¹ Less obviously, but unmistakably, oil (or in this case an oil pipeline) was a factor also in the 1998 NATO intervention in Kosovo. See Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 29; Peter Dale Scott, “Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington's On-Going Collusion with Terrorists, July 29, 2011, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3578.

² Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 8-9, 11.

³ Exxon for example is said to have paid no U.S. federal income tax in 2009, at a time of near-record profits (Washington Post, May 11, 2011). Cf. Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 19-20: “In some of the faraway countries where it did business,… Exxon's sway over local politics and security was greater than that of the United States embassy.”

⁴ Charles J. Lewis, “Obama again urges end to oil industry tax breaks,” Houston Chronicle, April 27, 2011; “Politics News: Obama Urges Congress to End Oil Subsidies,” Newsy.com, March 2, 2 012, http://www.newsy.com/videos/obama-urges-congress-to-end-oil-subsidies.

⁵ Cf. an article in 2001 from the Foreign Military Studies Office of Fort Leavenworth: The Caspian Sea appears to be sitting on yet another sea—a sea of hydrocarbons. The presence of these oil reserves and the possibility of their export raises [sic] new strategic concerns for the United States and other Western industrial powers. As oil companies build oil pipelines from the Caucasus and Central Asia to supply Japan and the West, these strategic concerns gain military implications. (Lester W. Grau, “Hydrocarbons and a New Strategic Region: The Caspian Sea and Central Asia. (Military Review [May-June 2001]. 96; quoted in Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 31)

⁶ See discussion in Peter Dale Scott, “Launching the U.S. Terror War: the CIA, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Central Asia,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, March 15, 2012, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3723. There have also been diplomatic discussions of a possible U.S. base in Tajikistan: see Joshua Kucera, “U.S.: Tajikistan Wants to Host an American Air Base,” Eurasia.net, December 14, 2010, http://www.eurasianet.org/node/62570).

⁷ David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999), x: “In 1974 [Treasury Secretary William] Simon negotiated a secret deal so the Saudi central bank could buy U.S. Treasury securities outside of the normal auction. A few years later, Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal cut a secret deal with the Saudis so that OPEC would continue to price oil in dollars. These deals were secret because the United States had promised other industrialized democracies that it would not pursue such unilateral policies.” Cf. 103-12.

⁸ “So long as OPEC oil was priced in U.S. dollars, and so long as OPEC invested the dollars in U.S. government instruments, the U.S. government enjoyed a double loan. The first part of the loan was for oil. The government could print dollars to pay for oil, and the American economy did not have to produce goods and services in exchange for the oil until OPEC used the dollars for goods and services. Obviously, the strategy could not work if dollars were not a means of exchange for oil. The second part of the loan was from all other economies that had to pay dollars for oil but could not print currency. Those economies had to trade their goods and services for dollars in order to pay OPEC” (Spiro, Hidden Hand, 121).

⁹ Hoyos, Carol & Morrison, Kevin, “Iraq returns to the international oil market,” Financial Times, June 5, 2003. Cf. Coll, Private Empire, 232: “A desperate Saddam Hussein, toward the end of his time in power, had signed production-sharing contracts with Russian and Chinese companies, but these agreements had never been implemented.”

¹⁰ Scott, Road to 9/11, 190-91. Cf. also William Clark, “The Real Reasons Why Iran is the Next Target: The Emerging Euro-denominated International Oil Marker,” Global Research, 27 October 2004, http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CLA410A.html.

¹¹ “Бомбежки Ливии – наказание Каддафи за попытку введения золотого динара,” Live Journal, March 21, 2011; discussion in Peter Dale Scott, “The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus,” April 27, 2011, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3522.

¹² “Iran Ends Oil Transactions In U.S. Dollars,” CBS News, February 11, 2009.

¹³ In March 2012 Swift, the body that handles global banking transactions, moved to cut Iran's banks out of the system, in response to American and UN sanctions (BBC News, March 15, 2012). Business Week (February 28,

2012) commented that the action “might roil oil markets on concern that buyers will be unable to pay the second-largest producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries for its 2.2 million barrels a day of oil exports.”

¹⁴ Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11, 163-64; cf. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7.

¹⁵ Scott, The Road to 9/11, 164

¹⁶ The World War II covert operations agency OSS was thrown together in part by recruiting Asia hands from oil companies like Standard Oil of New Jersey (Esso). See Smith, OSS, 15, 211.

¹⁷ “BP oiled coup with cash, Turks claim”, Sunday Times (London), March 26, 2000; quoted in Scott, The Road to 9/11, 165.

¹⁸ In 1998, Dick Cheney, when chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, remarked: “I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian” (Guardian [London], October 23, 200 1, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/23/afghanistan.terrorism11).

¹⁹ R. Craig Nation, “Russia, the United States, and the Caucasus,” Army War College (U.S.). Strategic Studies Institute. Talbott's words are worth quoting at length: ““For the last several years, it has been fashionable to proclaim or at least to predict, a replay of the ‘Great Game’ in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The implication of course is that the driving dynamic of the region, fueled and lubricated by oil, will be the competition of great powers to the disadvantage of the people who live there. Our goal is to avoid and to actively discourage that

atavistic outcome The Great Game, which starred Kipling's Kim and Fraser's Flashman, was very much of the zero-sum variety. What we want to help bring about is just the opposite, we want to see all responsible players in the Caucasus and Central Asia be winners.” (M.K. Bhadrakumar, “Foul Play in the Great Game,” Asia Times, July 13, 2005).

²⁰ James MacDougall, “A New Stage in U.S.- Caspian Sea Basin Relations,” Central Asia, 5 (11), 1997; quoting from Ariel Cohen, “U.S. Policy in the Caucasus and Central Asia: Building A New ‘Silk Road’ to Economic Prosperity,” Heritage Foundation, July 24, 1997. In October 1997 Sen. Sam Brownback introduced a bill, the Silk Road Strategy Act of 1997 (S. 1344), providing incentives for the new Central Asian states to cooperate with the United States, rather than with Russia or Iran.

²¹ Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), xiv.

²² Ariel Cohen, Eurasia In Balance: The US And The Regional Power Shift, 107.

²³ Michael Klare, Blood and Oil (New York: Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt, 2004), 135-36; citing R. Jeffrey Smith, “U.S. Leads Peacekeeping Drill in Kazakhstan,” Washington Post, September 15, 1997. CF. Kenley Butler, “U.S. Military Cooperation with the Central Asian States,” September 17, 2001, http://cns.miis.edu/archive/wtc01/uscamil.htm.

²⁴ Brzezinski, Grand Chessboard, 121.

²⁵ Peter Dale Scott, “Kyrgyzstan, the U.S. and the Global Drug Problem: Deep Forces and the Syndrome of Coups, Drugs, and Terror,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus; quoting President Bush, State of the Union address, January 20, 2004; “Bush: Georgia's Example a Huge Contribution to Democracy,” Civil Georgia, May 10, 2005. Likewise Zbigniew Brzezinski was quoted by a Kyrgyz news source as saying “I believe revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan were a sincere and snap expression of the political will” (http://eng.24kg.org/politic/2008/03/27/4973.ht ml, March 27, 2008).

²⁶ Scott, “Kyrgyzstan, the U.S. and the Global Drug Problem;” citing ¹⁹ Owen Matthews, “Despotism Doesn't Equal Stability,” Newsweek, April 7, 2010 (Cooley); Peter Leonard, “Heroin trade a backdrop to Kyrgyz violence,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 24, 2010; “Kyrgyzstan Relaxes Control Over Drug Trafficking,” Jamestown Foundation, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 7:24, February 4, 2010, etc.

²⁷ U.S. Department of Defense, Joint Vision 2020, May 30, 2000; discussion in Scott, Road to 9/11, 20.

²⁸ U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark has reported that back in 1991 one of the neocons in the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, told him that “we've about five or ten years to clean up those old soviet client regimes - Syria, Iran, Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us” (Wesley Clark, Talk to Commonwealth Club, October 3, 2007. Link). Ten years later, in November 2001, he heard in the Pentagon that plans to attack Iraq were “being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, …beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan” [Wesley Clark, Winning Modern Wars (New York: Public Affairs, 2003], 130).

²⁹ See Scott, American War Machine.

³⁰ For the hegemonic perversion of the DEA's “war on drugs” in Asia, see Scott, American War Machine, 121-40.

³¹ Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 89.

³² An example was Haji Zaman Ghamsharik who had retired to Dijon in France, where British and American official met with him and persuaded him to return to Afghanistan (Peter Dale Scott, “America's Afghanistan: The National Security and a Heroin-Ravaged State,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus; citing Philip Smucker, Al Qaeda's Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror's Trail [Washington: Brassey's, 2004], 9. For other drug traffickers, see Scott, Road to 9/11, 125.

³³ Scott. American War Machine, 235 (insurgents); James Risen, “U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Lords Tied to Taliban,” New York Times, August 10, 2009: “United States military commanders have told Congress that… only those [drug traffickers] providing support to the insurgency would be made targets.”

³⁴ Russia has understandably been aggrieved by America's and NATO's failure over a decade to deal seriously with the huge Afghan drug crop (e.g. “Russia lashes out at NATO for not fighting Afghan drug production,” RT, February 28, 2010). But the simple remedy Russia has proposed, destruction of crops in the field, would by itself probably drive peasants further into the arms of Afghanistan's militant Islamic fundamentalists, another threat to Russia and America alike. Many observers have noted that poppy field eradication leaves the small farmers in debt to the landowners and traffickers, often having to repay “in cash, land, livestock, or - not infrequently - a daughter…. Poppy eradication just pushed them deeper into the poverty that led to their growing opium in the first place” (Joel Hafvenstein, Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier, 214); cf. “Opium Brides,” PBS Frontline). Opium eradication in Thailand, often cited as the most successful program anywhere since China's in the 1950s, was achieved by combining military enforcement with comprehensive alternative development programs. See William Byrd and Christopher Ward, “Drugs and Development in Afghanistan,” World Bank: Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction Unit, Working paper series, Vol. 18 (December 2004); also “Secret of Thai success in opium war,” BBC News, February 19, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7899748.stm.

³⁵ See e.g. Peter Dale Scott, “Is the State of Emergency Superseding our Constitution? Continuity of Government Planning, War and American Society,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, November 2 8, 201 0, http:/1/japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3448.