Eastward Bound
Introduction
One
of the oddest parts of the current war being fought in Afghanistan is its
undefined nature. Besides offering
a vague notion of needing to “fight extremism,” little is ever said about why a
large American and European army is fighting in Central Asia. What is argued below is that this is
because there is no reason, at least not in doctrinal coherence. Instead, Afghanistan is being occupied
as the logical outcome of the United State’s post-Cold War policy. During this nineties, numerous
different interests set about trying to influence what role America was to play
in the world, all of them advocating for an expansion of American influence,
both geographically eastward into the former Soviet Union and ideologically, in
the question of what situations military force should be used. As such, these ideas became official
government policy, whether through conscious statecraft or back room lobbying.
The
result of this history is that the United States now attempts to wield political
power over a vast swath of Eurasian territory, stretching from the Eastern
Mediterranean into Southwest Asia.
In terms of geopolitics, this can be seen as an unprecedented intrusion
into an area that was traditionally under the influence of regional actors like
Russia and Iran. Moreover,
Washington saw its strategy as a zero-sum contest, actively trying to deny the
influence of these local powers while building up its own. One glaring example of this is in
Afghanistan, where only thirteen years after the Red Army retreated northward
through the Central Asian Republics (then Soviet Republics), the US Army
invaded using proxy forces and military bases located in the Central Asian
Republics. However, this is not to
say that Washington's strategy of shutting these other powers out of the region
has been successful. Russia, Iran,
and as of late China all have trade and military relations with the area in
question. In fact, it may turn out
that the US's reliance on military force has hindered its ability to influence
the governments of the region.
What
follows is an attempt to sketch two decades worth of history. The first section will examine
U.S.-Soviet Business dealings in the 1980’s and Chevron’s interest in Caspian
Basin energy deposits. The second
section will examine U.S. policy towards Turkey in the 1980’s. The third section looks at the
administration of George HW Bush in the context of American militarism, while
the fourth looks at the Clinton years in much the same way. Finally, the last section will detail
the Central Asia’s transition into a fully securitized region of the American
empire.
I. The Traders
On the business side, one of the men
most responsible for initiating the U.S. move into Central Asia was James H.
Giffen, a businessman with a history of promoting trade between America and the
Soviet Union. While his name
appeared in the business press from time to time throughout the 1980’s and
1990’s, it was not until the 21st century that he achieved infamy, when the was
indicted by the Justice Department in the largest foreign bribery case brought
against an American citizen in history.
He was charged under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, banning American
business leaders from bribing foreign officials.
Giffen's professional involvement in Soviet
business went back to 1968, when he turned his doctoral work at Berkeley into a
textbook on trading across cold war lines. He then entered private industry, working at Armco, an Ohio
steel company that supplied the Soviet oil industry. Giffen rose to be Vice President of the Armco oil-services
branch, serving under CEO C. William Verity, who would later be appointed
Secretary of Commerce in 1987 by Ronald Reagan.[1]
Both
Giffen and Verity were members of the odd political breed that pressed for
increased US-Soviet economic relations during the Cold War. However, this had not been in line with
government policy since 1974, when the “Jackson-Vanick” amendment was added to
U.S. trade law. The bill tied
preferential trading rates to foreign governments’ emigration policies, denying
“most favored nation” status to any Communist country that restricted or
charged high fees for the right of its citizens to emigrate. Although in theory the bill was meant
to punish human rights violations across Communist countries, it specifically
was aimed at Moscow’s practice of stopping Jews from immigrating to Israel.[2]
But
Giffen and Verity held true to their commercial beliefs, and in 1984 they
founded the Mercator Corporation, a private New York merchant bank that
specialized in American-Soviet relations.
Concurrently, Giffen took over from Verity as chairman of the
“U.S.-U.S.S.R. Trade Council,” a lobby for American businessmen hoping to
invest in the Soviet Union. Three
years earlier, the council had met in Moscow, their first meeting since the mid
1970’s. In a poignant marker for
the beginning of the end of the Cold War, Soviet leader Leonard Brezhnev died
only five days before the Trade Council meeting was scheduled to begin. However, according to Verity, this
threw no loop in the plans, as “Soviet officials were on telephone within two
hours after Brezhnev’s death was announced, urging the Americans to come
ahead.”[3]
These
developments coincided with Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power in Moscow, and
the reformist politician was reportedly a confidant of Giffen. According to Giffen, Gorbachev enlisted
him to set up joint ventures with American corporations, an idea out of which
was born the "American Trade Consortium," a group of five large US
companies (Chevron, RJR Nabisco, Eastman Kodak, Johnson & Johnson, and
Archers Daniel Midland) that wanted to do business in the Soviet Union. Giffen began building the consortium in
1987, and within a year an initial agreement had been signed. To mark the occasion, Gorbachev hosted a
Kremlin dinner for over 400 US businessmen, led by C. William Verity, now the
Secretary of Commerce.[4] In addition to the five
"blue-blood" companies, 34 other American businesses also piggybacked
on Giffen's deal and planned to establish joint ventures in the Soviet Union.
Financially,
the consortium’s business plan depended heavily on Chevron, which would provide
dollars to the other consortium members by exporting Soviet energy. Giffen had negotiated a deal where members’
businesses would share a pool of hard currency for investment, allowing them to
circumvent the Soviet law barring foreign companies from removing profits
before their business generate currency.[5] By pooling the capital resources
generated by energy sales, the corporations could both invest in the East and
move profit back to the New York ledgers of Mercator.
Chevron
was primarily interested in the large energy deposits of the Caspian Basin.
Although the area had sustained an oil industry dating back to the 19th
century, centered in the Azeri port of Baku, the supergiant Tenghiz field had
only been discovered in 1979.
Armed with a pile of geological maps, a team of Chevron advisors visited
the area, accompanied by Giffen, in 1987.
They were so impressed with the Tenghiz deposit that one Chevron
geologists considered it to be “the perfect oil field.”[6] Another compared it to the 3,850 foot
tall Mt. Diablo, near Chevron’s San Francisco headquarters. “He calculated that if one sawed
through Mount Diablo at its base, then turned it upside down and buried it far
underground, such that its tip reached a depth of 15,000 feet, that mountain
would be Tenghiz.”[7] At the time, both the Americans and the
Soviets had a conservative estimate that Tenghiz contained 10 billion barrels,
making it one of the world’s ten largest fields. However, over time this calculation has risen to 18 billion
proven barrels, all contained in one massive column 1,500 feet tall. Moreover, Chevron’s geologists were
also enticed by the fact that seismographs showed Tenghiz as only part of a
larger oblong atoll of deposits.
One image in particular “seemed to indicate the presence of another
field offshore containing two subterranean reservoirs, four times the size of
Tenghiz, or a minimum of 40 billion barrels of oil.”[8] But energy expert Michael Klare points
out that it is not even the size of these reserves that is most significant,
"but the fact that production in this region is likely to rise in the
years ahead while production in many other oil-bearing areas is likely to
decline."[9]
For Chevron, the prospect of adding such a
large concession to its bottom line came at a fortuitous moment. Although it had been a member of the
hegemonic Western oil cartel that Italian President Enrico Mattei had deemed
the “Seven Sisters,” the turbulence of the 1970's recalibrated the industry in
favor of producing states. Due to
a string of nationalizations, the oil majors had lost control of their crude
oil holdings, which were now in the hands of state owned companies like Saudi
Aramco. This meant that the
Western companies were relegated to selling the oil abroad and providing
technical service, denying them the ability to control production and price,
and taking huge amounts of oil out of their “booked reserves,” the amount of
proven oil underneath fields they held concessions to.[10] From 1977 to 1984, the Seven Sisters
saw their booked reserves drop by an incredible two-thirds.[11]
Balancing
this out was a dramatic rise in price, nominally known as the "oil
shocks." Oil prices rocketed upwards by 400% in 1973-1974, following Henry
Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy to end the Yom Kippur war, and then again in 1979
with the Iranian Revolution. But
the second half of the 1980's saw what Daniel Yergin terms "the third oil
shock," which beginning in 1985 sent prices plummeting. Yergin notes that, "it was not
merely that prices were collapsing; they were also out of control. For the first time in memory, there was
no price setting structure. There
was not even an official OPEC price.
The market was victorious, at least for the time being."[12]
The oil majors were also using the market for a
different strategy, that of the leveraged corporate merger (a strategy helped
out immensely by the Reagan's administrations attitude towards anti-trust
statutes). In her history of the
oil industry, Antonia Juhasz writes of the period that American oil companies “set
out to hunt for oil not in the field but rather on Wall Street, by buying up
other oil companies.”[13] In 1984, this practice hit record
heights when Texaco acquired Getty Oil for $10 billion, followed one month
later by the acquisition of Gulf Oil by Chevron. At the time, this was the largest merger in corporate
history, and Chevron saw its oil reserves nearly double to 4 billion barrels
and its natural-gas reserves increase by three-quarters.[14] The combination of lost oil reserves, a
wildly fluctuating market, and a culture of speculative monopoly on Wall Street
made the promise of access to Soviet Oil to avaricious to turn away from.
Initially,
Chevron was not offered the Tenghiz field but instead the adjacent Korolev
field, one-twelfth the size.
However, knowing that this was to be a long-term commitment, Chevron
“agreed to develop it so we could get in on exploration,” according to Richard
Matzke, then president of Chevron Overseas Petroleum.[15]
This paid off, for in January 1990 Giffen convinced Gorbachev that the Korolev
field was not large enough to generate the necessary capital for the other
members of the consortium, an argument that Gorbachev bought.[16] As a result, Chevron signed a “protocol
of intentions” at the Soviet Embassy in early June, giving the oil company
exclusive rights to explore an 8,900 sq. mile area that included the Tenghiz
field, but stopping short of establishing a joint venture that would allow oil
to actually be sold.[17]
The following month, Nurulstan Nazerbaev, the President of the Soviet Republic
of Kazakhstan and a leader close to Gorbachev, visited the United States and
met with Bush administration officials, members of Congress, and
businessmen. The main purpose of
his trip was to push for foreign investment in Kazakhstan, part of his plan for
“economic sovereignty” without political separation from Moscow, which stressed
privatization of property, dissolution of monopolies, expansion of
entrepreneurship, and the independence of enterprises.[18] In December, Nazarbaev announced that a
joint venture between the Republic and Chevron would be signed the following
month.[19]
In the simplest terms, Chevron managed to jump
the gun, beginning the capitalist exploitation of the Soviet Union before the
Cold War actually ended. As a
result, when the USSR formally disbanded in December 1991, Chevron already had
a political and economic agenda laid out for the “newly independent states” and
their energy reserves. While they
would not have hegemonic control over the area, all negotiations began on their
terms, and the rest of the industry had to horse trade in order to get
concessions. Richard Barnet, in
his analysis of the relationship between government and business in foreign
affairs, distinguishes between two scenarios—crisis management and long-term
policy. Concerning the former,
business leaders “may be informed as a courtesy due to the powerful, but they
will not have an active role in making the decisions.” However, concerning the latter, he
writes:
The role of
corporate managers in shaping long-term policies, such as those affecting
investment, availability, and use of resources, which are ultimately more
important, is much greater. On
these, businessmen make their weight felt in two ways. The first is through continuous
lobbying of the executive and Congress, most of it private and informal. The second is through the conduct of
their business. By making ordinary
business decisions affecting foreign countries, corporate managers set the
direction of American foreign policy. [20]
In this sense,
the Chevron approach served as the model for the entirety of American policy
towards the former Soviet Union and the commanding heights of its economy. It was all one big oil field,
controlled by Moscow elite, to be tapped, barreled, and sold for profit by the
American political industry, with Harvard University and the International
Monetary Fund filling the roll of the Seven Sisters.
II. The Warriors
It
was in Turkey that the Cold Warriors made their impact felt. For American-Turkish relations,
the military coup d'etat that took place in Ankara on September 12, 1980 serves
as a turning point. The coup
leaders, who reportedly had “the silent approval” of Turkey's western allies,
desired “a long term project to rebuild totally the political and economic
structures of the Turkish state.”[21] In order to facilitate this project,
the Parliament was dissolved, political leaders were taken into custody,
political parties and trade unions were directed to disband, and martial law
was declared countrywide.[22] However, the coup leaders planned to
resolutely push Turkey into the dominion of the U.S. military complex, and thus
Washington saw these autocratic developments as benign. As a prime example of the role major
newspapers play as an enforcer of US policy, the New York Times ran a fawning profile of Ankara's new generalissimo only one day after he had seized power, beginning
with the sentence “General Kenan Evren, the leader of the new Turkish military
government, faces the double task of defeating terrorism and bolstering his
country's position as NATO's bastion in the troubled Middle East,” while the Washington
Post ran a short factsheet entitled,
“Turkey: A Key U.S. Ally Bridging Europe and Asia.”[23]
During
the three years of military rule that followed the coup, a form of gunboat
diplomacy took place between Washington and Ankara. With simultaneous negotiations taking place over both its
massive external debt and its military acquisitions, Turkey was transformed
into the prototypical outpost of the neocolonial project. While Washington based international
lenders like the IMF and World Bank imposed strict financial dictates on
government spending and export laws and enforced the privatization of state-run
industries, the Pentagon and State Department colluded to negotiate US arm
sales and basing rights. In
essence, this was the realization of the hawkish position on Turkey that had
circulated among US strategists throughout the Cold War. The Anatolian plateau, geographically
situated in the underbelly of the Soviet Union and atop the vast resource pools
that are the Persian Gulf and Africa, would now be squarely under the political
thumb of Washington.
Tellingly,
the American ambassador to Turkey was Robert Strausz-Hupe, a venerable and
experienced Cold Warrior. Although
often overlooked in political history, Strausz-Hupe had been an influential
elite in Washington policy circles.
Born to a wealthy Austrian family in 1903, he immigrated to America at
age twenty, eventually ending up in New York City, where he worked at a Wall
Street bank and wrote for Current History
magazine. His eye was focused
across the Atlantic, to his native Europe, where totalitarian societies were
being nurtured in both Hitler's Germany and Stalin’s Russia. This time period influenced
Strausz-Hupe greatly, and in his worldview he never abandoned this prism of totalitarianism. After World War II, he was offered a
prestigious position at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where
he founded the Foreign Policy Research Institute in 1955. This would become his pulpit from which
he preached a hard-line, totalizing view of the Cold War as a battle between
ideological extremes. Considering
this, it is not surprising that he was in control of US policy towards Turkey
during the final decade of the Cold War. [24]
Also
not surprising is that Strausz-Hupe nominated another hardliner, Richard Perle,
an Assistant Secretary of Defense, to be his point man for negotiations.
Normally, Perle’s Pentagon post would not involve diplomatic relations, the
purview of the State Department, but Perle was the exception. Perle himself told an audience at the
Foreign Policy Research Institute “it is even rarer for an American ambassador
to invite a Defense Department official to take charge of a sensitive
negotiation that would normally be handled by the Department of State, yet that
is precisely what Ambassador Strausz-Hupe did in Ankara in the 1980's.[25] Over the decade, Perle negotiated a
major defense agreement and basing rights for Washington, reaffirming the
Anatolian plateau as a military ally.
At the close of the decade, he went into private practice in order to
financially benefit from his government service, forming International Advisors
Inc., a consulting firm that contracted to the Turkish government, along with
his associate Douglas Feith. It
was also at the close of the decade that Turkey set into motion its
“pan-Turkic” identity that aligned the country with the Caucasus and Central
Asia over the next twenty years.
“Pan-Turkism,”
an Ottoman-era ideology that imagined one united people stretching from the
Mediterranean into Western China, was reintroduced into official language as
the Soviet Union collapsed. As the
decade turned, “Turkey’s cultural, linguistic, historical and religious bonds
with the newly independent states were frequently mentioned as the basis for Ankara’s
influential future role in the Transcaucasus and Central Asia.” As such, a “Turkish speaking community
of states stretching from the Adriatic to the Great Wall of China increasingly
became part of official discourse.”[26] In autumn 1991, a meting was held in
Ankara between Turkish president Turgut Ozal and the presidents of all five
republics plus Azerbaijan. Here,
Ozal “pledged to support their declaration of sovereignty and emergence of a
Pan-Turkic world,” a move that “immediately alerted Iran, Pakistan and the Arab
countries to Turkeys efforts.”[27]
However, on the maps spread out on drawing room
table, a “pan-Turkic world” also serves as a geopolitical wet dream, a march of
hard and soft power straight into the heart of Eurasia. In terms of energy, it provided for an
“East-West” pipeline corridor from the Caspian Sea through Azerbaijan and
Georgia to Ceyhan, a Turkish port on the Mediterranean Sea. In terms of great-power rivalry,
it served as a challenge to both Russia and China, incorporating territory
traditionally under their influence.
On
February 12th, 1992 Washington, President Bush met with the Turkish
Prime Minister in Washington.
Afterwards, Bush, at a press conference on the White House’s south lawn,
stated “Turkey is indeed a friend, a partner of the United States, and it’s
also a model to others, especially those newly independent republics of Central
Asia. In a region of changing
tides, it endures as a beacon of stability.”[28] Meanwhile, James Baker was on a
five-day whirlwind tour of the Caucasus and Central Asia, visiting Moldova,
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. In an unusually frank assessment back
in Washington, one of Baker’s aides stated that the secretary’s conclusion of
Central Asia was that “some of these new countries are going to make it, and
others are going to join the swelling ranks of third world basket cases, just
limping along. Those that are most likely to make it are those like
Turkmenistan that have economies based on agriculture, oil, gas and minerals.”[29]
III. The Plan
In
Washington, much of the US strategy for Eurasia followed over the past twenty
years was determined during the George HW Bush administration, and especially
in Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney’s Pentagon. In recent American history, it would be hard pressed to
match the radical militarism practiced in government by Dick Cheney and his
followers. In the two major tours
of Washington duty they served, from 1989-1992 and 2001-2008, American soldiers
preemptively invaded Panama, Iraq (twice), and Afghanistan, and reportedly did
everything in their power to start a war with Iran. By and large, these are the men who have made famous the
idea of the “neocons” as a powerful elite sect, and to a degree, this idea is
correct, at least as it relates to the phenomena of the same individuals
repeatedly being appointed to powerful positions within Government.
These
are the Pentagon apparatchiks, the paper pushers and agenda writers like Paul
Wolfowitz, Irving Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and Zalmay Khalilzad, men who played
huge roles in facilitating the previously mentioned drives to war. They were Cheney’s aides and assistants
during the Presidency of George H.W. Bush, where they witnessed the end of the
Cold War and the dismantling of the Soviet Union. A decade later, they attempted to replicate this experience in
the Middle East under H.W. Bush’s son George. And when asked to produce their own national security
doctrine for a post Cold War world, they infamously planned for world
domination. In an article
published at the start of George W. Bush’s “marketing campaign” for an invasion
of Iraq, David Armstrong, the Washington bureau chief for the National
Security News Service, wrote of their
beliefs:
The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The
overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It
calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming military superiority
and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It
calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United
States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely
powerful.[30]
The document in
question is the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, a biannual planning document
charting the future of Pentagon policy.
In charge of writing this strategy was Paul Wolfowitz’s Pentagon Policy
office. According to a report
published in The New Republic, “On
Saturday mornings, Wolfowitz’s deputies convened a seminar in a small
conference room in the Pentagon’s E Ring, where they sat Cheney in front of a
parade of Sovietologists,” many of whom, “were mavericks who believed the
Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse.”[31] James Mann, in his group biography Rise
of the Vulcans, elaborates on these
meetings, writing that they were led by Zalmay Khalilzad, and participants
included Wolfowitz, his deputy Scooter Libby, and long time military
strategists like Andrew Marshall, Albert Wohlstetter, and Richard Perle.[32]
In
March 1992, when a polished draft of the strategy was circulated among the
Pentagon, it was leaked to New York Times
reporter Patrick Tyler, by an anonymous individual who believed that “this
post-cold war strategy debate should be carried out in the public forum.”[33] And the individual’s concerns were
justified, as Tyler writes “the classified document makes the case for a world
dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive
behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations
from challenging American primacy.”[34]
When the draft was covered in the Times and The Washington Post, it garnered uproar from all angles in
Washington. Senator Joe Biden, a
member of the Foreign Relations Committee, characterized it as an attempt by
the Pentagon to erect a “Pax Americana, a global security system where threats
to stability are suppressed or destroyed by US military power,” and the
spokesman for Democratic Presidential candidate Bill Clinton called it “one
more attempt” by defense officials “to find an excuse for big budgets instead
of downsizing.”[35]
Even within the Pentagon the leaked paper
elicited cold shoulders. Zalmay
Khalilzad felt that even Wolfowitz “didn’t want to be associated with it,”
leaving Khalilzad to feel ostracized for a number of days. That is, until he was approached by
Secretary Cheney, who told Khalilzad that his paper had “discovered a new
rationale for our role in the world.”[36]
As
many understand Wolfowitz’s Defense Planning Guide to be the first draft of the
“Bush Doctrine,” George W. Bush’s National Security Strategy of 2002, it has
received much analysis in the 17 years since it was originally leaked. James Mann covers it in Rise of the
Vulcans, his group biography of George W.
Bush’s foreign policy advisors, as does George Packer in The
Assassins Gate, his history of the 2003
invasion of Iraq. Additionally,
the National Security Archive at George Washington University has an extensive
casebook on the matter, including inter-office memos and declassified
documents.[37] Pointing
out the breadth of research into the DPG is to say that its importance should
not be taken lightly, for it eerily predicated policies that arose ten years
later, supposedly under the justification of the “war on terror.”
Part of the notoriety that the DPG has
accumulated is due to the cast of characters employed by both in the 1992
Pentagon and in the first term of the George W. Bush administration. At the time, Secretary of Defense Dick
Cheney ruled over his five-sided empire.
Third in command, at the post of undersecretary of defense for policy
was Wolfowitz. This was a very
influential office to hold, as the undersecretary for policy is the principal
staff assistant and advisor to the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary on all
matters of national security and defense policy. And within Wolfowitz’s office, where the DPG was crafted,
the picture becomes even clearer, for it is the exact same cast that controlled
American foreign policy after 9/11.
Wolfowitz’s top aide at the time was Scooter
Libby, who held the title of principal undersecretary of defense for strategy
and resources, and one of Libby’s leading assistants was Zalmay Khalilzad.[38] In 2001, Wolfowitz would move up one
spot in the Pentagon hierarchy to deputy secretary of defense, Libby would
become Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, top national security advisor,
and national security advisor to the President, and Khalilzad would first serve
on the National Security Council before 9/11, then as a “special envoy” to post
war Afghanistan, then as a “special envoy” to free (read: exile) Iraqis in
2002, then as ambassador to Afghanistan, and finally as ambassador to postwar
Iraq.
From
Mann’s description, it is clear the Khalilzad gets the credit as the lead
architect of the paper up until its leak in March 1992, aggregating opinions
from inside and outside the Pentagon.
But after March, Libby took it in his hands to rewrite the paper. One of his purposes was to tone down
the rhetoric of dominating other states, or “potential rivals” as it was
put. But the other reason was to
correct what he saw to be a flaw in the paper’s reasoning. While it was sufficiently bellicose to
state that the U.S, would stop a country like Germany or Japan from achieving
equal military power, in practice Libby believed this amounted to very
little. He was of the opinion that
the U.S.’s existing weaponry and technology would make it “the most powerful
nation in the world for a decade or two.”[39] But Libby’s concern was for the US to
permanently be the world military leader, and thus he believed the DPG should
point the country on a path “to become so militarily strong, so overwhelming
that no country would dream of ever becoming a rival.”[40] While Libby’s finalized DPG hid much of
this sentiment behind window dressing terms like “strategic depth” and “shaping
the future security environment,” his report still set the ground for what
Senator Biden had called a “Pax Americana.” In January 1993, just days before the Clinton Administration
assumed power, Secretary Cheney declassified the paper, now called “Defense
Strategy for the 1990s: The Regional Defense Strategy.”
Coinciding
with the Pentagon review was a plan to expand NATO, the longtime Atlantic
military alliance between the United States, Great Britain, and fourteen other
states. In May of 1990, President Bush took the opportunity of a commencement
speech at Oklahoma State University to explain to a stadium sized crowd that
the Cold War era military alliance would not only remain intact, but would look
to expand, in what Bush euphemistically called “building a new continent.” He declared, “Our enemy today is
uncertainty and instability,“ a threat to be combated by “a sound, collective military
structure, with forces in the field backed by larger forces that can be called
upon in some crisis.”[41] He also signaled that the US would keep
nuclear weapons in Europe, a controversial topic at the time, stating “we will
not allow Europe to be safe for a conventional war.”
Two months later, NATO
leaders met in London, where they set out to transform themselves from a
military alliance “into a political alliance building East-West structures of
peace,” according to diplomats quoted by the New York Times.[42] During the following year and a half,
the Alliance set about making their transformation a reality. In October, it was proposed that a new
political group be created within the Alliance that included the states of the
Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, the “North Atlantic Co-operation Council.”[43] By the fall of 1991, NATO had completed
its transformation in time for a meeting in Rome, where the alliance released
for the first time ever a public document, its new “Strategic Concept.”[44]
Beginning in December 1991, when the Soviet Union formally broke up,
American and British officials pushed for an immediate transformation of their
Atlantic alliance, both eastward and towards global realignment. John Weston, London’s ambassador to NATO,
stated in an interview that he considered his job purpose to be securing “the
maximum amount of tolerable change,” and George Bader, a director of European and
NATO policy in Paul Wolfowitz’s office, was quoted as “one of many” Pentagon
staffers who “argued that the traditional definition of ‘out of area’ (and
therefore prohibited) theaters for NATO operations must be radically revised.”[45]
In fact, in a 1997 speech at the
John Hopkins Institute for International Affairs, Deputy Secretary of State
Strobe Talbott congratulated Paul Wolfowitz, because while he was directing
Pentagon policy, “it was at his behest that the first military-to-military
contacts took place” in the former Soviet Union.[46]
An early review of this period in London’s International Affairs stresses that there was a definite push, led by Washington,
to move eastwards and towards “real-world military cooperation,” and
accordingly, that there was a consensus that “enlargement at least had to be
addressed at a summit.”[47]
III.
“The Disastrous Rise of Misplaced Power”
When Bill Clinton and his staff moved into the White House in
January of 1993, he faced a situation much like Barack Obama faced after his
recent 2009 coronation. Both men,
with little policy experience in foreign affairs, assumed control of a military
administration whose purpose had been radically transformed by Bush/Cheney rule
before them. Whereas Obama is
today making decisions on whether to employ the "Bush Doctrine" of a
preventive attack, Clinton faced a choice on whether to expand the American
military and financial presence into territory that had previously been
inaccessible, "rolling forward" into the former Soviet Union. As it is clear today, Clinton took no
divergence, and continued with the expansionist military doctrines set by his
predecessor, while the question is still out on Obama.
As an individual, Bill Clinton’s relationship with American
militarism was pragmatically twisted.
He was the first president since Roosevelt not to have served in the
military, and claimed to have “despised” the Vietnam War, a message that fit
with his youthful, populous image.
And yet, in his presidential campaign, Clinton spoke of a “New Covenant
for American Security,” which promised to change nothing in a national security
state that had just claimed to have “won” the Cold War.[48] This divide between Clinton’s personal
politics and his Presidential platform resulted in him assuming control of a
military bureaucracy that he had no interest in engaging with, a feeling
happily reciprocated by the Pentagon.
In reality, however, this was not a detriment to the national security
state at all, but a boon:
As soon became apparent, the
utter absence of credible executive authority in military matters across the
Potomac River meant the Niagara current of open-ended arms procurement, force projection,
nuclear swagger, and defense industry dominance of Congress could flow on
unchecked. American military
forces had more commitments abroad in the 1990’s than in any decade since 1950. The Clinton defense budget reflected
that, with totals increasing from $260 billion to more than $300 billion. Under Clinton, the Pentagon would even
renege on commitments that had been made under Reagan and Bush to Gorbachev and
Yeltsin, most egregiously on the question of NATO expansion.[49]
With a White House adverse to
implementing any sort of doctrinal approach to foreign affairs, much of the
United States’ foreign policy in the 1990’s was decided upon by institutional
lobbies, motivated not by the interests of the American populous but by their
own narrow agendas. Just as Dwight
Eisenhower had warned in his prophetic 1961 farewell address, the
military-industrial complex had gained an unwarranted influence over the
councils of government, resulting in what the World War II General had called
“the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”
Below, four factions of this complex—, the NATO bureaucracy, the media,
academic institutes, and the armaments industry—will be briefly discussed. Although the interests of these groups
may seem disparate, uniting them was a mutual affinity to push the boundaries
of the American Empire eastward.
*****
Following their 1990 London meeting, when NATO strategists set in
motion the military alliance's transformation into a globetrotting
"political" alliance, the bureaucratic structures were methodically
set in place in order to facilitate this transformation. Originally, this structure was known as
the “North Atlantic Cooperation Council” (NACC), and membership was open to any
NATO member and any of the newly independent states in Europe or the former
Soviet Union. Under its directive,
foreign and defense officials, former Cold War enemies but now supposed
friends, met to plan what was to be the new Eurasian military posture. Then, in
the fall of 1993, a new program was initiated to expand the NACC, the “Partnership
for Peace.” In the conservative Washington Times, journalist Warren Strobel wrote,
“The security map of Europe could be altered in startling ways under a
U.S. plan to transform the 44-year-old NATO alliance from an umbrella over
Western Europe to a fulcrum of East-West cooperation…Even four years after the
Berlin Wall's fall, some of the plans seem radical.”[50] Bill Clinton, in a rhetorical twist,
referred to this as “not drawing any lines in the sand,” meaning that there
were no longer any European boundaries of containment for Western might.[51]
Additionally, a new military school aimed at the officer classes of
the Partnership for Peace countries—The George C. Marshall European Center for
Security Studies—opened in the Bavarian resort town of Garmisch. Luckily for the American officers
stationed there, they could take time off from instructing Belarusians and
Uzbeks in the finer points of militarism and relax at the Edelweiss Luxury Ski
Resort across town, exclusively available to Pentagon employees and American
soldiers. After occupying the
lodge in 1945, the military liked it so much they decided to stay, for 65 years
and counting. When the Soviet
Union collapsed, Edelweiss was one of the budget lines put on the Defense chopping
block, but the establishment of the Marshall Center saved it.[52] At a Stanford conference on
Central Asia in 1997, Clinton-era Defense Secretary William Perry said that the
school was so important for him that he “planned his schedule around its commencements
and has given all six commencement addresses so far.”[53]
Functionally,
institutions like the George C. Marshall Center can be thought of as nodes in
the expanding geographical structure through which the military operates. When a new node lights up, as it did in
the German Alps in 1993, it has two distinct affects on the United States’
global posture. First, it creates
the tangible necessities of the structure--the airports, the supply routes, the
briefing rooms. No matter the
technology developed by DARPA, the military is still run as a massive physical
logistics exercise. But also
created is the intellectual drive to back up that structure. Charles Boyd, an Air Force General
serving as deputy commander of the European Command at the time, described the
George Marshall Center as part of “the new Marshall plan, with intellectual
capital instead of material capital.”[54] Contingency plans emerge for
possible “emerging threats” lurking behind every corrupt politician or leftist
movement. When small crises arise,
as they always do in international affairs, the combination of already existing
physical structures and contingency planning allows for a lightning quick, and
thus ill thought through, response.
As a sign of how far east Washington wanted to move, military
assistance to Kazakhstan was first added to Washington’s budget in 1993, with
$163,000 allocated under the State Department’s International Military
Education and Training (IMET) Program. In the following two years, Kyrgyzstan,
Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan were also given IMET funding.[55] According to the State Department, the
IMET program is seen to be a low cost and highly efficient institution that
“facilitates the development of important professional and personal
relationships that have provided U.S. access and influence in a sector of
society that often plays a pivotal role in the transition to democracy.”[56]
In 1995, the United States began hosting large training exercises
for NATO’s new Partnership for Peace forces. The first, titled Cooperative Nugget 95, was held over 18
days in August at Fort Polk, Louisiana. 970 soldiers attended from 14
Partnership for Peace countries, and they received training from American,
British, and Canadian instructors.[57]
Then, in December, the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan agreed
to form a collective security force, the Central Asian Battalion, at the behest
of NATO and Central Command.[58] This was one of six such groupings
formed by NATO between 1995-2000, an overlapping mosaic of alliances stretching
across Eastern Europe and Central Asia.[59]
In
line with its function as a “pan-Turkic” hub, Turkey also served as a military
trainer and supplier for Central Asia during the 1990s. A joint report issued by the World
Policy Institute and the Federation of American Scientists highlights the role
of the IMET program in the Turkish-American military relationship, under which
the U.S. has trained 23,268 Turkish personnel since 1950. In fact, between 1989 and 1999 Turkey
had been “the biggest recipient of U.S. military training, outstripping even
first-line allies like Israel and Egypt.”[60] Subsequently, these Turkish officers
then imparted this knowledge to their Central Asian counterparts. Cevik Bir, Deputy Chief of Staff of the
Turkish Army, noted in 1996 that “2,000 army officers from Central Asian
nations such as Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are
studying in Turkish military schools and academies.”[61]
It
is worth mentioning that in 1996 Turkey also signed an extensive five-year
military agreement with Israel, tying its military and foreign policy even
closer to the West. The agreement
called for “the exchange of military information, experience, and personnel, as
well as joint training exercises, the exchange of military observers at each
other’s exercises, reciprocal port access, for naval vessels, and for each
country’s planes to exercise in the other’s airspace for one week four times a
year.”[62] Also strengthened in this agreement
were the longstanding intelligence ties between Turkey and Israel, as revealed
by Deputy Chief of Staff Bir in his April 1996 address to the Washington
Research Institute when he stated “that Israel had requested Turkey’s
assistance in collecting intelligence information. Israel’s first priority target was Syria, while Iran was the
second.”[63] The third part of the agreement, which
was finalized later that September, involved a sharing of military technology
between Turkey and Israel. For the
Turkish armed forces, the Israeli military made a unique partner, due to its
“technology, reliability, and the capacity to cover almost all defense needs,”
allowing Turkey to engage in “a plan for rearmament and modernization costing
in the order of US $150 billion in twenty-five years.”[64]
In
an excited essay published in the New York Times that summer, Thomas Friedman referred to this as a “Turkish
Delight.” Opening with the
sentence ‘One of the best diplomatic stories going these days is a little known
cloak-and-dagger thriller involving bombs in Syria, an assassination attempt in
Turkey, missing bags of money in Ankara and covert Turkish-Israeli military
cooperation,” Friedman concludes that the Turkish-Israeli accord “is quite
simply, a major strategic realignment in Middle-East Asia. Israel’s peace process with the Muslim
world has given Turkey the cover to openly align itself with Israel.[65]
*****
Besides
the military bureaucracies of NATO, there were also a number of institutions
within the United States that heavily lobbied for military expansion. One was the major American news
media. Right from the very
beginning, the press saw the newly independent states to be pawns in a
geopolitical chess game. When
Secretary of State Baker took the very first diplomatic tour of Central Asia,
in February 1992, The Washington
Post ran a story entitled “Power
Competition in Central Asia: US, Other Nations Vie for Influence in Former
Soviet States.”[66] In The
New York Times, Thomas Friedman wrote from
Turkmenistan under the headline “Republics Promise to Protect Rights” of the US
“playing the “great game,” of geopolitics in historically contested Central
Asia, referencing the undeclared 19th century imperial contest
between Britain and Russia. [67] The Economist followed up on Friedman’s imperial theme, writing “now
that the tsarist empire's Soviet successor has collapsed, the independent
khanates are springing up as republics -- and a new round of the great game is
beginning.”[68] Various sides were defined in this
struggle—the US was countering Iran, the US was countering Moscow’s communist
economies, Islamist fundamentalism was the real threat—but the media consensus
was that Washington’s moves were to be thought of in an imperial, great power
manner. While no pundit had yet
pinned down what America’s new purpose in the world would be, it was clear that
a peace dividend was not going to be the preeminent talking point following the
Soviet Union’s collapse.
This
was also the position taken by a key sect in the scholarly community. Throughout the 1990’s, a number of
academic institutions created centers focused on the former Soviet Union. One of the first to do so was the
private Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, publishers of Foreign
Policy magazine. According to John B. Robert’s, in the early nineties a group
of “foreign policy elite” was “convened by the Carnegie Institute for
International Peace to change U.S. foreign policy after the Cold War.”[69] Roberts, who participated in the group
as a publicist, writes that the meetings, led by Carnegie President Morton
Abramowitz, “were my introduction to Clinton’s Cabinet-in-waiting,” with
Madeline Albright, Henry Cisneros, John Duetch, Richard Holbrooke, Alice
Rivlin, David Gergen and Admiral William Crowe in attendance. Roberts, however, did not take to the
new direction being considered, what is now known as “humanitarian
intervention.” The final report of
the group, “Changing our Ways: America’s Role in the New World,” urged “a new
principle of international relations: the destruction or displacement of groups
of people within states can justify international intervention.”[70] According to Roberts, “the report also
proposed the revolutionary idea that a U.S. led military strike was justified,
not to defend the United States, but to impose highly subjective political
settlements on other countries. It
discarded national sovereignty in favor of international intervention.”[71]
Another influential institution was the Paul
Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), part of John Hopkins
University. In 1996, when Paul
Wolfowitz was dean, the Central Asia and Caucasus Institute was established at
SAIS, led by longtime Soviet scholar S. Frederick Starr. According to journalist Ken
Silverstein, Starr views the region “almost exclusively through the prism of
American geopolitical interests and with little interest in issues like human
rights and corruption.”[72] Accordingly, Starr and his institute
sought personal relationships with many of the dictatorial leaders in Central
Asia. Starr even went so far as to
write the preface to the English edition of Uzbek President Islam Karimov’s
book, Uzbekistan on the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century.[73] In 1999, Harvard started a similar
initiative, the Caspian Studies Program and Azerbaijan Initiative, led by
Graham Allison, and heavily funded by oil companies through the Azerbaijan
Chamber of Commerce.[74]
The effects of these institutions are
numerous. They provide trained
experts for journalists to quote; they serve as a bridge between foreign
officials and U.S. government employees; they fund and host events for
policy-makers; they work as peer-review gatekeepers; and most importantly, they
mask partisan and political agendas behind a veneer of scholarship. However, these are not novel ideas, as
they mimic much of what occurred in the academic community at the start of the
Cold War. Describing Harvard’s
Russian Research Center, where he had served as a fellow, Richard Barnet
writes:
These centers, meant
to reflect and rationalize official government views of the Soviet Union,
concentrated on developing information for implementing official policy rather
than on testing its validity…The war potential U.S.S.R. and the stability of
the regime were the principal “academic” questions to be examined.[75]
The
American Defense Industry also played a part in pushing for military
expansion. Following the 1995
merger between aeronautics giants Lockheed and Martin Marietta into Lockheed
Martin, executives from what was now the world’s largest arms manufacturer
created the “U.S. Committee to Expand NATO.” Chairing the committee was Bruce Jackson, the Director of
Strategic Planning at Lockheed Martin.
In 1997, the New York Times
characterized Jackson and his ilk as “acting like globe-hopping diplomats to
encourage the expansion of NATO, which will create a huge market for their
wares.”[76] As an individual, Jackson is the
epitome of a national security elite.
His father, William Jackson, was the first National Security Advisor,
serving under Dwight Eisenhower, and his childhood neighbors included George
Kennan and William Bundy. After
attending Massachusetts’s elite St. Mark’s boarding school and Princeton
University, Jackson held a variety of Pentagon positions during the Reagan-Bush
years, where he aligned himself with burgeoning neoconservatives like Paul
Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Stephen Hadley, all three of whom would sit on
the board of the NATO expansion committee in the following decade. According to an unidentified “prominent
neoconservative,” Jackson is a “nexus
between the defense industry and the neoconservatives. He translates us to them, and them to
us.”[77]
The “U.S. Committee to Expand NATO,” is
best understood as a quasi-governmental body. While not sanctioned by the nominal power centers in the
White House or on Capitol Hill, it nonetheless spoke with an authoritative
edge, blessed by the other nodes in the American power structure. Just like so many advisory boards and
Blue Ribbon panels before it, Jackson’s committee serves as an example of “a
group of businessmen being called together at the initiative of the national
security bureaucracy to articulate and to publicize novel and controversial
ideas already held by a few members of the bureaucratic elite.”[78]
All of these different interest groups are the
manifestation of the constant focus on militarism as an element of Washington’s
foreign policy. The idea of
studying a region and then building up and selling arms to a foreign army is an
age-old imperial tactic, and in essence U.S. history is no different. Following both World War I and World
War II, when new international boundaries were formally drawn, Washington took
it upon itself to assist these “newly independent states” in becoming military
fortresses. From Saudi Arabia in
1933 to South Vietnam in 1954 to Uzbekistan in 1992, Washington has gifted
upon every sort of government every sort of training in warfare, terrorism, and
domestic security. As one
researcher put it in London’s austere International Affairs, “The emergence of the energy and security agendas
in Central Asia clearly reduced the previous emphasis in the American agenda on
democratization and good governance, as the pursuit of such objectives might
have complicated the pursuit of more concrete strategic objectives.”[79] John Laughland, a human rights activist
and journalist put it more bluntly, describing the Western treatment of the
“newly independent states”:
Promoting a system of political
and military control not unlike that once practiced by the Soviet Union…The new
NATO is both a mechanism for extracting Danegeld [a Viking-era protection tax]
from new member states for the benefit of the U.S. arms industry and an
instrument for getting others to protect U.S. interests around the world,
including the supply of primary resources such as oil. It is, in short, a racket.[80]
V. The Inevitable
By
1997, the effect of these different interests had coalesced such that it was
inevitable that the United States would play a major role in the future
security of Central Asia. U.S. officials
now spoke of the region in terms of National Security of the United States, not
usually a mere rhetorical flourish.
In Strobe Talbott’s previously mentioned speech at John Hopkins, he
stated "an area that sits on as much as 200 billion barrels of oil...matters
profoundly to the United States."[81]
Nearly $1 million worth of arms
subsidies was added to the regional budget, and NATO chief Javier Solana made a
round of visits that spring to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan,
meeting with military with diplomatic officials in order to expand cooperation
between the alliance and Central Asia.[82] In 1997, the Central Asian Battalion
held their largest drills yet, which began with 500 paratroopers from the 82nd
airborne making the longest flight in human history to Shymkent, Kazakhstan,
where they would lead a week of aviation and ground training drills with troops
from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Turkey, and Russia.[83] Two months later, when Kazakh President
Nursultan Nazarbaev visited Washington, the two nations formalized their
military ties by signing a Defense Cooperation Agreement that called for, among
other things, 40 similar missions to take place in 1998.[84] A training exchange program was also
set up between different state National Guards and Central Asia. In what Chalmers Johnson describes as a
“military version of “sister-city” relationship,” Kazakhstan was paired with
Arizona, Kyrgyzstan with Montana, and Uzbekistan with Louisiana.[85] In his prescient book Resource Wars, Michael Klare writes of this change:
The extension of American
military power into the Caspian Sea regions is, by itself, a momentous
geopolitical development. As shown
by the CENTRAZBAT exercises, it will require Washington to build and sustain military
relationships with the Central Asian republics, as well as to construct a
globe-spanning logistical capability.
In time, it could also involve the establishment of American military
bases in an area that was once part of the Soviet Union.[86]
The
year after Klare published these words, the US did establish basing
relationships with Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, in conjunction with the Winter
2001 invasion of Afghanistan. In
the first week of October, Uzbek leaders signed accords with Donald Rumsfeld,
allowing the US military to use the Khanabad airbase. Within a week, more than 60 planes had dropped off supplies
and 1,200 soldiers were on the ground, primarily light infantry troops from
Fort Drum’s tenth mountain division, the first soldiers to be deployed to
former Soviet territory. In
December, Kyrgyzstan followed suit, offering up the Manas International Airport
to the US, located on the outskirts of the capital, Bishek. Air Force engineers immediately got
underway building a thirty-acre compound at Manas, the equivalent of six city
blocks, in order to house 3,000 people, which they named “Peter J. Ganci Air
Base,” after the highest-ranking Fireman to die on September 11th.[87]
A report in the Washington Post at the time contains some remarkable statements
pertaining to this radical change in US military posture. Secretary of State Colin Powell is
quoted as saying “America will have a continuing interest and presence in
Central Asia of a kind we could not have dreamed of before,” and Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is quoted as admitting that the two new bases “may be
more political than actually military.”
Most blunt, though, was Thomas Donnelly, the Deputy Executive Director
of the Project of The New American Century. In an email circulated among military analysts, Donnelly
wrote that the “imperial perimeter” of the United States “is expanding into
Central Asia.” The Post reflects on these opinions and concludes “all told,
more than 50,000 US military personnel now live and work on ships and bases
stretching from Turkey to Oman, and eastward to Manas airport, 19 miles outside
Bishkek and 300 miles from the Chinese border.”[88]
It may be thought that these bases were
established in order to facilitate an occupation of Afghanistan. This however, is not quite
accurate. While the presence of
military garrisons in Central Asia may have had some affect on the Afghan
campaign, the bases are better viewed as representing the logical outcome of
the expansionist policies that had been followed for the last decade. The bases did not have one single
purpose, but merely served as the farthest possible garrisons on the “imperial
perimeter” to which PNAC’s Donnelly referred. In The Sorrows of Empire,
social scientist Chalmers Johnson writes of the disconnect between both the
Afghan and Iraq wars and the establishment of the Central Asian bases, giving
force to the argument that they are fundamentally a symptom of the expanding
mission creep that is the project of Western dominance, what Johnson calls our
“Empire of Bases:”
[Manas and Khanabad]
did not extend the reach of American air power in Afghanistan to any
appreciable degree. Aircraft
carriers in the Arabian Sea were just as close to targets in southern
Afghanistan and much cheaper to operate. Nor were these bases meant for the deployment of large
numbers of ground forces. The
Kyrgyzstan base was 620 miles from the Afghan border, and Washington’s strategy
in the war did not involve the use of large concentrations of American
troops. In fact, the Kyrgyz and
Uzbek bases were brought to bear only tangentially during the war, and they
were too far from Iraq to be of much use in the war already being planned
against Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Nor were they intended to supply significant amounts of humanitarian aid
to Afghanistan, since that remained largely in the hands of the United Nations
and non governmental organizations like the Red Cross, which are not normally
allowed to use bases. Nor were
they there to protect the local regimes from Islamic militants since these
governments would not entrust the mission to Americans and have agreements with
the Russians to deal with such problems.[89]
Instead, the
military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan were simply an expression of US
militarism, “an impulse on the part of our elites to dominate other peoples
largely because we have the power to do so, followed by the strategic reasoning
that, in order to defend these newly acquired outposts and control the regions
they are in, we must expand the areas under our control with still more bases.”[90].
[2]Julie Ginsburg, “Reassessing the Jackson-Vanick
Amendment” Council on Foreign Relations, July 2nd, 2009.
[5]Krarr,. 2.
[6] Steve Levine, The Oil and the Glory: the Pursuit
of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea,
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007) pg. 94.
[7] Ibid., 94.
[8] Ibid., 95.
[11] Ibid., 101.
[14]Ibid., 112.
[16] Ibid., 2.
[17]“Soviet Venture may include Tengiz,” Oil and Gas
Journal, June 11th 1990;
Stuart Auerbach, “Soviets Grant Chevron Corp. Rights to Explore Largest New Oil
Field,” Washington Post, June 3rd
1990.
[18] Clyde Farnsworth, “President of Soviet Republic Seeks
U.S. Business Deals,” New York Times,
July 30th, 1990.
[19] Jeff Pelline, “Chevron to Pump Oil in Soviet Union,” San
Francisco Chronicle, December 12th,
1990.
[20] Richard Barnet, The Roots of War: The Men and
Institutions Behind U.S. Foreign Policy,
(New York: Penguin Books, 1972) pg. 185.
[21]Dietrich Jung & Wolfango Piccoli, Turkey at the
Crossroads, (London: Zed Books Ltd.,
2001) pg. 93-94.
[22]Ibid., 94.
[23]Drew Middleton, “Man in the news; Friend to the West,
Foe of Turkish Terrorists,” New York Times, September 13, 1980; “Turkey: A Key U.S. Ally bridging Europe and
Asia,” Washington Post, September
13th, 1980.
[24]Andrew Crampton and Gearoid O Tuathail,
“Intellectuals, institutions and ideology: the case of Robert Strausz-Hupe and
American Geopolitics,” Political Geography (Vol. 15, No. 6/7, 1996), pg. 534.
[25]Richard Perle, “The First Annual Robert Strausz-Hupe
Lecture,” Foreign Policy Research Institute (Volume 7, No. 11), September 1999.
[27] Ahmed Rashid, The Resurgence of Central Asia:
Islam or Nationalism, (London: Zed
Books, 1994), pg. 211.
[29] Thomas Friedman, “Baker’s Trip to Nations Unready for
Independence,” New York Times,
February 15th, 1992.
[32] James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of
Bush’s War Cabinet, (New York:
Penguin Books, 2004), pg. 210.
[33]Patrick E. Tyler, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for
Insuring No Rivals,” New York Times,
March 8th, 1992.
[34]Ibid.
[35]Patrick E. Tyler, “Lone Superpower Plan: Ammunition
for Critics,” New York Times,
March 10th, 1992.
[37]http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb245/index.htm
[39] Ibid. 212.
[40] Ibid. 212.
[41] George HW Bush, “Remarks at the Oklahoma State
University Commencement Ceremony in Stillwater,” May 4th, 1990.
[42] Craig R. Whitney, “Evolution in Europe: NATO Leaders
Gather, In Search of a Purpose,” New York Times, July 5th, 1990.
[44] “The Alliance’s New Strategic Concept,”
http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_23847.htm
[45] Hella Pick, “London’s new Man at NATO packs two hats
in his kit,” Guardian, January 24th,
1992; Hella Pick, “US Seeks Global Fire-Fighting Role for Revamped NATO,” Guardian, May 12th, 1992.
[46] Strobe Talbott, “Farwell to Flashman: US Policy in
the Caucasus and Central Asia,” Address at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies, July 21st, 1997.
[47] John Borawski, “Partnership for Peace and beyond,” International
Affairs, (Vol.71, No.2, April 1995),
pg. 236.
[48] James Carroll, House of War: The Pentagon and the
Disastrous Rise of American Power,
(New York: Hought-Mifflin, 2006) pg. 451.
[49] Ibid., 454.
[51] Borawski, “Partnership for Peace and beyond,” 234.
[52] Steve Vogel, “Program Teaches Democracy to Former
East Bloc Officers,” Washington Post,
August 13th, 1994.
[53] “New Central Asian countries draw attention at
Stanford conference,” Stanford News Service, May 29th, 1997.
[54] Vogel, “Program Teaches Democracy to Former East Bloc
Officers.”
[55] Victoria Garcia, “Kazakhstan Report,” Columbia
International Affairs Online: Center for Defense Information, December 2003, (http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/gav10/).
[56]US Department of State: Bureau of
Political-Military Affairs, http://www.state.gov/t/pm/65533.htm,
(accessed on 12/8/09).
[57] “14 former Soviet Bloc Nations Join NATO Exercises in
U.S.,” Washington Post, August 9th,
1995.
[58] S. Neil MacFarlane, “The United States and
Regionalism in Central Asia,” International Affairs, (Vol. 80, No. 3) pg. 452. (note: CENTOCOM was not in
control of region until 1998.)
[59] “NATO: U.S. Assistance to the Partnership for Peace,”
GAO Report to Congressional Committees, July 2001, pg. 15.
[60] “Arming Repression: U.S. Arms Sales to Turkey During
the Clinton Administration,” World Policy Institute/Federation of American
Scientists, October 1999, pg. 11.
[61] John Pomfret, “U.S. Operations in Turkey Seeks to
Train, Unite Croats and Muslims,” Washington Post, June 6, 1996.
[63]Ibid., 162.
[64]Ibid., 163.
[66] David Hoffman, “Power Competition in Central Asia:
US, Other Nations Vie for Influence in Former Soviet States,” Washington
Post, February 13th, 1992.
[70] Ibid., 37.
[71] Ibid., 37.
[72] Ken Silverstein, “The Professor of Repression,” Washington
Babylon/Harper’s Magazine, May 24th, 2006:
(http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/05/sb-professor-repression-3284828).
[73] Ibid.
[74] “Kennedy School Launches New Caspian Studies
Program,” Harvard Kennedy School Press Release, September 24th, 1999.
[76] Jeff Gerth and Tim Weiner, “Arms Makers See Bonanza
in Selling NATO Expansion,” New York Times, June 29th, 1997.
[77] John B. Judis, “Minister without Portfolio,” American
Prospect, April 30th,
2003; Richard Cummings, “Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” Playboy.com, January 16th, 2007.
[79] MacFarlane, 452.
[81] Talbott, “Farwell to Flashman.”
[82]Birgit Brauer, “NATO chief explains expansion plans to
Central Asian nations,” Associated Press, March 11th, 1997.
[83]R. Jeffrey Smith, “U.S. leads peacekeeping drill in
Kazakhstan,” Washington Post,
September 15th, 1997; DoD News Briefing, General Henry H. Shelton, Chairman JCS, November 17th,
1997.
[84]Ibid.
[85]Robert G. Kaiser, “US Plants Footprint in Shaky
Central Asia,” Washington Post,
August 27th, 2002; Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire:
Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004), pg.175.
[87] Eric Schmitt and James Dao, “U.S. is Building up its
Military bases in Afghan Region,” New York Times, January 8th, 2002; Vernon Loeb, “Piece by
Piece, Air Force Flies In a Presence; Installation for 3,000 Takes Root at
International Airport,” Washington Post, February 9th, 2002; C.J. Chivers “The Signs of a Buildup
are Becoming More Evident,” New York Times, October 10th, 2001.
[88] Vernon Loeb, “Footprints in Steppes of Central Asia;
New Bases Indicate U.S. Presence Will be felt after Afghan War,” Washington
Post
[90] Ibid., 152.
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