choice. So the force presence would have to be hammered in, which seems to have been the plan from step one.

Next: Zayer and Helvey: No to Saddam, No to War

Sources:
[1] Rozen, Laura. “Dictator downturn: It just isn't as easy being a tyrant as it used to be.” Salon. February 3 2001 http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2001/02/03/dictators/print.html
[2], [3] McLaughlin, Abraham. “In Zimbabwe, people power fails to ignite.” Christian Science Monitor
from the March 22, 2005 edition Accessed June 12, 2006.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0322/p01s04-woaf.html
[4] Richman, Sheldon. “Albright Aplogizes.” The Future of Freedom Foundation. November 7 2003. http://www.fff.org/comment/com0311c.asp
[5], [6] Hoyos, Carola. “Russia in New Push to Lift Iraq Sanctions.” Finanacial Times. September 12 2000.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/iraq1/council/russ0009.htm
[7] President George W. Bush's Pentagon Memorial Speech. October 11, 2001 Copied October 19, 2004 from: http://www.september11news.com/PresidentBushPentagon.htm
[8] “Mr. President, Milosevic is the Problem.” Project for a New American Century, International Crisis Group, Balkan Action Council, and Coalition for International Justice. Open letter to the President of the United States. September 20, 1998.
[9] Project for a New American Century Rebuilding America’s Defenses September 2000 Page 14.
[10] Pipes, Daniel “The Scandal of U.S.-Saudi Relations.” The National Interest. Winter 2002/03 http://www.danielpipes.org/article/995