"The Middle East Crisis in Retrospect" Was It Meant To Trigger The Final Sequence?

JR Nyquist.com ^ | May 8, 2003 | JR Nyquist

[JudgeAmint]

"The Middle East Crisis in Retrospect"
Was it meant to trigger the final sequence?

by J. R. Nyquist

I should like to offer a more detailed analysis of the recent Middle East crisis as it developed toward “the Battle of Iraq.” Since late 1999 we find a pattern of moves aimed at damaging America’s strategic position. These moves have not succeeded, but the game is far from over.

In late 1999 the Russian Federation announced a fleet deployment into the Mediterranean [1]. This announcement was not incidental. It anticipated future events. As oil prices spiked in early 2000, Russia began to show her hand in terms of moves intended to dramatically expand oil exports and production. It appeared on the surface that Russia might be preparing to exploit a general Middle East crisis involving a partial shutdown of some of the region’s oil production. Also coincident with the last days of 1999, the head of the U.S. Congressional Task force on Terrorism and Unconventional warfare, Yossef Bodansky, publicly stated that Osama bin Laden had acquired Russian-built nuclear weapons through criminal intermediaries in the former Soviet Union.

The following questions must be asked: Was the Kremlin preparing to trigger, through its agents in the Islamic world, a damaging sequence of events that would boost its own oil revenues while damaging its oil-importing American nemesis? Was the Palestinian uprising of September 2000 the first eruption in a series of planned eruptions that would bring on an unprecedented energy crisis, a terror crisis and an economic crisis aimed at knocking America to her knees as it raised Russia from economic ruin?

In November 2000 the Israeli security services revealed that the al-Aqsa uprising was planned in late 1999, less than a month before the announced Russian fleet move to the Mediterranean (mentioned above). The timing of the Russian announcement suggests the possibility of coordination between Palestinian and Russian strategists. Furthermore, the instigation of a Middle East crisis could not have been more auspicious in terms of a damaging rise in oil prices vis-à-vis an already shaky U.S. economy. Signs of impending turmoil were apparent in key oil-producing states. Crises were brewing in Venezuela, Indonesia and Nigeria. The stage was set for an oil crunch, and Russia acted as though she was positioning herself to exploit a sudden doubling or tripling of prices. Arafat’s sudden trip to Moscow at the peak of the Palestinian crisis in late November 2000, to consult Russian President Vladimir Putin, is suggestive of collusion.

Arafat had good cause to see his Russian patron. Over the weekend of November 24-26 the Israelis began to seriously mobilize. Israeli Prime Minister Barak accepted the advice of Chief of Staff Mofaz and ordered preparations for a regional Middle East conflict. By Dec. 1 the Knesset had approved emergency measures. The Israelis were going to beat down the Palestinian Authority and destroy Arafat’s security infrastructure. The game of peace was over. But the Arab world was not rallying to Arafat’s cause.

To bring this pot to a boil a further provocation was in the offing. On September 11, 2001, al Qaeda terrorists led by Mohammed Atta attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The destruction of the Twin Towers was a major blow aimed at the U.S. economy. Weeks before a Russian senior economist (from the Institute of Macroeconomic Research at the Russian Ministry of Economic Development and Trade) named Tatyana Koryagina had publicly predicted an attack on America by “shadow forces” that would collapse the U.S. economy. The dollar would soon be something to use for “wallpapering bathroom stalls,” she said. In the wake of Koryagina’s testimony before the Russian Duma, the country’s lawmakers adopted gold coinage as legal tender. Russian citizens were encouraged to dump their dollars for gold. It is suspicious that a Russian, connected to a government ministry, should roughly guess the impending hit on America. What is most interesting, in light of this, is the background of the terrorists who organized the Sept. 11 attack. According to Czech sources, Mohammed Atta was trained as a terrorist in communist Czechoslovakia before the fall of the Soviet Union. Even more interesting, Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, spent several months in Russian secret police custody. (See my article, Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Russian adventure.) This prince of the Egyptian terrorists, with his Egyptian accent, claimed that the Russians did not know who he was and let him go.

In terms of the push for Jihad against America, Zawahiri’s voice was stronger even than bin Laden’s at the outbreak of the September 2000 Palestinian uprising. During a September 21, 2000 al-Jazeera TV broadcast Zawahiri was heard to say: “Dear brothers, I am not trying to play on your emotions or ask you for your sympathy; rather, we are not talking business, we are talking Jihad.” Referring specifically to the United States he said: “These heathens have spread their forces in Egypt, Yemen, and the Gulf, killing our children, persecuting our scholars, soiling our holy shrines, and stealing our wealth. Dear brothers, let us start working and stop playing.”

What Zawahiri meant is quite clear. At the outset of the Palestinian uprising he was calling for a holy war against the United States. A connection between the September 2000 Intifadah and the September 2001 attack on America is here indicated. Add to this the connection alleged between bin Laden’s nuclear arsenal and Russian agents in Chechnya. [See my article, The Chechen War and bin Laden’s Nukes.] For those who did not follow the Chechen intrigue closely, it was an odd affair, not at all straightforward. Recent reports indicate, in addition, that Moscow’s theater hostage crisis, in which key Chechen terrorists were eliminated, was a secret police provocation organized to cover the Kremlin’s tracks. Chechen terrorists under Kremlin control had served their purpose and were now inconvenient witnesses to a double game. All of this leads back to the suspicious apartment bombings – blamed on Chechen terrorists – that triggered the Second Chechen War and gave color to the story of Chechen terrorists passing nuclear weapons to bin Laden. It also should be mentioned that President George W. Bush has stated his belief that Saddam Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. It is therefore significant that documents captured in Baghdad show extensive Russian support for Saddam Hussein’s secret operations, including Kremlin offers of support for assassinations against targets in the West.

The picture here is not altogether clear. But we should not ignore the curious connectedness of Russia to Iraq, Russia to Zawahiri, Russian nukes to bin laden and Russia’s Czech satellite to Atta. The Kremlin’s past support for terrorism is famous. It is not something that can be credibly disputed. And so we must ask ourselves: Did the combination that began with the September 2000 Palestinian uprising set the stage for the economically devastating destruction of the Twin Towers, a Middle East war, an oil crisis and an economic crisis meant to cripple the United States? Was that the plan? And was this plan thwarted by America’s incredible resiliency and strength?

KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, writing in March 1992, explained Russia’s strategy in the Middle East as follows: “A primary objective of the strategy here is to achieve a partnership with the fundamentalists in Iran and Algeria and to replace the present American-oriented rulers of Saudi Arabia with fundamentalists.”

Was bin Laden a part of this strategy?

Whatever the answer, the failure of bin Laden to ignite a revolution in Saudi Arabia is a critical failure indeed. The collapse of Saddam Hussein is a further blow to those who would make trouble for America in the Middle East. We cannot be sure exactly how the Russians hoped to exploit the emerging crisis of 2000-2001. But this much is certain: America’s position has been strengthened, if only for the moment. Totalitarian regimes across the planet are alarmed. Of course, this situation is only temporary. We find elucidation on this point from the late Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, who once lectured a colleague on the weaknesses of America. “They don’t comprehend our final goals,” he explained. “And they mistake tactics for strategy. Besides, they have too many doctrines and concepts proclaimed at different times, but the absence of a solid, coherent, and consistent policy is their big flaw.”

The strategists who want to knock America from its dominant global position are men who think in terms of decades. They do not jump from expedient to expedient. They prepare the ground long ahead of time. As KGB defector Golitsyn explained in his postscript on Russia’s long-range strategy in his book, The Perestroika Deception: “[T]he Soviet long-range strategists have a coherent framework within which to pursue their objectives. And they are taking precautions to ensure that the crisis of confusion among conservative forces will not be temporary. On the contrary, practical measures are in hand to prevent any recovery of perspective, which would lead to the true purposes of [Russian] ‘restructuring’ being understood in time.”

The Bush administration remains naïve and deluded about Russia’s goals. President Bush continues to follow the false path of arms control and disarmament. The modernization of U.S. forces yet entails further reductions in the number of American tanks, planes and ships. Meanwhile, the Chinese and Russian armed forces continue to grow.

I should like to end with a quote from Andrei Navrozov, who anticipated the present situation more than a decade ago when he wrote what the Kremlin strategists were then thinking: “Democracies have never understood that we have a strategy. They never had one, and when somebody does not know how to play chess and just ‘shuffles his galoshes’ as we say, he always assumes his opponent is doing the same. They think Iosif Vissarionovich [Stalin] was a fool, Hitler a madman. Even if they could read what I am thinking now …  they would never believe their eyes. They cannot comprehend that in war as in chess, the stronger your position the more productive the combinations you set up, until there is simply no room for failure left and your opponent surrenders.”

Notes:

[1] The Russian fleet deployment was later canceled after the Arab states failed to mobilize for war against Israel after the start of the Intifadah al-Aqsa in September 2000.

© 2003 Jeffrey R. Nyquist
May 7, 2003

[JudgeAmint]

Interesting comments from JR with regards to the Ruskies...

[JudgeAmint]

Hal Lindsey has a similar take..

Saddam's 'Inferno'

Saddam's 'Inferno'

The Bush Administration is now shifting its focus to reconstruction, and Rumsfeld said it's unclear how long that will take.

Rumsfeld told the Sunday talk shows, "We're going to have to see that that has proper security, and we're going to have as many people in there as we need for as long as we need them."

Rumsfeld also said he expects captured Iraqi officials to start providing coalition forces with information soon. And, we learn more about live under Saddam Hussein.

Iraqi citizens dug up 47 bodies outside of the Shiite Muslim holy city of Najaf on Sunday. Some of the hands of the victims were tied behind their backs. The victims appear to have been executed during the 1991 Shiite uprising.

In what was once the home of the former head of Iraqi military intelligence, an impromptu group called Committee of Freed Iraqi Prisoners now studies the theories and practice of Saddam's living nightmare.

About six months ago, Saddam emptied his prisons of most of the criminal and some political offenders in preparation for the American invasion. The families knew what it meant when these men never came home, but they have never received confirmation of what happened to them.

In the prisons, Iraqi widows search for familiar names scratched into cell walls. More than 290,000 Iraqis have vanished during Saddam's reign of terror.

That doesn't include the forty Iraqi villages he gassed over the years. Or the more than one million Muslims Saddam sent to meet Allah from both sides during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War.

Death loomed everywhere in Iraq under the Ba'ath Party regime.

It is estimated to have ultimately killed some 2 million people, both old and young, almost exclusively Muslim, since Saddam came to power in 1979. The summary of the declassified 14-page report on war crimes committed by the Iraqis in Kuwait offers a taste of what Iraqi Ba'athists did wherever they held power.

The evidence is too gruesome to describe here. For years groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have compiled detailed, firsthand accounts of such abuse with photographs too graphic to print, including pictures of mutilated children tortured to death.

But their reports tended to be ignored or reduced to a few inches in the back pages of metropolitan newspapers. Even when the evidence was overwhelming, reporters and editors looked the other way.

The cable-news network CNN bills itself as the "most trustworthy" in the world. Until it admitted in the New York Times that it deliberately withheld information that confirmed torture chambers. The reason? Network executives claim they were scared to tell the truth because they didn't want to endanger lives.

Critics point out that CNN gave no warning even when it had advance notice of murders planned by the regime. It is clear that CNN's motive was its bottom line.

It didn't want to lose the competitive advantage it's Baghdad office gave it over rival Fox News. The survivors of Saddam's torture chambers don't understand the anti-war protestors, no matter what CNN says.

One news report quoted on of Saddam's victims, an Iraqi named Bayanne Surdashi. "Why weren't they protesting when 350,000 Iraqis were chemically and biologically attacked?" asks Surdashi.

"Where is the outrage? Why weren't they on the streets then? We know the price of freedom is going to be high, but two million of my people died under the Gestapo tactics of Saddam."

Where is the outrage, indeed?
 

[JudgeAmint]

Ping..) ) )

[Alberta's Child]

This guy's analysis is extremely flawed, particularly in retrospect.

The following questions must be asked: Was the Kremlin preparing to trigger, through its agents in the Islamic world, a damaging sequence of events that would boost its own oil revenues while damaging its oil-importing American nemesis?

There is a clear contradiction in this statement -- How could Russia "boost its own oil revenues" while "damaging its oil-importing American nemesis" at the same time? Any damage that was done to the U.S. would result in a drop-off in demand for oil on the world market, thereby defeating the whole point of the plan in the first place.

Beyond that, I find it hard to believe that the Russians would have been dumb enough to support something that would inevitably result in a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan as well as many former Soviet republics in the oil- and gas-rich Caucasus region.

The Russians have a major problem right now -- they've got plenty of oil production capacity, but no economical means to transport oil to the largest oil markets. As a result, the same barrel of oil that costs $30+ on the world market only costs something like $4.50 in Russia.

[Bob J]

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[Cicero]

It's possible, of course. The Soviet Union supported "national liberation" type terrorism around the world quite openly. And Putin is a KGB man with all that that implies.

Nevertheless, if there's anything in it, it's not very smart on their part. Islamic terrorism is there whether or not Russia supports it.

As for Russia building up its army while ours runs down, the two Gulf Wars and the Afghan campaign made it very clear that Russian military doctrine and equipment simply cannot compete with us. The only threat Russia holds over us is MADD. They are the one nation with enough nuclear weapons and delivery methods to assure mutual destruction. But there's no reason to think they would want to commit mutual suicide now, any more than they did at the height of the Cold War.

In some ways, bin Ladin did us a favor. He attacked too soon, before Muslims had a chance to take over Europe, and before any Muslim nation but Pakistan had nuclear weapons. If he had not woken us up, the balance would still be shifting in favor of the Arabs.

[elbucko]

What a deuce-and-a-half of pure Bravo Sierra.

[John H K]

Meanwhile, the Chinese and Russian armed forces continue to grow.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHHAHAH!!!!!!

Geez, this Nyquist guy is a moronic tool. It's an embarassment to FR that there are people on this thread taking this guy seriously.

The Russian armed forces have gone in the crapper, and it's not some giant deception campaign. They're certainly not "growing." Even during the worst of the Clinton reductions the decline of the Russian military was hundreds of times worse.

And while the Chinese are attempting to modernize they're actually REDUCING the size of their army.

[Paleo Conservative]

If Osama had Russian nukes, he would have used them on September 11, 2001.

[dark_lord]

The Russians have a major problem right now -- they've got plenty of oil production capacity, but no economical means to transport oil to the largest oil markets. As a result, the same barrel of oil that costs $30+ on the world market only costs something like $4.50 in Russia.

Yeah. Some problem. I am sure American industrialists would be happy to have that problem. Just shows that the Russians are still a bunch of incompetent corrupt Socialists. Because with energy costs that low they could move bigtime into energy intensive industries and produce product at much lower costs than competitors in other countries. Fortunately for us, they're Russians.

[Alberta's Child]

Because with energy costs that low they could move bigtime into energy intensive industries and produce product at much lower costs than competitors in other countries.

The only problem with this scenario is that producing more product at lower costs than competitors isn't going to do them any good if getting the product out of the country is as difficult as getting oil out.

[dark_lord]

Sure, but it isn't. Oil needs reliable pipelines, pumping stations, and specialized port equipment. Product just needs rail lines and cranes at the ports with standard shipping containers. Even 3 world countries can do that and many do.

[Alberta's Child]

Product just needs rail lines and cranes at the ports with standard shipping containers.

And adequate depth in the ports and adequate width in the Dardenelles and Bosporous Straits to accommodate post-Panamax container ships, shipping channels that are open year-round, etc.

Two shipping routes to the largest consumer market in the world is also a key (the northeastern U.S., via the East Coast and West Coast ports), to take advantage of economies of scale in shipping. This is one reason why the center of manufacturing in Asia has moved from Japan/Taiwan/Korea to Indonesia/Malaysia -- the latter region is almost exactly halfway around the world from the Mid-Atlantic states.

[dark_lord]

They have a very nice blue water port with access to the Pacific ocean. Its called Vladivostok. (They also have Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Magadan, and Sovetskaya Gavan, but those are subsidiary ports.) They have rail lines running to it, also. They need more, but the fact is they have the capability to ship manufactured items from the interior to a port that has sealane access to our West coast. Yes, they need to do infrastructure improvements for rail net, and yes, the port needs upgrading -- but those are easier than getting pipelines built.

[Alberta's Child]

When you look at the cost of upgrading all of the infrastructure not only at the port but on the rail lines themselves (to provide the adequate overhead bridge clearances, superelevated curved track, etc. to allow for intermodal trains), you might find that the pipeline isn't as expensive as you think. Especially since a pipeline would provide access not only to the U.S., but to Japan as well.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

My first impression about the contradiction of crippling America while increasing oil exports was the same as yours. However, the main point of the article was that Russia was up to its eyeballs in the plans of Sept. 10, 2000, to set the ME ablaze. That would have stopped all oil production in that part of the world, and they are the largest suppliers, which would have opened up Japan and Europe, two very large consumers, to Russia as the most viable source of supply. Then they could have charged more than the prevailing world market price of $30/bbl. At least that was my take.