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The Next Attack
Stephen Flynn, Washington Monthly
Terrorists in Iraq are becoming proficient at blowing up oil refineries. Similar plants in a handful of American cities represent our greatest vulnerability. We could easily be making them less dangerous. But we’re not.
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…. Readers may be surprised to learn that an oil refinery can pose such a huge threat [as shown in the scenario just described]; terrorists, rest assured, are not. Al-Qaeda has been acquiring experience in these kinds of attacks in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and sharing the details of constructing improvised explosive devices in Internet chat rooms. All the information on the dangers of hydrofluoric acid and the vulnerability of the Sunoco facility can be found in publicly available reports that are accessible with the click of a mouse. And there are dozens of other similar plants near urban areas-from refineries to chemical factories to water-treatment facilities-where, to this day, in a worst-case scenario, hundreds of thousands of Americans could be killed or injured.
Much has been said about how Iraq is a training ground for terrorists, but it’s rarely mentioned that the training is in precisely the sort of terrorism to which the United States is most vulnerable: attacks on our unsecured industrial facilities such as refineries and chemical plants. Between January 2004 and March 2006, insurgents carried out attacks on oil and gas pipelines that cost Iraq more than $16 billion in lost oil revenue. Successful attacks on the electrical grid have kept Iraq’s average daily output at 5 to 10 percent below the prewar level despite the $1.2 billion the United States has spent to improve the country’s electrical production. Terrorists are cataloging and sharing their new skills online. And many foreign insurgents now return to their native lands with the experience of successfully targeting the kinds of complex systems that support economic and daily life within advanced societies.
Unfortunately, in the five years since 9/11, Washington has barely gone through the motions in its efforts to address the vulnerability of our chemical plants. While the Bush administration took us to war with the aim of protecting us from weapons of mass destruction produced abroad, it has shown little appetite for managing the risk of our most dangerous weapons of mass destruction at home. …
To understand why meaningful chemical security legislation has languished for more than five years, it helps to sit in the Bush administration’s seat in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. As members of the administration surveyed the United States, they saw a country that was impossibly vulnerable to attack by terrorists who had taken them by surprise. There were thousands of miles of unsecured borders and countless easy targets: stadiums, school buses, trains, tunnels, and so forth. They concluded that it would be immensely expensive-and, ultimately, futile-to attempt to protect them all.
The administration decided that the only defense was a determined offense. This notion-that it was impossible to undertake effective actions at home that would insulate us from all forms of terrorism-also meant that the White House did not need to revisit its core political views. Because 85 percent of the critical infrastructure within the United States is privately owned, federal efforts to advance homeland security would have clashed with the conservative belief that Washington should avoid regulating industry. In July 2002, the White House made this thinking official doctrine when it quietly released The National Strategy for Homeland Security.
(March 2007 issue)
Putin and the Geopolitics of the New Cold War
F. William Engdahl, Global Research
Or, what happens when Cowboys don’t shoot straight like they used to…
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The frank words of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to the assembled participants of the annual Munich Wehrkunde security conference have unleashed a storm of self-righteous protest from Western media and politicians. A visitor from another planet might have the impression that the Russian President had abruptly decided to launch a provocative confrontation policy with the West reminiscent of the 1943-1991 Cold War.
However, the details of the developments in NATO and the United States military policies since 1991 are anything but ‘déjà vu all over again’, to paraphrase the legendary New York Yankees catcher, Yogi Berra.
This time round we are already deep in a New Cold War, which literally threatens the future of life on this planet. The debacle in Iraq, or the prospect of a US tactical nuclear pre-emptive strike against Iran are ghastly enough. In comparison to what is at play in the US global military buildup against its most formidable remaining global rival, Russia, they loom relatively small. The US military policies since the end of the Soviet Union and emergence of the Republic of Russia in 1991 are in need of close examination in this context. Only then do Putin’s frank remarks on February 10 at the Munich Conference on Security make sense.
Because of the misleading accounts of most of Putin’s remarks in most western media, it’s worth reading in full in English (go to www.securityconference.de for official English translation).
Putin spoke in general terms of Washington’s vision of a ‘unipolar’ world, with ‘one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making, calling it a ‘world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.’
Then the Russian President got to the heart of the matter: ‘Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts. As a result we do not have sufficient strength to find a comprehensive solution to any one of these conflicts. Finding a political settlement also becomes impossible.’
…Ironically, oil, in the context of Washington’s bungled Iraq war and soaring world oil prices after 2003, has enabled Russia to begin the arduous job of rebuilding its collapsed economy and its military capacities. Putin’s Russia is no longer a begger-thy-neighbor former Superpower. It’s using its oil weapon and rebuilding its nuclear ones.
F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, and the soon-to-be published Seeds of Destruction: the dark side of gene manipulation. This article was drawn from his new book, in preparation, on the history of the American Century. He may be reached through his website: www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
(20 Feb 2007)
The Fallacy of Bleed-Out
Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Speaking Truth to Power
The idea is that, although Bush was wrong to get us into this war, we are there and we cannot simply pull our troops out. If we do so, then Iraq will collapse into civil war and Iran could very well take over the whole country, including its oilfields.
This seems plausible. But when you look closely at this argument, you will see that there is nothing to support it other than the delusion that the US is fighting the good fight. There were no terrorists in Iraq before we invaded the country. The so-called insurgency is in reality a resistance. This has been a war of conquest from the start. The US troops there must terrorize the Iraqis in order to maintain any sort of ascendancy. In so doing, they demoralize the Iraqis and themselves.
…Political leaders cling to this idea of bleed-out simply because they do not want US interests to lose their grip on Iraq’s oil wealth. This is what the invasion was about all along: oil. And now they are afraid to let go of the country for fear of losing this oil bounty. Should that happen, they can envisage this oil being used against us, perhaps leading to a realignment of the entire Middle East with all of its energy riches poised against the US.
(22 Feb 2007)
Carolyn Baker writes:
Geologist Dale Allen Pfeiffer, a foremost authority on Peak Oil, assesses the Bush administration’s bleed-out policy in the light of America’s energy consumption. Visit Dale’s website, MOUNTAIN SENTINEL HOME
Funny how times change. Pfeiffer’s views were once exclusive to the left. Now, similar sentiments are being expressed by mainstream foreign policy people and (probably) by military and CIA types. Of course the vocabulary is different, but it’s surprising how much agreement there is on the basic picture. (Neocons and Bush true-believers apart.) -BA
