The following article examines evidence that the 'Salvador Option' for Iraq has been ongoing for some time and attempts to say what such an option will mean. It pays particular attention to the role of the Special Police Commandos, considering both the background of their US liaisons and their deployment in Iraq. The article also looks at the evidence for death-squad style massacres in Iraq and draws attention to the almost complete absence of investigation. As such, the article represents an initial effort to compile and examine some of these mass killings and is intended to spur others into further looking at the evidence. Finally, the article turns away from the notion that sectarianism is a sufficient explanation for the violence in Iraq, locating it structurally at the hands of the state as part of the ongoing economic subjugation of Iraq. ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mounting evidence indicates that the ‘Salvador Option’ mooted for Iraq is already proceeding at full throttle
On 8 January this year, Newsweek published an article that claimed the US government was considering a ‘Salvador Option’ to combat the insurgency in Iraq (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/ ). The Salvador Option is a reference to the military assistance programme of the 1980s, initiated under Jimmy Carter and subsequently pursued by the Reagan administration, in which the US trained and materially supported the Salvadoran military in its counter-insurgency campaign against popularly supported FMLN guerrillas. The Newsweek article was widely cited in the mainstream media but the allegations were rapidly dismissed by Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. Though the reports mentioned human-rights violations, they generally made little of the fact that it was the very units that US military advisors had instructed that were frequently responsible for the most unspeakable crimes* and that there was at times a clear correlation between fresh bouts of training and subsequent atrocities (see Noam Chomsky, ‘The Crucifixion of El Salvador’, http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/sam/sam-2-02.html ).
In an earlier interview on 10 January, retired General Wayne Downing, former head of all US special operations forces, took a very different line, stating that US-backed special units had been ‘conducting strikes’ against leaders of the so-called insurgency since March 2003 (cited in ‘Phoenix Rising in Iraq’ by Stephen Shalom, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7227 ). However, Downing was careful to say that implementing a Salvadoran strategy would add an extra ‘type’ of unit to the occupation’s arsenal. What neither the press, Donald Rumsfeld, nor General Downing pointed out was that the Salvador Option was already well underway in Iraq, and far more literally than might have been imagined.
According to an article recently published in New York Times Magazine, in September 2004 Counsellor to the US Ambassador for Iraqi Security Forces James Steele was assigned to work with a new elite Iraqi counter-insurgency unit known as the Special Police Commandos, formed under the operational control of Iraq’s Interior Ministry (‘The Way of the Commandos’, Peter Maass, http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/resources_files/TheWay_of_the_Commandos.html ).
From 1984 to 1986 then Col. Steele had led the US Military Advisory Group in El Salvador, where he was responsible for developing special operating forces at brigade level during the height of the conflict. These forces, composed of the most brutal soldiers available, replicated the kind of small-unit operations with which Steele was familiar from his service in Vietnam. Rather than focusing on seizing terrain, their role was to attack ‘insurgent’ leadership, their supporters, sources of supply and base camps. In the case of the 4th Brigade, such tactics ensured that a 20-man force was able to account for 60% of the total casualties inflicted by the unit (Manwaring, El Salvador at War, 1988, p 306-8). In military circles it was the use of such tactics that made the difference in ultimately defeating the guerrillas; for others, such as the Catholic priest Daniel Santiago, the presence of people like Steele contributed to another sort of difference:
People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador – they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to watch. (Cited by Chomsky, op cit.)
The Police Commandos are in large part the brainchild of another US counter-insurgency veteran, Steven Casteel, a former top DEA man who has been acting as the senior advisor in the Ministry of the Interior. Casteel was involved in the hunt for Colombia’s notorious cocaine baron Pablo Escobar, during which the DEA collaborated with a paramilitary organization known as Los Pepes, which later transformed itself into the AUC, an umbrella organization covering all of Colombia’s paramilitary death squads (http://cocaine.org/colombia/pablo-escobar.html ; http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/040105isac.htm ).
Like Colombia’s death squads, Iraq’s Police Commandos deliberately cultivate a frightening paramilitary image. During raids they wear balaclavas and black leather gloves and openly intimidate and brutalize suspects, even in the presence of foreign journalists (see the report by Peter Maass’s). Significantly, many of the Commandos, including their leader, are Sunni Muslims.
Evidence of Massacres
In the last few weeks, with the discovery of several mass graves in and around Baghdad, evidence of multiple extra-judicial killings has started to become much more visible, but, in fact, even a cursory review of such archives as the one compiled by Iraq Body Count (http://www.iraqbodycount.net /) reveals that mass executions have been taking place commonly in Iraq over at least the last six months. What is particularly striking is that many of those killings have taken place since the Police Commandos became operationally active and often correspond with areas where they have been deployed.
The victims are repeatedly stated to have belonged mostly to the security forces, with ‘insurgents’ blamed for conducting a campaign of intimidation. Yet, most of the bodies were dressed in civilian clothes with little in the way of identification. In the few instances in which positive identifications have been reported, these are based on flimsy evidence. For instance, in the case of nine victims described as soldiers that had been shot in the head, a US army lieutenant simply stated that a ‘unit recently moved to one of the US bases’ had ‘some guys missing’ (http://www.smh.com.au/news/After-Saddam/Iraqi-soldiers-found-murdered-in-Mosul/2004/11/21/1100972263... ); photographs of the victims showed them wearing civilian clothes. A blatant case of disinformation regards a group of 31 bodies ‘discovered’ by the Police Commandos in March 2005 scattered around a cemetery in western Mosul. The bodies, described by an Interior Ministry spokesman as belonging to civilians, police officers and army soldiers, were said to have been the victims of a single policeman, Shoqayer Fareed Sheet, who confessed to these and numerous other killings on a special television show conceived by founder of the Police Commandos Adnan Thavit, called Terrorism in the Hands of Justice (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23448-2005Mar10.html ). Not only does this programme break every conceivable moral and legal standard, but it is notorious for parading obviously tortured detainees who are often forced to confess to being homosexuals or paedophiles as well as murderers. ( http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:OkQ0b9q9QbkJ:uniraq.org/documents/ArabicRegionalNews22 March2005.doc+quds+press&hl=en&client=safari)
Given the extreme paucity of evidence, the lack of secure identification and the disinformation put out by the Interior Ministry, there is at least a strong possibility that many, if not all, of the extra-judicial killings in Mosul have been carried out by the Police Commandos.
Police Commandos Directly Accused
A similar, thought less complete pattern is emerging in other areas where the Commandos have been operating, notably Samarra, where bodies were recently found in nearby Lake Tharthar (http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=41936 ). However, the strongest case is currently starting to emerge in Baghdad, where a wave of killings over the last few weeks has resulted in accusations being made directly against the state security forces and specifically against the Police Commandos. The accusations revolve around three distinct massacres. On 5 May a shallow mass grave was discovered in the Kasra-Wa-Atash industrial area containing 14 bodies. The victims, all young men, had been blindfolded, their hands tied behind their backs and they had been executed with shots to the head. The bodies also revealed such torture marks as broken skulls, burning, beatings and right eyeballs removed. In this case family members were able to identify the bodies; the victims were Sunni farmers on their way to market. According to Phil Shiner of the British-based Public Interest Lawyers, the men had been arrested when Iraqi security forces raided the vegetable market (http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1488096,00.html , http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=760368 ).
With such accusations being made specifically against US-trained counter-insurgency forces it is worth briefly mentioning some of the other massacres that have occurred in Iraq over recent months. In October 2004 some 49 bodies were discovered on a remote road about 50km south of Baquba. The victims, who wore civilian clothes, had all been shot in the head. The Interior Ministry announced that they were off-duty soldiers. Some accounts by police said the rebels were dressed in Iraqi military uniforms, although details were far from clear (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/10/24/international0921EDT0440.DTL ; http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,136419,00.html ).
Similarly, in March of this year 26 bodies were discovered at Rumana, near Qaim, close to the Syrian border. According to the Interior Ministry, most of the victims were members of a rapid response team. The victims had been blindfolded, handcuffed and shot in the head. The bodies, which once again were dressed in civilian clothes, were found in an area where the US army had been conducting Operation River Blitz, a marine-led assault on insurgents in the Euphrates River valley (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,136419,00.html ; http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/03/09/iraq.main/ ).
To further muddy the waters, the bodies of eight men from Sadr City were found in Yussufiah, 40km south of Baghdad, on 9 May this year. The victims, who had been tortured, then executed with a bullet to the back of the neck, were found wearing army uniforms, but relatives identified them as civilians. Army captain Ahmed Hussein suggested that the killers wanted people to believe they had executed soldiers (http://www.news24.com/News24/World/Iraq/0,,2-10-1460_1701988,00.html ).
There are other similar cases of mass killings, as well as many more involving smaller numbers of bodies far too numerous to mention. Nonetheless, it is worth emphasising the many bodies (more than 100) gradually being dredged up from the River Tigris, especially around Suwayra, south of Baghdad. The bodies began to be noticed in late February of this year, surfacing at the rate of one or two a day, but began to increase in frequency in April; some of the victims, who were mostly men but included some women and children, were bound, others shot or beheaded. In April, president Talabani claimed the victims had been kidnapped by insurgents in the village of Madain, but, in fact, those identified to date hailed from a wide radius and could not be accounted for by a single episode of kidnapping. Police in Suwayra have stated that many of the victims are likely to have been stopped at impromptu checkpoints by masked men, while some Sunnis say that the victims may include people detained by the police (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/04/22/MNG45CDDBQ1.DTL ).
In light of these bodies in the Tigris, it may be significant to note a strange report on the website Jihad Unspun of US soldiers dumping body bags from helicopters in the Diali River in eastern Iraq during the early hours of the morning. The writer argues that the bags held the corpses of American soldiers or foreign mercenaries that the army wished to conceal from public knowledge (http://www.jihadunspun.com/intheatre_internal.php?article=100552&list=/home.php& ). This implausible theory leaves a very large question mark over the identity of bodies that the US army wishes to conceal and recalls the report submitted to the Brussels Tribunal, ‘Tarmiya: the Silent Agony’. This account contains first hand testimony from an agricultural worker who survived an attempted execution by a team of US special forces. He and a colleague were abducted from the farm where they worked, then taken to a secluded grove where their throats were cut. They were left for dead, but miraculously, one of them survived (http://www.brusselstribunal.org /). Whilst this account lacks corroboration and has remained anonymous to protect the identities of those involved, it remains a convincing description of the kind of long-range ‘reconnaissance’ missions that people like James Steele were conducting in Vietnam.
Modelling the Iraq War
Whilst much of the violence across Iraq appears chaotic, some lines are starting to emerge that follow the pattern and the logic of other counter-insurgency wars. In El Salvador, when the war finally came to an end, it became clear that the majority of its victims had been participants in progressive social movements as well as peasants who had been perceived as sympathising with or supporting the guerrillas. The object of the war was not to defeat an ideologically motivated rebellion, it was to prevent the possibility of progressive social change and to maintain the country within the US economic orbit in its traditional tributary role.
The same can be said of Colombia at present, where the long current phase of the internal conflict in which thousands of social activists have been murdered has butted seamlessly with the country’s exposure to economic liberalisation. In short, legitimate social demands are violently suppressed in favour of allowing foreign capital to extract super profits from Colombia’s rich natural resources and selling off its public assets for the same purpose. Much of the conflict takes place within the realm of so-called ‘civil society’, where progressive leaders are excluded or eliminated, whilst those who are prepared to throw in their lot with predatory foreign capital are rewarded and extolled.
In Iraq the war comes in two phases. The first phase is complete: the destruction of the existing state, which did not comply with the interests of British and American capital. The second phase consists of building a new state tied to those interests and smashing every dissenting sector of society. Openly, this involves applying the same sort of economic shock therapy that has done so much damage in swathes of the Third World and Eastern Europe. Covertly, it means intimidating, kidnapping and murdering opposition voices.
The economic assault on Iraq is well underway. Visible unemployment stands at around the catastrophic level of 28%, large parts of the state sector have already been sold off and wages have fallen (often to less than half of their pre-war levels), thanks in part to the introduction of thousands of cheap workers from Pakistan, India and the Philippines. These workers are often tricked into coming and stripped of their passports, effectively working as slaves in order to undercut accustomed Iraqi living standards. Reconstruction projects are given almost exclusively to foreign (mainly US) companies, who pay a flat rate of 15% tax with no limits to repatriation of profits, while Iraq’s state-owned companies are excluded (http://www.antiwar.com/orig/shumway.php?articleid=3005 ). In the countryside, Iraqi farmers are now obliged to buy a licence to grow genetically modified seed and are prohibited from resowing the seed developed by their ancestors in the cradle of civilisation (http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KHA501A.html ).
The covert assault has also begun. Attacks on workers and trade unionists are becoming increasingly common (http://www.iraqitradeunions.org/archives/000200.html ) and it is instructive that the railway workers union, in an industry that has been slated for privatisation, seems to have been particularly targeted, with US administrators on the ground threatening to bring in Indian workers (http://www.iraqitradeunions.org/archives/000117.html ). Whilst the IFTU, the dominant, state-sanctioned new trade-union umbrella organisation, may have endorsed the occupation, the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI) has not; in any case, ordinary Iraqi workers will find themselves increasingly at odds with the puppet government as they try to defend even rudimentary living standards. Industrial action is already widespread in Iraq, though little reported in the mainstream press.
An even more frightening picture is emerging within the sector of higher education, where, since the beginning of the occupation, some 200 Iraqi academics have been murdered, while control and intimidation has become systematic. Many of the victims worked in the social sciences, where overlap with progressive social movements is unavoidable (http://www.newstatesman.com/200409060018 ).
Unfortunately, in Iraq it is almost impossible to securely attribute any of the host of assassinations and extra-judicial killings, while the US-UK propaganda campaign has left many all too willing to believe in such bugbears as Al-Zarqawi (see Michel Chossudovsky’s article ‘Who is Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi?’ (http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO405B.html ). What we do know, however, is that hundreds of Iraqis are being murdered and that paramilitary hit squads of the proxy government organized by US trainers with a fulsome pedigree in state terrorism are increasingly being associated with them.
In the context of a country where good information is extremely scarce, disinformation and black propaganda are endemic and independent journalists and monitors are deliberately eliminated, it is vital to be able to model the situation in order to understand it and, hopefully, be effective. There are two principle dimensions to such modelling. In the first, Iraq has frequently been compared to Vietnam. The similarity is that the US has well over 100,000 soldiers on the ground. However, the analogy is misleading in that in Iraq conflict with a populous enemy state, as North Vietnam was, ended quickly. As a model, El Salvador is not wholly accurate either. In El Salvador US ‘advisors’ were few in number and prohibited from taking part in combat. Nevertheless, it is towards this model that the US is attempting to move, hoping to farm out the sordid business of occupation to Iraqi auxiliaries. But, in many ways it is contemporary Colombia that offers the closest analogy: not for the disposition of US forces, but because here the same process of asset-stripping, impoverishment and conquistador-like plundering is both deeply entrenched and ongoing. It is here that is to be found that clearest pattern for the assaults on academics, independent trade unionists and peasant organisations that will increasingly characterise Iraq for those prepared to look beyond the fireworks. This is the second dimension that any model must address, but in essence the pattern is repeated time after time in every imperialist so-called counter-insurgency war; for behind each and every one lurks the reality of exploitation and class war, and, as successive imperialist powers have shown, the bottom line in combating the hopes and dreams of ordinary people is to resort to spreading terror through the application of extreme violence. In Iraq, the Salvador Option may mean returning home to find your entire family seated at table with their own severed heads served to them and a bowl of blood for relish.
*One of the worst atrocities was committed in December 1981 at the village of El Mozote in the department of Moraz‡n by the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite counter-insurgency force trained by US advisors and regarded as one of El Salvador’s best fighting units. Over 200 men, women and children (the entire village) were systematically tortured and murdered over the course of a day (http://www.usip.org/library/tc/doc/reports/el_salvador/tc_es_03151993_casesC.html ).
Max Fuller has worked for some years as a member of the Colombia Solidarity Campaign in the UK and has read extensively on US policy and Latin America. He is the author of several reports published in the Bulletin of the Colombia Solidarity Campaign. ------------------------------------------------------------------------
SINGAPORE How will China and the rest of Asia respond to U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's blunt assertion that China's military spending is a threat to regional security? This is the very stance that some of America's friends in the region were hoping it would avoid. Only the day before, Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, warned that a policy of containing China would find few takers in the region.
China could probably see this coming. What Rumsfeld said in Singapore on Saturday simply restored a default setting of American foreign policy, at least under the Bush administration. Before 9/11 changed the world, Rumsfeld and other neoconservative hawks were busy fashioning a policy that cast rising China as America's competitor. Now that the war on terror seems to be waning, there has been a noticeable shift in Washington back to considering China a threat to free trade and security.
The suspension of reality these past four years has allowed China to gain some valuable strategic ground in Asia.
Just in the past few months, Beijing has signed a security treaty with Pakistan and a defense cooperation agreement with the Philippines, both stalwart American allies. If America is indeed preparing to contain China's rise, it will come up against an extensive network of multilateral arrangements that China has sewn up with countries in the region, including a soon to be inaugurated East Asian Community stretching from India to Japan and excluding the United States and its ally Australia.
From the beginning of the year, Washington put Beijing on notice that its emergence as a regional superpower would not go unchallenged. In February the United States convinced Japan to commit to a more robust defense of Taiwan. Then the U.S. Treasury stepped up pressure on China to revalue its currency, and more lately there have been threats of trade sanctions over textile imports. Now Rumsfeld is saying that China's improved ability to project power and its advanced military technology are putting the delicate military balance at risk.
One effect of this will be to erode the patina of good will and cooperation that allowed the United States a free hand in the global war on terror. We can now expect China to increase the tenor of its more active foreign policy, both at the United Nations, where it is a more vocal presence on the Security Council, and in parts of the world where China is acquiring a measure of influence through investment in natural resources, like Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Beijing's big fear is that the United States will set up a picket fence of alliances around China that will put a potential stranglehold on vital lines of supply.
China is also likely to accelerate its military expansion program, as Chinese leaders begin to sense that Americans should not be trusted. Rumsfeld told his Singapore audience that he saw no threat to China that could explain its growing military budget, which the Pentagon estimates is far higher than officially stated. A Chinese official in the audience shot back: "Do you believe that the United States is threatened by the emergence of China?" Rumsfeld's cheerful riposte was no, and if China had only peaceful intentions, then why roll out batteries of ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan?
While the rest of Asia would like China's meteoric rise to be balanced by a sustained U.S. commitment to defense of the region, no one wants to be asked to choose between supporting one superpower over the other. Lee Hsien Loong argued that as the pre-eminent player in the region, America has the rare opportunity to assist Asia's emerging giants, India and China, "in settling the parameters for long-term cooperation and competition."
Rumsfeld's words hardly sounded like those of a benign moderator. They sounded more like a challenge. It also seems as if the Bush administration wants to extend its campaign for freedom into the region with calls for China to open up its political system. "With a system that encouraged enterprise and free expression," Rumsfeld said, "China would appear more as a friend and a welcome partner." There are many in Asia, like Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean diplomat, who don't quite share this view. He argues that a sudden end of Communist rule in China would unleash dangerous nationalist forces that could lead to conflict in the region.
The worry is that as Washington's views on China harden, the channels for cooperation that act as valuable confidence-building mechanisms in the region will become sclerotic too. It is also possible that the same nationalist forces that unleashed anger against Japanese interests in China could turn against sizable American interests as well. This can only make us all worry more about the possible outbreak of conflict in regional hotspots like North Korea and the East China Sea. Few Asians will want to thank Secretary Rumsfeld for making them feel more secure in the region.
(Michael Vatikiotis is a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore.)
Yes, we are threatening China. The prize in this Grand Game the United States is playing is world domination, only China, not the Muslims, stands in our way.
I have been compiling a list of weaponry sometimes in the form of our agitating ethnic tension in which we threaten China. Still not complete but closer, it’s at the end of this post
-Am
Who is Zooming Who? Rumsfeld, China and Hypocrisy By CHARLES WALKER POFF
June 6, 2005
"Since no nation threatens China, one must wonder; Why this growing investment? Why these continuing large and expanding arms purchases? Why these continuing robust deployments?"
Thus spake the yet to be tried war criminal Donald Rumsfeld. But when one looks closely at the situation one is struck by the fact China is surrounded on all sides by threatening, or possibly threatening nations, least of which is the U.S.
To the East lies Japan, a nation with the second largest military budget in the world, the capability of maunfacturing nuclear weapons in days if not hours, and most worrisome a bellicose government bent reliving the militarism which plagued Japan in the 1930's. Indeed so rampant is the resurgent militarism in Japan, openly encouraged by the Bush regime, that Japanese troops are sent to War in a nation thousands of miles from Japan, purely at the behest of America.
Combined with awful history of Japanese aggression toward China, it is eminently reasonable that China is apprehensive about it's neighboor to the East.
To the North lie Russia, owning thousands of nuclear bombs, which has had a history of low-level armed conflict with China for the past 50 years. Also there is Mongolia which has seen U.S. military advisors installed simply for the purpose of roiling the waters.
To the South lie Taiwan, where the remnants of the Kuomintang fled in 1949 displacing the native Taiwnese, and engaging, with U.S. connivance, in decades of provactive armed aggression, sabotage, and mischief-making in general. A nation which just announced launching of a home-made cruise missile. Vietnam, which had major armed clashes in 1979-1980 with China and a millenia old history of hostility toward China. North and South Korea, one of which can at best be termed a highly unreliable quasi-ally, the other a puppet government, host to tens of thousands of U.S. troops and their attendent nuclear weapons.
Needless to say the Korean War and U.S. attacks on China have not been forgotten. Burma, where for years the U.S. armed and funded irredentist attacks against China using Kuomintang forces and encouraging narcotics trafficking to weaken China's southern provinces. Nepal, where a raectionary monarch slaughters civilians with U.S. supplied armaments under the direction of U.S. advisors.
To the Southwest is nuclear-armed India, a nation whose relations with China have been fractious at best, and have exploded into armed conflict on more than one occasion, threatening to escalate into full-fledged nuclear exchange. The border disputes are still unresolved.
To the West are the Central Asian nations, of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Krygystan, and Kazakhstan. While militarily weak themselves they either are host to enormous U.S. military bases, each one of which must be presumed to possess nuclear capability, or in the case of Kazakhstan possibly possess leftover Soviet nuclear arms.
And then there is the greatest threat of all, the United States of America; the most warlike nation in the history of mankind. A nation which has overthrown numberless governments, invaded countless nations including those so tiny as Grenada as to not possess armed forces, and which most importantly openly boasts of "full-spectrum dominance", militarizing space, and spends as much as the rest of the world COMBINED on its military (not including hundreds of billions on "black programs" and "intelliegence" agencies). A nation, lest it be forgotten, which in attempting to assassinate Chou-en-Lai blew up the wrong civilian aircraft. A nation which to this day constantly violates Chinese airspace with provacative overflights by manned and unmanned aircraft.
No, as usual, when Rumsfeld points his blood-soaked finger the other four point directly back. A more accurate statement would be "Since no nation threatens the United States, one must wonder: Why this growing investment? Why these continuing large and expanding arms purchases? Why these continuing robust deployments?"
We are threatening China by attempting to control the flow of oil and by military means.
-Am
In a world that runs on oil, the nation that controls the flow of oil has great strategic power. U.S. policy-makers want leverage over the economies of competitors -- Western Europe, Japan and China -- that are more dependent on Middle Eastern oil. #msg-4798276
According to a Chinese white paper, Beijing sees “new negative developments” in the Asia-Pacific region. These include a strengthening US military presence and bilateral military alliances in China’s neighbourhood, and US development of a theatre missile defence system and plans to deploy it in Asia. “The Taiwan Straits situation is complicated and grim,” the white paper states. #msg-4383869 http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_18-10-2002_pg3_8
Taiwan intends to build "nuclear test ground" or "missile base". #msg-4682068
We have 90 nukes at the Turkish base of Incirlik and you will still have only a partial list of the weapons, troops, bases and nukes with which we are threatening Russia, China and other countries. #msg-6405164
In mid-April of this year, the Japanese government agreed to let the US Army's 1st Corps transfer from Fort Lewis, Washington, to Camp Zama near Yokohama.
Besides the recent decision to re-deploy the 1st Corps, the US is busily building up Guam as a "power projection hub", with, in the words of Pacific Commander Admiral William Fargo, "geostrategic importance". The US is also trying to shift Guam-based bombers to Yokota airbase near Tokyo. Christopher Hughes of Warwick University, an expert on the region, told the (British) Guardian, "The ramifications of this would be that Japan would essentially serve as a frontline US command post for the Asia-Pacific and beyond."
A number of Bush administration sounding boards, such as neo-conservative Charles Krauthammer, have openly advocated Japan going nuclear as a way to offset the growing influence and power of China. Acquiring nuclear weapons would be relatively easy for Japan, which has plenty of fuel to reprocess, as well as missiles and satellite targeting systems. #msg-6547899
In the first step toward erecting a multibillion-dollar shield to protect the United States from foreign missiles, the U.S. Navy will begin deploying state-of-the-art destroyers to patrol the waters off North Korea as early as next week.
The mission, to be conducted in the Sea of Japan by ships assigned to the Navy's 7th Fleet, will help lay the foundation for a system to detect and intercept ballistic missiles launched by "rogue nations." - Sep. 25, 2004 #msg-4129889
China has already protested the establishment of a Uighur Government-in-Exile in Washington and Beijing has repeatedly made it clear that it will not tolerate any political interference from abroad, where pro-independence Uighur organizations exist. This means us. It would seem we are orchestrating a riot in the Xinjiang province of China. Kyrgyzstan is one of the countries that borders the Xinjiang region. #msg-4098311
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