Uranium Diplomacy:The US Double-Standard in Kazakhstan and Iran

By Allen Ruff and Steve Horn*

[This is a slightly revised version of  "Uranium Double-Standard: The U.S., Kazakhstan and Iran," that originally appeared at Nation of Change. It is the second installment of an ongoing series on U.S. involvement in Kazakhstan. The first originally appeared at Truthout and is also available here.]

Iran’s alleged “nuclear threat” has taken center stage among diplomats, military men, and politicians in Washington, Tel Aviv, and the West at-large.

Despite the fact that investigative journalists Seymour Hersh, Gareth Porter and others have meticulously documented the fact that Iran, in fact, poses no nuclear threat at all, the Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress have laid down multiple rounds of harsh sanctions as a means to “deter” Iran from reaching its “nuclear capacity.”

The most recent round featured a call to boycott Iran’s oil industry by President Obama.

While rhetorical attention remains focused on Iran’s “threat”, there is an “elephant in the room”: Kazakhstan’s booming uranium mining and expanding nuclear industry --  a massive effort involving U.S. multinational corporations and an authoritarian regime increasingly tied to Washington.

Double standards have long reigned supreme in U.S. foreign policy. Few examples illustrate that better than the contrast between Washington’s stance toward the nuclear ambitions of Iran and Kazakhstan.

The  Seoul Dog and Pony Show

Seoul Nuclear Summitry: Obama and  Kazakhstan's Nazarbayev (c.) have a laugh as Russia's Dimitry Medvedev (r.) looks on.

The alleged Iranian “threat” was a central concern at the Nuclear Security Summit, which occurred in Seoul, South Korea between March 26-27.

Notables attending the conference included the likes of U.S. President Barack Obama, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister, Dan Meridor; Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Russian outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev, Chinese President Hu Jintao, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, and British Prime Minister Nick Clegg, to name several.

Noticeably absent were representatives from Iran, though the country received the brunt of criticism from many of the attendees at what amounted to a dog and pony show in Seoul.

Speaking at the Summit, Obama stated, "There is time to solve this diplomatically, but time is short. Iran's leaders must understand that there is no escaping the choice before it. Iran must act with the seriousness and sense of urgency that this moment demands. Iran must meet its obligations."

One notable uranium-developing powerhouse in no way viewed as a “threat” by the 53 world leaders assembled at Seoul was Kazakhstan, the resource-rich former Soviet republic strategically located at the center of the Asian heartland.

A country four times the size of the state of Texas, the Central Asia giant now serves as a key thoroughfare for what the Pentagon and U.S. geo-strategic planners refer to as the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), the main route equipping US/NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Kazakhstan’s self-proclaimed “president for life” --  Nursultan Nazarbayev – played a highly visible role at Seoul and joined Obama in a bilateral meeting, as well as a photo op.

As the Summit started, the New York Times published a public relations piece by Nazarbayev, fittingly titled, “What Iran Can Learn From Kazakhstan.” Noting his country’s post-Soviet efforts at nuclear weapons disarmament, the Kazakh leader informed his readers that his country “…chose building peaceful alliances and prosperity over fear and suspicion…”

The cynicism in Nazarbayev’s rhetoric could not have been missed by those familiar with a country where no true opposition parties, critical media or free trade unions are allowed, where protections under the law are virtually absent; and bribery and corruption rule.

Just days prior to the appearance of Nazarabyev’s Times piece, Amnesty International examined events in the aftermath of the December 2011 massacre of striking oil workers in Zhanaozen. Appearing a 100 days after that dark day, the  report found the government’s investigation into the events “inadequate.” Amnesty noted, “There have been numerous reports of widespread torture and other ill-treatment of those detained by security forces in the aftermath of the violence and investigations into these allegations do not to date appear to be thorough and impartial.”

A striking oil worker at Zhanaozen, one of many massacred on December 16, 2011

In an effort to counterbalance the influence of neighboring Russia and China, and concerned with Nazarbayev’s importance as a supportive ally in regard to nearby Afghanistan and Iran, US officials have often extended lip service praise for slow-in coming cosmetic social and political reforms as Nazarabyev consolidated his hold of what amounts to a one party monopoly on all the levers of power.

Numerous major human rights monitors, including Human Rights Watch, Freedom House and Amnesty International have long cited Kazakhstan for violations of international protocols regarding workers’ rights, the freedom of assembly and dissent, the state control of the media system at all levels, the routine repression of opposition political parties and candidates, the absence of due process under the law, the impunity of the police, ubiquitous torture, and the limited rights of those accused, detained, prisoners and the lawyers who defend them; and state violence, in general. The mistreatment of immigrants, the exploitation of child labor and human trafficking in the country have also been cited.

Kazakh media remain subject to legal restrictions, prohibitive libel and defamation judgments, self-censorship, harassment, and pressures from partisan owners and politicians. When Kazakhstan assumed the chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in 2010, the government pledged to improve human rights practices and increase media freedom. The level of press freedom nevertheless declined during the year, as a restrictive internet law passed in 2009 was used to intimidate bloggers and block websites, two independent newspapers were closed, and a journalist remained in jail.

The final report regarding country’s 2010 OSCE chairmanship concluded that the Nazarbayev government introduced no positive changes in regard to its own human rights record, as was promised at the beginning of its OSCE tenure. The report stated that the regime had actually displayed disrespect for its international obligations in regard to human rights.

Despite documentation of such regularized abuses, representatives of the regime centered at the country’s newly constructed showcase capital, the “mini-Dubai” at Astana, have regularly been well received by Washington.

Nazarabyev's "Mini-Dubai" at Astana

Kazakh Nukes

Well-known for its massive quantity of Caspian Sea oil and natural gas resources, massive quantity of Caspian Sea oil and natural gas resources Kazakhstan is also a growing nuclear power, possessing roughly 15-percent of the world’s known uranium supply and producing roughly one-third of the current global supply, according to the World Nuclear Association. Bypassing Australia and Canada last year, it currently is the world’s largest producer of the nuclear fuel source.

Kazakhstan’s nuclear industry extends from the mining, processing and export of uranium to the construction of nuclear reactors.  Closely tied to both Canadian and U.S. mega energy corporations, it seemingly poses no concern for Washington. Unlike Iran, no one seems to be calling for sanctions or regime change despite the repressive nature of Nazarbayev’s regime. Business is business and U.S. strategic interest trumps all.

A bit of recent nuclear industry business history is in order.

In October 2006, the Japanese multinational corporation Toshiba -- of television- and computer-manufacturing fame -- purchased a 77-percent majority share in Westinghouse Electric for a mere $5.4 billion. The other two companies involved in the buyout were Japan’s IHI Corporation, as well as the U.S. multinational Shaw Group.

Less than a year later, in July 2007, Kazakhstan’s state owned company KazAtomProm paid $486.3 million for a 10-percent of Toshiba’s stake in the jointly owned corporation, meaning it now owns 7.7-percent of Westinghouse.

“The deal,” explained nuclear industry analyst and consultant, Dan Yurman, “would give Toshiba access to Kazakhstan's uranium at a time when increased demand has tripled prices of the nuclear fuel ingredient in the past year. It would give Kazatomprom access to Toshiba's uranium processing technology and its sales channels.”

The transaction infuriated close observers of the global nuclear industry who cited human rights concerns and the dictatorial, kleptocratic nature of the Nazarbayev regime that “won” yet another rigged election in January, 2012 held amidst the ongoing repression following the state crackdown at Zhanaozen.

Clinton and Nazarbayev: East Meets Westinghouse

The nature of wheelings and dealings under Nazarbayev was fully displayed in an earlier nuclear deal that preceded, but was directly connected to the Westinghouse purchase -  a 2005 transaction between the Kazakh state-owned KazAtomProm and a Canadian energy entrepreneur, facilitated by none other than the former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

In 2005, Clinton, then (and still) head of the newly-formed Clinton Foundation, helped Canadian business mogul Frank Giustra make the nuclear deal of a lifetime.

According to the New York Times, Clinton facilitated a trip in September that year for the two of them to visit Nazarbayev in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Two days later Giustra “signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy interests in three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.”

Clinton and Nazarbayev: "Let's Make a Deal"?

The deal needed Nazarbayev’s go-ahead to assure final approval. With Clinton at his side, Giustra received it. As the Times piece described it, “The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company (UrAsia Energy Ltd.) into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra.” 

Giustra obtained a stake in the mines for $450 million, “the largest initial public offering in the history of Canada’s Venture Exchange.” In appreciation for his role as internediary, Giustra made a “philanthropic gift” to the former President’s  Foundation totaling $131.1 milliion.

Clinton and Canadian uranium mogul pal, Frank Giustra

It gets better. “In February 2007, a company called Uranium One agreed to pay $3.1 billion to acquire (the shell company) UrAsia. Mr. Giustra, a director and major shareholder in UrAsia, would be paid $7.05 per share for a company that just two years earlier was trading at 10 cents per share,” the New York Times story explained. That same month, the then president of KazAtomProm, Moukhtar Dzhakishev, paid a special visit to Clinton’s Chappaqua, NY abode.

The reason for the visit? The Times provides the answer: “Mr. Dzhakishev said he wanted to discuss Kazakhstan’s intention — not publicly known at the time — to buy a 10 percent stake in Westinghouse, a United States supplier of nuclear technology.”   

Roughly two years after the deal was cut, Dzhakishev was sent packing to a high security penitentiary for 14 years, accused by Nazarbayev’s investigators, Bloomberg reported, of “embezzling state shares in uranium deposits, including one co-owned by Canada’s Uranium One.” (Uranium One, of course, was the company that purchased Giustra’s UrAsia Energy Ltd.)

The arrest was made by the KNB, the Kazakhstani successor to the Soviet-era KGB. Many believe -- including leaders from the opposition Azat Party -- that the arrest was politically motivated.

Everyone walked away a winner in this one, other than Dzhakishev.

In exchange for his patronage, Nazarbayev received Clinton’s praise for “opening up the social and political life” of Kazakhstan. The ex-president and former leader of the “free world” proceeded to endorse the dictator in his bid to become the chair of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the body mandated to monitor arms control, human rights, freedom of the press, and fair elections across the Global North.

Eleven months prior to the 2005 deal, then U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) co-signed a letter to the U.S. State Department she now heads sounding “alarm bells” regarding Nazarbayev’s earlier bid to head the OSCE. The letter found Kazakhstan’s bid unacceptable and cited “serious corruption,” cancelled elections and government control of the media. This

The only honest way to describe the situation: insider wheeling and dealing of epic proportions for Clinton, Giustra, and the Nazarbayev clique, with Dzhakishev ending up on the rotten end of this deal.

The Fukushima Connection

No story about the nuclear industry would be complete without a mention of the spring 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. This tale, too, would be incomplete without pointing to the connections between U.S. geopolitical maneuvering, the Iranian “nuclear” threat, the “benevolent” Kazakhstani nuclear industry, and what is now a wasteland in Fukushima.

In the days after Japan’s nuclear disaster, investigative journalist Greg Palast connected some of the dots  by revealing that, “One of the reactors dancing with death at Fukushima Station 1 was built by Toshiba. Toshiba was also an architect of the emergency diesel system.”

Such back-up power generators were part the “seismic qualification” (SQ) test requirements that all nuclear power plants must pass. Yet, meeting SQ qualifications is expensive, so, as Palast explained, “The most inexpensive way to meet your SQ is to lie.” Stone and Webster, the nuclear unit of The Shaw Group, did just that for Fukushima Daiichi.

Shaw, as mentioned, owns a 20-percent stake in Westinghouse, KazAtomProm owns a 7.7-percent stake in it, while Toshiba owns a 69.3-percent stake.

Kazakhstan continues to experience its own nuclear tragedy in the area around Semipalatinsk, (Semey), formerly the center of Soviet-era nuclear weapons tests. A still unknown, but massive number of inhabitants of this northeastern Kazakh region continue to suffer and die from leukemia, other cancers, and horrific birth defects caused by high levels of radiation.

“Already, the thyroid cancer rate in the east and north of Kazakhstan is twice as high as in the rest of the country, and other cancers such as breast, have higher rates,” explained The Ecologist in an August 2011 article.

This, then, raises the question: Who or what poses the nuclear threat? Nuclear energy, nuclear armament, and uranium enrichment in of themselves, or solely Iran’s “nuclear ambitions”?

History Repeating Itself?: Iran’s Once Benevolent Nuclear Industry

Iran hasn’t always been deemed a “nuclear threat” by U.S. policymakers.

Long before U.S. geopolitical planning elites deemed Iran’s nuclear program a “threat,” its development was encouraged, in the 1970s during the closing years of Shah Reza Pahlavi’s dictatorship. None other than former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, all three at the time holding held high-level national security positions under President Gerald Ford, promoted the effort.

The scenario was best unpacked in an article appearing in the The Washington Post in March 2005. Dafna Linzer wrote of the deal:

“Ford's team endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive nuclear energy industry, but also worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar deal that would have given Tehran control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium -- the two pathways to a nuclear bomb. Either can be shaped into the core of a nuclear warhead, and obtaining one or the other is generally considered the most significant obstacle to would-be weapons builders.

Iran, a U.S. ally then, had deep pockets and close ties to Washington. U.S. companies, including Westinghouse and General Electric, scrambled to do business there.

            (Snip)

“After balking initially, President Gerald R. Ford signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel.”

(Snip)

“The U.S.-Iran deal was shelved when the shah was toppled in the 1979 revolution that led to the taking of American hostages and severing of diplomatic relations.”

Linzer went on to explain that U.S. companies, led by Westinghouse, stood to gain $6.4 billion from the sale of six to eight nuclear reactors and parts.

It all connects. Westinghouse today is co-owned by Toshiba, The Shaw Group, and  Kazakhstan’s uranium giant, KazAtomProm. Basically the same corporate interests eyeing Iran’s nuclear development under the US-backed Shah’s currently have their hands in Kazakhstan’s nuclear industry today.

Hypocrisy and the Looming Attack on Iran

With rapidity, the build-up for an attack on Iran progresses.

In response to a U.S. threat to sanction Iran’s oil industry, in late-December 2011 the Iranian government threatened to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic “choke point”  for oil passing passing from the Persian Gulf.

Soon after, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey told CBS’ Face the Nation that, “[Iran] has invested in capabilities that could, in fact, for a period of time block the Strait of Hormuz. We’ve invested in capabilities to ensure that if that happens, we can defeat that.”

Three weeks on, the U.S. Navy announced the deployment of a floating "forward operating base" “mothership” south of Iran, aboard the USS Ponce. “Navy documents indicate that it could be headed to the Persian Gulf, where Iran has threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial shipping route for much of the world’s oil supply,” explained The Washington Post. The ship will manned with active-duty Navy SEAL commandos.

In the midst of the Hormuz snafu, investigative reporter Mark Perry published a groundbreaking exposé, revealing that agents from Israel’s foreign intelligence service, Mossad, had been posing as U.S. spies in Pakistan to recruit members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight a covert war against Iran, presumably with the blessing of the U.S. government. Jundallah is a State Department designated terrorist organization.

Perry also broke a story on March 28, uncovering the fact that Israel -- again, almost certainly with U.S. blessing -- procured an air base in Azerbaijan, Iran’s northern neighbor located to the southwest of Kazakhstan, across the Caspian sea. He referred to this as “Israel’s Secret Staging Ground.”

This development is a logical one, given that Azerbaijan has already been the home site of a secretive U.S. Central Operations Command (CENTCOM)/Blackwater Worldwide (now known as Academi and, previously, as Xe Services) forward operating base as part of the broader Caspian Guard Initiative for years. Jeremy Scahill explained the Initiative in his book “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.” He wrote,

"Beginning in July 2004, Blackwater forces were contracted to work in the heart of the oil- and gas-rich Caspian Sea region, where they would quietly train a force modeled after the Navy SEALs and establish a base just north of the Iranian border," Scahill wrote.

"Blackwater would be tasked with establishing and training an elite ... force modeled after the U.S. Navy SEALs that would ultimately protect the interests of the United States and its allies in a hostile region ... [serving] a dual purpose: protecting the West's new profitable oil and gas exploitation in a region historically dominated by Russia and Iran, and possibly laying the groundwork for an important forward operating base in an attack against Iran," he continued.

More recently, The New Yorker magazine’s  Seymour Hersh, writing on “Our Men in Iran?,” revealed that the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has been training another U.S. designated terrorist organization, the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), since 2005. The training has occurred at the Department of Energy’s Nevada-based National Nuclear Security Administration headquarters.

Hersh and others have suggested that the MEK and others, including Mossad have been responsible for the spate of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists over the past several years. They also portend a dark future, if these series of events proceed in their logical and rather predictable order.

The alleged Iranian “nuclear threat” has become a pretext for regime change in Tehran, a desired goal of U.S. strategic planners and allies in Tel Aviv ever since the overthrow of the U.S.-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979.

The real concern since then for the U.S. has been control over the flow of increasingly valuable strategic sources of energy -- oil, gas, and uranium -- that propel corporate state interests in the region. Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev will remain a strategic ally regardless of the brutality of his regime, as long as he keeps in line.

As Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said in regard to Nicaragua’s U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza García, "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

The same, it appears, could be said about Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev as the U.S. moves toward desired regime change in Iran.

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*Allen Ruff received his Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He's written on the history of the American Left, local history and has published one novel. Schooled by decades of activist experience, his primary work now centers on opposition to U.S. interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere. He hosts a weekly a public affairs program on WORT, 89.9fm in Madison, WI, where he currently lives.

*Steve Horn is a researcher and writer at DeSmogBlog. He is also a freelance investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter at @Steve_Horn1022.

Obama's Imperial Continuity

Obama's Imperial Continuity

DESPITE THE RHETORIC of hope and promises of “change we can believe in” that ushered him into the White House, Barack Obama has offered anything but a marked shift in the fundamental course of U.S. foreign policy. The change Obama has brought — to the relief of U.S. and global elites — is away from the George W. Bush-era fantasy that U.S. military firepower and ideological muscle could unilaterally dominate the globe. But his underlying policy goals are very much in continuity not only with Bush but with a century of his predecessors.

For those ruling elites deeply concerned with the challenges facing the U.S. economy on the global scale and wary of the unilateral adventurism of the preceding eight years, Obama appeared to offer a more “winnable” approach to maintain U.S. “leadership” and advance “national interest.” He never promised a departure from the mainstream currents of U.S. global reach, despite rhetorical flourishes to captivate those who, tired of Bush-Cheney, had somehow come to imagine otherwise or who weren’t paying close attention.

There certainly was talk of a new multilateralism prior to and immediately following the January 2009 inauguration. In a signature move, the new administration moved away from Bush’s extreme and absurd provocation of stationing “missile defense” on Russia’s borders, signaling at least that Russia would no longer be treated with arrogant contempt.

This was accompanied by calls for renewed cooperation with traditional European allies and the stated willingness to dialogue with the formerly demonized “rogue states” Iran, North Korea and Cuba. Those speeches always offered junior partner status to friends old and new, and a negotiation starting point of “an offer you can’t refuse” for perceived adversaries.

The new administration has kept one campaign promise. It scaled back and redeployed the number of ground troops in Iraq (now “only” 100,000 with an equal number of contractors) and shifted the imperial war effort and attention toward the “right war” in Afghanistan. President Obama increased the number of “boots on the ground,” escalated drone attacks and pressured Pakistan’s dependent Zardari regime to move against al-Qaeda and the domestic Taliban in what’s now commonly referred to as the “Af-Pak theater.”

On the western front the Israelis under Benjamin Netanyahu, feeling safe in their assumptions of unwavering U.S. support, proceeded with new settlement construction in the West Bank, the crippling siege of Hamas-governed Gaza, and the ongoing cooptation of the Palestinian Authority.

The crisis that has erupted over settlement expansion in East Jerusalem came about when Israel’s government miscalculated, blatantly disregarding America’s need to preserve the appearance of a “peace process,” even one that never brings peace.

Following some initial public talk of “a willingness to sit down” with Iran, the administration has “stiffened resolve” against an Iranian regime which remains determined in its right to proceed down the nuclear path but is fractured internally by deepening leadership fissures, social tensions and political protest. White House calls for increased international sanctions against Iran are strengthened by its more multilateral, less frighteningly, militarist stance.

Backward Beyond Bush-Cheney

Obviously the complex problems for the U.S. imperial project in Southwest and Central Asia are not of Obama’s making. But the current administration’s global posture can best be understood in a context extending far beyond the Bush-Cheney years. It must be viewed as a continuation, in no way a departure, of that longer quest for U.S. global supremacy dating to the beginning of the 20th century. Obama’s espoused liberal interventionism certainly harkens back to John F. Kennedy, if not all the way back to Woodrow Wilson.

Among global strategists embedded in what is now commonly referred to as the National Security State bureaucracies, there has long been a foreign policy consensus, shared since World War II, regarding the geo-strategic value of the “Greater Middle East.” State Department planners, their strategic sights fixed on supplanting British and French colonial rule in the oil rich Middle East and eastern Mediterranean, mapped a course for U.S. postwar imperial power even as World War II raged.

Already certain of victory and unassailable postwar strength, they soon turned toward the creation of strategic alliances with compliant regimes, bolstered with economic aid, arms and intelligence, to hamper authentic independence and social revolution in the region and to block any advances by the wartime-allied Soviet Union.

Publicly articulated as defense against an expansionist Russia, the 1947 Truman Doctrine, announced at the height of crises in Greece and Turkey proclaimed the right to intervene anywhere in the region “in defense of freedom.”

In the early postwar years, various independent nationalist movements including those of Mossadegh’s Iran or Nasserite Egypt, often painted in the Cold War monochrome of “red,” were depicted as inimical to U.S. interests. Through the creation of the short-lived Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) among the signers of the 1955 “Baghdad Pact” — Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan, and Great Britain which was already a junior partner — Washington backed an alliance of regimes forming a regional “northern tier” on the Soviet Union’s southern flank.

That decade also witnessed the 1958 incursion of 14,000 U.S. troops into Lebanon, sent ashore to bolster minority Christian Maronite predominance in a heightening internal conflict. To justify the move, the White House invoked the Eisenhower Doctrine which proclaimed a U.S. right to intervene in countries threatened by “international Communism.”

The following decade saw the beginning of the massive turn toward Israel as the 1967 war dealt a devastating blow to regional pan-Arabism and secular nationalism.

Carter Doctrine and “Arc of Crisis”

Current policy continues to be defined largely by that longer-term projection of U.S. power into the broader region. Most significant for our current understanding is the Carter Doctrine, articulated in 1980. Proclaimed in his State of the Union Address in January of that year, Jimmy Carter’s strategic policy pronouncement pledged to uphold U.S. “vital interests” in the Persian Gulf region by “any means necessary, including military force.”

This came in the immediate aftermath of the fall of U.S.-installed Shah Reza Pahlavi’s Iran dictatorship, at the time a heavily armed Cold War client on the Soviet Union’s southern frontier and a surrogate “regional gendarme” of counterrevolution. It also followed close on the heels of the Soviet military intervention in landlocked Afghanistan. Carter’s address portrayed this move as a first step in the Soviets’ quest for a warm water port via Pakistan, rather than an attempt to bolster a bordering client regime made increasingly unstable by the spread of an Islamist insurgency that was already receiving covert U.S. assistance.

Key architect of the Carter Doctrine was his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, the “realist” rival to the Republican favorite, Henry Kissinger. By the later 1970s, prior to the Shah’s ouster and the Soviet military move into Afghanistan, Brzezinski had described an “arc of crisis” spanning north and eastward from the Horn of Africa, extending from Somalia, Sudan and Ethiopia, across the Levant and Arabian Peninsula, and eastward through Iran and Afghanistan to Pakistan.

Brzezinski saw the vast area as absolutely vital to the U.S. “national interest” and under threat from secular, left-led nationalist or pan-Arab revolutionary movements under the sway or potential influence of the main Cold War rival.

Strategically pivotal was the Persian Gulf, outlet for a major portion of the world’s oil supply. This region, understood as essential to the capitalist world economy and “well-being” of “the West,” was now seemingly threatened by the “loss” of Iran and potential instability in allied Saudi Arabia.

A strategist with a constant eye on the “Great Game,” Brzezinski also viewed Central Asia in geo-strategic terms as a contested “core area” crucial to U.S. hegemony, to be secured and held from competing imperial rivals, present and future.

At the time Carter announced his doctrine, the United States was still reeling from the defeat in Vietnam. Its capacity to intervene militarily was politically hampered at home by the “Vietnam syndrome,” that deep-seated mass reluctance to send U.S. troops into combat. The end of the Cold War draft, won as a concession by the Nam-era antiwar movement, also constrained the ability to intervene.

In the Middle East and elsewhere there had already been a turn, begun under the “Nixon Doctrine,” toward the massive arming and military assistance to reactionary regional proxies, notably the Shah’s Iran and Saudi Arabia in the Gulf and including “regional lynchpins,” non-Arab Israel and Turkey. The Carter-Reagan presidencies also featured the turn toward “low intensity warfare” — the often clandestine support of counter-revolutionary surrogate forces globally — in the name of “security” and “stability.”

One result was the infamous “Iran-Contra Affair” — that mid-1980s web of illicit weapons sales to Iran, then at war with Iraq, and illegal funneling of resulting revenues to the U.S.-backed Contras attacking the Nicaraguan Revolution. Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, was then a key player as deputy to Reagan’s CIA Director, William Casey.

In response to the Iran crisis but with no significant military capabilities in the region, the Carter administration moved to create a tactically mobile Rapid Deployment Force capable of extinguishing global “brush fires.” The RDF eventually morphed into United States Central Command (CENTCOM), to this day militarily “responsible for US security interests in twenty nations of the Middle East and Central Asia” and currently under the command by General David Petraeus.

The Reagan years witnessed the funneling through Pakistan of massive U.S. support of arms and money to the then “valiant rebel freedom fighters,” the Afghan muhjahideen and international jihadis (among them Osama bin Laden), fighting the “good jihad” against the Soviet “Evil Empire.” Meanwhile to the west, the eight-year long Iran-Iraq war, initiated by a U.S.-assisted Saddam Hussein, took well over a million lives.

The “Shia Crescent”

With the implosion of the Soviet bloc, the major public justification for U.S. intervention across the “arc of crisis” — the threat of “Evil Empire” subversion and aggression — also disappeared.

So too did former East bloc material support, often erratic but real, for various secular nationalist and “anti-imperialist” movements. Their decline paralleled the ascent of Islamist formations such as the Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad over an Israeli-defeated Palestine Liberation Organization.

Importantly, as the older rationales for continuing U.S. presence across the region vanished, new forms of resistance, mainly Islamist in form, moved to the fore. Unresolved crises, created in large part by the imperial project with all its legacies of uneven development and cultural intrusion, exacerbated further by unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the backing of repressive allies from Cairo and Riyadh to Kabul and Islamabad, led to further instability, new interventions and ongoing conflict.

The 1991 Gulf War, coming just as the Soviet Union imploded, placed a U.S. land army in the Arabian Peninsula. That military incursion came not just as a response to Saddam Hussein’s Kuwait land grab, but also as the first major test of U.S. power in the post-Cold War world: an assertion of U.S. might in the Gulf and “national resolve” to uphold the Carter Doctrine.

President Bush the Elder at the time proclaimed that the “Vietnam Syndrome could finally be laid to rest,” and that “America could once again stand tall.”

Then, with the Soviet “Red Menace” gone and communism seemingly relegated to “the end of history,” planners and ideologues spent more than a decade casting about for ways to redefine “American mission,” the best way to gain domestic and foreign support for an imperial project facing new global challenges. The “war on drugs” was tried, as was “humanitarian intervention.” The latter, used by George Bush I and his successors in the Clinton administration as the justification for sending an ill-fated contingent of 28,000 U.S. troops ashore in Somalia in 1993, became the primary rationale for the U.S.-led NATO coup de grâce to the former Yugoslavia.

But while it portrayed U.S. benevolence in favorable light, “humanitarian intervention” lacked the mobilizing capacity of earlier Cold War explanations. Its claims were contradicted by Clinton’s concurrent punishment of Iraq, the dual campaign of unabated air strikes and devastating sanctions, intended to force “regime change” from within.

Throughout the ‘90s, the older Cold War rhetoric of the “arc of crisis” was gradually refurbished and expanded upon to reemerge as the “arc of Islam.” Political Islam and “fundamentalism” replaced “communism” as the sole explanation for increasing unrest, instability and “terrorism” extending from Morocco and Algeria in the west to Indonesia and the Philippines in the east. The new peril to the Arab Middle East became an Iranian-backed Shiite militancy extending across a “Shia Crescent.”

With the shock and trauma of the September 11th attacks, the “war on terror” moved to the fore to mobilize support and justification for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the subsequent war and occupation of Iraq, and the related increase of surveillance and contraction of civil liberties and constitutional guarantees at home.

The Bush-Cheney administration’s “Axis of Evil” rhetoric initially targeted Iran, North Korea and Syria, none of which had anything to do with Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda, as “state sponsors of terrorism” while it ignored the state terror of regional allies, most notably Israel but also including Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The “Bush Doctrine” turned to “preemptive war,” the unilateral right to militarily intervene against any regime of “failed state” posing a potential or perceived future threat. It ended, as we know, in disaster.

And Then Came Obama…

While promising change, Bush’s successor has displayed a ready willingness to utilize and adapt much of the rhetoric of his predecessors. Certainly not about to appear “soft” on the “war on terror,” Barack Obama as Commander-in-Chief and Imperial CEO has clearly delineated a foreign policy entirely in keeping with the long-established focus on U.S. global supremacy.

In three major addresses — at Cairo in early June, 2009 and then in quick succession at West Point and Oslo in December — Obama readily displayed the commitment to U.S. supremacy in a rapidly changing multi-polar world.

Delivered to a highly vetted audience in the sealed-off space of Cairo University, the June speech, while intending to set a tone of “not-Bush” reconciliation to the Muslim and Arab worlds, in large part reproduced in “kinder, gentler” form, the “clash of civilizations,” the Neoconservatives’ overarching explanation for the antagonisms between “the West” and Islam’s adherents.

While referencing a number of other sources of conflict and instability — among them colonialism and Cold War, “modernity,” “globalization” and “violent extremism” — Obama primarily portrayed the main sources of tension in cultural and religious terms and called for a coming together of “all people of good faith.”

In continuity with his predecessors, and not about to discuss U.S. strategic determination to remain hegemonic across the Greater Middle East, he described U.S. actions as if America were a reluctant victim once again forced to take action.

The Purple Prose of Cairo

In perhaps the most remarkable section of the Cairo address, Obama delivered a homily of sorts that must have seemed incredibly contradictory if not ludicrous to any listener attuned to Middle East history and present realities. While reaffirming unconditional support for Israel and a call for a return to the “road map,” he stated that, “The Palestinians must abandon violence.” Silent in regard to Israel’s disproportionate use of its military might and collective punishment, he asserted — only minutes after stating that the United States had its own origins in a justified rebellion against empire — that “resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed.”

At a time when the new administration had already increased the number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan through the escalating use of drone attacks, he went on to assert with no Orwellian subtlety lost: “violence is a dead end. It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children…That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.” As if those in the West Bank and Gaza or languishing in the refugee camps of Lebanon were somehow primarily responsible for their own plight and should not resist by any means necessary!

Conveniently avoiding Bush’s fraudulent claims about weapons of mass destruction to justify the Iraq war, Obama stated that the invasion and occupation of that country occurred solely to depose the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and that it left “the people of Iraq better off.” The Cairo address called for democracy (certainly the irony there could not have been lost among some of his audience of hand-picked Egyptian students), religious tolerance, women’s rights and nuclear arms control, with pointed comments aimed at Iran and no reference to Israel’s existing nuclear arsenal.

From West Point to Oslo

Obama formally announced another troop increase to Afghanistan, his second since coming to office, in a nationally televised presidential address delivered not from the Oval Office, but before the Cadets at West Point.

Although not appearing on an aircraft carrier deck in a flight suit, he repeated the “war on terror” trope of a menacing al-Qaeda, now abetted by a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as the sole reason for escalating the U.S.-NATO war in Central Asia. “What’s at stake,” the Commander in Chief told us, “is not simply a test of NATO [meaning U.S.] credibility…but the security of our allies, and the common security of the world.”

Here we have once again a replay of the constant themes used to justify U.S. imperial interventions across the breadth of a century or more: the defense of an ally’s freedom and democracy from outside threat coupled with national security concerns. No mention of inconvenient realities about the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai, American-installed, riddled with corruption and subsequently “reelected” in a massively fraudulent pseudo-election.

It was in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech at Oslo that Obama clearly laid out the direction of his presidency. He pointed to the contradictory irony of receiving the award while waging two ground wars of occupation in Asia. His war-is-peace address, while draped once again in the rhetorical flourishes of a revived liberal internationalism, served primarily as public relations justification and statement of imperial purpose to the rest of the world.

Couched in universal terms laden with the liberal interventionist moralism of a Woodrow Wilson or John Kennedy, the speech actually contained an air of imperial realism. At its center stood a call to redefine the notions of “just war” doctrine for use in legitimizing present and future armed interventions.

Obama cited the components of the longstanding set of principles, the basis of the UN Charter and older international accords — that force be used as last resort or in self-defense; that it be proportional and that civilians be spared “whenever possible.”

He then went on to speak of new global situations — the threat of civil wars, among them — requiring redefinitions of the concept. While differing in tone from the “you’re either with us or with the terrorists” of the preceding administration, Obama reiterated “the right of the United States to act unilaterally when necessary” (without defining who or what might define such “necessity”).

To provide international legitimacy for the escalating war in Afghanistan, he praised the current incarnation of the “coalition of the willing,” the 43 self-interested allies and lesser supplicant states gathered under the NATO banner. In truth, if the original rationale for the existence of NATO was that of Western Europe’s “protective shield” against “Soviet aggression,” then it should have disbanded long ago.

Obama at Oslo gave a remarkable and revealing historical sketch of the post World War decades when “America led the world in constructing an architecture to keep the peace.” He cited the Marshall Plan for the rebuilding of a capitalist Western Europe under U.S. aegis, and the United Nations, long utilized by the United States when necessary and otherwise bypassed and ignored, as crowning achievements of the era.

A similar chord was struck in Obama’s Cairo speech, where he finished up with calls for mutual interest in cooperation in “economic development and opportunity,” a “broader engagement beyond concerns for oil” and requisite appeals for improved trust, friendship and increased scientific, educational and cultural exchanges.

This a refinement of the “Open Door,” that centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy since the beginning of the 20th century, first and foremost meaning American corporate access to markets everywhere. For an example of the progress and benefits this has brought, see Haiti.

War Is Peace

In Oslo, bypassing the long history of U.S. interventions on the side of dictatorship, numerous anti-democratic destabilization efforts across the planet (Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, Cuba in the 1960s) and various proxy wars (Nicaragua and Afghanistan in the 1980s among them), the Peace Prize Prez stated: “America has never fought a war against democracy and [that] our closest friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens.”

The Korean War and Vietnam, and the nature of the U.S.-sponsored regimes in both, disappeared from memory, as did the present-day close friendships with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Afghanistan — interesting examples of “governments that protect the rights of their citizens” — and Israel whose 43-year record in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is in constant violation of human and democratic rights.

At the very time when the U.S. military was busy increasing the number of civilian casualties in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Commander in Chief could state without flinching,

“Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct. And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight.”

As the Imperial President drew to a close at Oslo, he noted that, “…No Holy War can be a just war.” He of course was referring to those Islamist elements, among them former allies now defined as “extremists.” He failed to address that other “holy war,” largely wrapped in the moralist secular garb of American mission, that ongoing pursuit and maintenance of U.S. strategic advantage in the “Greater Middle East” and elsewhere, the armed defense of global hegemony, an old world order now increasingly challenged economically if not militarily.

The world is a different place than during the Cold War. No longer divided between a capitalist “West” and the so-called “really existing socialism” of an “East,” the globe has divided into intertwined yet increasingly rival economic blocs — an ascendant Chinese growth engine with its East Asia sphere and expanding global reach, the European Union led by a unified Germany, a Russia back on its feet and a developing India — all of serious concern to U.S. capital.

Across the “Global South,” in Latin America and elsewhere, various “breakaway republics” no longer fully under superpower sway have slowly moved toward regional partnerships. The Obama administration has successfully eased Honduras back into safe channels, through a military coup and a pseudo-electoral transition to a new regime, keeping the repression and murder of popular activists mostly out of the headlines. Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, however, are harder to bring under control.

Other nations in Africa and the global South, still strapped by the legacies of colonial and neocolonial underdevelopment made worse by the recent global downturn and deteriorating environments, remain in a state of abject dependency to the capitalist centers. New instabilities, conflicts and forms of resistance, at their heart the result of imperial penetration, abound. Therein lie the challenges faced by U.S. ruling circles and their Imperial President as they seek those changes, advantageous for empire, they can believe in.

(This piece originally appeared in Against the Current 146, May-June 2010.)