"We're Taking Down Seven Countries in Five Years":
A Regime Change Checklist
by Gary Leupp
January 17, 2007
Last October in a speech at the University of Alabama Gen. Wesley Clark again recounted his conversation with a general at the Pentagon in November 2001.
I said, "Are we still going to invade Iraq?" "Yes, Sir," he said, "but it's worse than that." I said, "How do you mean?" He held up this piece of paper. He said, "I just got this memo today or yesterday from the office of the Secretary of Defense upstairs. It's a, it's a five-year plan. We're going to take down seven countries in five years. We're going to start with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, then Libya, Somalia, Sudan, we're going to come back and get Iran in five years. I said, "Is that classified, that paper?" He said, "Yes Sir." I said, "Well, don't show it to me, because I want to be able to talk about it."
This was of course just two months after 9-11, when Americans' attention was focused on al-Qaeda and preparations for an invasion of Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden lived as a guest of the Taliban.
Five years and two months have passed. The plan to "take down" all those countries is behind schedule, and has even been modified somewhat. Libya has left the target list due to Muammar Qaddafi's agreement to dismantle his WMD programs in 2003. (Bush has tried to take credit for that, although patient British diplomacy deserves more credit. During Anglo-American negotiations with Libya the British were so disgusted with John Bolton's behavior they asked that Bush's envoy be removed from the talks.) But the U.S. did indeed take down Iraq, and all the other countries listed remain in the crosshairs.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan07/Leupp17.htm Blood Oil
Could a bunch of Nigerian militants in speedboats bring about a U.S. recession? Blowing up facilities and taking hostages, they are wreaking havoc on the oil production of America's fifth-largest supplier. Deep in the Niger-delta swamps, the author meets the nightmarish result of four decades of corruption.
by Sebastian Junger February 2007
On June 23, 2005, a group of high-ranking government officials were convened in a ballroom of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C., to respond to a simulated crisis in the global oil supply. The event was called "Oil ShockWave," and it was organized by public-interest groups concerned with energy policy and national security. Among those seated beneath a wall-size map of the world were two former heads of the C.I.A., the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The scenario they were handed was this:
Civil conflict breaks out in northern Nigeria—an area rife with Islamic militancy and religious violence—and the Nigerian Army is forced to intervene. The situation deteriorates, and international oil companies decide to end operations in the oil-rich Niger River delta, resulting in a loss of 800,000 barrels a day on the world market. Since Nigerian oil is classified as "light sweet crude," meaning that it requires very little refining, this makes it a particularly painful loss to the American market. Concurrently, in this scenario, a cold wave sweeping across the Northern Hemisphere boosts global demand by 800,000 barrels a day. Because global oil production is already functioning at close to maximum capacity (around 84 million barrels a day), small disruptions in supply shudder through the system very quickly. A net deficit of almost two million barrels a day is a significant shock to the market, and the price of a barrel of oil rapidly goes to more than $80.
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When Nigerians are asked about these problems, few can offer more than anger and despair—or the promise of violence. A typical Nigerian reaction came from President Owei, the Ijaw priest who tried to help with our first trip into the creeks. Owei is the head of an organization that promotes Ijaw rights and protects their communities in the delta. At first, my questions just provoked a torrent of indignation. "The people of the Niger delta don't need theory—they need practical things," he declared. "We need to be made to feel like human beings. There is an economic blockade of the Niger delta—they don't want money to flow here. With the wealth that Nigeria has, the whole nation should have roads and free education."
Owei lives in the great, seething slum of Bundu-Waterside, on the outskirts of Port Harcourt. Bundu-Waterside is a community built literally atop garbage and mud. High tide and raw sewage continually threaten to rise up over the thresholds of its thousands of plank-and-corrugated-iron shacks. People are packed into Bundu-Waterside with such desperate ingenuity that almost every human activity—cooking, fighting, eating, sleeping, defecating—seems to be observable from almost anywhere at any given moment. When I met with Owei, he and several of his assistants were seated on a wooden bench beneath a canopy of corrugated iron that serves as an open-air community center. Young boys swam in the tidal muck while, a few feet away, other young boys squatted to relieve themselves. Every 20 minutes or so, an oil-company helicopter thumped past on its way to one of the offshore rigs.
"The Niger-delta people are the new world power," Owei informed me solemnly. "I don't have a bulletproof vest, but I can drink acid. Can you drink acid? I can drink acid. We are a world power. We are waiting. We want to live in peace because God is peaceful, but the rest of the world is building armaments while they wait for Jesus. I don't know."
http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/nvs/blood-oil-8.html