This dude changed his colors like a Chameleon . Another gem from Kaleem Omar of The News
Zalmay Khalilzad: US Big Oil's man for Iraq
By Kaleem Omar
Many figures in the Bush administration--including President George W Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice--have close links to the American oil industry, aka Big Oil. Chevron, Rice's former employer, has even named an oil tanker after her. So it comes as no surprise that Big Oil should be eyeing a post-Saddam Iraq, licking its lips at the prospect of getting preferential access to all that lovely oil.
Iraq has the world's second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia. Official estimates put Iraq's reserves at 113bn barrels, but some oil experts think it could be twice that figure, or some 226bn barrels. At the current crude oil price of about $34 per barrel, the potential market value of Iraq's oil reserves works out to a staggering $7.68 trillion, using the 226bn barrels reserves estimate. Even at the lower official reserves figure of 113bn barrels, the potential market value works out to $3.842 trillion--still a pretty useful piece of change even by America's profligate standards.
That is where the Afghan-born, former Unocal consultant Dr Zalmay Khalilzad comes in. Bush recently appointed the controversial former academic Special Presidential Envoy for Iraq. This is in addition to Khalilzad's assignment as Special Presidential Envoy for Afghanistan, a job to which Bush appointed him on 31 December, 2001, only nine days after the US-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai took office in Kabul.
Before that, from 23 May, 2001 onward, Khalilzad was Special Assistant to the President for Southwest Asia, Near East and North Africa at the National Security Council, a position he continues to hold, reporting to Bush through the hawkish Dr Rice. As Special Envoy for Afghanistan, and now also for Iraq, Khalilzad reports to Bush through US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, who, on Wednesday, issued a virtual indictment of Iraq, telling the UN Security Council to stand behind its resolutions on Iraq or risk becoming irrelevant.
In saying this, Powell was echoing what Bush said in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September last year. And although Powell stopped short of an ultimatum of war against Iraq, in his 90-minute presentation of intelligence material, he told the Security Council: "This body places itself in danger of irrelevance if it allows Iraq to continue to defy its will without responding effectively and immediately."
All this is happening, despite the fact that UN chief weapons inspector Dr Hans Blix had said only a few days earlier that Baghdad was co-operating with the weapons inspectors and that the inspectors had found no evidence so far that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Of the Security Council's 15 members, only the US and Britain have voiced support for an invasion of Iraq.
When Bush appointed Khalilzad as his Special Envoy for Afghanistan in December 2001, the White House announcement said: "The Special Envoy is a representative of the Afghan people as they seek to consolidate a new order, reconstruct their country and free it from al-Qaeda and Taliban control."
The 51-year-old Khalilzad, a native Dari speaker, was born in the northern Afghan city of Mazare Sharif. While he was still young, his family moved to Kabul, where his Pashtun father worked in the government, and where Khalilzad attended an English-language school.
He originally visited America as an American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker charitable organisation) exchange student, and left Afghanistan for good in the 1970s when he won a scholarship to attend the American University of Beirut. In 1979 he obtained a PhD from the University of Chicago.
In the early 1980s, Khalilzad taught Political Science at Columbia University in New York, where he worked with Zbigniew Brezinski, a former US National Security Adviser. He was also executive director of the Friends of Afghanistan, a support group for the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets. In 1984, he became an American citizen and joined the State Department on a one-year fellowship.
In 1985, in the midst of the Mujahideen's war against Soviet occupation, Khalilzad's background and language skills were valuable enough to win him a position on the State Department's Policy Planning Council. There he worked under Paul Wolfowitz, who served as director of policy planning in the Reagan administration. The two have been allies ever since. As Deputy Secretary of Defense, Wolfowitz is the most stridently hawkish member of the Bush administration. So what does this make Khalilzad? Another hawk, by all accounts.
Khalilzad, who as Bush's Special Envoy gave a speech upon his arrival in Kabul condemning the Taliban, had at one time, as a paid adviser to the US oil company Unocal, courted and defended them (in 1997 Unocal put together a consortium to build a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan). Indeed, Khalilzad has changed his tune so often that one analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, Anatol Lieven, said, "If he was in private business rather than government, he would have been sacked long ago."
Khalilzad was also an early worrier about Saddam Hussein. As the Iran-Iraq war drew to a close in 1988, Khalilzad wrote a memo to then-Secretary of State George Schultz, arguing for an American policy tilt away from Iraq and toward Iran. Schultz was said to have angrily vetoed the proposal which was not surprising, considering that Saddam Hussein was one of the US's "good guys" in those days.
In 1998, Khalilzad joined Wolfowitz and others in signing an open letter to the Clinton administration, arguing for a policy of overthrowing the Iraqi president.
What's remarkable about Khalilzad's views ever since he did a volt face on the Taliban in August 1998, however, is how closely they have tracked the Bush administration's emerging Afghan policy since 9/11. Bush--whose links to the US oil industry go back to the 1970s--has described Khalilzad as his "favourite Afghan".
In December 2000, Khalilzad was chosen by Cheney to head the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Department of Defense, and has been a Counselor to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He is a former director of the Strategy and Doctrine Programme of the RAND think tank's Project Air Force, and a former adviser to Unocal. Unocal has been long criticised for doing business in countries with repressive governments, and is rumoured to have close ties to the US State Department and the American intelligence community.
In the mid-1990s, while working for the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Khalilzad conducted risk analyses for Unocal at a time when it had signed letters of approval from the Taliban. In December 1997, Khalilzad joined Unocal officials at a reception for an invited Taliban delegation to Texas.
Khalilzad also lobbied publicly for a more sympathetic US government policy towards the Taliban. Five years ago, in an op-ed article in the Washington Post [ITALICS], he defended the Taliban regime against accusations that it was a sponsor of terrorism, writing: "The Taliban does not practice the anti-US style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran."
Khalilzad said: "It is time for the United States to reengage the Taliban regime." This "reengagement," of course, would have been enormously profitable to Unocal, which was otherwise unable to bring gas and oil to market from landlocked Turkmenistan.
Zalmay Khalilzad: US Big Oil's man for Iraq
By Kaleem Omar
Many figures in the Bush administration--including President George W Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice--have close links to the American oil industry, aka Big Oil. Chevron, Rice's former employer, has even named an oil tanker after her. So it comes as no surprise that Big Oil should be eyeing a post-Saddam Iraq, licking its lips at the prospect of getting preferential access to all that lovely oil.
Iraq has the world's second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia. Official estimates put Iraq's reserves at 113bn barrels, but some oil experts think it could be twice that figure, or some 226bn barrels. At the current crude oil price of about $34 per barrel, the potential market value of Iraq's oil reserves works out to a staggering $7.68 trillion, using the 226bn barrels reserves estimate. Even at the lower official reserves figure of 113bn barrels, the potential market value works out to $3.842 trillion--still a pretty useful piece of change even by America's profligate standards.
That is where the Afghan-born, former Unocal consultant Dr Zalmay Khalilzad comes in. Bush recently appointed the controversial former academic Special Presidential Envoy for Iraq. This is in addition to Khalilzad's assignment as Special Presidential Envoy for Afghanistan, a job to which Bush appointed him on 31 December, 2001, only nine days after the US-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai took office in Kabul.
Before that, from 23 May, 2001 onward, Khalilzad was Special Assistant to the President for Southwest Asia, Near East and North Africa at the National Security Council, a position he continues to hold, reporting to Bush through the hawkish Dr Rice. As Special Envoy for Afghanistan, and now also for Iraq, Khalilzad reports to Bush through US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, who, on Wednesday, issued a virtual indictment of Iraq, telling the UN Security Council to stand behind its resolutions on Iraq or risk becoming irrelevant.
In saying this, Powell was echoing what Bush said in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September last year. And although Powell stopped short of an ultimatum of war against Iraq, in his 90-minute presentation of intelligence material, he told the Security Council: "This body places itself in danger of irrelevance if it allows Iraq to continue to defy its will without responding effectively and immediately."
All this is happening, despite the fact that UN chief weapons inspector Dr Hans Blix had said only a few days earlier that Baghdad was co-operating with the weapons inspectors and that the inspectors had found no evidence so far that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Of the Security Council's 15 members, only the US and Britain have voiced support for an invasion of Iraq.
When Bush appointed Khalilzad as his Special Envoy for Afghanistan in December 2001, the White House announcement said: "The Special Envoy is a representative of the Afghan people as they seek to consolidate a new order, reconstruct their country and free it from al-Qaeda and Taliban control."
The 51-year-old Khalilzad, a native Dari speaker, was born in the northern Afghan city of Mazare Sharif. While he was still young, his family moved to Kabul, where his Pashtun father worked in the government, and where Khalilzad attended an English-language school.
He originally visited America as an American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker charitable organisation) exchange student, and left Afghanistan for good in the 1970s when he won a scholarship to attend the American University of Beirut. In 1979 he obtained a PhD from the University of Chicago.
In the early 1980s, Khalilzad taught Political Science at Columbia University in New York, where he worked with Zbigniew Brezinski, a former US National Security Adviser. He was also executive director of the Friends of Afghanistan, a support group for the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets. In 1984, he became an American citizen and joined the State Department on a one-year fellowship.
In 1985, in the midst of the Mujahideen's war against Soviet occupation, Khalilzad's background and language skills were valuable enough to win him a position on the State Department's Policy Planning Council. There he worked under Paul Wolfowitz, who served as director of policy planning in the Reagan administration. The two have been allies ever since. As Deputy Secretary of Defense, Wolfowitz is the most stridently hawkish member of the Bush administration. So what does this make Khalilzad? Another hawk, by all accounts.
Khalilzad, who as Bush's Special Envoy gave a speech upon his arrival in Kabul condemning the Taliban, had at one time, as a paid adviser to the US oil company Unocal, courted and defended them (in 1997 Unocal put together a consortium to build a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan). Indeed, Khalilzad has changed his tune so often that one analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, Anatol Lieven, said, "If he was in private business rather than government, he would have been sacked long ago."
Khalilzad was also an early worrier about Saddam Hussein. As the Iran-Iraq war drew to a close in 1988, Khalilzad wrote a memo to then-Secretary of State George Schultz, arguing for an American policy tilt away from Iraq and toward Iran. Schultz was said to have angrily vetoed the proposal which was not surprising, considering that Saddam Hussein was one of the US's "good guys" in those days.
In 1998, Khalilzad joined Wolfowitz and others in signing an open letter to the Clinton administration, arguing for a policy of overthrowing the Iraqi president.
What's remarkable about Khalilzad's views ever since he did a volt face on the Taliban in August 1998, however, is how closely they have tracked the Bush administration's emerging Afghan policy since 9/11. Bush--whose links to the US oil industry go back to the 1970s--has described Khalilzad as his "favourite Afghan".
In December 2000, Khalilzad was chosen by Cheney to head the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Department of Defense, and has been a Counselor to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He is a former director of the Strategy and Doctrine Programme of the RAND think tank's Project Air Force, and a former adviser to Unocal. Unocal has been long criticised for doing business in countries with repressive governments, and is rumoured to have close ties to the US State Department and the American intelligence community.
In the mid-1990s, while working for the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Khalilzad conducted risk analyses for Unocal at a time when it had signed letters of approval from the Taliban. In December 1997, Khalilzad joined Unocal officials at a reception for an invited Taliban delegation to Texas.
Khalilzad also lobbied publicly for a more sympathetic US government policy towards the Taliban. Five years ago, in an op-ed article in the Washington Post [ITALICS], he defended the Taliban regime against accusations that it was a sponsor of terrorism, writing: "The Taliban does not practice the anti-US style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran."
Khalilzad said: "It is time for the United States to reengage the Taliban regime." This "reengagement," of course, would have been enormously profitable to Unocal, which was otherwise unable to bring gas and oil to market from landlocked Turkmenistan.
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