3d Chess or the NEW Great Game :o}
This series of news articles demonstrate the order of complexity that the Bush administration is dealing with. You game? You, me, and the BS thread. I love it. Deep Blue 'r us. Yowsuh!
New Russia-U.S. war ties revealed
Cooperation in Afghanistan extends deeper than thought
msnbc.com
MILITARY DOCUMENTS obtained by MSNBC.com indicate that for months now, huge shipments of American war materiel have been passing through Russian territory by rail, from northern European ports in Murmansk and Helsinki, and from the Russian Far Eastern port of Vladivostok. Not since World War II, when the United States and the Soviet Union allied to fight Hitler’s Germany, has the American military had such a presence on Russian soil.
The documents, including PowerPoint maps from the U.S. military’s Central Command that show main resupply routes for the Afghan campaign, indicate Russian railroads have been used extensively to keep troops supplied. The supplies appear to be destined for U.S. bases in former Soviet parts of Central Asia, particularly Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The documents indicate that the shipments include ammunition, and probably food, medical supplies and other equipment needed to sustain the 7,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan and several thousand more in neighboring Central Asian states.
Other main supply routes run through the Persian Gulf state of Oman, through Pakistan and the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.
The shipments, until now undisclosed by either government, also shed new light on the complex horse-trading under way over the Iraq resolution at the Security Council, where issues of international law and nuclear proliferation are mingling with oil interests, national pride and the desire of some Council members to exercise a check on unilateral American action.
Asked to comment on the shipments, Sgt. Charles Portman, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said, “We leave it up to coalition companies to discuss any participation” in the U.S.-led Afghan campaign. He referred calls to the Russian Embassy, where several calls for comment went unanswered.
‘ANOTHER LEVEL’
Dick Melanson, a professor of national security strategy at the National War College in Washington, D.C., said that if Russia has been helping ship American war supplies to the battle zone, “that takes the relationship to another level.
Ties between Russia and the United States, former Cold War enemies, warmed considerably in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Russian President Vladimir Putin helped clear the way for U.S. forces to use former Soviet bases in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and he used his influence after the war to persuade the Russian-backed factions within the Afghan Northern Alliance to support Hamid Karzai as their new president.
It was widely believed, however, that most of the Russian assistance took place behind the scenes.
“Apparently the Russian authorities don’t want to emphasize it,” said Moscow-based military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer, who noted that Russian nationalists would seize upon the shipments in political attacks on the Kremlin.
U.N. TALKS
Experts also suggested that this kind of cooperation would be considered an important Russian “chit” in the complex negotiations over a new U.N. resolution on Iraq.
“I think that probably makes the Bush administration’s efforts to get a new Iraq resolution with teeth that much more difficult,” said Melanson, who stressed that his was his own view and not that of the military. “In some ways, the administration is paying the price for not deciding whether the priority is defeating global terrorism, or unseating Saddam Hussein. I can see where the Russians could exploit that.”
An Arab diplomat attached to his nation’s U.N. delegation confirmed this: “There is more going on than meets the eye between them,” the diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Oil, geopolitical considerations, and especially their mutual interest in fighting what they call terrorism.”
Felgenhauer described the Afghan campaign as an area of particular agreement: “The Russians are apparently ready to help, because the al-Qaida and Taliban remnants in Afghanistan remain common enemy,” he said.
Russia, along with France, has been reluctant to allow approval of a new resolution on Iraq that would allow the United States to use military force against Baghdad without further consultation at the Security Council should Baghdad fail to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors. The United States accuses Iraq’s regime of secretly pursuing nuclear weapons and stockpiling chemical and biological weapons in defiance of pledges it made at the end of the Gulf War in 1991 and U.N. resolutions passed since then.
REMOTE REGION
Securing Russia’s cooperation ahead of last October’s conflict in landlocked Afghanistan was considered a major breakthrough by the Bush administration, which prior to Sept. 11, 2001, had been on shaky footing with Moscow.
Locating reliable supply lines for American troops operating in northern Afghanistan, in particular, had been a major concern of American military planners. Operations in the southern part of the country are supplied largely through Pakistan. But in the mountainous north, air supply would be prohibitively expensive.
“It’s cheaper to use rail than to take it all by air, so it makes sense,” said Felgenhauer, the Russian military analyst. “Russia can offer a united rail network, left over from the Soviet Union,” that still joins far-flung ports in Vladivostok and Murmansk to the now independent states of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, which have become important garrisons for American operations inside Afghanistan.
MSNBC.com’s Preston Mendenhall in London contributed to this report.
From Belgrade to Baghdad
Stephen Schwartz on how the Serbs have been providing Iraq with military aid Washington, DC
spectator.co.uk
There is a fog of maritime commerce much like the fog of war, and, as October came to an end, a vessel called the Boka Star briefly emerged from it into the bright light of the world media, following the murky wake of the Karine A. The latter ship, one will recall, either was or was not sent by Iran with a load of weapons and ammunition for Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. While the Tehran government came in for a great deal of abuse over the Karine A, the story had no legs, or, as it were, fins, for it quickly sank from global view. Maritime documentation on the Karine A’s real consigners was never established.
The Boka Star is a ship flying the convenience flag of the South Pacific monarchy of Tonga, but owned and manned by Montenegrins. It was seized in the Adriatic by Croatian authorities, who had been told it was transporting Yugoslav military aid to Iraq in violation of United Nations sanctions. The cargo turned out to be gunpowder, rather than aircraft parts, as some had speculated. Meanwhile, however, the Belgrade newspaper Blic published documents showing that Serbia has exported thousands of tons of explosives and munitions to Iraq and other questionable clients.
At the same time, the US government charged that Jugoimport, a state-owned conglomerate in Belgrade, has been working with Iraq to develop a cruise missile. The American embassy in Sarajevo has complained that Orao (Eagle), a military enterprise in the Bosnian Serb zone, also contracted by Jugoimport, has been repairing Iraqi aircraft.
Saddam Hussein and the Serbs? Is this the same Saddam described by the Saudi King Fahd as ‘the sword of Islam’ when he was fighting Iran? And are these the same Serbs who only yesterday spilled lakes of their neighbours’ blood while claiming to defend Europe from the Muslim hordes?
The most distasteful element of this picture, for Balkan hands, consists in the fact that the Serbia–Saddam alliance has been partly maintained by members of the Serbian Radical party (SRS), a fascist movement whose leaders frequently visit Iraq. The Serbian Radicals are the most extreme anti-Muslim element in Yugoslavia. Their founder, Vojislav Seselj, is a former dissident and one-time beneficiary of support from Western human-rights monitors. He and SRS are directly responsible for the martyrdom of thousands of Balkan Muslims.
Anti-Americanism has always made strange bedfellows, and there is no reason that should be any less the case today. The Orao case has led to dismissals from the Yugoslav and Bosnian Serb governments, the latter of which accepted responsibility for that part of the affair. The Yugoslav President, Vojislav Kostunica, yesterday’s star of Serbian democracy, tried ineptly to brush off the issue. ‘We were under sanctions for ten years ...the economy had to function somehow,’ he told the BBC. He said it would be ‘mean and hypocritical’ for anyone to act surprised that Yugoslavia ‘violated UN sanctions [against Iraq] by continuing old practices’. He also argued that the Orao contract involved no more than the servicing of old planes, rather than ‘selling state-of-the-art weapons’.
But the cruise-missile revelation has put paid to that excuse, and the scandal has even wider implications. Jugoimport was favoured by the deposed Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, and the post-Slobo interior minister serves as head of its board. In the past, Jugoimport also sold multiple rocket-launchers and other high-value military technology to the Baghdad regime. Kostunica is at least formally correct in saying that nobody should be surprised to learn that such transactions continue.
Indeed, the Serbian connection with Arab rogue states is old news. In his controversial 6 May speech identifying Cuba as a producer of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the US under-secretary of state for arms control and international security, John R. Bolton, included a comment that was overlooked by the media: he pointed out that Serbia, as well as other countries, has provided assistance critical to Libya’s ballistic-missile development programme. A Yugoslav firm called Brunner built a rocket-propellent factory in Libya and helped the Libyans gain access to American military software for upgrading missile guidance control. Brunner is contracted by Jugoimport to develop an engine for the Iraqi cruise missile.
Serbia has also maintained its homegrown WMD programme. In the least-known of such developments, during the 1999 Nato intervention in Kosovo, Serbian scientists were said to be working day and night on experimental technology for new and more destructive military devices. They were supported in this effort by a prominent Western quantum physicist of an ultra-leftist bent, J.P. Vigier, who has been called France’s Noam Chomsky. Vigier circulated among Western scientists, claiming that Serbian researchers were on the edge of a breakthrough in fusion energy research; the implication was that Serbia could soon defeat Nato with superweapons. Serbian media had always aired such rumours, often based on fantastic tales about the work of the engineering pioneer Nikola Tesla, a Croatian Serb.
But there can be no doubt that Milosevic has long had good friends among radical Arab states and movements, which rallied to his defence during the Nato operations against him. Iraq and Libya both described the Nato action in Kosovo as an anti-Yugoslav aggression. Earlier, the Libyan foreign minister Umar al-Muntasir had announced, after a meeting with the Yugoslav ambassador to Libya, that Muammar Gaddafi supported ‘dialogue’ between Belgrade and the Kosovar Albanians, the majority of them Muslim and then living in gullies and on mountainsides after their houses had been burnt by Serb irregulars and police.
Throughout the Nato bombing, Libya maintained firm trade and economic relations with Serbia. Serbian management cadres have also helped run Libyan industry, and Serb officers have assisted in training Gaddafi’s personal guards. Leading Palestinians, incredibly enough, nurtured a similar sympathy for Milosevic. What may be considered the most surrealistic gesture during the entire decade of recent Balkan wars occurred eight months after Nato’s Kosovo campaign began. On 1 December 1999, the Palestinian Authority invited Milosevic to Bethlehem to celebrate the Orthodox Christmas.
News of this invitation, though more or less ignored in the West, was reported under banner headlines in the Balkans. An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman said that if Milosevic accepted the invitation he would be arrested on arrival, since Israel, as a UN member, was obliged to carry out arrest orders issued by The Hague Tribunal, which had indicted him. The PA, not being a UN member, was under no such obligation. Nor was the PA the only Palestinian element to vacillate over Kosovo. Earlier in 1999 the Palestinian Hamas movement denounced the US intervention to settle the Kosovo crisis as ‘hiding under the slogans of human rights to impose its power in the Balkans’. Hamas thus echoed the allegations of Milosevic’s own media, as well as the Russians and various leftists worldwide.
The Serbian media and politicians were noticeably less than enthusiastic in the wake of 11 September about supporting the US-led coalition against terror. Indeed, prominent Belgrade newspapers gleefully crowed that 9/11 was payback for US world hegemony.
Truth to tell, there’s plenty of hypocrisy to go around in this scene. Apart from the cosiness between Saddam’s regime and the Serbian followers of Seselj, there’s the seldom mentioned fact, recently revealed in the Dutch investigation of the Srebrenica massacre, that Israel secretly supplied weapons to the Bosnian Serbs. Sarajevo Jews are said to have been shocked to discover that the casings of shells that killed their neighbours and wrecked their houses had Hebrew markings. It will be interesting to see how news of Serbian assistance to Iraq’s cruise-missile programme, and the possible arrival of these missiles on Israeli territory, may be greeted in the Jewish state.
Stephen Schwartz is the author of The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa’ud from Tradition to Terror (Doubleday
U.S. to beef up Horn of Africa force
msnbc.com
Tactical military headquarters
to be set up for hunt for al-Qaida
An American soldier tries to hide his face from the media last September in Djibouti, where hundreds of U.S. troops are based
By Tammy Kupperman
NBC NEWS
WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 — The United States plans to set up a tactical military headquarters in the Horn of Africa focused on hunting al-Qaida groups in the region, defense officials told NBC News on Thursday.
THE FINAL DETAILS are still being worked out, so officials don’t expect orders for the deployment right away. But troops could be on the move in three to four weeks. There is “no real urgency here,” one official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We are moving at deliberate speed.”
Officials said the move was mainly to assign a military commander to focus on the Horn of Africa, because Central Command chief Gen. Tommy Franks is focused on Iraq and the ongoing military operations in Afghanistan.
Sources said that while al-Qaida members are suspected of being in the general area, the plan is not a response to additional intelligence suggesting a major influx of al-Qaida into the area.
In the past, U.S. officials have suspected that al-Qaida figures were in Yemen and Somalia, where they were allegedly able to operate with immunity because of the lawlessness in that country.
SECURITY ARRANGEMENTS
Franks, in a briefing Tuesday, offered some details of the Horn of Africa operation, noting that the U.S. military has “security arrangements or engagement opportunities” with many countries in the region, including Kenya, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Yemen.
The commander characterized the plan as part of America’s campaign to root out terrorism throughout the world.
“We said a long time ago (that) first of all, we’re going to rout the terrorists out of Afghanistan, get rid of the Taliban,” Franks said.
“We also said that there are going to be some friendly nations, and we’re going to want to work with them in order to help them help themselves get over the terrorist problem. And we also said it may be necessary from time to time to coerce others to get rid of their terrorist problem.”
CAMP LEJEUNE
The so-called Combined Joint Task Force is to be led by Maj. Gen. John F. Sattler, the commanding general of the 2nd Marine Division, based at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
In addition to the more than 700 U.S. troops — including some special operations forces — already based in Djibouti, the task force would include about 400 Marines from the 2nd Marine Division that would mainly form the headquarters for the task force.
Sattler is expected to command the force from aboard the USS Mount Whitney command ship, which would deploy from Norfolk, Va.
The troops now in Djibouti have been standing by in case they were needed to go after al-Qaida fighters in the region.
In addition to the troops, a large-deck U.S. Navy amphibious ship has been in the Gulf of Aden available for use as a lily pad for forces launching a mission in Yemen.
At the moment, the USS Nassau is assuming this role from the USS Belleau Wood.
A former French territory, Djibouti borders the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, between Eritrea and Somalia. With a population of 472,000, it’s slightly smaller than Massachusetts.
The country is most important because of its strategic location near world’s busiest shipping lanes and Arabian oilfields. |
