Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism

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Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Guest - 07-14-2004

Pioneer 13thJuly2004
Jihad vs. the politically correct:Sandhya Jain
Even as political correctness makes candid discussion about Islamic fundamentalism virtually impossible, concerned intellectuals the world over are cautiously determined to analyze the concept of jihad and its implications for non-Islamic societies. Ever alert to such dangers, Muslim organizations and their fellow travellers are trying to whitewash the term that noted journalist M.J. Akbar bluntly designated the âsignature tuneâ of Islam.

Shrugging aside such candour, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) lamented the misuse (sic) of the holy word, claiming jihad has nothing to do with terror (Daily Excelsior, 27 June 2004). A recent television programme on history textbooks saw a student activist quibbling over the definition of jihad as declaration of war against non-Muslims, which indicates the extent to which evasion and negation have permeated the debate.

This is surprising as the Koran is fairly explicit and leaves little doubt about the meaning of its major tenets. Moreover, the ulema have always interpreted it literally, rather than mystically. The strain felt by the AIMPLB in reforming the communityâs divorce law is evidence of this penchant for literalism.

Hence, it is unfair for Muslims to seek refuge in obfuscation while the world struggles to cope with terrorist attacks, from which even Saudi Arabia is not exempt. Investigating why American Muslim converts readily embrace terrorism, Mr. Robert Spencer, director, Jihad Watch, points out that Koranic passages such as the âVerse of the Swordâ (Sura 9:5) are perceived by Muslims themselves as sanctifying violent jihad (3 June 2004). In 1991, Cairoâs prestigious Al-Azhar University ruled that a manual on Islamic law, which called jihad âwar against non-Muslims,â conformed âto the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community.â

This explains why radical Muslims all over the world insist they are not terrorists, but mujahideen (holy warriors engaged in jihad). Violent jihad, says Spencer, has been a constant theme of Islamic history, and though dormant in Europe for over three centuries, has never been rejected or discarded by Islamic theology. Buttressing this argument, former Director-General of Police R.K. Ohri, points to a saying attributed to the Prophet: âParadise comes under the shade of swords.â In a meticulously researched work, Long March of Islam, Mr. Ohri emphasizes that the tradition of jihad began with the Prophet, who approved more than eighty jihads in his lifetime and personally led more than twenty, known as âGhazwahsâ. The term âghazi,â warrior who has killed in the service of the faith, is etymologically related to Ghazwah.

Jihad, Ohri contends, has a long history in India, and continues to be a contemporary reality. Apart from the innumerable jihads waged by successive invading armies, there have been at least three prominent jihads in the modern era. The first was in 1824, when Sayyid Ahmed incited the Yusufzai tribes for Targhib-ul-Jihad against the Sikh kingdom, where the azaan (summons to prayer) and cow slaughter were banned. Though many Muslims from present-day Uttar Pradesh heeded his call, Ahmed and his mujahideen were routed by the Sikh army.

A few years later, Sayyid Ahmed managed to seize the Peshawar valley. But his strict enforcement of Islamic law as interpreted by the puritanical Wahabi school, rapidly disillusioned the Pathan tribes. One night, while he was away with some devoted soldiers, they murdered all his followers. Sayyid Ahmed suffered another reverse while confronting the Sikh general, Hari Singh Nalwa. In 1830, he again faced the Sikhs in Hazara district, where he lost his life in the battle of Balakot.

After a quiescent phase, the Wahabis turned their ire against Britain for declaring war on Turkey in 1914, but all jihad-related activity between 1915 and 1919 failed to yield success. The second major jihad was called by the Khilafat Committee and other Muslim groups after the First World War, when the British and French armies captured Constantinople and abolished the Ottoman Caliphate. This jihad was also a flop. Called by Mohammad Ali, Shaukat Ali, Hasrat Mohani and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, it witnessed the ridiculous migration and ruin of around eighteen thousand Muslim families who sold their belongings for hijrat to Afghanistan, which was declared Dar ul Islam (land of the pure). But this jihad showed its nasty face in the Malabar, where thousands of Hindus were massacred, women outraged, temples desecrated and forced conversions made to Islam; the violence stopped only when British troops reached the area and restored order.

It is the third jihad that is the most evocative, and continues to cast a heavy shadow on our age. Declared by the All India Muslim League in 1946, it called for the creation of Pakistan. Calcutta (Kolkata) Mayor, Mohammed Usman, issued the âMunajat for Jihad,â which, inter alia, stated: âWe are starting a Jehad in Your Name in this very Month of Ramzanâ¦ enable us to establish the Kingdom of Islam in Indiaâ¦. The Muslims in China, Manchuria, Mongolia, Malaya, Java and Sumatra are all fighting for their freedomâ¦.â

This jihad was a resounding success, thanks in no small measure to H. S. Suhrawardy, Muslim League Minister in charge of Law and Order. Though Calcutta had a Hindu majority, the strategic transfer of Hindu police officers from key posts saw a veritable massacre of the population on 16 August 1946, which the League designated as âDirect Action Day.â With Muslim police officers in charge of twenty-two police stations, and Anglo-Indians controlling the remaining two, the mob had a field day, with a complicit British bureaucracy failing to call the army till Hindus and Sikhs began to organize and fight back.

The most revelatory statement in the Direct Action Day jihad proclamation was the reference to the plight of Muslims in China, Mongolia, Malaya, Java, Sumatra as well as several Arab and African countries, which were fighting for freedom and the establishment of a âvery strong Islamic kingdom in this worldâ. The creation of Pakistan, Ohri asserts, was the first step in that direction, and the action is now visible in all countries mentioned in the âMunajat for Jihadâ proclamation.

Unlike Indiaâs ostrich-like media, leading newspapers abroad are beginning to look sharply at Islamâs close affinity with the culture of bombs and explosives. The New York Times is following the Manhattan trial of one Mohammed Junaid Babar, 29-year-old grandson of Pakistani immigrants, accused of aiding a plot to blow up British pubs, railway stations and restaurants. Pleading guilty in a sealed court, Babar said his grandfather imbued him with a strong sense of Muslim loyalty. In an interview broadcast by ITN Five News, Canada, some months after 9/11, he said: âI did grow up there, but that doesn't mean that my loyalty is with the Americans. My loyalty has always been, is and forever will be, with the Muslimsâ (New York Times, 17 June 2004). At the time of the interview, Babar had given up a lucrative $70,000-a-year job to go to Pakistan, where he was waiting to be smuggled into Afghanistan to fight American troops.

To conclude, jihad is an integral component of Islamic theology, the call for which can be given as and when expedient. Disregarding this reality under the pretext of political correctness not only facilitates Islamic radicals in accomplishing their goals, but also liberates the so-called moderates (read apologists) from the moral obligation to reject and oppose this violent doctrine.

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Guest - 09-07-2004

Putin blasts U.S. on terror stance
QUOTEBut Putin said each time Russia complained to the Bush administration about meetings held between U.S. officials and Chechen separatist representatives, the U.S. response has been "we'll get back to you" or "we reserve the right to talk with anyone we want."

Putin blamed what he called a "Cold War mentality" on the part of some U.S. officials, but likened their demands that Russia negotiate with the Chechen separatists to the U.S. talking to al Qaeda.

These are not "freedom fighters," Putin said. "Would you talk with Osama Bin Laden?" he asked
...
"Osama Bin Laden attacked the United States saying he was doing it because of policies in the Middle East," Putin said. "Do you call him a freedom fighter?"

Putin's comments came a few weeks after the U.S. granted asylum to Ilias Akhmadov, the "foreign minister" of the Chechen separatist movement.
What if Russia decides to do same with al-queda and give political astlum to all most wanted?

QUOTE"In Russia, democracy is who shouts the loudest," he said. "In the U.S., it's who has the most money."
For India one who have more criminals and rapist in their party.

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Guest - 09-07-2004

QUOTE(Mudy @ Sep 7 2004, 12:42 PM) What if Russia decides to do same with al-queda and give political astlum to all most wanted?

Mudy, About a decade ago I remember watching CNN's Larry King live on the night the OKC's Federal building was blown up by the home grown terrorist. I was a bit surprised that the caller to the show was Brit from UK and he seemed pretty irate asking questions like 'how about we start talking to your anarchists/militants since you guys don't have any problem talking to those who are blowing up our homes' (was in reference to some IRA guy who was a getting a sponsored tour in DC at the time).

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Guest - 09-07-2004

In reality, people who hate US is growing exponentially and now Russia as a state came out openly. If Russia openly start following US and UK method of supporting terrorist of other nations for muscle flexing, it will be dangerous for rest of world.
US and UK will never change its method and Russia will be tempted to do other things.

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Bhootnath - 09-08-2004

Russia, is very very fortunate to have a person like Putin as president.

I am sure Russians realise that. And look at India .. sad ..sad!

> In reality, people who hate US is growing exponentially and now Russia as a state came out openly.

That is why its important to Bring in Duffer Bush back as president, earler the better, only than the average American will realise what is US upto! when they "ppl" will get banged when they venture outside.

Bush reminds me of Laloo Yadav , excpet the former is backed by big orgs , while Laoo is not.

Kerry will slow down the tempo

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Guest - 09-08-2004

Bhootnath,

Actually from the little I understand about things Kerry is equally clueless. He supported war in eyerack. But now says this not the way - get some UN involvement or some such cr@p - basically trying his best to be different then Bush without looking anti-national and given the environment after 9-11 thats a tall order.

To be honest in the US there is so much centrism its very hard to understand and distinguish who is saying what .. <!--emo& Sad

--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='sad.gif' /> ..

I know one thing - Kerry is isolationist. He might have some effect on outsourcing. How much, I dont know. And rest assured with Kerry in the state dept non-prolif jehadis will be out in full force..

Re Putin..

I will wait till he actually does something. He is in a fix right now - he doesnt have money to fight expensive wars and Russia cannot meddle with Pakis while US is saying pakis-are-our-bitches so besides some flowery statements lets wait for some concrete action from Putin.

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Guest - 09-08-2004

Rajesh, Re: Putin:

We should not expect an American style invasion of Afghanistan but if you have noticed his speech was very silent, quite without any promise for revenge.........and that to me is the calm before the storm. The rage is there, it's just who the Bear gonna go after??

Would it be a small-scale-LOC-sort-of-fire-exchanges with the Georgina, Uzbeks orf full-scale rampage in Chechnya.........or the KGB hit squad goes after a selected few.........

let's just wait n' see.

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Hauma Hamiddha - 09-08-2004

1) TSP and Saudi are assets for the US and the US is willing to pay some price to keep these assets.
2) Why are these costly assets maintained- obviously they help in curbing India, Russia, and Iran and establishing secret liasons with China. People may protest that the cold war is over. It may be, but the US realizes that these countries are serious competitors for the Anglospheric dominance and India defeating Britain ultimately is not forgotten. So down-sizing the real rivals with real armies and institutions is definitely a high priority. Terrorists are not a real threat for the US. They continue to use Russia as a safety valve to redirect the steam of Islamic violence.
3) Why does the US go after irrelevant targets in the guise of fighting terrorism? The answer to this lies in where the loyalties of the arch neo-conservatives are.
4)Majority of Americans wanted a war in Iraq, so it was their democratic bipartisan opinion and now they have to shoulder the responsibilities arising from it. Though most likely they are going to work on making the masses forget the whole thing and declare victory (they may remove the bulk of the forces and leave a smaller garrison to keep the puppet govts in place).
5) It is clear, as Putin admitted, that Russia is weak now. They are unlikely to be able to do anything spectacular. It is likely that Russia continues to decline for sometime in the near future.

Everyone will need to fight their own battles against Islam. Even at the peak of the war between the Osman Turks and the Christians of Europe, England and France covertly aided the Turks against fellow Christians of central Europe during the reign of Suleiman-i-kanooni. They saw a benefit in keeping their fellow European competitors tied down. Sweden, Russia and the Osman turks- same kind game.

The way I see it the European and Hindu response against Islam was sort of similar. Some strong bulwarks but a lot of uncoordinated and even traitorous responses. The most crucial point was that the tide in Europe started turning against the Moslem before the same thing started happening in India. So they go a head-start while we were still to regroup.

Russia had also demolished Islam entirely on it own, but the Western Europeans, who were traditional rivals of the Russians, reconstructed Islamism to claw into the soft under-belly of the Russian empire. The communism interesting damaged Russian nationalism (through allegience to Marx and unbelievable State lies, like who invented the aeroplane) rather than furthering it.

Let us not forget that the same Osama was a creation of the CIA meant for use against Russia.

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Guest - 09-08-2004

rajesh
QUOTEI know one thing - Kerry is isolationist. He might have some effect on outsourcing. How much, I dont know. And rest assured with Kerry in the state dept non-prolif jehadis will be out in full force..


I highly doubt anything will change wrt to foreign policy - no matter who resides in White House. The rest is all election year FUD (fear/uncertainity/distrust) being spread around to garner votes. In words on Bill Maher (the comedian who got canned after 911 for PC-incorrect statements) - "is Bush the only person capable of pointing to the map on 9/12 and 'bomb this'"?

Meanwhile,
Russia set to hit terror centres worldwide

QUOTE
A prominent banner at the main Moscow rally was adorned with British flags and read: "Want to help? Then extradite Zakayev!", a reference to Maskhadov's London-based spokesman who has political asylum in Britain.


Does anyone know if Britain has ever arrested/extradited those JKLF thugs who in mid 80s kidnapped and killed our diplomat Ravindra Mahtre?

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Guest - 09-08-2004

QUOTEDoes anyone know if Britain has ever arrested/extradited those JKLF thugs who in mid 80s kidnapped and killed our diplomat Ravindra Mahtre
Yes, they have arrested Riaz Malik and Qayyum Raja
Pleas of Mahtreâs killers rejected

British support to terrorism
Killer freed after sentence 'cut'
QUOTEA man sentenced to life for the political murder of an Indian diplomat is due to be released on Wednesday after a High Court judge reconsidered the minimum period he must spend in prison.
Solicitors for Mohamed Riaz said he was "delighted" by the judge's decision to adopt a 16-year tariff - even though the prisoner has served almost all of the 20-year minimum sentence originally imposed.

The case is believed to be the first re-setting of a lifer's tariff under Government legislation introduced last year.

Riaz, then aged 22, was convicted of the murder of Ravindra Mahtre, Deputy High Commissioner for the Indian High Commission in Birmingham, in 1984

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Guest - 09-09-2004

Beslan, lessons for Bharat: GP

This is an important article from G. Parthasarathy which should be deliberated upon by all bharatiya, irrespective of the parties they belong to or ideologies they profess. Given the track record of Bharat's governments succumbing to terror threats, given the track record of impotence displayed by keeping bharatiya troops on the frontline for over year without retaliating effectively against the attack on Parliament, wrong signals have been sent to the islamist terrorists. Given the links that ISI has built up within Bharat and in Bangladesh and given the nature of the violence taking place in Nepal, there should be a concerted and determined against eliminating all terrorist threats in the country.

The recent pay-off to gain release of truck-drivers n Iraq and proposed ordinance to repeal POTA will certainly send the wrong signal to the prospective terror groups and sleeper cells.

Hopefully, there are people in Bharat who care for the country's sovereignty and territorial integrity, despite the ongoing sycophancy in collusion with the red star ideologues being the governing order. This temporary governing order cannot be allowed to dent the strategic security of the nation.

Islamist terror understands only one language of the victim: determination.

Kalyanaraman

Beslan: Lessons for India

G Parthasarathy

No terrorist attack in recent times has evoked greater horror, condemnation and revulsion than the attack in the small town of Beslan located in Russia's Caucasian Region, bordering Georgia. Over one thousand school children and their parents were held as hostages there and hundreds perished in the ensuing carnage.

Few of us in India understand what is happening along Russia's Caucasian borders. What we are witnessing there is a vicious conflict being waged against a democratic, pluralistic Russia, by separatists, committed to Wahhabi extremism and medieval barbarism. The separatist aim is to create an Islamic Emirate in Chechnya and its surrounding areas.

The Chechens have historically challenged Moscow's rule ever since the Caucasian Region was incorporated into Czarist Russia in 1859. Chechnya, like many other parts of the Soviet Union, proclaimed its independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. But no Russian ruler can ever accept total Chechen independence, because of the region's crucial strategic importance. Russian access to the Black Sea and the Caspian is through Chechnya.

Russian oil and gas pipelines to Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan go through Chechnya. Moscow, therefore, had no option but to use military force to deal with a separatist rebellion led by Chechen military commander Dzokhar Dudaev, who gave a call for jihad and brought in Arab, Afghan and Pakistan Jihadis to fight Russian forces in 1993.

Despite initial setbacks, the Russians reasserted their authority after Chechen President Aslan Mashkadov who was elected in 1997 defeating the Wahhabi oriented Shamil Basaev, proved incapable of preventing Basaev and his followers from seizing control of large parts of the Republic. Things came to a head when Basaev and his Arab supporters led by a fanatic Wahhabi, Ibn-ul Khattab mounted a military operation in 1999 to seize control of the neighboring Republic of Dagestan. Khattab was killed in 2002 by Russian forces. He was succeeded by a 35 year old Saudi jihadi Abu al Walid who has earlier military experience in Afghanistan and Bosnia.

The conflict in Chechnya ceased to be just another civil war and assumed international dimensions primarily because of the support that the Chechens received from Saudi Arabia, the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and from Pakistan. Saudi Arabia financed the jihad in Chechnya with hundreds of millions of dollars routed through its so called "charities" that had close links with the Saudi Royal family. The Governor of Riyadh Prince Salman who is King Fahd's brother and King Fahd's "favorite son" Prince Azouzi are known to have been involved in training and financing Chechen terrorists.

Ever since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan in 1994, Afghanistan became a major base for supporting, training and arming fundamentalist Wahhabi oriented groups, like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in Central Asia and supporters of Chechen terrorists, like former "President" Zelmikhan Andarbaev and Shamil Basaev in Chechnya. Taliban support for terrorism in Chechnya was voiced by its Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil who accorded diplomatic recognition to Chechnya as an independent country and proclaimed: "It is the Muslim World's shame that it does not support the Chechens. They are my brothers. They are Muslim."

Given the links between the ISI and the Taliban, Pakistan also provided support to Chechen terrorists. Andarbaev visited Pakistan in 1999-2000 and collected funds for the Chechen jihad. The Naib Amir of the Jamat Islami (JI) Professor Ghafoor Ahmed welcomed Andarbaev and gave a call for jihad in Chechnya. He also set up a fund for this jihad . In January 2000 the Amir of the JI Qazi Hussein Ahmed appealed to Pakistanis to support Chechens in Grozny with weapons.

There have been a number of reports even in the Pakistan press about Chechen terrorists being ideologically indoctrinated and trained in a madarsa linked to the Haqqania Mosque in Pakistan's NWFP. After the American attack and the subsequent overthrow of the Taliban regime, the Chechen terrorists in Afghanistan were scattered, with large numbers now operating from strongholds along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, in North and South Waziristan. Support for the Chechens has been voiced and extended by groups operating in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere in India, like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammed.

Over the past five years, the Russians have faced a terrorist challenge that dwarfs the challenges we face in India. Schools have been attacked, political leaders assassinated, innocent persons held hostage like in the attack on a theatre in Moscow, aircraft have been hijacked or blown up, and the capital rocked by periodic bomb blasts in crowded locations like Moscow's underground Metro. But, under President Putin's leadership, the Russians have not wavered in their determination never to yield to terrorist demands that compromise national unity, sovereignty and dignity.

They have also not hesitated to use covert means to eliminate terrorist leaders seeking refuge abroad like Andarbaev, who was killed in Qatar on February 13, 2004. While Russia denied any involvement in Andarbaev's killing, three Russian citizens charged with involvement in the killing were set free by the Qatar authorities, after what was evidently some hard Russian pressure.

Diplomatically, Russia has sought to mend fences with Saudi Arabia following a visit to Moscow by Crown Prince Abdullah in September 2003. But suspicions of continuing Saudi involvement with Chechen terrorists remain. The Russians are also obviously concerned at what are perceived as attempts by the United States and its NATO allies not only to erode Russian influence in Central Asia and the Caucasus, but to also loosen Moscow's hold in outlying and strategically located Republics like Chechnya and Dagestan.

The Americans and their allies appear to have adopted policy of deliberate ambiguity on the entire question of Russia's unity and territorial integrity. This makes it difficult for the Russians to deal with more secular minded Chechens like supporters of former President Aslan Mashkadov, who appear to enjoy understanding and support from western powers. Denying Russia influence in its former Republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus seems to have become an integral part of the new "Great game" now being played out in these oil and energy rich parts of the world.

India has a track record of surrendering to terrorist demands. The disgraceful surrender by the VP Singh Government during the kidnapping of Rubaiyya Syed led to the insurgency in Kashmir getting a boost. Our anti-terrorist efforts received a further setback when terrorists who took over the Hazratbal shrine were allowed to get away. The terrorists were even served biryani by the security forces that surrounded them! The release of three hard core terrorists during the hijacking of IC 814 led to Maulana Masood Azhar masterminding the December 13, 2001 attack on Parliament and Omar Syed Sheikh brutally killing American journalist Daniel Pearl and establishing links with the hijackers of 9/11.

The third terrorist then released, Mushtaq Zargar, now operates from Muzaffarabad in POK, directing terrorist operations in J&K. Following these examples, State Governments in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu cravenly surrendered to extortionist demands by a brigand like Veerapan. We are now told that the Congress led-UPA Government acquiesced in a payment of $1 million for the release of three truck drivers kidnapped in Iraq. Is it not time that we should at least get a unanimous resolution adopted by our Parliament affirming that we will never change our national policies, pay ransom, or release detained terrorists in response to terrorist threats? And should we sit quietly with folded hands as we now do, when terrorists operate against us with impunity from safe havens in Pakistan and Bangladesh?

http://203.200.89.17/indexn12.asp?main_var...t&counter_img=3

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Guest - 09-09-2004

Terror at the doorstep of Bharat

The Venom Of Terror

Islamic fundamentalism is fast spreading its tentacles across the subcontinent

http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=2...m+%28F%29&sid=1

When 13 grenades were thrown at an Awami League rally in Dhaka on August 21, killing 20 persons, injuring up to 300 and coming within a whisker of wiping out the entire top leadership of the Awami League, our first reaction was to breathe a sigh of relief that it happened somewhere else. Eight months earlier, when Gen Musharraf escaped two successive attempts on his life within a week, we experienced the same secret relief. Such things didn't happen in India, we said to ourselves. They were fruits of the ambivalence the two governments had displayed towards terrorism in the past. Some even went so far as to say that having made their bed, it would serve Pakistan and Bangladesh right if they had to sleep in it.

Such complacency is utterly unwarranted. What nearly happened in Bangladesh and Pakistan has already happened here: thirteen years ago we lost a much loved former prime minister to a suicide bomber. And lest public memory be short, only last year a terrorist cell in Maharashtra committed no fewer than five major acts of terror that took more than a hundred lives before it was finally broken. The truth is that South Asia is not immune from the special brand of terrorism spreading across a large part of the globe.

A new breed of intolerance feeds it. And it is thriving on the abundant supply of the most lethal small arms that the world has ever known. Its epicentreâan austere religious establishment in Saudi Arabia which feeds large sums of money into madrassas that propagate its form of Islam. A handful of these have become breeding grounds for terrorism.

But in the final analysis, this new brand of terrorism has been able to make inroads into all three countries mainly because of indecision among political leaders over whether to ride the tiger of religious intolerance or confront it. Pakistan is the most obvious example. During the Afghan war it played host to the Arab mujahideen who later became the backbone of Al Qaeda. After the war, it inducted some of them into terrorist operations in Kashmir. This served as a green signal to other Islamic fundamentalist organisations, notably the LeT, to recruit and collect funds at will so long as they send some cadres to do the government's bidding in Kashmir.

The Faustian pact turned Pakistan into an epicentre of global terrorism in the '90s. Worse still, by serving a national purpose in Kashmir and Afghanistan, the Afghan mujahideen built solid bases within Pakistan's security establishment. It is this connection that enabled LeT, Jaish and other terrorist groups belonging to the notorious Brigade 313 to make a bid on Musharraf's life.

The attack on the Awami League shows that a combination of political expediency and religious ambivalence may be taking Bangladesh down the same road. The ruling Bangladesh National Party (BNP) made what would otherwise have been a sagacious political move when it decided to fight the 2001 elections in tandem with the Jamaat-e-Islami. This was because the Jamaat was stronger in the western fringes of the country where the BNP was the weakest. But the Jamaat is no ordinary party. It had for years been trying to propagate an intolerant arabicised brand of Islam that was alien to Bangladesh's secular culture. This alliance therefore forced the BNP to give ground on crucial issues like banning Ahmadiya texts and introducing a law against blasphemyâPakistan style.

These compromises made by its leaders (a large number of whom fought against precisely the kind of cultural colonialism that the Jamaat espouses, 33 years ago) have inflamed a violent fringe both outside and at the edges of the Jamaat itself. The BNP too is learning, thereforeâas the Pakistani establishment has doneâthat there is no half-way house in accommodating fanaticism.Its leaders may well be right when they claim that by bringing the Jamaat into the government they have brought it into civil society.But the compromise has empowered a violent intolerant fringe that now threatens the very existence of democracy and civil society in Bangladesh. What is worse, it has given this fringe just enough legitimacy in the eyes of the security forces to paralyse them and abort the rule of law. That may be one reason why although twelve days have passed since the bombing, the police and intelligence agencies have not arrested a single person in connection with it.

India has no record of ambivalence towards Islamicâor to be precise self-proclaimed Islamicâterrorism. But over the past six years, the bjp too established a not-too-creditable record of running with the hares and hunting with the hounds. Throughout that period, A.B. Vajpayee left no one in doubt that he sternly disapproved of any manifestation of Hindu exclusivism and prejudice. Advani frequently gave him valuable supportâso much so that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad labelled both of them as pseudo-secular. But when the party had to choose between defending the secularism of the Constitution by cracking down on the lunatic fringe of the Sangh parivar and looking the other way, it chose the latter. Gujarat was of course the most blatant example and fittingly cost the NDA its hold on power.

The near-catastrophe in Bangladesh should serve as a salutary warning to all three countries. There can be no compromise with absolutism in any form. We therefore need to work together to prevent it from taking root in the South Asian soil. This requires profound changes in all countries both on domestic issues and towards each other.

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Guest - 09-10-2004

Governing with the wiggle of a Mustache

Lectures prepared for the

CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY,

Budapest, July 2004

In the scheduled Course entitled

"Rewriting History: Emerging Identities and Nationalism in Central Asia"

H.B. Paksoy, D. Phil.

I. Mustache

Truth is like the universe. Most individuals only know parts.

An ancestor is said to have ruled his royal domain with his eyebrows. If he
raised one, he was displeased. The movement of the other indicated annoyance.
Both, horror.

Not too long ago, the USSR was ruled by a mustache. However hefty or stylish,
it still was a mustache. Those in his retinue learned, or thought they did, how
to read that piece of facial hair. As a result, the members of this âinner
circleâ carried out despicable acts and atrocities in the name of the face
holding the mustache. And the mustache, in full knowledge of the misdeeds, did
nothing to discourage the retinue.

The whisker mobility style of governance is always open to interpretation. That
is, to the interpretation of the immediate inner circle of the mover of the
whiskers; provided, of course, there is benefit to glean for the interpreters of
the facial hair. That leads to excesses and communally undesirable
consequences. For example, when the mustache asked for a simple and solitary
doppi[1], the interpreters did not hesitate to deliver one sitting atop a
freshly decapitated head. Some of the immediate circle members will benefit
from such a system; only for a spell, before, they, too, fall. After all, the
single mustache is the combined prosecutor, judge and jury. Often, he is also
the executioner.

When there is no recourse to an independent judiciary, whose interests are also
shared by the population, then no one personâs life is safe. By way of
demonstration, one may point to various prominent individuals, including that of
Beria, the Secret Police chief of the era.

Under the rule of âwhisker governanceâ many organizations are fostered by
sycophants. All will be devoted to pleasing the mustache. In the process, they
will hog all the resources of the polity. This will leave less, a lot less for
the general populace, and, by necessity, create a bifurcation among the
citizenry. This societal chasm will be amplified by the competing secret
organizations established by different organizations fighting for the attention
of the Whiskers. Indeed, these factions are competing for greater resources for
themselves and using the Whiskers for the purpose. This increases the distance
between the population and the tools of the Governance Strata. In fact, this
development creates the ânewâ Governance Strata.

The all out efforts by the control tools will leave no part of the societal
fabric untouched. The primary objective will be to foster a pliant mindset.
This can be accomplished with least cost only through the construction of a new
Identity for the polity and individual members.

The purpose of the Identity is to hold a polity together; indeed to form a
polity in the first place. Since Identity itself is a composite with many
parts, the new one under construction will have to encompass all aspects of the
societal life. Along the way, new symbols and rituals will have to be created
in order to reinforce the new Identity---much like the Christian church grafted
itself onto the pre-Christian ceremonies, special days, doctrines and beliefs,
for the purpose of supplanting all. However, during this process, Christianity
also soaked its ecumene and theology with what came before itself. The new
Identity formation efforts will not be immune to this process. The Designer
Community working on the project will be subject to the influences of what they
encounter. This is inescapable. The Designer Communityâs research into the
past Identity will also renew a broader interest in the past Identity. The
contest of wills thus gain another front, since the past owners
of the extant Identity had already left their testament in what they enjoyed.
Thus, the Governance Strata will now have to contend with a renewal of the past
Identity and related actions, their consequences. Another front in the struggle
for the hearts and minds of the population is opened.

II. Leavening

Leavening of Identity is a natural process, akin to fermentation. Nature
utilizes fermentation to refine and transform substances, mostly for
preservation purposes. Yeast is the best known fermentation agent. It is used
by bakers, beverage makers, geneticists, dairy operators. The basic yeast
occurs freely in nature. It is the humans that isolate specific yeasts, nurture
it to perform targeted tasks, after refining them. It must not be forgotten
that, while a strain of yeast might affect almost all living organisms and
beings, it is the refined and targeted varieties that will yield the desired
best results. Consequently, winemaking yeast added to milk is unlikely to
produce a tasty yoghurt or pleasant wine. It must not be forgotten that not all
cultures are naturally compatible when refined. However, all cultures need
their basic elements to remain alive. Once a culture is dead, it may not be
possible to revive it. At least, not in its original flavor.

What is referenced as human culture is essentially the result of refinement of
what humans are born with. Arts are the leavening agent in this process.

The word and concept of Culture is derived from the Roman use. Hence,
agriculture is cultivating the fields for the purpose of growing crops useful to
humans. At that point, the question is raised: for the benefit of which
humans? The immediate polity growing the crops, or some far-off entity that
requires it?

Likewise, the concept of Civil is Roman invention, referring to laws and
regulations applying to its non-military inhabitants; thus, the general Roman
population. Civilization is derived from that root, certainly encompassing
Culture.

Among humans, akin to natural yeasts, natural leavening agents exist. It is the
duty of the polities, not only their Governing Strata, to refine those leavening
agents to advance the society at the local level, as well as entire humanity.
This is nothing less than a race, competition.

Doctrines of Belief Systems are outlined in userâs manuals specific to that
system. The method is not unique to âreligions.â All Belief Systems have been
abused and given over to serve the needs of the Designer Community and the
Governance Strata . In the process, the verbiage contained in those doctrines
are sprinkled with contemporary vocabulary borrowed from the Governance milieu.
Even when the user manuals are translated into new languages, this attribute is
prevalent. For example, the word âLordâ is utilized to denote a deity of
deities in English. Of course, the reference is to the title or designation of
the immediate ruler of the realm and polity. This, is due to the Identity of
the clergy in question: For example, the forced merging of identities during
the Holy Roman Empire (which was neither) when the Emperor and the Pope entered
into an uneasy pact to support each other, at least publicly, for their mutual
benefit.

III. True Believer

A True Believer may be identified by how she handles a doctrine,
unquestioningly. She has no qualms about whether it is rational or beneficial
to all concerned.

Whereas a person with a curious thought process always must question herself
whether a particular human path is superior to all others in terms of universal
outcome, a True Believer rarely engages in a similar exercise. The thoughtful
person may choose the saying ânever in doubt, always in errorâ as a thinking
method, while the zealot might counter with âI believeâ in whatever second hand
doctrine handed her.

Imagine an artery, a major road crossing a large city. In the middle, we
unexpectedly discover a checkpoint, manned by a sniper. He is in civilian
clothes. He has decided he has the authority to shoot and kill anyone he deems
unfit, unhealthy or unphotogenic. And, he carries his self appropriated task
with zest. Is this just? Is it acceptable to the populace, The Governing
Strata?

What happens if this sniper is actually âgivenâ that task by a committee,
deciding who should be shot and killed, instead of leaving that decision to the
lone sniper? Does that change the questions we just asked, or the nature of our
inquiry?

What gives the ârightâ or authority to the sniper to carry out his deeds,
killing people he does not agree with or does not like? How did this sniper
decide on his course of action? Did he inherit his views and call to action
from his family? A particular philosophy? Club? What was the motivation of the
philosopher in designing the thought which influenced the sniper? How was that
philosophical thought transmitted to the sniper, and became his own to act upon?
Was it a direct line of transmission, meaning the sniper read the philosopherâs
book and absorbed it? Or, were there intermediaries who might have modified
the original thought of the philosopher for some reason or other? How do we
know that we understand all that has been going on?

The point is: every action begins as a thought first. All our thoughts have
their beginnings in interactions with humans, institutions. But, humans are
capable of transcending as well as descending into the depths of baseness.
Humans perform extraordinary feats at either extreme. What makes the
difference? Religion/Belief System? Literae humaniores ?

If we opt to believe that religion makes the difference, we must also remember
that all theology is manmade. This also includes political ecumene.

Burning books of knowledge, especially those opposing the current regime de
jour, never extinguished the curiosity of the human mind. Moreover, draconian
measures always failed to reach their purported objectives.

Are we, in this discussion, examining morality and ethics? That may comfort
adherents of religions, people of the book. After all, âholy booksâ exhort the
readers, âthou shall not killâ in various forms. The point here, however, is
not the precepts of belief systems. Instead, we are concerned with profane and
mundane matters such as reasoning arts and sciences. For example: what is the
Identity of the sniper? Is he a monster? What about the Identity of the
Committee that âtaskedâ him? And, what is the Identity of the Governance system
that fosters all this abomination?

Does the sniper lay claim to Natural Law? If she claims the right to kill
accordingly, does she realize that the same right exists for others to kill him
as well?

Single person Governance Systems, regardless of their designations such as
kingdom, empire, democracy, etc, have inherent weaknesses. One person could
not possibly be on duty 24/7. Of course, the autocrat realized that, and
sought two solutions:

spent resources on increasing amounts of security forces to keep himself
alive,
recruited a slate of obsequious lieutenants

Under such a system, as soon as duties are delegated to others, degradation of
collective tasks begins. This is simply because the individuals delegated may
or may not share the ambitions of the âruler,â hence, pursue different agendas.
But, there is even a deeper structural flaw in this system: Educational
differences. Education is not a simple matter of earning a diploma; the greater
the difference between the governed and the governing strata, more difficult for
both sides to communicate with each other, and hence failure of the system.
It is only a matter of time before the Governed snap under the strain. This
happens under many categories.

IV. Individuals or Groups over Polity

What is the common denominator for Spain, England, Sweden, Denmark, Finland,
Japan, Norway? They are all monarchies. They have also embraced the
constitutional version (as opposed to the autocracy) and possess representative
governments. A number of political parties regularly contest the elections.

The foregoing is in contrast to the examples of Democratic Republic of Germany,
Poland, Democratic Republic of Vietnam at al of pre 1991. Even though these
polities sported the term âdemocraticâ in their official appellations, they did
not have representative governments.

That is not to say that all polities that purport to be democratic are
pluralistic; neither were the origins of democracy. By way of comparison: about
10% of the former âsocialistâ polity were members of the ruling communist
party---as in the examples above---the proportion is perhaps similar in the case
of the original democracy where 10% of the population were citizens with the
right to vote, and the remaining 90% comprised of slaves without such
privilege.

Why is it important for all members of a polity to participate in the governance
of that polity? An autocrat (under any designation) may drag the polity into
war and ruination by personal machinations. The all member participation in
governance will inject sanity to the deliberations in case of a crisis.

In an authoritarian polity, the Governing Strata will use its resources to
compel the population. This compulsion will take the form of all-out pressure
that will ignore the bases of human dignity. For example, getting shot dead
without a trial, for transgressions not even known is definitely against human
rights. Any form of torture is absolutely within this domain.

All this is intimately tied to deciding how the wealth of the polity is going to
be shared, allocated and spent. Will the resources be expended on guns or
butter?

That, in turn, requires a definition of Identity. The question to elicit the
answer is not âWho are you;â instead âWhat are you?â

There are quite a few answers to that query: offspring, parent, sibling,
citizen, member of a profession, political party adherent, club member. There
are obligations, benefits, costs and gains in each case. But those designations
still do not answer the question âWhat are you?â Human psyche is quite dynamic
and attributes will fluctuate from one moment to the next. Are these
oscillations caused by emotion or reason or economic factors---the most powerful
impellents?

Do these choices also apply to the polity as a whole, in addition to the
solitary members? After all, the polity is comprised of individuals, each
possessing their own Identities.

Moreover, the Governance Strata will also have their own Identity. This is
already demonstrated in two well known manuals of statecraft: Balasagunlu
Yusufâs Kutadgu Bilig, and Nicolo Machiavelliâs Prince.

In Kutadgu Bilig stresses the necessity of having a happy and content population
if the ruling dynasty is to survive and prosper.

In The Prince, Machiavelliâs concerns are focused on the happiness of the Prince
(ruler) without regard to the prosperity of the population.

This contrast begins to point to the roots of Identity in each case. Keeping
only 10% of the population happy and content and the rest unsatisfied is a good
recipe of regime change under any political system.

---------------------------------

[1] Regular Ozbek skullcap.

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Guest - 09-10-2004

Evil's true name
By ANDREW BOLT
08sep04

We've been tip-toeing around the real nature of terrorism for far too
long. The horror in Russia compels us to recognise the truth about
this evil.

ENOUGH. Finally enough with the evasions and excuses -- the pretence
that this had nothing to do with Islamism. No, the evil that turned a
Russian school into a slaughterhouse is too great and too threatening
for more such polite fictions.

Consider: the terrorists who seized the school in Beslan refused to
give their 1100 hostages water -- not even children who after two
days in stifling heat were unconscious from thirst.

Consider: one child, 10-year-old Stanislav Tsarakhov, said he'd seen
a boy beg a terrorist for water, "but instead of giving him water he
drove his bayonet through the boy's body".

Consider: when a teacher, Elza Viktorovna, pleaded for the terrorists
to at least spare the children, she was asked, "Have you finished?",
and when she nodded was shot dead.

Consider: when the terrorists exploded into their final orgy of
bloodletting, they shot in the back many children who tried to flee.

Reporters described how one rescuer carried out a girl while trying
frantically to keep her insides from spilling out of the hole blown
in her back. They described, too, how one female terrorist wounded
and then killed a father as he ran to the school to save his
children.

Aveta Aylyarova, a grandmother, told how she tried to help children
who made it to her house, and how a girl shot in the legs
cried: "Help me, aunty, I'm dying."

And look now at the funerals -- like that of Sveta Aylyarova, just
six, who was carried to her grave dressed in lace and with a pink
teddy at her feet. "She was a beautiful, smart little girl," cried a
relative, a man who could barely speak for grief.

We need to know the depravity of what was done in Beslan because we
need to understand there is now moving in the world an ideology that
spurs men to commit horrors beyond even our nightmares.

And we need to realise a movement that can plan and work such evil in
Beslan knows no boundaries of any kind. What might such people be
planning next, and where and with what weapons? Surely no one can be
safe. No massacre is unimaginable.

But what have we seen in so much of the coverage of this carnage, in
which more than 350 people were killed, nearly half of them children?
Once again we have seen toxic excuses and evasions of the kind the US
had to endure after September 11, and that even we suffered after
Bali.

First, there was the blaming of the devastated victims -- this time
of Russia. What wickedness had Russia done, it was asked, to bring
this on itself?

And then there was the pretence that these terrorists -- or,
rather "rebels" or "militants" -- were not motivated at all by
Islamism.

The European Union, typically, was very quick to treat Russia as the
accused, demanding it explain "how the tragedy could have occurred",
implying Russian soldiers were to blame.

The Council of Europe urged the world to gang up on Russia -- "to
keep up the pressure for a resolution to the Chechen conflict" -- as
if the child-murderers of Beslan were simply reacting to its
undeniably harsh rule in Chechnya.

Much of the commentary, particularly from the Left, took up the same
themes, just as the terrorists would have hoped. The terrorists were
ritually deplored, of course, but it was the Russian President,
Vladimir Putin, who, perversely, was put on trial.

"Toll rises as Putin admits fatal errors," cried the front-page lead
of Monday's Age -- which described the terrorists as simply "Chechen
militants" and nowhere mentioned the words "Islamic" or "Muslim".
Putin "faces his own questions", intoned host Kerry O'Brien on the
7.30 Report on Monday, calling the terrorists "Chechen rebels".

Again, nowhere in his introduction or the moving report that followed
was Islam mentioned.

Putin "now faces the most serious challenge of his presidency",
declared SBS, which then had the Islamic Council of Victoria condemn
Putin's actions in Chechnya.

It is astonishing how far some media outlets went to avoid even
hinting that the terrorists were Muslim, let alone Islamist
extremists.

On Monday, Channel 9's evening news showed a clip of one captured
terrorist pleading for his life.

"I swear by Allah, I did not shoot. I swear by Allah, I did feel
sorry for the children," he said in Russian. But Channel 9's English
translation dropped all his references to Allah.

This was just a Chechen rebel, you see, not an Islamist terrorist.
Russia to blame, Islamism not.

The trouble with that script starts with the fact that the Beslan
hostages were being slaughtered even before Russian troops stormed
the school.
Men and women had for days been hauled off by the terrorists into one
classroom to be shot dead and flung from a window.

One man was shot in front of the children as a warning to shut up.
Children were close to death from dehydration, while others were
forced to drink urine to survive. And then the terrorists' bombs
began to explode in the gym, crowded with women and children.

Don't blame the Russian soldiers for then rushing in to stop the
massacre, losing a dozen of their own in their frantic attempts.
Nor is it at all clear yet that most of the terrorists were
the "Chechen rebels" we've been told of so often.
Perhaps they will turn out to have been just that, even though the
main Chechen rebel leader, the fugitive former Chechen "president"
Aslan Maskhadov, denies it -- and even though many Chechens, given
increasing autonomy by Putin, would rather be ruled by Russia than by
such animals.

But there are also indications that at least some of the killers were
not Chechen at all.

Russian officials have variously claimed -- without giving proof --
that the more than 30 terrorists who seized the Beslan school
included 10 Arabs, as well as an African, Russian and Ossetian, and
some Ingush, Chechens and Kazaks.

Journalists in Beslan have also said books in Arabic were later found
in the ruins after the siege.

If true -- if -- this suggests the operation was by a group with far
more on its mind than Chechen independence. Indeed, the one captured
terrorist of Beslan, Nur-Pashi Kulayev, allegedly told interrogators
his leader said the real aim was to "trigger a war throughout the
Caucasus", far beyond tiny Chechnya.

And inside the school, according to 15-year-old hostage Yana Khayaba,
a Muslim herself, "the terrorists talked to us about Islam and how
Allah was the only one to kneel before".

Nor is it news that Islamist groups have sent fighters and money into
the region.

Russia has long claimed al-Qaida has deep ties with the most lethal
of the Chechen warlords, Shamil Basayev, who has become steadily more
Islamist and more brutal, adopting the suicide attacks that are the
hallmark of Muslim terrorists.

Chechnya, and neighbouring Russian lands, is now yet one more
battlefield in the Islamist jihad that has killed so many civilians
in so many countries -- from Australians in Bali to Masons in Turkey;
from Nepalese cooks in Iraq, to Americans in offices in New York. And
Muslims everywhere.

The fighters for this cause do not want simply independence for a
scrap of Russia.

To call them "Chechen rebels", rather than Islamist terrorists, is to
pretend they have limited demands that could be met. That they have a
cause that has nothing to do with us.

No. Theirs is a corruption of Islam that demands the end of our
civilisation, and of democracy in Muslim lands. Theirs is a b@st@rd
Islam that would rather kill than let live. That worships death, and
licences the murder of children.

Too many of our commentators will not face this harsh fact. But a few
moderate Muslims are, at last, speaking out against this
fundamentalist threat to them, to their religion, and to the children
of towns as far away as Beslan, or near.

"Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and
residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have
been Muslims," wrote Abdulrahman al-Rasheed, head of the Al-Arabiya
TV channel, on Saturday.

In a bitter column in the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awset, he
added: "Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted
culture."

The editor of the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassa, Ahmad Al-Jarallah,
insisted Islamist extremism be fought by spreading democracy in
Muslim countries such as Iraq, and defending it by force, with
America's help: "Terrorism can be tackled only through war, and only
the United States . . . is capable of handling such a war."
They understand this war -- but we surely won't if we keep misnaming
our enemy.

So let's be clear. The men and women who shot children in the back in
Beslan were not "Chechen rebels", "Chechen militants" or, as SBS put
it, a "pro-Chechen commando group".
They were terrorists undoubtedly, and Islamist almost certainly. Some
may have been Chechen, too, but that is not what made them so evil,
or what makes their cause so lethal, even to us.

Sources:
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/printpage...0699560,00.html
http://www.utro.ru/gallery.shtml?20040908ntv,5,7,,53
____________________________________

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Guest - 09-13-2004

Aleksandr Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics.

Demokratizatsiya; 1/1/2004; Dunlop, John B.

One perceptive observer of the Russian political scene, Francoise Thom, noted as far back as 1994 that fascism, and especially its "Eurasianist" variant, was displacing Russian nationalism among statist Russian elites as a post-communist "Russian Idea," especially in the foreign policy sphere. "The weakness of Russian nationalists," she emphasized, "stems from their inability to clearly situate Russian frontiers. Euras[ianism] brings an ideological foundation for post-Soviet imperialism." (1)

There probably has not been another book published in Russia during the post-communist period that has exerted an influence on Russian military, police, and statist foreign policy elites comparable to that of Aleksandr Dugin's 1997 neo-fascist treatise, Foundations of Geopolitics. (2) The impact of this intended "Eurasianist" textbook on key elements among Russian elites testifies to the worrisome rise of fascist ideas and sentiments during the late Yeltsin and Putin periods.

The author of this six-hundred-page program for the eventual rule of ethnic Russians over the lands extending "from Dublin to Vladisvostok," Aleksandr Gel'evich Dugin, was born in 1962, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Russian military officers. (3) His father is said to have held the rank of colonel, and, according to one source, he served in Soviet military intelligence, in the GRU. (4) By all accounts, Dugin was a bright and precocious youth with a talent for learning foreign languages. (He is said to have mastered at least nine of them.) While still a teenager, he joined a secretive group of Moscow intellectuals interested in mysticism, paganism, and fascism. Both the "masters" of this group and their "disciples" engaged, inter alia, in translating the works of foreign writers who shared their interests. As one of his contributions, Dugin completed a translation of a book by the Italian pagan-fascist philosopher Julius Evola.

Dugin is reported to have been detained by the KGB for participating in this study group, and forbidden literature was subsequently discovered at his apartment. According to one account, he then was expelled from the Moscow Aviation Institute, where he had enrolled as a student some time in the late 1970s. According to another account, he eventually managed to graduate from the institute. (5)

In 1987, during Gorbachev's second year of rule, Dugin was in his mid-twenties and emerged as a leader of the notorious anti-Semitic Russian nationalist organization, Pamyat', headed by photographer Dmitrii Vasil'ev. During late 1988 and 1989, Dugin served as a member of the Pamyat' Central Council.

In 1989, taking advantage of increased opportunities to visit the West, Dugin spent most of the year traveling to Western European countries. While there, he strengthened ties with leading figures of the European New Right, such as Frenchman Alain de Benoist and Belgian Jean-Francois Thiriart. These contacts led to Dugin's "belated reconciliation" with the USSR, just as that state was approaching its final demise. It appears that, largely as a result of these contacts with the European Nouvelle Droite, Dugin became a fascist theorist. On the subject of Dugin's indubitable fascist orientation, Stephen Shenfield has written: "Crucial to Dugin's politics is the classical concept of the 'conservative revolution' that overturns the post-Enlightenment world and installs a new order in which the heroic values of the almost forgotten 'Tradition' are renewed. It is this concept that identifies Dugin unequivocally as a fascist." (6)

By the beginning of the 1990s, as the Soviet Union was approaching its collapse, Dugin began to assume a more high-profile political role. He formed an association with "statist patriots" in the communist camp and was, for a brief period, close to the Genadii Zyuganov, the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. According to Stephen Shenfield, Dugin "probably played a significant part in formulating the nationalist communist ideology that was Zyuganov's hallmark." (7)

In 1991, the year that witnessed the end of the USSR, Dugin made the acquaintance of an important neo-fascist writer with ties to elements in the Russian military, Aleksandr Prokhanov, whose journal Den' (subsequently renamed Zavtra), served as a key sounding-board for the "red-brown opposition" (8) Dugin soon emerged as "one of the leading ideologists of Den' in its best period (1991-1992)." (9)

In July 1992, Dugin also began to edit his own journal, Elementy: evraziiskoe obozrenie, which appeared twice yearly (later once a year) in a print run of 5,000-10,000. The journal's title was borrowed from the theoretical journal of the French New Right, Elements, edited by Alain de Benoist. Concerning Dugin's journal, Aleksandr Verkhovskii and Vladimir Pribylovskii have noted: "In speaking of Elementy, one should not forget that half of each issue is comprised of 'geopolitical notebooks' containing articles about the global opposition of various civilizations, primarily Russia and the West?" (10)

During the early 1990s, Dugin founded his own publishing house, "Arktogeya" This name was borrowed from the publishing house of German racist writer Guido yon List (1848-1918). It combines the ancient Greek words arktos (north) and gea or gaia (land), a reference to the vanished polar continent that was supposedly the original home of the Aryans. (11)

In 1991-1992, Prokhanov and Dugin attempted to form an alliance between certain leaders of the European New Right and several department heads and professors at the Academy of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces. The first issue of Elementy in 1992 published the transcript of an April 1992 roundtable, held on the premises of the academy, which included Lieutenant General Nikolai Klokotov, head of the academy's strategy department; Lieutenant General Nikolai Pishchev, deputy head of the same department; Major General Vladislav Iminov, head of the academy's department of military history; Alain de Benoist, "the leader of the European New Right"; and Jean Lalou, another New Right spokesman. (12)

The commander of the General Staff Academy, General Igor' Rodionov, was reported to be "particularly well-disposed toward Dugin," and Dugin's ideas evidently continued to enjoy his support once he became Russian Defense Minister in 1996-1997. (13) It may be significant that Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics was written during the time that Rodionov was serving as defense minister. (14)

The General Staff Academy and GRU's interest in geopolitics and Eurasianism reached back some forty years. "Beginning in the 1950s," Francoise Thom remarked, "Soviet strategists like General Shtemenko and Admiral Gorshkov were inspired by Eurasianist thinking." (15) As for Dugin, he singled out Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, a Soviet military chief of staff in the early 1980s, as "an outstanding geopolitician, strategist, and Eurasian." (16)

In 1993, Dugin joined his efforts with those of charismatic demagogue Eduard Limonov (born 1943) and founded the National Bolshevik Party (NBP). As Verkhovskii and Pribylovskii have pointed out, "The ideology of the National Bolshevik Party was fully generated by one man--Aleksandr Dugin." (17) Limonov played the role of a fascist-style leader, and Dugin served as second in command and the party's chief theoretician. The new organization appears to have been more influenced by German than by Russian national Bolshevism. The German National Bolshevik Ernst Niekisch had "advocated a German-Russian alliance against the West. In the Soviet Union, especially Stalin's Soviet Union, many German nationalists [like Niekisch] saw the logical fulfillment of the war against 'Jewish capitalism.'" (18) In 1995, Dugin ran for the Russian State Duma on a National Bolshevik platform but was resoundingly rejected by voters, receiving a mere 0.85 percent of the vote. (19)

In 1997, Dugin broke with the stormy Limonov and began a noteworthy political ascent. In that same year, he published his Foundations of Geopolitics, one of the more influential works of the post-communist period. It appears to have been written with the assistance of General Nikolai Klokotov of the General Staff Academy, who served as an official consultant to the project. Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, head of the International Department of the Russian Ministry of Defense, also may have served as an adviser. (20) Perhaps due in part to such high-level input, "Dugin's geopolitical ideas [as expressed in Foundations] are clearly much more influential than are the other more openly mystical and esoteric sides of his philosophy." (21)

During the following year, Dugin's career took a key step forward when he was named an adviser on geopolitics to Gennadii Seleznev. Seleznev was chairman (or "speaker") of the Russian State Duma and a major player in Russian politics. (In June 2001, Seleznev was ranked the tenth most influential political figure in Russia by Nezavisimaya gazeta's panel of experts. (22)) In the course of a March 1999 radio interview, Seleznev made public the fact that Dugin was serving as one of his advisers and "he urged that Dugin's geopolitical doctrine be made a compulsory part of the school curriculum." (23) Two years later, at the founding congress of the new "Eurasia" movement, Dugin boasted, "I am the author of the book Foundation of Geopolitics, which has been adopted as a textbook in many [Russian] educational institutions." During the same congress, the aforementioned General Klokotov--now a professor emeritus but one who continued to teach at the academy--noted that the theory of geopolitics had been taught as a subject at the General Staff Academy since the early 1990s and that in the future it would "serve as a mighty ideological foundation for preparing a new [military] command." (24) At present Dugin's book presumably is being used as a textbook at the General Staff Academy.

In 1999, Dugin's publishing house brought out a volume of writings by the interwar emigre Eurasian writer, Prince Nikolai Trubetskoi. In his introduction to the volume, Dugin wrote that Trubetskoi "can be termed the Eurasian Marx." (25) It seemed that Dugin saw a similar exalted role for himself as the formulator of a new "Russian Idea" at the dawn of a new millennium.

Some time in late 1999, Dugin founded "The Center for Geopolitical Expertise" in Moscow. In an article in Zavtra, he speculated that this new center might shortly become "an analytical instrument of the Eurasian Platform for, simultaneously, the Presidential Administration, the Government of the Russian Federation, the Council of Federation, and the State Duma." (26) In late March of 2000, in a second Zavtra article, Dugin envisioned a new role for the Russian secret police (which until recently had been headed by the newly elected Russian president, Vladimir Putin). Whereas in his 1993 book, Konspiralogiya, Dugin had criticized the secret police for perceived "Atlanticist," that is, pro-American and pro-British sympathies, he now toasted the KGB (the initials he preferred to FSB) as "a new caste, a new social stratum" called upon both to hold the line against "American hegemony" and to "recreate a mighty Eurasian sovereign state" which would include all of the CIS republics. (27)

In August 2000, after reading an article by "one of the chief ideologists of the [Putin] Kremlin," Gleb Pavlovskii, Dugin wrote Pavlovskii suggesting a meeting. Pavlovskii, the creator of several influential pro-Kremlin Web sites, agreed. Commenting on this burgeoning relationship, journalist Andrei Kolesnikov remarked: "Extreme right ideology is not only turning into the dominant view in Russian publications and state rhetoric, it is also becoming fashionable in a salon sense." (28)

In November 2000, shortly before undertaking a trip to Brunei, President Putin declared publicly, "Russia has always perceived of itself as a Eurasian country." (29) Dugin later termed this statement "an epochal, grandiose revolutionary admission, which, in general, changes everything. The prophecy of [French conspiratologist] Jean Parvulesco has come to pass.... There will be a Eurasian millennium." (30)

On April 21,2001, Dugin achieved new heights with the founding congress of the "Pan-Russian Political Social Movement 'Eurasia.'" Holding this congress underscored the close relations that Dugin had formed with present and especially former members of the Russian special services. The congress took place in a hall belonging to the "Honor and Dignity" Club, a group of veterans of the special services and law enforcement organizations. The head of the club, Vladimir Revskii, earlier had served in Vympel, a special operations unit attached to the First Chief Directorate of the KGB (and later the SVR). Revskii officially opened the congress and later was elected to membership in "Eurasia's" ruling body, the Political Council.

Petr Suslov, also a former Vympel member and a retired colonel in the SVRY, played an even more noteworthy role at the congress. Suslov served as head of the committee that organized the congress and then was elected deputy leader of the new movement (with Dugin chosen as the leader). (31) During a July 2001 interview, Suslov confided that he was a graduate of the Ryazan' Paratroop School who had then "served in the structures of the KGB ... in a unit which conducted special operations abroad." (32) In this capacity, he said, he had served in Afghanistan, Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua, and Vietnam. Retiring from the SVR in 1995, he had become a consultant on issues relating to the Caucasus for Duma speaker Seleznev, which had provided him with an opportunity to meet Dugin, who was advising Seleznev on geopolitical questions. The two soon realized that they agreed on many key issues.

Writing for the Gleb Pavlovskii-sponsored web site, SMI.ru, journalist Grigorii Osterman commented: "[Petr] Suslov himself enjoys broad connections within the leadership of the FSB (there exists information that he is an external employee of the central apparatus of the FSB), as well as in the Presidential Administration, bodies to which the leader of 'Eurasia,' Dugin, also has entree." (33) "Dugin is already being perceived," the weekly Obshchaya gazeta observed, "not as the preacher of an ideological sect but as an officially recognized specialist on geopolitical questions." (34)

In a similar vein, the investigative weekly Versiya observed in late May 2001: "Contacts between Pavlovskii and 'Eurasia' actually do occur, but most likely on the level of personal consultations. Aleksandr Dugin and the head of Kremlin politico-technology enjoy good, friendly relations." Under Vladimir Putin, the newspaper continued, Dugin had become "one of the drafters of the concept of national security." It was noted that Dmitrii Ryurikov, a leading adviser to President Yeltsin on foreign affairs, and currently the Russian ambassador to Uzbekistan, had agreed to become a member of "Eurasia's" Central Council. Dugin's new organization, Versiya went on, also was engaged in "the preparing of analytical reports on foreign affairs for the Presidential Administration." As for the financial support of "Eurasia," the newspaper wrote: "The financial support of the movement comes through regional organizations of the special services. And this support, according to our sources, is not small. Moreover, not only finances are provided but also 'necessary' connections." (35)

In his address to the founding congress of "Eurasia," Dugin expressed his gratitude to "the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation," for its assistance, before also thanking the Moscow Patriarchate, the Central Spiritual Administration for the Muslims of Russia, and other organizations. (36) On May 31, 2001, the Russian Ministry of Justice officially registered the "Eurasia" movement, which was reported to have branches in fifty regions of Russia. (37) In late June 2001, "Eurasia" hosted an ambitious conference, provocatively titled "Islamic Threat or a Threat to Islam?" held at the Presidential Hotel in Moscow. The titular co-chairmen of the conference were Seleznev (who did not attend) and Sheikh Talgat Tadzhuddin, the officially recognized head of the Muslims of Russia and the CIS states. (38)

By summer 2001, Aleksandr Dugin, a neo-fascist ideologue, had managed to approach the center of power in Moscow, having formed close ties with elements in the presidential administration, the secret services, the Russian military, and the leadership of the state Duma. In an interview with the Krasnoyarsk division of Ekho Moskvy Radio on July 25, 2001, Dugin, commenting on Putin's role at the recent G-8 meetings in Genoa, affirmed, "It is my impression that in the international sphere Putin is splendidly realizing the Eurasian political model." (39) Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist incidents in New York City and Washington, D.C., Dugin's opinion was solicited by a major Russian newspaper, along with the views of the secretary of the Russian Security Council, the speaker of the Federation Council, and various Duma faction leaders, which testifies to the perceived influence that Dugin wields in present-day Russia. (40)

Several Russian journalists have underscored that Dugin-style "Eurasianism" meets a number of political needs in Russia. A belief in the primacy of the rights of the individual over those of the state, journalist Evgenii Ikhlov wrote, would result in the control of civil society over the state. In Russia, by contrast, Ikhlov continued:

[O]ur new chief stratum are incapable of ruling under such a
democracy.... [T]hey stand in need of an attractive foundation for
another, non-democratic model. Here Eurasianism extraordinarily
fits the bill. It offers the following: an
anthoritarian-charismatic (autocratic) model; selfless and
ascetical serving of the regime as the highest form of valor
(the messianic great power syndrome); the agreement of ethnic and
religious minorities to play a subordinate role; and imperial
xenophobia. (41)
"What induces the regime to seek a new ideology in Eurasianism?" journalist Dmitrii Radyshevskii, asked. He answered: "Here [in Dugin-style Eurasianism] there are ideas which meet the psychological needs of society: there is an alternative to the failed love affair with the West; there is the [Russian] tradition of messianism; and there is the proximity of Asia.... The regime stands in need of a new ideology, but of a traditional one, 'integral and great.' All of this is happily combined in Eurasianism." (42)

The Geopolitics of Dugin's 1997 Book

Dugin's militant views on geopolitics, as expressed in his 1997 "textbook" presumably will strike Western readers as both crude and mad, representing a slight improvement over the ravings of Duma deputy speaker Vladimir Zhirinovskii. Although Dugin's ideas and prescriptions are indeed extreme, dangerous, and repellent, it should be emphasized that they are very much in the tradition of the writings of interwar fascists and adherents of the European Nouvelle Droite. Historically speaking, fascist thought more than once has resulted in explosive expansionism. It should be noted that Dugin does not focus primarily on military means as a way of achieving Russian dominance over Eurasia; rather, he advocates a fairly sophisticated program of subversion, destabilization, and disinformation spearheaded by the Russian special services, supported by a tough, hard-headed use of Russia's gas, oil, and natural resource riches to pressure and bully other countries into bending to Russia's will. Dugin apparently does not fear war in the least, but he would prefer to achieve his geopolitical goals without resorting to it.

Drawing on the extensive twentieth-century literature on geopolitics--and especially on the interwar German school of Karl Haushofer--Dugin posits a primordial, dualistic conflict between "Atlanticism" (seafaring states and civilizations, such as the United States and Britain) and "Eurasianism" (land-based states and civilizations, such as Eurasia-Russia). (43) As Wayne Allensworth noted, once one penetrates below the surface of Dugin's seemingly rational and scholarly language in Foundations of Geopolitics, one realizes that "Dugin's geopolitics are mystical and occult in nature, the shape of world civilizations and the clashing vectors of historical development being portrayed as shaped by unseen spiritual forces beyond man's comprehension." (44) In Dugin's treatise, as Allensworth underscores, the author has appropriated almost wholesale "the idea" of Belgian geopolitician Jean Thiriart, who "recognized the Russified Soviet Union as the final bastion of civilization in a Europe overrun by rootless American consumerism." Thiriart earlier had advocated the formation of a new "Holy Alliance" of the USSR and Europe aimed at constructing a "Euro-Soviet Empire," which would stretch from Vladivostok to Dublin and would also need to expand to the south, "since it required a port on the Indian Ocean." (45)

The Gorbachev Debacle

The Gorbachev years (1985-1991) represent, in Dugin's eyes, one of the most wrenching geopolitical defeats in the millennial history of Russia-Eurasia-USSR. Beginning in 1989, it became clear that "no-one in the Soviet leadership was capable of explaining the logic of traditional [Soviet] foreign policy and, as a result, there took place the lightning-fast destruction of the gigantic Eurasian organism ..." (95). (46) Unexpectedly, the USSR "found itself in almost the same situation as postwar Germany--its world influence reduced to nothing, its territory sharply diminished, its economy and social sphere reduced to ruins" (96).

Dugin contends that the Soviet disaster of 1989-1991, like the earlier German one, resulted from a failure of the country's leaders to heed the counsel of its geopoliticians. Hitler disregarded the advice of Karl Haushofer and other specialists when he decided to invade the Soviet Union in 1941. In similar fashion, a "certain secret department of the GRU" and other voices had been advocating a "Eurasian" course for the USSR, but their advice went unheeded (103).

As Dugin sees it, the "project" that Westernizing Russian reformers attempted to implement during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years by now has been discredited fully: "This project denies such values as the people, the nation, history, geopolitical interests, social justice, the religious factor, etc. In it, everything is constructed on the principle of maximal economic effectiveness, on the primacy of the individual, on consumerism, and the 'free market'" (179).

Dugin believes the Atlanticists (especially the United States) consciously plotted the downfall of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR. "The Heartland therefore is required to pay back Sea Power in the same coin" (367). The goal, as Dugin sees it, is to resuscitate and reinvigorate Eurasia/Russia after the near-fatal geopolitical blows it absorbed from 1989 to 1991.

Dugin emphasizes that the current Russian Federation, which appeared in 1991 from under the rubble of the USSR, is not a full-fledged state, but rather "a transitional formation in the broad and dynamic global geopolitical process" (183). The new states that have come into existence in the space of the former Soviet Union also do not, with the sole exception of Armenia, possess any markings of authentic statehood (187). Instead they represent artificial, ephemeral political constructs.

The ethnic Russian people, in contrast, are seen as "the bearers of a unique civilization." (47) Russians are a messianic people, possessing "universal, pan-human significance" (189). The Russian people, Dugin insists, can serve only as the core ethnos of a vast empire: "[T]he Russian people (i.e. Russia) never made its goal the creation of a mono-ethnic, racially uniform state" (190). Such a distorted view represents "the Atlanticist line masking itself as 'Russian nationalism'" (213).

"A repudiation of the empire-building function," Dugin warns sternly, "would signify the end of the Russian people as a historical reality, as a civilizational phenomenon. Such a repudiation would be tantamount to national suicide" (197). Deprived of an empire, Russians will "disappear as a nation" (251). The sole viable course, in Dugin's view, is for Russians to rebound from the debacle of 1989-1991 by recreating a great "supra-national empire," one in which ethnic Russians would occupy "a privileged position" (251-252). The result of such a rebuilding effort would be "a giant continental state in the administration of which they [Russians] will play the central role" (253). This ethnic model, Dugin notes, is quite similar to that of the former Soviet Union.

In order to facilitate the recreation of a vast Russian-dominated continental empire, Dugin advocates the unleashing of Russian nationalist sentiment, but of a specific type. "This [Russian] nationalism," he writes, "should not employ state but, rather, cultural-ethnic terminology, with a special emphasis on such categories as 'Narodnost" and 'Russian Orthodoxy'" (255). Religious sentiment, Dugin urges, should be placed front and center: "Russians should realize that they are Orthodox in the first place; [ethnic] Russians in the second place; and only in the third place, people" (255). There is a need, Dugin insists, for the "total churchification" of Russians, for the Russian nation to become viewed simply as "the Church" (255-256). Such an emphasis, he believes, should--together with a persistent focus on the glorious past and bright future of the Russian nation--help bring about the "demographic upsurge" so desperately needed by Russians today. Economic incentives by themselves will prove insufficient to promote such an upsurge (256-257). One "radical" slogan, Dugin concludes, must be consistently put forward: "The nation is everything; the individual is nothing" (257). This slogan encapsulates one of Dugin's most cherished beliefs.

Gutting Atlanticism

Employing the "strategy of the Anaconda" (a term borrowed by Dugin from interwar German geopoliticians used in reference to Britain), the United States and its close allies are seen as exerting unrelenting pressure on all Eurasian coastal zones (103, 110). Following precepts enunciated by Francis Fukuyama among others, the United States seeks to implant its own political and economic model throughout the globe (127). Moreover, following the prescriptions of Paul Wolfowitz, the United States attempts to reduce Russia's role to that of a lowly "regional power" (199). In cynical fashion, the United States wants to "transform Russia into an 'ethnic reservation' so that it can receive full control over the world" (169).

How is a revived Eurasian-Russian empire to bring about "the geopolitical defeat of the U.S." (260)? An appropriate response to the looming Atlanticist threat, Dugin contends, is for the renascent Eurasian-Russian empire to direct all of its powers (short of igniting a hot war), as well as those of the remainder of humanity, against the Atlanticist Anaconda. "At the basis of the geopolitical construction of this [Eurasian] Empire," Dugin writes, "there must be placed one fundamental principle--the principle of 'a common enemy.' A negation of Atlanticism, a repudiation of the strategic control of the United States, and the rejection of the supremacy of economic, liberal market values--this represents the common civilizational basis, the common impulse which will prepare the way for a strong political and strategic union" (216). The anti-Americanism of the Japanese, "who remember well the nuclear genocide and the disgrace of political occupation," must be unleashed, as well as the fervent anti-Americanism of fundamentalist Muslim Iranians (234, 241). On a global scale, Dugin declares, "the main 'scapegoat' will be precisely the U.S." (248).

One way in which Russia will be able to turn other states against Atlanticism will be an astute use of the country's raw material riches. "In the beginning stage [of the struggle against Atlanticism]," Dugin writes, "Russia can offer its potential partners in the East and West its resources as compensation for exacerbating their relations with the U.S." (276). To induce the Anaconda to release its grip on the coastline of Eurasia, it must be attacked relentlessly on its home territory, within its own hemisphere, and throughout Eurasia. "All levels of geopolitical pressure," Dugin insists, "must be activated simultaneously" (367).

Within the United States itself, there is a need for the Russian special services and their allies "to provoke all forms of instability and separatism within the borders of the United States (it is possible to make use of the political forces of Afro-American racists)" (248). "It is especially important," Dugin adds, "to introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements--extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics" (367).

Dugin's Eurasian project also mandates attacking the United States through Central and South America. "The Eurasian project," Dugin writes, "proposes Eurasian expansion into South and Central America with the goal of freeing them from the control of the North" (248). (48) As a result of such unrelenting destabilization efforts, the United States and its close ally Britain eventually will be forced to leave the shores of Eurasia (and Africa). "The entire gigantic edifice of Atlanticism," Dugin prophesies, "will collapse" (259). He believes that this could happen unexpectedly, as occurred with the sudden collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR. Expelled from the shores of Eurasia, the United States would then be required to "limit its influence to the Americas" (367).

The Moscow-Berlin Axis

Within the territorial sprawl of Eurasia, Dugin's program focuses on the formation of three key axes: Moscow-Berlin, Moscow-Tokyo, and Moscow-Teheran. With regard to the future of Europe, Dugin writes: "The task of Moscow is to tear Europe away from the control of the U.S. (NATO), to assist European unification, and to strengthen ties with Central Europe under the aegis of the fundamental external axis Moscow-Berlin. Eurasia needs a united, friendly Europe" (369). In advocating this path, Dugin appears to be influenced by the writings of the European New Right, which from the 1970s on, argued for "the strict neutrality of Europe and its departure from NATO" (139). The basis of the Moscow-Berlin axis, Dugin writes, will be "the principle of a common enemy [that is, the United States]" (216).

In exchange for cooperating with Russia in this project, Dugin proposes that Germany be given back "Kaliningrad oblast' (Eastern Prussia)" (228). As a result of a Grand Alliance between Russia and Germany, the two countries will divvy up the territories lying between them into de facto spheres of dominance. There is to be no "sanitary cordon." "The task of Eurasia," Dugin emphasizes, "consists in making sure such a [sanitary] cordon does not exist" (370). Russia and Germany together, he insists, "must decide all disputed questions together and in advance" (226).

The integration of swaths of Western and Central European territory into a German sphere of dominance will be encouraged directly and abetted by Eurasia-Russia. The formation of a "Franco-German bloc" especially is to be supported (171). "In Germany and France," Dugin asserts, "there is a firm anti-Atlanticist tradition" (369). Germany's influence likely will spread to the south--to Italy and Spain (220). Only Britain, "an extraterritorial floating base of the U.S." is to be cut off and shunned (221).

Moving eastward, Dugin proposes offering Germany de facto political dominance over most Protestant and Catholic states located within Central and Eastern Europe. The "unstable" state of Finland, which "historically enters into the geopolitical space of Russia" is seen as an exception (316). In this instance, Dugin proposes that Finland be combined together with the Karelian Autonomous Republic of the Russian Federation into a single ethnoterritorial formation "with maximal cultural autonomy, but with strategic integration into the Eurasian bloc" (371-372). The northern regions of Finland, Dugin adds, should be excised and donated to Murmansk oblast'.

On the subject of the Baltic states, Dugin proposes that Estonia be recognized as lying within Germany's sphere. A "special status," on the other hand, should be accorded to both Latvia and Lithuania, which suggests that they are to be allocated to the Eurasian-Russian sphere. Poland, too, is to be granted such a "special status" (372).

With regard to the Balkans, Dugin assigns "the north of the Balkan peninsula from Serbia to Bulgaria" to what he terms the "Russian South" (343). "Serbia is Russia," a subheading in the book declares unambiguously (462). In Dugin's opinion, all of the states of the "Orthodox collectivist East" with time will seek to establish binding ties to "Moscow the Third Rome," thus rejecting the snares of the "rational-individualistic West" (389,393). The states of Romania, Macedonia, "Serbian Bosnia," and even NATO-member Greece in time, Dugin predicts, will become constituent parts of the Eurasian-Russian Empire (346, 383).

As for the former union republics of the USSR situated within Europe, they all, in Dugin's view, (with the exception of Estonia) should be absorbed by Eurasia-Russia. "Belorussia," Dugin asserts flatly, "should be seen as a part of Russia" (377). In similar fashion, Moldova is seen as a part of what Dugin calls "the Russian South" (343).

On the key question of Ukraine, Dugin underlines: "Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning. It has no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness" (377). "Ukraine as an independent state with certain territorial ambitions," he warns, "represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics" (348). And he adds that, "[T]he independent existence of Ukraine (especially within its present borders) can make sense only as a 'sanitary cordon'" (379). However, as we have seen, for Dugin all such "sanitary cordons" are inadmissible.

Dugin speculates that three extreme western regions of Ukraine--Volynia, Galicia, and Trans-Carpathia--heavily populated with Uniates and other Catholics, could be permitted to form an independent "Western Ukrainian Federation." But this area must not under any circumstances be permitted to fall under Atlanticist control (382). With the exception of these three western regions, Ukraine, like Belorussia, is seen as an integral part of Eurasia-Russia.

At one point in his book, Dugin confides that all arrangements made with "the Eurasian bloc of the continental West," headed by Germany, will be merely temporary and provisional in nature. "The maximum task [of the future]," he underscores, "is the 'Finlandization' of all of Europe" (369).

The Moscow-Tokyo Axis

The cornerstone of Dugin's approach to the Far East lies in the creation of a "Moscow-Tokyo Axis." In relation to Japan, he emphasizes, "the principle of a common enemy [that is, the United States]" will prove decisive (234). As in the case of Germany, Japan is to be offered an imperial Grand Bargain. Dugin recommends that the Kuriles be restored to Japan as Kaliningrad is to be restored to Germany (238). For future expansion purposes, Japan is to be encouraged to impose "its own 'new order,' which it planned to carry out in the 1930s, in the Pacific Ocean" (277).

Dugin notes that another important ally of Eurasia-Russia will be India, which, like Japan, will be invited to join Russia in efforts to contain and perhaps dismember China. The two Koreas and Vietnam also will be invited to participate in this effort (360). Mongolia is seen as constituting "a strategic ally of Russia" and is to be absorbed directly into Eurasia-Russia (363).

Like the United States, the People's Republic of China is seen as constituting an enormous danger for Eurasia-Russia. Once it rejected Mao's healthy path of "peasant socialism," China set about instituting economic reforms that have been achieved "at the price of a deep compromise with the West" (232-233). China, in Dugin's perverse view, verges upon being an Atlanticist factotum.

At several points in his book, Dugin gives vent to a fear that China might at some time in the future "undertake a desperate thrust to the North--into Kazakhstan and Eastern Siberia" (172). In a section titled "The Fall of China," Dugin directly warns: "China is the most dangerous geopolitical neighbor of Russia to the South" (359). China, he maintains, is a danger to Russia both "as a geopolitical base for Atlanticism and by itself, as a country with heightened demographic compactness in quest of 'no man's land'" (360).

Because of the threat to Russia's vital geopolitical interests represented by China, Dugin holds that the PRC must be dismantled. He underlines: "Tibet-Sinkiang-Mongolia-Manchuria taken together comprise a security belt of Russia" (363). Eurasia-Russia must seek, at all costs, to promote "the territorial disintegration, splintering and the political and administrative partition of the [Chinese] state" (360). "Without Sinkiang and Tibet," he concludes, "the potential geopolitical breakthrough of China into Kazakhstan and Siberia becomes impossible" (362).

As "geopolitical compensation" for the loss of its northern regions, China, Dugin recommends, should be offered development "in a southern direction--Indochina (except Vietnam), the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia" (363). These areas constitute China's appropriate sphere of dominance.

It should be noted that in the lengthy postscript section appended to the 1999 version of Foundations of Geopolitics, Dugin reaffirms his belief in the need for Eurasia-Russia to effect a dismembering of China (781). In an interview given by Dugin in late July 2001, however, he backed off slightly from this position--presumably in deference to Putin's stated position on China--but only to a degree. He continued to insist that Russia's relations with Japan, Iran, and India were more vital and significant than those with China. (49)

The Moscow-Teheran Axis

The most ambitious and complex part of Dugin's program concerns the South, where the focal point is a Moscow-Teheran axis. "The idea of a continental Russian-Islamic alliance," he writes, "lies at the foundation of anti-Atlanticist strategy. [T]his alliance is based on the traditional character of Russian and Islamic civilization" (158). "On the whole," he continues, "the entire Islamic zone represents a naturally friendly geopolitical reality in relation to the Eurasian Empire, since the Islamic tradition .., fully understands the spiritual incompatibility of America and religion. The Atlanticists themselves see the Islamic world, on the whole, as their potential opponent" (239).

As the result of an especially broad Grand Alliance to be concluded with Iran, Dugin maintins that Eurasia-Russia will enjoy the prospect of realizing a centuries-old Russian dream and finally reach the "warm seas" of the Indian Ocean. "In relation to the South," he writes, "the 'geopolitical axis of history' [Russia] has only one imperative--geopolitical expansion to the shores of the Indian Ocean" (341). "Having received geopolitical access--in the first place. naval bases--on the Iranian shores," he writes, "Eurasia will enjoy full security from the strategy of the 'Anaconda ring'" (241). Eurasia-Russia and the Empire of Iran, he emphasizes, will have "one and the same geopolitical tendency" (242).

As a consequence of this Grand Alliance, Eurasia-Russia should be prepared to divide up the imperial spoils with "the Islamic Empire in the South" (239). After asking the question "What is the Russian South?" Dugin claims that it includes "the Caucasus [all of it]"; "the eastern and northern shores of the Caspian (the territories of Kazakhstan and Turkmeniya)"; "Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kirgiziya and Tajikistan"; plus "Mongolia." Even these regions, he notes, should be seen "as zones of further geopolitical expansion to the south and not as 'eternal borders of Russia'" (343). "Control over the Caucasus," Dugin notes at one point in the book, "opens ... an exit to the 'warm seas'" (349).

The extensive stretch of territory lying to the south of the Russian Federation is to be divvied up with a future Iranian Empire and with Armenia as well. "A special geopolitical role," Dugin writes, "is played by Armenia, which is a traditional and reliable ally of Russia in the Caucasus. Armenia will serve as a most important strategic base in the thwarting of Turkish aggression to the north and to the east." It is necessary, therefore to create "the [subsidiary] axis Moscow-Erevan-Teheran" (352). "The Armenians," Dugin underscores with approval, "are an Aryan people ... [like] the Iranians and the Kurds" (243).

Azerbaijan represents one example of how the trio Eurasia-Russia, Iran, and Armenia might choose to divide up the spoils. "If Azerbaijan," Dugin warns, "maintains its [present] pro-Turkish orientation, then that 'country' will be split up among Iran, Russia, and Armenia. Almost the same holds true with regard to other regions of the Caucasus--Chechnya, Abkhaziya, Dagestan, etc." (243). "It makes sense," Dugin writes elsewhere, "to bind Azerbaijan to Iran" (352).

According to Dugin, Kazakhstan will be integrated "into a common continental bloc with Russia" (354). Abkhaziya, too, will be tied "directly to Russia" (351). He speculates that a "united Osetiya" also might be incorporated into Eurasia-Russia (351). And as for the remaining parts of Georgia? Dugin implies that what remains of this Orthodox Christian country after Russia absorbs Abkhaziya and South Osetiya might be turned over to Iran as booty, appropriate punishment, presumably, for its prickly independent course toward Russia in the post-communist period.

According to Dugin, a key reason for concluding a Grand Alliance with Iran is Russia's need for a Muslim ally in its struggle against secular Turkey and "Islamic Saudi Arabia" with its dangerous Wahhabism. Turkey is to be treated as harshly as the United States and China. "It is important," Dugin writes, "to take into consideration the necessity of affixing to Turkey the role of 'scapegoat' in this [Eurasian] project" (244). Kurds, Armenians, and other Turkish minorities are to be provoked into rebellion. Dugin stresses the need to create "geopolitical shocks" within Turkey (352). Like Azerbaijan, Dugin predicts that Turkey could be dismembered by Eurasia-Russia, Iran, and Armenia in the future. If such a dismemberment should not occur, however, Turkey, like China, must be encouraged to expand exclusively southward, "into the Arab world through Baghdad, Damascus, and Riyadh" (244).

Conclusion

In a moment of exultant imperial elan, Dugin revealingly trumpets at one point in his book, "The battle for the world rule of [ethnic] Russians has not ended" (213). It is necessary to speak the unvarnished truth. An official adviser on geopolitics to the speaker of the Russian Duma is a dangerous Russian fascist. As has been noted, Dugin also reportedly enjoys close ties to elements in the presidential administration, the secret services, the military, and the parliament. Although Dugin's influence should not be exaggerated, it also should not be understated. One is required to ask whether Russian fascism--a tendency which exhibits contempt both for international borders and for international law--has a realistic chance of emerging as the "new political thinking" in international affairs in Vladimir Putin's Russia. In late 1998, Russian academic Andrei Tsygankov appropriately warned that the discourse of Dugin and of like-minded "Eurasians" is in reality "the discourse of war." (50)

Interviewed by a journalist from the army newspaper Krasnya zvezda in May 2001, Dugin patiently explained: "Eurasian space is the territory of Russia, the countries of the CIS and a part of the adjacent territories to the West and to the South, where there is no clear-cut geopolitical orientation. All of this comprises Eurasian strategic space broadly understood." (51) The army reporter offered no objections to this quite mad schema.

Aleksandr Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics, to summarize, represents a harsh and cynical repudiation of the architecture of international relations that was laboriously erected following the carnage of the Second World War and the emergence of nuclear weapons. Dugin and his "system," it seems, resemble the combustible interwar period and the rise of fascism in Europe, with the lurid imperial fantasies of the Duce, the Fuhrer, and other fascist demagogues. Could a reversion to a destructive past be the "dividend" which Russia and the West are to receive for having finally and with enormous effort put an end to the cold war?

NOTES

The author would like to thank Robert Otto for generous and extremely helpful bibliographical assistance. Thanks also to Glen Howard for bringing several useful bibliographical items to my attention and to my research assistants, Joyce Cerwin and Yuliya Shmeleva, for their fine work.

(1.) Francoise Thom, "Eurasiansm: A new Russian foreign policy?" Uncaptive Minds 7, no. 2 (1994): 76.

(2.) Aleksandr Dugin, Aleksandr. Osnovy geopolitiki: Geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii (Moscow: Arktogeya, 1997). The book was republished without change by Dugin in 1999, together with lengthy supplemental materials--of no great significance--appended under the title Myslit' prostranstvom. My references are to the 1997 edition.

(3.) Unless otherwise indicated, the biographical information on Dugin provided in this paper comes from Stephen Shenfield, Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, Movements (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 190-220.

(4.) See Marina Latysheva, Issledovateli temnykh sil iz dvizheniya 'Evraziya' sdelali dlya prezidenta analaticheskii tsentr i gotovy zamenit" MID. Versiya, May 29, 2001.

(5.) Charles Clover, "Will the Russian bear roar again?" Financial Times, December 12, 2000.

(6.) Shenfield, 195. For a representative sample of Dugin's theoretical fascist writings, see Aleksandr Dugin, Absolyutnaya rodina (Moscow: Arktogeya, 1999).

(7.) Shenfield, 192.

(8.) On Prokhanov, see John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire, 2d. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 169-177.

(9.) Aleksandr Verkhovskii and Vladimir Pribylovskii, Natsional-patrioticheskie organizatsii v Rossii (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo 'Institut eksperimental'noi sotsiologii,' 1996), 50.

(10.) Ibid., 51.

(11.) Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 395.

(12.) See "Rossiya, Germaniya i drugie," Elementy, 1 (1992): 22-25.

(13.) Shenfield, 198.

(14.) Clover.

(15.) Thom, 67-68.

(16.) Aleksandr Dugin, Konspiratologiya (Moscow: Arktogeya, 1993), 115.

(17.) Verkhovskii and Pribylovskii, 50.

(18.) Wayne Allensworth, The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization and Post-Communist Russia (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 257.

(19.) Shenfield, 194.

(20.) Clover.

(21.) Shenfield, 199.

(22.) "100 vedushchikh politkov Rossii v iyune," Nezavisimaya gazeta, July 10, 2001.

(23.) Shenfield, 197.

(24.) See "Stenogramma raboty uchreditel'nogo s'ezda Obshcherossiiskogo Politicheskogo Obshchestvennogo Dvizheniya 'Evraziya,' 21 aprelya 2001," at http://eurasia. com .ru:8101/syezd.htm.

(25.) See Aleksandr Dugin, introduction to Nikolai Trubetskoi Nasledie Chingizkhana (Moscow: AGRAF, 1999), 5-25.

(26.) Aleksandr Dugin "Evraziiskaya platforma," Zavtra, January 21, 2000.

(27.) Aleksandr Dugin "Zarya v sapogakh," Zavtra, March 31, 2000.

(28.) Andrei Kolesnikov "Posle podvodnoi lodki," Izvestiya, August 29, 2000.

(29.) Vladimir Putin, "Rossiya vsegda oshchushchala sebya evroaziatskoi stranoi," Strana.ru, November 13, 2000.

(30.) http://www.arctogaia.com/public/putin/htrr, May 23, 2001.

(31.) Yaroslava Zabello "Evraziya--prevyshe vsego?" Transkaspiiskii proekt: informatsiono-analaticheskii server, June 13, 2001.

(32.) Pavel Polnyan "Sibir' otchenlyaetsya legko," Moskovskii komsomolts v Krasnoyarske, 29, July 18, 2001, http://arctogaia.krasu.ru/eurasia/dugin_krsk12.shtrr.

(33.) Grigorii Osterman "Esli vakhkhabizm ne sdaetsya, ego ipravlyayut," June 28, 2001, SMI.ru,.

(34.) Aleksandr Maksimov and Orkhan Karabaagi. "Oni v svoikh korridorakh," Obshchaya gazeta, May 31,2001.

(35.) Latysheva.

(36.) "Stenogramma ..."

(37.) Strana.ru, June 4, 2001.

(38.) Tadzhuddin is recognized by a minority of the forty Muslim administrations in Russia, but he can boast of "not at all bad connections with the [Russian] special services," with whom he has been cooperating since taking up his current post in 1980. See Maksimov and Karabaagi. It should be noted that on June 19, 2001, a rival organization of "Eurasians," headed by state Duma deputy Abdul-Vakhed Niyazov, held a founding congress for a new Eurasian Party of Russia (EPR). Niyazov is an ethnic Russian (formerly Vadim Medvedev), who converted to Islam in 1996. On July 26, 2001, the EPR, with branches in seventy regions of Russia, was registered by the Russian Ministry of Justice. Dugin has assailed this rival group as being witting tools of Saudi Arabia and of Wahhabism. A number of well-known leaders of Muslim background in Russia and in CIS states, on the other hand, have offered support for the EPR. These leaders include Aslambek Aslakhanov, Ramazan Abdulatipov, Chingiz Aitmatov, Olzhas Suleimenov, Stanislav Derev, and Mufti Akhmad Kadyrov. The presidents of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbaev, and of Tatarstan, Mintimer Shaimiev, also have indicated a degree of support. See Novye izvestiiya (June 30, 2001 and July 27, 2001); Nezavisimaya gazeta (June 8, 2001 and July 31, 2001); SMI.ru (June 19, 2001); Moskovskii komsomolets (August 3, 2001); and NG-religii (August 8, 2001).

(39.) Aleksandr Dugin "Interv'yu dlya 'Ekho Moskvy-Krsnoyarsk'," 25 iyulya 2001, posted at: http://arctogaia.krasu.ru/eurasia/dugin_int_1.shtm.

(40.) See "Rossiya dolzhna uchest' oshibki Ameriki," Nezavisimaya gazeta, September 13, 2001. For Dugin's take on the events of September 11, see his "Lastochki Apokalipsa," http://arctogaia.com/public/lastochki.html, September 12, 2001.

(41.) Evgenii Ikhlov"Oni v svoikh korridorakh: Dve storony novogo evraziistva," Obshchaya gazeta, August 2, 2001.

(42.) Dmitrii Radyshevskii "Soblazn evraziistva," Moskovskie novosti 18, May 1-14, 2001.

(43.) For a useful survey of twentieth-century Western geopolitical literature, see Geoffrey Parker Western Geopolitical Thought in the Twentieth Century (London: Croom Helm, 1985). Chapter five of Parker's book is devoted to "German Geopolitik."

(44.) Allensworth, 249.

(45.) Ibid., 251.

(46.) Here and subsequently, the page numbers given in parentheses refer to the 1997 edition of Dugin's book.

(47.) All italics appearing within quotations are those of Dugin.

(48.) In this connection, the following report is of interest. During a visit to Moscow in May of 2001, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela "indicated that he and Putin share a vision of a world in which power must be more evenly distributed to offset the unipolar influence of the United States, and that his dream of a 'Bolivaran Federation' of Caribbean and Latin American nations fits into that scheme." Chavez made it clear that he and Putin "would work together to form a strategic alliance against [the] U.S." Petroleumworld, May 15, 2001.

(49.) Dugin, "Interv'yu dlya 'Ekho Moskvy-Krasnoyarsk.'"

(50.) Andrei P. Tsygankov "Hard Line Eurasianism and Russian Contemporary Geopolitical Perspectives." East European Quarterly (Fall 1998): 323, 329.

(51.) "Geopolitika. Evraziiskii milliard."

John B. Dunlop is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His current research focuses on the conflict in Chechnya. Russian politics since 1985, Russia and the successor states of the former Soviet Union, Russian nationalism, and the politics of religion in Russia.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Heldref Publications

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Guest - 09-13-2004

The new geopolitics.

Monthly Review; 7/1/2003; Klare, Michael

The war in Iraq has reconfigured the global geopolitical landscape in many ways, some of which may not be apparent for years or even decades to come. It has certainly altered the U.S. relationship with Europe and the Middle East. But its impact goes well beyond this. More than anything else, the war reveals that the new central pivot of world competition is the south-central area of Eurasia.

The term "geopolitics" seems at first to come from another era, from the late nineteenth century. By geopolitics or geopolitical competition, I mean the contention between great powers and aspiring great powers for control over territory, resources, and important geographical positions, such as ports and harbors, canals, river systems, oases, and other sources of wealth and influence. if you look back, you will find that this kind of contestation has been the driving force in world politics and especially world conflict in much of the past few centuries.

Geopolitics, as a mode of analysis, was very popular from the late nineteenth century into the early part of the twentieth century. if you studied then what academics now call international relations, you would have been studying geopolitics.

Geopolitics died out as a sell-conscious mode of analysis in the Cold War period, partly due to echoes of the universally abhorred Hitlerite ideology of lebensraum, but also because there were a lot of parallels between classical geopolitical thinking (which came out of a conservative wing of academia) and Marxist and Leninist thinking, which clashed with the ideological pretensions of Cold War scholars. So it is not a form of analysis that you see taught, for the most part, in U.S. universities today.

Geopolitics was also an ideology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-a self-conscious set of beliefs on which elites and leaders of the great powers acted. It was the thinking behind the imperialism of that period, the logic for the acquisition of colonies with specific geographical locations. The incidents leading up to the First World War came out of this mode of thinking, such as the 1898 Fashoda incident over the headwaters of the Nile River that gave rise to a near conflict between Third Republic France and late Victorian Britain.

In the case of the United States, it became the dominant mode of thinking at the time of Teddy Roosevelt and led very self-consciously to the decision by Roosevelt and his cabal of associates to turn the United States into an empire. This was a conscious project. It was not an accident. The Spanish-American War was an intentional device by which the United States acquired an empire. The Spanish-American War and the occupation of the Philippines were followed quickly by the seizure of Panama, openly justified by geopolitical ideology To see just how self-conscious this process was, I recommend Warren Zimmermann's First Great Triumph (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). The parallels to the current moment are striking.

Geopolitical ideology was later appropriated by Hider and Mussolini and by the Japanese militarists to explain and to justify their expansionist behavior. And it was this expansionist behavior--which threatened the geopolitical interest of the opposing powers--that led to the Second World War, not the internal politics of Germany, Italy, or Japan.

This ideology disappeared to some degree during the Cold War in favor of a model of ideological competition. That is to say, geopolitical ideology appeared inconsistent with the high-minded justifications (in which "democracy" and "freedom" largely figured) given for interventions in the third world.

But really, if you study the history of the Cold War, the overt conflicts that took place were consciously framed by a geopolitical orientation from the American point of view. The United States had to control the Middle East and its oil. That was the basis of the Truman Doctrine and the Eisenhower Doctrine and the Carter Doctrine. The United States had to control parts of Africa because of its mineral wealth in copper, cobalt, and platinum. That's why the United States backed the apartheid regime in South Africa. And the reason for both the Korean War and the Vietnam War was understood at the highest levels in terms of the U.S. interest in control of the Pacific Rim.

Today, we are seeing a resurgence of unabashed geopolitical ideology among the leadership cadres of the major powers, above all in the United States. In fact, the best way to see what's happening today in Iraq and elsewhere is through a geopolitical prism. American leaders have embarked on the classical geopolitical project of assuring U.S. dominance of the most important resource areas, understood as the sources of power and wealth. There is an ideological consistency to what they're doing, and it is this geopolitical mode of thinking.

Perhaps there is some question as to exactly how conscious this is, but you can see this way of thinking in the overt discourse of many contemporary leaders. Dick Cheney and some prominent neoconservatives especially, but also Democrats such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, speak in this manner. They openly state that the United States is engaged in a struggle to maintain its power vis-a-vis other contending great powers and that America must prevail.

Now, you might ask, what contending great powers? From our point of view it is far from obvious that any exist. But if you read what these folks write and hear what they say, you will find that they are absolutely obsessed by the potential emergence of rival great powers; Russia, China, a European combination of some sort, Japan, and even India.

This is the essence of the Wolfowitz Doctrine, first articulated in the Pentagon's Defense Planning Guidance document for 1994-1999, first leaked to the press in February 1992. This document calls for proactive U.S. military intervention to deter and prevent the rise of a contending peer (or equal) competitor, and asserts that the United States must use any and all means necessary to prevent that from happening. At the time this statement was met with such howls of outrage from U.S. allies that then President Bush had to squelch the document, and it was revised to take out this language.

But this doctrine lingered in the think-tank writings of the 1990s, reemerging as the official global military policy of the Bush II administration. It has now been incorporated as the core principle of the document known as the National Security Strategy of the United States of America (September 2002), available for download from the White House website. This document states explicitly that the ultimate purpose of American power is to prevent the rise of a competing great power, and that the United States shall use any means necessary to prevent that from happening, including preventive military force when needed, but also through spending so much money on defense that no other peer competitor can ever arise.

Against this background, it can hardly be questioned that the purpose of the war in Iraq is to redraw the geopolitical map of Eurasia so as to insure and embed American power and dominance in this region vis-a-vis these other potential competitors.

Now let us step back for a minute and return to the classical geopolitical thinking of the early part of the last century, particularly the views of Sir Halford Mackinder of Great Britain. This perspective held that Eurasia was the most important part--the "heartland" of the civilized world, and that whoever controlled this heartland by definition controlled the rest of the world because of the concentration there of population, resources, and industrial might. In classical geopolitical thinking, world politics is essentially a struggle over who will control the Eurasian heartland.

The strategists of the turn of the twentieth century saw two ways through which global dominance could arise. One was through the emergence of a continental power (or a combination of continental powers) that dominated Eurasia and was, therefore, the master of the world. It was precisely this fear--that a German-controlled continental Europe and Russia, together with a Japanese-dominated China and Southeast Asia, would merge into a vast continental power and dominate the Eurasian heartland, thereby reducing the United States to a marginal power--that galvanized American leaders at the onset of the Second World War. Franklin D. Roosevelt was deeply steeped in this mode of analysis, and it is this ideological-strategic view that triggered U.S. intervention in the Second World War.

The other approach to global dominance perceived by early twentieth century geopolitical strategists was to control the "rimlands" of Eurasia--that is, Western Europe, the Pacific Rim, and the Middle East--and thereby contain any emerging "heartland" power. After the Second World War, the United States determined that it would in fact maintain a permanent military presence in all of the rimlands of Eurasia. This is what we know of as the "containment" strategy. And it was this outlook that led to the formation of NATO, the Marshall Plan, SEATO, CENTO, and the U.S. military alliances with Japan and Taiwan. For most of the time since the Second World War, the focus was on the eastern and western ends of Eurasia--Europe and the Far East.

What is happening now, I believe, is that U.S. elites have concluded that the European and East Asian rimlands of Eurasia are securely in American hands or less important, or both. The new center of geopolitical competition, as they see it, is South-Central Eurasia, encompassing the Persian Gulf area, which possesses two-thirds of the world's oil, the Caspian Sea basin, which has a large chunk of what's left, and the surrounding countries of Central Asia. This is the new center of world struggle and conflict, and the Bush administration is determined that the United States shall dominate and control this critical area.

Until now, the contested rimlands of Eurasia were the base of U.S. power, while in the south-central region there was but a very modest presence of U.S. forces. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the primary U.S. military realignment has entailed the drawdown of American forces in East Asia and Europe along with the buildup of forces in the south-central region. U.S. bases in Europe are being closed, while new military bases are being established in the Persian Gulf area and in Central Asia.

It is important to note that this is a process that began before 9/11. September 11 quickened the process and gave it a popular mandate, but this was entirely serendipitous from the point of view of U.S. strategists. It was President Clinton who initiated U.S. military ties with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, and who built up the U.S. capacity to intervene in the Persian Gulf / Caspian Sea area. The U.S. victory in Iraq was not a victory of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld it was Clinton's work that made this victory possible.

The war against Iraq was intended to provide the United States with a dominant position in the Persian Gulf region, and to serve as a springboard for further conquests and assertion of power in the region. It was aimed as much, if not more, at China, Russia, and Europe as at Syria or Iran. It is part of a larger process of asserting dominant U.S. power in south-central Eurasia, in the very heartland of this mega-continent.

But why specifically the Persian Guif/Caspian Sea area, and why now? In part, this is so because this is where most of the world's remaining oil is located-approximately 70 percent of known petroleum reserves. And you have to think of oil not just as a source of fuel-although that's very important-but as a source of power. As U.S. strategists see it, whoever controls Persian Gulf oil controls the world's economy and, therefore, has the ultimate lever over all competing powers.

In September 1990, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Saddam Hussein would acquire a "stranglehold" over the U.S. and world economy if he captured Saudi Arabia's oilfields along with those of Kuwait. This was the main reason, he testified, why the United States must send troops to the area and repel Hussein's forces. He used much the same language in a speech last August to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. I believe that in his mind it is clear that the United States must retain a stranglehold on the world economy by controlling this area. This is just as important, in the administration's view, as retaining America's advantage in military technology.

Ten years from now, China is expected to be totally dependent on the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea area for the oil it will need to sustain its economic growth. Europe, Japan, and South Korea will be in much the same position. Control over the oil spigot may be a somewhat cartoonish image, but it is an image that has motivated U.S. policy since the end of the Cold War and has gained even more prominence in the Bush-Cheney administration.

This region is also the only area in the world where the interests of the putative great powers collide. In the hotly-contested Caspian Sea area, Russia is an expanding power, China is an expanding power, and the United States is an expanding power. There is no other place in the world like this. They are struggling with one another consciously and actively. The Bush administration is determined to dominate this area and to subordinate these two potential challengers and prevent them from forming a common front against the United States. (For more on the emerging power struggle in the Caspian Sea basin, see my Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict [Henry Holt/Metropolitan, 2001].)

What then are the implications of this great realignment of U.S. geopolitical strategy made possible by the Cold War defeat of the Soviet Union?

It is obviously much too early to draw any definitive conclusions on this, but some things can be said. First, Iraq is just the beginning of a U.S. drive into this area. We will see further extensions and expressions of U.S. power in the region. This will provoke resistance and self-conscious opposition to the United States by insurgent groups and regimes. But the United States will also become enmeshed in local conflicts that arose long before America's involvement in the region. For example, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and that between Abkhazia and Georgia--both of which have a long history--will come to impact on U.S. security as the United States becomes dependent on a newly-constructed trans-Caucasian oil pipeline. The Chechen and Afghani wars continue and bracket the region. In all such disputes there is a likelihood of indirect or direct, covert or overt intervention by the United States and the other contending powers.

We are at the beginning, I believe, of a new Cold War in south-central Eurasia, with many possibilities for crises and flare-ups, because nowhere else in the world are Russia and China directly involved and supporting groups and regimes that are opposed to the United States. Even during the height of the Cold War, there wasn't anything quite comparable to this. American troops will be there for a long time, with a high risk of violent engagement and the potential for great human suffering. It appears, then, that the U.S. and international peace movement will have a lot of work ahead!

Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the author, most recently, of Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (Henry Holt/Metropolitan, 2001).

COPYRIGHT 2003 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Guest - 09-15-2004

Must read....
Beating terrorism by beatings â and worse? By Daniel Pipes
Two opposite responses to Muslim violence 

Two terrorist dramas began in Iraq on the same day, Aug. 19, 2004, when jihadists separately seized 12 Nepalese workers and 2 French reporters. Although their fates may end differently â the former were murdered and the latter remain alive in captivity â it is striking how similarly impotent both victim populations felt and how differently they responded.

In the Nepalese case, a group of cooks, janitors, laundry attendants, and other laborers had just crossed the border from Jordan into Iraq when it was kidnapped by Ansar al-Sunna, a violent Islamist group. On Aug. 31, an Islamist website showed a four-minute video of their executions.

Nepalese responded to this atrocity by venting their anger by assaulting the Muslim minority in Nepal. Hundreds of infuriated young men surrounded Katmandu's one mosque on Aug. 31 and heaved rocks at it. Violence escalated the next day, with five thousand demonstrators taking to the street, yelling slogans like "We want revenge," "Punish the Muslims," and "Down with Islam." Some attacked the mosque, broke into it, ransacked it, and set fire to it. Hundreds of Korans were thrown onto the street, and some were burned.

Rioters also looted other identifiably Muslim targets in the capital city, including embassies and airline bureaus belonging to Muslim-majority countries. A Muslim-owned television station and the homes of individual Muslims came under attack. Mobs even sacked the agencies that recruit Nepalese to work in the Middle East.

The violence ended when armored cars and army trucks enforced a shoot-on-sight curfew, leaving two protesters dead and 50 injured, plus 33 police, and doing an estimated US$20 million in property damage.

Thus did a frustrated, enraged, and powerless people overwhelm their authorities and target close-by innocents.

The French response could not have been more different. Threats to murder the two reporters met with a massive governmental effort to save their lives, not by targeting French Muslims but by cultivating them. Paris strenuously pushed local Islamists to condemn the kidnappings, hoping that their voice would convince the terrorists to release the two men.

In the process, Islamic organizations effectively took charge of the country's foreign policy, issuing statements and acting as though they represented the national population. Bertrand Badie of l'Institut d'Ã©tudes politiques in Paris complains that French Muslims became "a sort of substitute for the French foreign ministry."

Likewise on the international level, Paris called in chits for having stood with the Arabs against Israel and with Saddam Hussein against the U.S.-led coalition. French diplomats openly sought the support of terrorist groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

These efforts culminated thirty years of French appeasement and, in the scathing analysis of Norbert Lipszyc, "constituted a major victory for Islamists and terrorists." Lipszyc sees France acting like a dhimmi (a Christian or Jew who accepts Muslim sovereignty and in return is tolerated and protected). "France has publicly confirmed that its dhimmi status, its readiness to submit to Islamist overlords. In return, these have declared that France, dhimmi that it is, deserves protection from terrorist acts."

If the hostages are released, the policy of appeasement at home and abroad will seemingly have been vindicated. But at what a price! As Tony Parkinson writes in Melbourne's Age newspaper, "No democracy should have to jump through these hoops to keep innocent people alive." And jumping those hoops has deep implications.

The historian Bat Ye'or, the first person to comprehend the gradual process of Europe accepting the dhimmi status, observes that this fundamental shift began with the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, when the continent began moving "into the Arab-Islamic sphere of influence, thus breaking the traditional trans-Atlantic solidarity."

Bat Ye'or points to Euro-Arab collaboration now being near-ubiquitous; it is "political, economic, religious and in the transfer of technologies, education, universities, radio, television, press, publishers, and writers unions." She envisions this shift ending in "Eurabia," or Europe under the thumb of Arabia.

Returning to recent events: the abhorrent Nepalese violence reflected an instinct for self-preservation â hit me and I will hit you back. In contrast, the sophisticated French reaction was supine â hit me and I will beg you to stop. If history is a guide, the Nepalese thereby made a repetition of atrocities against themselves less likely. And the French made such a repetition more likely.

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Guest - 09-20-2004

Terrorism and Energy

World Affairs; Washington; Fall 2004; Gawdat Bahgat

Volume: 167, Issue: 2, Pages: 51-58, ISSN: 00438200

[Headnote]
Potential for a Strategic Realignment

In early September 2003, Saudi crown prince Abdullah led a large delegation
in a three-day visit to Russia. The visit was the first top-level contact
between the two countries since 1932, when Prince Faisal, who became king
three decades later, visited Moscow. In 1926, the Soviet Union ironically
became the first nation to establish diplomatic relations with the kingdom.1
The Soviet-Saudi relationship, however, was characterized by mutual
suspicion and antagonism. On the eve of the second World War, the Soviets
withdrew their diplomats from Riyadh. During the cold war, the Saudis led
the conservative Arab countries in resisting Soviet penetration of the
Middle East. Furthermore, Riyadh and Moscow engaged in a proxy war in East
Africa and Afghanistan. The Soviets supported socialist regimes, and the
Saudis funded conservative movements.

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 opened a new chapter in the
Soviet-Saudi relationship. Diplomatic relations were resumed but remained
cool. The strategic changes that followed the terrorist attacks in the
United States on September 11 have provided a common ground for Moscow and
Riyadh. Saudi Arabia and Russia are, respectively, the world's first and
second largest oil producers and exporters. Russia holds the world's largest
natural gas reserves, followed by Iran, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. These large
hydrocarbon reserves can be used as a basis for either cooperation or
rivalry between Moscow and Riyadh. The potential changes in the relations
between the two energy superpowers cannot be understood in isolation from
their relations with the United States. Washington is the world's largest
energy producer, consumer, and net importer.2

Unlike other Middle Eastern states, the Saudi oil industry had been
developed exclusively by American oil companies. For most of the past half
century, Washington has considered Riyadh a reliable source of oil supplies.
Given its substantial reserves, the kingdom has played a decisive role in
maintaining and reinforcing stability in global energy markets. The
September 11 terrorist attacks, in which fifteen out of the nineteen
hijackers were Saudi citizens, drastically challenged the dynamics of the
relations between Washington and Riyadh. In the aftermath of these attacks,
many policymakers, news organizations, and think tanks in the United States
have expressed skepticism toward Saudi Arabia and have called for reducing
dependence on imported oil from the kingdom. Indeed, since the early 2000s,
there has been a new determination to develop and increase oil supplies from
non-Middle Eastern suppliers in West Africa, Latin America, Canada, the
Caspian region, and Russia.

In Russia, where production and exports have risen rapidly since the late
1990s, officials moved quickly to offer an alternative reliable source of
oil. In a summit meeting in May 2002, President George W. Bush and President
Vladimir Putin signed an agreement to forge an "energy partnership" between
the two nations. Since then, American policymakers and oil executives have
met with their Russian counterparts to further consolidate their
cooperation.

Despite this growing U.S.-Russian cooperation, Saudi Arabia has maintained
its status as a major oil exporter Io the United States, along with Canada,
Mexico, and Venezuela. Still, the Saudi crown prince's visit to Moscow can
be seen as an attempt to counter any effort to sideline the kingdom and to
promote cooperation and contain rivalry with Russia. In this article, I
examine the relations between Washington and Riyadh in the aftermath of
September 11. I argue that the growing mistrust between the world's largest
oil importer (the United States) and the world's largest exporter (Saudi
Arabia) has led the former to try to forge a partnership with the world's
second largest exporter (Russia). To maintain its leading share in the U.S.
oil market and its status as the world's dominant oil power, Riyadh has
sought to coordinate its oil policy with Moscow and to explore the
opportunities for cooperation between the two nations in natural gas. The
study suggests that energy policy should not be seen in zero-sum terms. In
the final analysis, more oil and gas from Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other
producers would enhance global energy security.

U.S.-SAUDI RELATIONS AFTER SEPTEMBER 11

Beginning with the revelations that Saudi citizens were involved in the
September 11 attacks, the kingdom has come under public and congressional
suspicion as a breeding ground for terrorism. Several American news
organizations, members of Congress, and influential think tanks have accused
the Saudi government of supporting terrorism and tolerating a "Jihadist"
culture. In other words, the argument goes, fiery anti-Americanism preaching
in Saudi mosques and an educational system that promotes hate against the
United States and the West are largely unopposed by the Saudi authorities.

On the other hand, Saudi officials have categorically denied any role in
supporting terrorism either directly or indirectly. Rather, they argue that
Osama bin Laden intentionally chose Saudi citizens to participate in the
terrorist attacks to sabotage and weaken the close Saudi-American relations.
In addition, the Saudis claim that their country is a victim of terrorism.
In other words, the argument continues, Saudi Arabia and the United States
are in the same boat, confronting a mutual enemy. The suicide car bombings
of residential compounds in Riyadh that killed thirty-four people, including
nine assailants, in May 2003 have further strengthened the Saudi argument.
Following these attacks, Saudi officials have become more forthcoming in
combating terrorism and cooperating with the United States. In August 2003,
Riyadh agreed to set up a joint task force with Washington that allows U.S.
law enforcement officials to be stationed in the kingdom to target
individuals suspected of funneling money to al Qaeda and other terrorist
organizations.3 The Saudi government also issued a ban on cash contributions
in local mosques and removed donation boxes for charities from shopping
malls. In addition, several hundred clerics were fired and suspended for
preaching intolerance.4 Finally, the Council of Senior Clerics, Saudi
Arabia's highest religious body, has strongly condemned violence by Islamic
militants and has deemed helping terrorists as "one of the greatest sins."
In a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, the council said
that participating in terrorist acts is "a dangerous criminal act punishable
by Islamic law."^

Alienated by these accusations and the ramifications of anti-Muslim
statements made by prominent American religious leaders and concerned about
their investment in the United States and the possibility of the U.S.
government freezing their assets, some Saudis withdrew billions of dollars
from American markets. The total funds withdrawn by individual investors,
including members of the royal family, is estimated to be more than $200
billion.6 The Saudi funds are invested in private equity, stock and bond
markets, and real estate.

In addition, the long-standing military cooperation between Saudi Arabia and
the United States was affected by the strain in relations. Despite some
Saudi reservations about the United States using military bases and
facilities in the 2003 war in Iraq, the royal family eventually agreed to
every U.S. request for military and logistical support, including use of the
operations center and the staging of special operations forces from bases in
the kingdom.7 Despite this cooperation, the Saudis remained highly sensitive
about the presence of U.S. military forces in the kingdom, both before and
after the war in Iraq, which was unpopular among the Saudi people. To
relieve internal political pressure on the royal family, officials from the
two countries agreed to end military operations in Saudi Arabia and remove
almost all U.S. forces to the al-Udeid air base in neighboring Qatar. This
departure, however, does not mean a termination of security cooperation
between Washington and Riyadh; the United States is still committed to the
defense of the kingdom.

Interestingly, the mutual mistrust and skepticism that have characterized
U.S.-Saudi relations since September 11 had little, if any, impact on the
oil links between the two countries. Although the terrorist attacks did not
change the fact that Saudi Arabia holds one-fourth of the world's proven
reserves and is the world's largest producer and exporter, the attacks did
change many Americans' perceptions of the kingdom. The central concern that
has been raised in the United States is that if Saudi Arabia is unreliable
as an ally in the fight against terrorism, it also may be unreliable as an
ally in providing energy security.8 Guided by this assumption, efforts have
been made to reduce U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil, particularly that
of Saudi Arabia.

The record of the past half century, however, proves that the kingdom has
been a reliable supplier of oil to the United States and other importers.
Since oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia in the late 1930s, Riyadh has
participated in only one major oil disruption, the Arab oil embargo of
1973-74. The Saudis learned their lesson, and since the mid-1970s, they have
sought to promote stability and moderation in the oil markets. Saudi Arabia
noticeably took the lead in calming international markets in the early
200Os. In the past few years, there have been major political crises in and
disruption of supplies from three major oil-producing countries-Nigeria,
Venezuela, and Iraq. In response, Saudi Arabia boosted its production to
prevent any shortage of oil and rising of prices. In early 2003, the kingdom
added 1.6 million barrels per day (b/d) to its production, which reached 9.5
million b/d, the highest level in decades.9 This deliberate Saudi policy of
keeping oil markets well supplied allowed the Bush administration to avoid
releasing emergency stockpiles from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) in
preparation for the war.

These strains in U.S.-Saudi relations since September 11 raise concern about
the six-decade-long unofficial alliance between the two countries. Will they
remain allies? In the long term, it seems that the main foundations of their
cooperation-oil and security-are still sound. The relation between the two
nations has always been built on mutual interests, not shared values. Riyadh
is committed to the non-interruption of oil supplies and the stability of
prices and markets. On the other hand, despite the withdrawal of U.S. troops
from Saudi Arabia, Washington is still committed to defending the kingdom
from any foreign threat. The future of the U.S.-Saudi alliance also depends
on what happens in Iraq. Given its size, population, and hydrocarbon
resources, changes in Iraq will substantially alter the strategic landscape
in the Persian Gulf and the entire Middle East.

In the short term, the marriage of convenience between Washington and Riyadh
seems to have become a dysfunctional one. The two nations continue to have
important overlapping interests on oil and regional security questions, but
they seem to disagree on how to fight terrorism. A lack of trust in Saudi
policy has convinced U.S. officials to seek an energy partnership with
Russia. Some policymakers in Washington hope that Russia can replace the
Middle East as the major source of oil supplies to global markets. Partly to
offset the American move and to protect its own economic and strategic
interests, Saudi Arabia also turned to Russia. Oil and natural gas are the
main areas of cooperation and conflict between Moscow and Riyadh.

MOSCOW AND RIYADH: RIVALRY IN OIL POLICY

In 1988, the Soviet Union's oil production reached a peak of 12.5 million
b/d, most of which came from Russia.10 Such high production levels stemmed
largely from the exploitation of new petroleum reserves discovered in
Western Siberia. With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the
collapse of the state planning system, the oil industry was thrown into
disarray, and production fell to only six million b/d in 1996." A turnaround
in Russian oil output began in 1999, partly because of rising world oil
prices and partly because of new financial policy, particularly the
devaluation of the ruble. Since then, production has surged, and major
Russian oil companies compete with Western oil companies throughout the
world as equals.

This recovery of Russia's oil industry and its impressive rising production
have given the country tremendous leverage in global oil markets. Within
this context, the Saudi crown prince visited Moscow, and the two nations
signed a five-year agreement that called for bilateral cooperation to ensure
stability in the global oil markets. This agreement is the first formal
recognition of a fragile alliance between Moscow and Riyadh, which has kept
oil prices high since the late 1990s.

Despite serious efforts to diversify their economies, both Russia and Saudi
Arabia are heavily dependent on oil revenues and, subsequently, are
dangerously vulnerable to the fluctuation of oil prices.12 oil revenues
account for critical shares in the total export earnings, government
revenues, and overall GDP in both states. The effects of oil price
fluctuations on oil-producing countries vary greatly, depending on many
factors. For instance, countries with large populations and relatively small
oil reserves tend to favor a strategy of short-term revenue maximization,
and those with small populations and large oil reserves tend to favor a
strategy of long-term revenue maximization. Similarly, for relatively
high-cost oil producers, low oil prices can turn many oil fields from
economical to uneconomical in a short period of time, and high oil prices
tend to encourage oil exploration and production in relatively expensive
areas. On the other hand, for low-cost producers the marginal cost of
producing each additional barrel of oil is relatively low, and, therefore,
it often remains economical to produce oil from these countries. They
generally are in stronger positions to weather price declines.13

Despite these differences between Moscow and Riyadh regarding their oil
strategies, the two countries benefit from keeping prices at a certain level
(roughly between twenty-five and thirty dollars). Too-high prices tend to
encourage conservation and investments in developing other sources of energy
in consuming countries.14 Saudi Arabia and Russia, however, have not found
the right mechanism to coordinate their production policies and prevent
prices from falling. Oil prices, like that of any other commodity, are
subject to the law of supply and demand. For several decades, Saudi Arabia
has viewed OPEC as the appropriate vehicle to maintain stability in global
oil markets, bringing billions of dollars in oil revenues without pushing
the world over the brink into recession. As Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi
argues, "OPEC still holds about two-thirds of global oil reserves, moves
half the exports, and maintains the bulk of the world's spare production
capacity."15 The Saudis, in cooperation with other OPEC members, learned
their lesson from the 1970s and have kept oil prices low enough to keep the
wheels of the world running but high enough for them to make a healthy
return.

The "right" price for a barrel of oil is seen as a balance between two
opposing factors: maximizing the profit and defending the market share. To
maintain this balance and prevent a decline in oil prices, OPEC members, led
by Saudi Arabia, have sought to avoid Hooding the market with their oil.
Russia, a non-OPEC producer, has produced and exported more of its oil since
the late 1990s. This surge in Russia's share in global oil markets is at the
expense of OPEC. In other words, OPEC's deliberate policy of reduced
production benefits Russia by keeping prices high and enabling Moscow to
sell more of its oil. Thus, the Russians stand to gain the most if they
remain separate from OPEC but sell oil at OPEC-boosted prices. It is no
wonder that a Russian analyst wrote, "The Russian oil companies should be
praying for the survival of OPEC in order to avoid the supply free-for-all
and the price collapse that would be [the] inevitable legacy of its
destruction."16

As a non-OPEC oil producer, Russia is not obligated to abide by any quota
system. Indeed, since (he late 1990s, most of the increase in non-OPEC
production has come from Russia. This expansion of Russia's share in global
oil markets has posed a serious challenge to OPEC's ability to raise oil
prices through production cuts by increasing the overall float of crude oil
available in the oil markets. In response, Saudi Arabia and other OPEC
members have sought Moscow's cooperation. The goal was to restrain
production to a certain level to prevent a collapse of oil prices. In late
2001, Russian producers argued against cooperating with OPEC. Their argument
was based on two reasons. First, they could not simply turn their spigots on
and off like Saudi Arabia because of their investments in frozen Siberian
oil fields. second, they wanted to recover market shares lost since the
demise of the Soviet Union. This disagreement between OPEC and Russia led to
threats of a price war. In the end, the Russian government decided to make a
show of cooperation by offering to match OPEC actions with what was supposed
to be a 5 percent curb on exports. In other words, the Russian government
agreed to an oil export cut of 150,000 b/d in the first quarter of 2002,
following suit with other non-OPEC members such as Mexico, Oman, Norway, and
Angola. Despite the Russian government's pledged oil output cut, Russian oil
exports actually increased in the first quarter of 2002. Government-imposed
export tariffs caused a glut of crude oil on the Russian market, causing a
price collapse. Russian oil companies then sent their crude oil to Russian
refineries, which led to an increase in oil product exports and a surplus of
refined products on the market. Furthermore, Russian oil companies increased
their crude oil exports as world oil prices climbed, and Russia formally
abandoned its stated export cuts as of July 1, 2002.17

It is important to point out that even if the Russian government wanted to
cooperate with OPEC, it would have had to overcome several hurdles. First,
Russia's oil industry has been largely privatized since the early 1990s. In
2003, two major mergers were announced: Tyumen oil Company (TNK) with
British Petroleum (BP) and Yukos with Sibneft.18 Prior to these mergers, the
Russian oil industry was dominated by five companies: Yukos, LUKoil,
Surgutneftegaz, TNK, and Sibneft. Combined, these companies accounted for
roughly 70 percent of the country's oil production. The other 30 percent
belonged to the country's roughly one hundred fifty small- to medium-size
oil producers.19 second, unless Russian companies add to their reserves,
further production increases may prove harder to achieve. Russian oil fields
have been rapidly depleted. Indeed, Russia's rate of oil production is
exceeding its rate of discovery of new reserves by a significant margin.
Furthermore, the country's share of the world's proven reserves (5.7
percent) is limited compared with that of Saudi Arabia (25.0 percent).20

Third, the continuation of the resurgence in oil production and exports
depends on huge exploration and development projects in arctic and far
eastern frontiers. Although Russia has attracted domestic and foreign
investment to rich opportunities in existing fields, its record with larger
and riskier frontier projects is spotty.21 Moscow is much more hospitable
than Riyadh to foreign capital, but relatively little foreign investment in
the Russian oil industry has been made. Fourth, one of the largest factors
preventing the rapid development of Russian energy exports is its
transportation network. This network was largely built during the Soviet era
to supply Soviet republics with their oil and natural gas needs. Shipments
to new markets require the construction of huge pipelines and terminals,
which will take several years and billions of dollars. Export pipelines are
currently operating at full capacity. In addition, the continuing feud
between independent oil producers and the Russian state pipeline monopoly
Transneft needs to be resolved to expand the country's export capacity.

Fifth, most Russian crude deliveries currently go to European refineries
from ports on the Black or Baltic seas. Indeed, Russia, along with Norway
and Saudi Arabia, is a major oil supplier to European markets. In the early
2000s, Russian oil companies sought to ship oil to North America. The
country, however, has no deepwater ports capable of loading the type of
large tanker that would be required to make the long journey across the
Atlantic. In 2003, major Russian oil companies agreed to conduct feasibility
studies for a new pipeline and deepwater tanker terminal in Murmansk on the
Barents Sea. For geographic reasons, Europe is more likely than the United
States to remain an important energy partner for Russia, at least in the
foreseeable future.

To sum up, since the late 1990s, Russia has benefited significantly from
OPEC's policy of keeping its production restrained. The trouble is that
although OPEC's power to hold prices up may be limited, its power to push
prices lower remains awesome. Production costs are much higher in Russia
than in Saudi Arabia and most other OPEC member countries. Saudi Arabia can
make money at twelve dollars per barrel, but production becomes unprofitable
for Russian companies at this low price, and private-sector Russian firms
are unlikely to want to get that close to the margin.22 Cooperation in
oil-pricing policy would serve the interests of both giant producers.

MOSCOW AND RIYADH: POTENTIAL COOPERATION IN NATURAL GAS POLICY

For the past several years, natural gas has been the fastest growing source
of primary energy in the world because of its environmental and economic
advantages.23 For several decades, the Saudi authority has focused its
attention on developing the kingdom's huge oil reserves, paying little
attention to its natural gas deposits. Since the early 1980s, however, there
has been a growing interest in gas exploration and development. Saudi
Arabia's Master Gas System, which started in 1982, has sought to increase
domestic and foreign investment to meet the country's growing demand.24
Since the 1990s, natural gas production and consumption have risen to meet
the kingdom's growing needs in power generation, petrochemicals manufacture,
and seawater desalination. In line with this interest in natural gas, Saudi
Arabia's proven reserves of the fuel have increased by more than 94 percent
over the past two decades.25 Furthermore, many experts believe that the full
potential of the kingdom's gas resources remains underexplored and unused.
Vast reserves of gas are likely to be discovered in many parts of the
kingdom.

The increasing official interest in boosting the kingdom's natural gas
production was a major reason for an important policy dubbed the Saudi Gas
Initiative (SGI). In September 1998, Crown Prince Abdullah met with senior
executives from several American oil companies and asked them to submit
recommendations and suggestions to him about the role that their companies
could play in the exploration and development of both existing and new oil
and gas fields. In the following years, the Saudi government and
representatives of international companies negotiated the conditions and
shape of their cooperation. In May 2001, the two sides signed a preliminary
agreement to develop three "core ventures." These were:

core venture 1, South Ghawar: ExxonMobil (35 percent), Shell (25 percent),
BP (25 percent), and Phillips (15 percent);

core venture 2, Red Sea: ExxonMobil (60 percent), Marathon (20 percent), and
Occidental (20 percent); and

core venture 3, Shaybah: Shell (40 percent), Total (30 percent), and Conoco
(30 percent).26

The SGI had promised to be the first major reopening of Saudi Arabia's
upstream hydrocarbon sector to foreign investment since nationalization in
the 1970s. However, after two years of intense negotiations, the two sides
could not reach an agreement, and the whole scheme was canceled in June
2003. A major breaking point was the disagreement over the rates of return:
International companies wanted a much higher rate than the Saudi government
was willing to offer.

It is important to highlight three factors that might have influenced the
negotiation, particularly in the final months. First, the SGI was initially
proposed under conditions of economic and financial crisis because of low
oil prices in 1998. The recourse to foreign investors was meant to free some
scarce capital in government hands for alternative uses. Since then, oil
prices have recovered, and the Saudi government's sense of a cash crisis has
consequently faded. second, some analysts have speculated that the Saudis
were worried about the political fallout they might have suffered at home
and with Arab neighbors if the contracts, mainly with U.S.-based oil
companies, were approved amid the current heightened diplomatic and military
tensions in the Middle East.27 Third, some analysts argued that
international companies might have been emboldened by the potential
investment opportunities in neighboring Iraq and, as a result, refused to
compromise and accept the Saudi offers. This argument, however, is flawed
for two reasons: First, the negotiations between the Saudis and
international companies were in trouble long before the war in Iraq; second,
the current security situation and political instability in Iraq suggest
that it will be many years before large investment opportunities can
materialize in that country.

The cancellation of these three core ventures, however, has not stopped the
Saudis from pursuing foreign investment to develop their natural gas
reserves. In July 2003, Royal Dutch/Shell, the Anglo-Dutch energy group, and
Total, of France, signed a deal with Saudi Arabia28 to search and develop
gas reserves in two hundred thousand square kilometers in the southeast of
the Empty Quarter desert.29 The project, expected to involve an investment
of about $2 billion, is a scaled-down version of an earlier plan for the
companies to develop gas in Shaybah (core venture 3).3<) This project is
smaller than the vast deals often associated with Shell and Total, two of
the world's top oil companies, but it gives them a key foothold in the
kingdom with its vast hydrocarbon resources.

This deal with Shell and Total is considered the first step in an ambitious
Saudi plan to forge a partnership with international companies. Several days
after signing the agreement with the two European firms, the kingdom invited
forty energy companies to a meeting in London to hear the terms and
conditions that it offered in exchange for exploring, extracting, and
producing its natural gas. Al-Naimi promised a progressive fiscal regime and
confirmed his government's commitment to creating an attractive environment
for private and foreign investment.31 In line with this policy, Saudi Arabia
awarded an additional three contracts to international oil companies to
explore for natural gas in January 2004. The contracts were awarded to
Russia's OAO LUKoil, China's Sinopec International Petroleum Exploration and
Production Corp, and Italy's ENI SPA.32 Any commercial quantities of gas
found will be used in Saudi Arabian petrochemical plants and for power
generation and water desalination.

These opportunities to invest in Saudi Arabia's natural gas sector provide a
sound foundation for a partnership with Russia, which contains almost
one-third of the world's natural-gas proven reserves and is the world's
largest producer and exporter. Gazprom, the state-run natural-gas monopoly,
produces most of Russia's natural gas and contributes a significant share of
public revenues. Unlike oil, Russia's natural gas production has not surged
in recent years. Gazprom, which has larger gas reserves and production than
any other company in the world, faces a major problem. Much of its huge gas
reserves are in extremely hostile environments, such as Siberia, or beneath
the frozen waters of the Arctic oceans,33 which lack the infrastructure to
deliver the natural gas to consumers and will require much higher levels of
investment. These harsh conditions make it more difficult to expand domestic
production. Thus, Gazprom and other Russian oil companies have been active
in working with other natural gas producers to develop their deposits. In
the past several years, the Russian giants have been involved in gas
projects in Turkmenistan, Iran, and many other gas-producing countries.
Partnership with Russian oil and natural gas companies is particularly
attractive given these companies' extensive expertise in natural gas
industry. Cooperation between Russia and Saudi Arabia in developing the
kingdom's gas deposits will serve the interests of the two countries.

CONCLUSION: TERRORISM AND ENERGY

The summit meeting between the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia and the
Russian president in early September 2003 has opened a new chapter in the
relations between the two energy superpowers. It will take some time to
fully assess the implications of a Russian-Saudi dialogue on the geopolitics
of energy. Still, preliminary conclusions can be drawn. First, opening the
lines of communication between Russia and Saudi Arabia at the highest level
will serve the political interests of the two nations. Moscow is eager to
regain the influence it had in the Middle East during the Soviet era.
Furthermore, close ties with Saudi Arabia would improve Russia's standing in
the Islamic world.34 Meanwhile, given the American allegations against the
kingdom and the talks by some in Washington about the need for a "regime
change" in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia has shown a greater interest in energizing
and developing its relations with other global powers such as Russia.

second, an important outcome of the Russian-Saudi summit was the agreement
to set up a working group to coordinate their efforts against terrorism. For
several years, some Russian officials have suspected that the Chechen rebels
receive funding from Saudi charities.35 Saudi leaders are eager to assure
Russia and the rest of the world that the kingdom has no ties with the war
in Chechnya and that it does not fund or endorse terrorism. An important
step in this direction was a visit to Saudi Arabia by Ahmad Kadyrov, the
pro-Moscow president of Chechnya, in January 2004. The trip boosted
Kadyrov's standing in the Muslim world. In addition to holding talks on
building up Chechnya's oil sector and hosting an Islamic conference in
Moscow, Kadyrov36 secured a pledge from Riyadh to sever suspected financial
links between Saudi charitable groups and rebel fighters in Chechnya. The
business climate between Moscow and Riyadh is likely to improve with their
joint efforts to eradicate terrorism.

Third, given Russia's huge natural gas reserves and its status as the
world's largest producer and exporter, its greatest influence would be in
gas rather than oil. Gas exploration and development can serve as the
foundation for a Russian-Saudi partnership. The kingdom has huge
underexplored and unused gas deposits, and Russia has the technological
skills and expertise to develop them. The renewed Saudi efforts to invite
foreign investment to the natural gas sector suggest that there are many
business opportunities for Gazprom and other Russian companies in the
kingdom.

Fourth, the possibility of Russian-Saudi cooperation in the oil sector is
remote. The two countries compete with each other. Moscow's expanding market
share in recent years has been at the expense of Saudi Arabia and other OPEC
members. Furthermore, since the early 200Os, Russian oil companies have
sought a share of the U.S. market, again in competition with Saudi Arabia.
In the short term, the surge of Russian production gives Moscow substantial
leverage. But, in the long term, Russia's large production is unsustainable.
The country simply does not have the reserves to sustain such high levels of
production and export. At the end of the day, oil has to come from where it
is available. Saudi Arabia has about onefourth of the world's reserves,
Saudi oil is the cheapest to produce, and the kingdom enjoys
well-established access to global markets. Finally, the kingdom has the
world's largest spare capacity, which Riyadh has used effectively to counter
any possibility of disruption.

Fifth, global energy security should not be seen as importing more oil from
Russia and reducing dependence on Saudi Arabia. The 2003 war in Iraq has
demonstrated that the risks of oil dependence on the Middle East have been
exaggerated; there was no oil disruption. The region's vast oil holdings
overshadow its history of political instability. Diversification is the
first principle of energy security. More oil from Russia, the Caspian Sea,
Latin America, and West Africa would enhance global energy security.
[Sidebar]

OPEC's deliberate policy of reduced production benefits Russia by keeping
prices high and enabling Moscow to sell more of its oil.

[Footnote]
NOTES
1. William B. Quandt, Saudi Arabia in the 1980s: Foreign Policy, security,
and oil (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1981), 65.
2. Energy Information Administration, "Country Profile: United States of
America," http://www.eia. doe.gov/.
3. Philip Shenon, "U.S. Agents to Join Saudis in Terror Financing Inquiry,"
New York Times, August 27, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/.
4. James Dao, "Saudis Fire Clerics Who Preached Intolerance," New York
Times, June 13, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/.
5. Associated Press, "Senior Saudi Clerics Condemn Terrorists," Washington
Post, August 17, 2003, http://www.washingtonpost.com/.
6. Roula Khalaf, "Saudis Withdraw Billions of Dollars from US," Financial
Times, August 20, 2002, http://www.ft.com/.
7. Vernon Loeb, "U.S. Withdrawing Forces from Saudi Arabia," Washington
Post, April 29, 2003, http://www.washingtonpost.com/.
8. Vahan Zanoyan, "Global Energy security," Middle East Economic Survey 46,
no. 15 (April 14, 2003), http://www.mees.com/.
9. Energy Information Administration, "Country Analysis Briefs: OPEC,"
http://www.eia.doe.gov/.
10. Energy Information Administration, "Country Profile: Russia,"
http://www.eia.doe.gov/.
11. Dougla Stinemetz, "Russian oil sector Rebound under Full Swing," oil and
Gas Journal 101, no. 22 (June 2, 2003): 20-31; see p. 20.
12. Generally, the Russian economy is more diversified than that of Saudi
Arabia.
13. Energy Information Administration, "oil Prices and Revenues: An Economic
Analysis," http://www.eia.doe.gov/.
14. As the famous saying goes, "Keeping prices high is like killing the
goose laying the golden eggs for its meat."
15. AIi al-Naimi, "Producer-Consumer Dialogue," Middle East Economic Survey
45, no. 39 (September 30, 2002), http://www.mees.com/.
16. Chris Weafer, "OPEC, Russia and Iraq," Moscow Times, September 25, 2002,
http://www. thcmoscowtimes.com/.
17. Energy Information Administration, "Russia: Oil and Natural Gas
Exports," http://www.eia.doc. gov/.
18. The proposed merger between Yukos and Sibneft was derailed in late 2003
following the arrest of Yukos ehief executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
19. Energy Information Administration, "Country Profile: Russia,"
http://www.eia.doe.gov/.
20. British Petroleum, BP Statistical Review of World Energy (London:
British Petroleum, 2003), 4.
21. "Editorial: The oil Superpowers," oil and Gas Journal 100, no. 42
(October 14, 2002): 17.
22. "Russian Roulette," Petroleum. Economist 68, no. 12 (December 2001):
2-3.
23. Energy Information Administration, International Energy Outlook
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2003), 3.
24. Gawdat Bahgat, "The Geopolitics of Natural Gas in Asia," OPEC Review 25,
no. 3 (September 2001): 273-90; see p. 278.
25. Abdullah M. Aitani, "Big Growth Ahead seen for Saudi Gas Utilization,"
oil and Gas Journal \ 00, no. 30 (July 29, 2002): 20-27; see p. 21.
26. Energy Information Administration, "Country Profile: Saudi Arabia,"
http://www.eia.doe.gov/.
27. Maureen Lorenzetti, "US Companies: Saudi Gas Negotiations at Critical
Stage," oil and Gas Journal 100, no. 38 (September 16, 2002): 26-28; see p.
26.
28. Shell will have 40 percent of the project, and Total and the state firm
Saudi Aramco will have 30 percent each.
29. Carola Hoyos, "oil States to Unlock Doors for Foreigners," Financial
Times, July 22, 2003, http://www.ft.com/.
30. BBC News, "oil Firms Win Landmark Saudi Deal," July 16, 2003,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/.
31. Carola Hoyos, "Saudis to Open Energy sector," Financial Times, July 23,
2003, http://www.ft.com/.
32. "Saudi Arabia," oil and Gas Journal 102, no. 5 (February 2, 2004): 8-9.
33. Isabel Gorst, "Nice Reserves-Shame About the Location," Petroleum
Economist 69, no. 9 (September 2002): 16-17; see p. 16.
34. In mid-2003, some Russian officials talked about joining the
Organization of Islamic Conference as observers.
35. Some allegations were made that the Chechen gunmen who seized a Moscow
theater in October 2002 made telephone calls to Saudi Arabia during the
siege.
36. In May 2004, Kadyrov was assassinated.

[Author note]
Gawdat Baligat is a professor of political science and the director of the
Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Copyright HELDREF PUBLICATIONS Fall 2004

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Guest - 09-20-2004

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Cyber-nightmare
Robert Lenzner Nathan Vardi, 09.20.04

QUOTEFour years ago al Qaeda operatives were taking flying lessons. Today they are honing a new skill: hacking. How much damage could a cyberterrorist do to an electric grid or the Internet? We don't know yet.

Jason Larsen is a master hacker. He sports the de rigueur black shirt, black slacks, glasses and ponytail. A 31-year-old programmer at the secretive Idaho National Engineering & Environmental Laboratory in Idaho Falls, he obsesses about the ways in which a terrorist intruder might go online and trip circuit breakers on the electrical grid or open valves at chemical storage tanks.

"I could easily turn off the power in a couple dozen cities by the end of the day," says Larsen. He has hacked into the automated control systems at several big utilities; usually it takes him all of a week.

Experts like Larsen make a living by stoking cyberfear in the rest of us. They say that terrorists could shut down chunks of the Internet, the phone system or the electric grid by hacking into computers. We're not spending enough on computer security, they say, and the consequences could be devastating.

These experts have an ax to grind. But they might be right. As the Internet spread like a virus in the 1990s, hundreds of utilities, chemical factories, wastewater plants and the like went online to enable remote monitoring and more instant communications. Yet their antiquated control systems lack protection against digital intrusion, providing an easy target.

The most destructive terrorist act in history began with Islamic radicals going to flight school and ended when they turned airliners into flying bombs. As the third anniversary of Sept. 11 passes, the next threat could be aNet threat:Solid evidence shows that al Qaeda agents and other terrorists are trying to attain the online skills needed to wage cyberwar. Terrorists could use the Internet to disrupt the communications systems of the military's Pacific Command or turn off the lights in Los Angeles or Chicago; they could open the massive floodgates of Arizona's Roosevelt Dam or disable huge parts of the World Wide Web.

Yet in the U.S. and elsewhere no urgent crusade has emerged to fix the flaws. The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, signed last year by President Bush, proposes a sweeping overhaul of U.S. networks. In it the White House's former counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, urged a wholesale reboot of government computer systems and new security rules for electric utilities and Internet access providers. But few of his proposals have been adopted, Clarke says. "All the regulated industries--the electric utilities, the gas pipelines and oil refineries, the water and transportation systems--are still vulnerable to cyberattack."

Washington lacks any consensus on what to do about the Net threat--or whether it even constitutes a threat. "The idea that hackers are going to bring the nation to its knees is too far-fetched a scenario to be taken seriously," asserts James Lewis, a former State Department and Commerce Department official. He has dismissed cyberterror in reports for the nonpartisan Center for Strategic & International Studies.

Patching the holes could easily cost billions of dollars. Some 80% of the nation's infrastructure is owned by corporations, but government and business can't even agree on who should cover the cost. "We haven't developed a comprehensive strategy for addressing this weakness in our critical infrastructure," says Congressman Adam Putnam (Republican-Florida), who sits on a subcommittee on tech issues. "America must not be so focused on preventing physical attacks that we leave our cyber-backdoor wide open and unattended. The tragedy of 9/11 has taught us that we must imagine the unimaginable."

The unimaginable is looking ever more plausible. The FBI says the cyberterrorism threat to the U.S. is "rapidly expanding." "Terrorist groups have shown a clear interest in developing basic hacking tools, and the FBI predicts that terrorist groups will either develop or hire hackers," Keith Lourdeau, an FBI deputy assistant director, told the U.S. Senate earlier this year. Material found in Afghanistan by U.S. forces in 2001 showed that al Qaeda was trying to develop cyberterrorists, says John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School.

Computer systems that control the water supply and wastewater systems "have been the targets of probing by al Qaeda terrorists," says Representative Putnam, who cites U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Unwanted intrusions have occurred in some 50 incidents over the past ten years to automated systems that control important physical equipment through the Net, says Joseph Weiss, a security consultant in San Jose, California. "Not enough people are taking this seriously," he laments.

Al Qaeda previously has used the Net to circulate propaganda and communicate with operatives. The terror alert in August, detailing al Qaeda plans to attack financial institutions inNew York and New Jersey, came after the arrest in Pakistan of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a computer engineer. Elsewhere, Abu Anas al-Liby, one of al Qaeda's ranking computer experts, trained agents in computer surveillance techniques, according to testimony in 2001 in the Nairobi embassy bombing trial.

For now most e-jihadists can barely even mess up an obscure Web site, but they are learning. Some two dozen online terrorist discussion groups and Arabic-language hacking forums are now tracked online, up from only four a year ago, says IDefense, a Reston, Virginia firm. IDefense spotted jihadist hackers unsuccessfully trying to take down the Bank of Israel's Web site (see box, p. 110).

Hacking tools and talent are readily available online. "If al Qaeda can't do it, they can go buy it," says John Watters, IDefense's chief. Last year at a hacking conference in Birmingham, U.K., a techie presented a detailed paper on cracking into water systems. The U.S. National Security Agency says foreign governments already have developed such computer attack capabilities. U.S. officials believe Iran, North Korea, Russia and China have trained hackers in Internet warfare.

U.S. military computer networks have proved easy to penetrate. In 1998 hackers started using stealthlike attacks that, over several years, cracked open Pentagon computers and downloaded thousands of sensitive technical files. A federal investigation, dubbed Moonlight Maze, traced the intrusions back to dial-up Internet connections near Moscow. The hackers have never been caught.

Online, America's aching Achilles' heel is the wide-open automated control systems that run the nation's networks for electricity, water, gas, oil and more. The control systems were designed years ago when each utility was an island, without any thought given to bulletproofing against online intrusion once everything was linked together.

"There is potential vulnerability throughout industry where control systems are connected to the Internet," says Clarke, the former White House head of counterterrorism. Yet the feds often aren't even told when an online event has affected some control system; no mechanism has been developed to report such incidents.

Clarke is, admittedly, a grandstander who wrote a tell-all book and made headlines questioning the Bush Administration's urgency in responding to the terrorism threat. But even the staid GAO has weighed in similarly, underscoring the danger to "our nation's critical infrastructure."

"Control systems can be vulnerable to a variety of types of cyberattacks that could have devastating consequences--such as endangering public health and safety," warns a report issued in March by the GAO (which now stands for Government Accountability, rather than General Accounting, Office).

Utilities are particularly defenseless. A total 270 utilities that generate 80% of the nation's electricity use control systems that are ripe for hacking, according to research by Ted G. Lewis for the Navy Postgraduate School. "We have visited 15 utility companies and been able to penetrate all of them," says Brian Ahern, chief executive of Verano, a provider of cyberdefense systems for utilities.

Microsoft's software is both ubiquitous and vulnerable. In January 2003 the Microsoft SQL Server worm, known as Slammer, infected a private computer network at David-Besse nuclear power plant in Oak Harbor, Ohio, disabling a safety monitoring system for nearly five hours, says the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The dormant plant's process computer failed, and it took six hours to get it up and running again. At another utility, in an undisclosed city, Slammer downed the computer network controlling vital equipment. Other times the attacks are more personal:In 2000 a discontented consultant, rejected for a job at a water treatment plant in Australia, remotely hacked into a sewage treatment system and released 264,000 gallons of raw sewage into rivers and parks.

Many of these systems are known as Scada, for Supervisory Control & Data Acquisition, and are made up of computers, networks and sensors that control industrial activity over large geographic areas. Another kind of system, known as DCS, or Distributed Control Systems, is often used in isolated areas such as a chemical plant.

Most control systems lack any encryption, and they have proved simple to manipulate once a hacker gets inside. In a recent test Steven Schaeffer, a software engineer at the Idaho National Engineering & Environmental Laboratory with no Scada experience, easily figured out how to outsmart a General Electric Scada system running a mock utility. It took Schaeffer only five months to analyze the setup and write code that would let him, from his laptop, tell the Scada system to open and close enough breakers to bring down the mock utility--without letting the legitimate operator see what was going on.

"What if this was a chemical plant? You want to start a Bhopal incident?" Schaeffer asks, referring to the accidental chemical leak at a Union Carbide plant in India that killed 3,800 people in 1984. "It's fairly trivial to do this. Anyone with some software experience can."

The Internet has brought these plants online and made them more vulnerable, and the foundation of the Net itself is susceptible to attack, too. "Someday someone will find a packet of death to bring down the Internet," warns Ken J. Silva, former National Security Agency official now at VeriSign, the main operator of the Internet-address database that directs billions of digital packets around the world every day.

Some weaknesses, already well-known to hackers, foreign governments and, most likely, jihadists, have been exposed in two areas: the Domain Name System that VeriSign oversees and the Border Gateway Protocol, which governs how Internet service providers and large networks exchange routing information. The millions of computers and Web sites linked to the Net are identified by distinct serial numbers; the DNS converts these tags into identifiable Web addresses. The DNSrides on top-level servers around the world, which in turn are guided by the true pillars of the Internet:13 root servers, most of them run by volunteers.

Often these big servers are poorly secured. In 2002 they were flooded with traffic from tens of thousands of infected computers in an unsolved "distributed denial of service" attack. It lasted for about an hour and took down 9 root servers; had all 13 gone down, the entire Internet might have crashed for hours or days.

Richard Clarke believes a debilitating attack on the Internet could be mounted by manipulating routing information via the Border Gateway Protocol, corrupting it to "send everything down a black hole." In April router vendors like Cisco and Internet service providers like AT&T and AOL had to quickly fix two security holes exposed in BGP protocols. The feds worried a hacker could exploit the new gaps and affect "a large segment of the Internet community."

More often, however, the response of government and business is sluggish or nonexistent. A year ago a new cybersecurity standard for electric utilities was set by an industry advisory group, the North American Electric Reliability Council, which was formed in 1968 after the blackout in New York City. Earlier this year the utilities filed reports revealing their level of compliance--but the council won't release the results.

"My guess is the results of those self-audits were real poor," says John O'Shea, who recently quit as chief of ABB's $200-million- a-year business selling control systems to electric companies. "After the big blackout [in 2003] there was so much energy to secure the grid, but we have lost that drive."

Government officials could press industry for more urgent measures, but they, too, are behind on the issue. The Department of Homeland Security has appointed a cyberczar to focus on the online world:Amit Yoran, the founder of information security firm Riptech. But Yoran himself admits that mobilizing a response from industry and government "has been a more challenging process than I ever anticipated."

"There is more infighting and yapping than action," complains Congressman William (Mac) Thornberry (Republican-Texas), chairman of a House subcommittee on cybersecurity. "I'm disappointed it took so long for the Homeland Security people to be in place."

Even if the powers that be could agree on a response, it would raise the stickier question of who should pay for it. Homeland Security Under Secretary Frank Libutti, in a speech to corporate tech executives in June, declared: "The private sector must belly up."

And indeed it must; securing corporate networks is a corporate responsibility. But many of the companies behind America's infrastructure are tightly regulated and can't easily pass on new costs to customers. Others are in bad financial shape or must compete in unforgiving markets where price hikes are all but undoable.

"Companies have to justify the decision to spend money on security," says Representative Thornberry.He favors using tax breaks to coax corporate spending rather than imposing new rules that require it. "We need a system of incentives for liability protection and tax incentives to energize industry," he says, "but no legislation has been proposed."

As the government hesitates, industry dithers. Utilities say their vendors are late in providing better security; the vendors say the utilities are unwilling to pay for it. "We have a catch-22," says Joseph Weiss, the security consultant in San Jose. "Vendors are reticent to spend millions to develop secure control systems, because the market won't buy it."

Fixing this mess would be incredibly difficult. Thousands of old and already-installed systems are in place but can't be updated in one fell swoop. Because of the way they are designed, a simple software patch for one could disrupt others. New gear is better protected but not widely available.

"We have lobbied hard with our suppliers to put more reliable systems in place," says David Kepler, Dow Chemical's chief information officer. "The vendors are not providing them as fast as we would like."

But the giant companies that make control systems--General Electric, Siemens, ABB and others--say that even when they offer new wares with digital armor, customers balk. "No matter what you do, the customer always wants everything for free," says Paul Skare, the manager of Scada development at Siemens. Adds O'Shea:"There are lots of people who would love to jump on the solutions we are offering, but what Iam hearing is, âHow am I going to pay for it?'"

Yes, it costs a lot of money to armor-plate software, as Microsoft discovers with each new version of Windows. ABB enlisted the professional hackers in Idaho to find holes in an early version of a new $1.2 million Scada system. Sure enough, it was riddled with weaknesses.

Invensys, which sells $1.4 billion a year of control systems and related services to chemical and oil conglomerates, has dispatched 30 specialists to visit clients and help them assess and tighten their control systems. At first Invensys covered the cost, but now it's charging for the service.

In the end, though, someone has to pay to stave off the bad guys; the question is whether American business will take the lead or wait for government--maybe--to force it to act. After the Sept. 11 attacks exposed gaping holes in airline security, the feds took control of the nation's 55,000 airport screeners. The new Department of Homeland Security formed the Transportation Security Administration, which awarded $8.5 billion in contracts and is requesting another $5.3 billion next year. Homeland's cybersecurity division, by contrast, will have a budget next year of less than $80 million.

If another unimaginable attack on America occurs, this time a devastating raid on our networks, what will Congress do? It will commission a panel to look into why we failed to anticipate the threat.

Geopolitics And The War On Terrrorism - Guest - 09-21-2004

B. Raman's Osama's intriguing silence