The US's new UN Ambassador's and his Oily Past
Graham Saul
Hi folks,
The Bush Administration is nominating Zalmay Khalizad, the current US
Ambassador to Iraq, to be the next US Ambassador to the United Nations.
This article outlines Khalizad's "Oily Past".
Graham Saul
Oil Change International
www.priceofoil.org
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U.N. Ambassador's Oily Past
Phyllis Bennis
January 08, 2007
/Phyllis Bennis is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in
Washington and of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Her most
recent book is/ Challenging Empire: How People, Governments and the U.N.
Defy U.S. Power <http://www.powells.com/biblio/156656607x?&PID=30079> /./
The transfer of current U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad from his job as
the Great Wizard of Iraq’s embattled Emerald City in Baghdad’s Green
Zone, to the quieter but no less complicated halls of the United
Nations, may have several rationales.
One reason may be a belated Bush administration recognition that
Khalilzad’s favored strategy of demanding that Iraq’s Shi’a-dominated
government “reach out” to Iraq’s angry Sunni community has failed to
quell the violence. (It is unlikely, however, that anyone in the
administration acknowledges that no strategy will work as long as the
U.S. occupation continues.) Another may be based on an overdue
recognition that sending a Sunni Afghan-born envoy who speaks several
regional languages means little, when that diplomat still represents
policies of war and occupation across the region.
But sending Khalilzad to the United Nations clearly indicates that the
White House, however ideologically committed to unilateralism and the
unbridled assertion of military power, still need the U.N. Zalmay
Khalilzad’s history—with U.S. policies in Central Asia, Afghanistan,
oil, the Bush family—goes back many years, and he remains a key defender
of those policies. He served in key Cold War positions in both the
Reagan and Bush Senior administrations, mostly having to do with the
1980s anti-Soviet contra war in Afghanistan as well as the Iran-Iraq War
of the same period. In both cases he distinguished himself by backing
regimes that would only later be identified as part of the so-called
axis of evil: Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
It was in Afghanistan that he made the biggest splash. He had been an
early supporter of the Taliban during the brutal internecine fighting
that accompanied the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan. And he remained in
touch with the fundamentalist forces after they trounced opposing
warlords and took power in Kabul in 1996. By 1997, according to the
/Washington Post/
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3401-2001Nov22?language=printer>:
…at a luxury Houston hotel, oil company adviser Zalmay Khalilzad was
chatting pleasantly over dinner with leaders of Afghanistan’s
Taliban regime about their shared enthusiasm for a proposed
multibillion-dollar pipeline deal.
Khalilzad, a hardcore neoconservative protégé of Dick Cheney and member
of the Project for a New American Century, was working as a risk
assessor for Unocal oil company, which was then debating the viability
of a natural gas pipeline project in Afghanistan. The Taliban had no
official diplomatic relations with the U.S., but Unocal flew Taliban
ministers to Texas and flew their own corporate officials to Afghanistan
for negotiations. No one in Texas and few in Washington had anything to
say then about the Taliban’s treatment of women, its imposition of harsh
medieval laws mandating punishments of amputation and death by stoning,
its destruction of Afghanistan’s rich cultural heritage or its denial of
health care and education.
As the respected World Press Review pointed out, the “United States was
slow to condemn the Taliban in the mid-1990s because the Taliban seemed
to favor U.S. oil company Unocal to build two pipelines across
Afghanistan.”
That included Zalmay Khalilzad. Writing on October 7, 1996, just as the
Taliban was sweeping to victory in Afghanistan’s civil war and five
years to the day before his future boss George W. Bush would launch a
massive war against Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Khalilzad said:
the Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism
practiced by Iran. We should ... be willing to offer recognition and
humanitarian assistance and to promote international economic
reconstruction... It is time for the United States to re-engage [the
Taliban].
So after September 11, when the Bush administration was determined to go
to war against Afghanistan, concern remained about how to protect U.S.
economic—read: oil—interests in the area. In 1998 Halliburton CEO Dick
Cheney had told oil executives
<http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1018-10.htm> that “the current hot
spots for major oil companies are the oil reserves in the Caspian Sea
region.” So it was no surprise that the oilmen and oilwomen of the Bush
administration would continue their efforts to protect U.S. access to
current and future oil and gas in the region, even as they launched a
war against the country they had so recently hoped would become a giant
oil transit hub for U.S. oil companies drilling there. As the Bush
administration began casting around for the right person to protect
those interests, Afghan national, oil expert and recent Taliban-backer
Zalmay Khalilzad, by then on staff of the National Security Council and
a special adviser to the president on Afghan policy, fit the bill
admirably.
Two years earlier, even before 9/11, Khalilzad himself had urged the
Bush administration to create “a military stalemate” in war-torn
Afghanistan. Drafted as part of a major set of proposals for a new U.S.
policy in Afghanistan, Khalilzad went on to call on Bush to
<http://www.twq.com/winter00/231Byman.pdf>
appoint a high-level envoy for Afghanistan who can coordinate
overall U.S. policy. The envoy must have sufficient stature and
access to ensure that he or she is taken seriously in foreign
capitals and by local militias. Equally important, the special envoy
must be able to shape Afghanistan policy within U.S. bureaucracies.
Two years later, on December 31, 2001, Khalilzad’s appointment as
special envoy to the new Afghan regime was announced. The White House
announcement did not mention his history with Unocal. Nor did it repeat
Dick Cheney’s words about the importance of oil in the Central
Asia/Caspian region. The Amarillo Globe-News, reporting on Cheney’s 1998
speech, said the “potential for this region turning as volatile as the
Persian Gulf, though, does not concern Cheney... ‘You’ve got to go where
the oil is,’ he said <http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1018-10.htm> .
‘I don’t worry about it a lot.’”
That Bush administration tendency not to worry showed up in Khalilzad as
well. Three months into the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the
U.S.-backed president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, who also happened to
be a former colleague of Khalilzad at Unocal, told the press he had not
asked the United States for a bombing halt. Khalilzad, noting in Kabul
at the same time that the U.S. bombing was causing civilian Afghan
casualties, said blithely
<http://musiciansforpeace.org/librarydocs/bombingnecessary.html> :
“you have to weigh the risks of ending the conflict prematurely with
the costs of continuing it. I have no doubt, on balance, that we
will continue until we achieve our goals… We do not target
civilians, but civilians unfortunately do get affected, even
killed,” Khalilzad went on. “War is a very imperfect business.”
It was a good lesson Khalilzad remembered when he moved on to his next
war, in Iraq.