|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Charles Jannuzi
|| Clearly, the US had military planning in place for the Taliban and
|| Afghanistan (and I have no doubt the strategic value of a
|| non-Russian route
|| for Caspian gas and oil were of primary importance, which work
|| nicely with
|| the bottom line of Halliburton and Carlyle Group).
||
|| However, Afghanistan was always something of a sideshow (which
|| is why the
|| prisoners at Gitmo have nothing much of anything to offer the
|| US in terms of
|| intelligence). Iraq, with Hussein in power and all that oil in
|| the ground,
|| must have been the biggest goal the Bush presidency set for itself.
The problems in your reasoning are:
1. The Afghanistan pipeline is a big prize but an even bigger one is total millitary control of Central Asia. This ensures the safety of the Caspian and future Turkmen pipelines and the continued cooperation of oil dictators, by demonstrating that only the US Army can provide true security. The former US - Saudi policy of supporting jihadists in Chechnia, Uzbekistan, Xinjiang, etc., has therefore been abandoned, having served its purpose, viz. to discredit regional military powers. The US now moves in to claim its bases and to sit on the oil dictators. This is a rerun of the protection racket that the US squeezed the Sauds dry with, but it has perhaps even more potential in view of the booming, energy-hungry Chinese economy. So Afghanistan is certainly no sideshow.
As for the US failing to extract any intelligence from the orange people at X-ray, it should be pretty obvious that the massacre of starving Afghans and the humiliation of Taliban prisoners in the Gitmo dog kennels are this primitive admin's way of satisfying the crowd's call for blood. It has nothing to do with military strategy or intelligence and everything to do with Dubya's popularity. The US has been bending over backward for years to _avoid_ receiving intelligence about Jihadist terrorists in what looks like a desperate effort to preserve plausible deniability and S11 has not changed this one iota. Where's ObL? Where's Omar? Why doesn't anyone care? How the hell does SA and the Bin Laden family get away with continuing to withhold information? How is it possible that not one single S11 organizer has been found?
2. The US-Saudi relationship requires that Iran and Iraq be kept on a leash. Removing either one would strengthen the other and threaten SA both economically and militarily. Destroying both would create unpredictable chaos - a Beirut of massive proportions. As for the oil fields, there's no market for them. SA is having enough difficulty as it is marketing its crude, which is the cheapest and best there is. The ME is in terminal decline with popular fundamentalist revolt just around the corner. The US has been steadily reducing its dependency on ME oil and its new focus is on Central Asia.
Consequently, the S11 plot appears to serve a dual end: a) The US has been given the pretext of occupying Central Asia. b) Israel has almost, but not quite, been given the pretext of a war between Arabs and the West to break out of its 50-odd-year beachhead and grab itself some real territory. Israel will continue to attempt to push the US into raising more havoc with the Arabs in the hope of provoking open hostilities. The campaign against Saddam only serves Israeli interests, or rather the aims that ultrazionists imagine to be in Israel's interest.
So Iraq, the Philippines, Yemen, Somali - all this does nothing for US interests. Iraq is a Mossad game. The rest is probably just red herrings to prevent the media from concentrating on the impending civil war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as on the US buildup in Central Asia.
Hakki