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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (9040)	1/1/2002 4:57:05 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 93284

portage, can you imagine what it was like to try and negotiate a contract with the Taliban? Rashid reported that an Argentinean company, Bridas, "actually began to negotiate a contract with the Taliban. It took weeks of painstaking work through the summer for three Bridas executives to negotiate the 150-page document with 12 Taliban mullahs, who had no technical experts amongst them apart from an engineering graduate who had never practiced engineering. The Taliban had no oil and gas experts and few who spoke adequate English, so the contract was translated into Dari. 'We are going through it line by line so that nobody can accuse us of trying to dupe the Taliban. We will get the same contract approved by the opposition groups so it will be an all-Afghan agreement,' a senior Bridas agent told me. Unocal had declined to negotiate a contract until There was a recognized government in Kabul. P170-171 The story has many twists and turns. It took Rashid: "seven months of traveling, over 100 interviews and total Immersion in the literature of the oil business - of which I knew Nothing-to eventually write the cover story for The Far Eastern Economic Review in which appeared in April 1997." P164 Earlier in the book Rashid points out that: "The scramble for oil and influence by the big powers in the Caspian has been linked to the Middle East in the 1920s. But Central Asia today is an even larger complex quagmire of competing interests. Big powers such as Russia, China and the USA, the neighbors Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkey, the Central Asian states themselves and the most powerful players of all, the oil companies, compete in what I called in a 1997seminal magazine article, 'The New Company Great Game'. The name seemed to stick and was taken up by governments, experts and the oil companies." p. 145 The above are excerpts from the book, The above is an excerpt from the book: Taliban Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid, published in the United States by Yale University Press. Copyright 2000 by Ahmed Rashid.

To: Mephisto who wrote (9040)	1/1/2002 5:02:44 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 93284

portage, a second post 9040 was meant for you. Rashid keeps going back to the big oil companies who had the most power the most powerful players of all, the oil companies. These oil companies traveled to Texas. At one point Henry Kissinger served as an officer for Unocal. Rashid points out that lobbyists from the Carter and Bush administrations pressured congress over this pipeline deal. All this brings me to one point. Who nudged George W. Bush forward as a candidate for President? I bet it was the oil companies. They contributed a great deal of money to his campaign.