Paul Craig Roberts
Is Bush Doomed by the Neocons?
Sun Jan 18 16:20:10 2004
64.140.158.58

Is Bush Doomed by the Neocons?

Paul Craig Roberts
Saturday, Jan. 17, 2004

Fear must be coursing through President Bush’s veins as he realizes the Iraqi trap into which the neocons have placed him. Bush is caught between an Iraqi civil war and a wider insurgency.

Desperate to extricate himself from the weekly carnage well before the November election, Bush can neither deliver on his promise of democracy via direct elections nor impose his plan for an Iraqi assembly elected indirectly by caucuses.

If Bush delivers on his democracy promise, the Shi’ites with 60 percent of the population will be elected, and the country will break out in civil war. If he tries to water down Shi’ite representation with his plan for an assembly elected indirectly by caucuses, the so-far-peaceful Shi’ites are likely to join the violence.

If the Shi’ites become violent, the insurgency would be too large to be contained by our present occupying force. Moreover, the outbreak of a general rebellion in Iraq would spill over throughout the Middle East, where unpopular secular rulers are sitting on a smoldering Islam. Our puppet in Pakistan would likely bite the dust. Israel would then face countervailing Muslim nukes.

If you think more U.S. troops are needed now in Iraq, imagine how many more would be required to deal with a wider conflagration. Where would they come from? The U.S. military is already so thinly stretched that soon 40 percent of the occupying troops will be drawn from the National Guard and reservists, resulting in tremendous disruption in the affairs of tens of thousands of families.

Pilots and troops are shunning the cash bonuses offered for re-enlistments. The troops recognize a quagmire even if their neocon overlords cannot. The only source of troops is the draft.

A Shi’ite insurgency that brought back the draft would deprive Bush of re-election. A civil war with the prospect of a Kurdish state would bring in the Turks. On Jan. 14 Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan said that Turkey will intervene in the event of Iraq’s disintegration.

The Shi’ites and the Turks are forming an alliance as both have the same interest in maintaining the geographical integrity of the Iraqi state. The U.S. could come dangerously close to military conflict with a NATO ally.

All of this was perfectly clear well in advance of the ill-considered invasion. If Bush wasn’t smart enough to see it, why didn’t his national security adviser or his secretary of state see it? How did a handful of neocon ideologues hijack U.S. foreign policy?

Bush did not campaign on a neocon policy of conquest in the Middle East. There was no public debate over this policy. The invasion of Iraq was the private agenda of the neocons.

Why have the neocons not been held responsible for their treason in abusing their presidential appointments to substitute their personal agenda for America’s agenda?

Bush has been the neocons' puppet for so long that he is now stuck with responsibility for their horrible mistake. With no way of his own to get out of his trap, his arrogance toward the “irrelevant” U.N. and our doubting allies has disappeared Come bail me out, he pleads.

Bush, desperate to be extricated before doom strikes him, is experiencing a reality totally different from the chest-thumping of neocon megalomaniacs such as Charles Krauthammer, who declared the U.S. so powerful as to be able to “reshape, indeed remake, reality on its own.”

Bush now knows that he lacks the power to deal with the reality of Iraq. Indeed, Bush cannot even deal with his own appointees.

COPYRIGHT 2004 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Dr. Roberts is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of "The Tyranny of Good Intentions
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What spooks told Old Lady about BCCI
MI6 and the Bank had suspicions, so why was nothing done, creditors ask in the High Court.
By Conal Walsh, The Observer
Sunday January 18, 2004

On a spring day in 1989, Roger Barnes of the Bank of England's supervisory division sat down for a meeting with officers from MI6. The officers asked him to tell them what he knew about the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

Rumours of fraud were starting to swirl around the giant Pakistani-Arab bank, whose main office was in Leadenhall Street in the City.

Barnes's reply was unsettling. According to the MI6 officers, he told them that BCCI had 'no natural or established customer base [and] there was no obvious, respectable explanation as to how it came to grow so quickly and became so profitable ... it was widely assumed that the BCCI management were less than meticulous as to what funds they handled'.

Other Bank of England officials were more forthright, telling MI6 of allegations linking BCCI to drug gangs in Colombia and to the military regime of General Manuel Noriega in Panama.

But if the Bank knew of alleged unsavoury dealings at BCCI, why didn't it investigate them? That is the question at the heart of the blockbuster legal case that began at the High Court in London last week.

Two years after the meeting between Bank officials and MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service), BCCI collapsed in the world's biggest- ever banking fraud, leaving £7 billion in undeclared debts and thousands of depositors empty-handed. BCCI's creditors are suing the Bank, which regulated the financial industry at the time, accusing it of deliberately failing to protect them.

The Bank denies the claim, saying that it had assumed BCCI should be supervised by Luxembourg, where it was officially registered, rather than by the authorities in Britain, where it did most of its business.

But Gordon Pollock QC, the barrister leading the creditors' case, spent last week arguing that the Bank had early warning of trouble at BCCI, and is likely to seize on further evidence of this from the intelligence community.

The Observer's account of Barnes's 1989 meeting with MI6 comes from a top-secret document compiled by Lord Bingham, whose official investigation into the BCCI debacle was issued in a report in 1992. The document - known as 'Appendix 8' - deals with the role of the intelligence services in the BCCI affair. Unlike the rest of Bingham's report, it has never been made public - until now.

Some passages in the 30-page appendix remain 'blacked out' for security reasons. However, the document makes it clear that the Bank received a host of additional warnings from intelligence agencies about alleged misconduct at BCCI.

In August 1989, the Bank was made aware of intelligence suggesting that BCCI was in serious financial difficulty and had only been bailed out by a valuable Abu Dhabi oil account. Officials at Threadneedle Street appear to have done nothing to investigate BCCI's solvency.

According to Bingham, the Bank was also told twice that 'the Panamanian Ambassador to the UK, a Noriega appointee, was engaged in moving funds from accounts held with BCCI in London to other accounts elsewhere held by Noriega front companies and nominees'.

Further reports claimed that BCCI branches in Pakistan, Luxembourg, Argentina, Colombia, Panama and Paraguay were suspected of money-laundering and drug-trafficking. Some of the suspects in the Paraguayan operation were based in the UK. But in no case, apparently, did the Bank send in its investigators.

If the Bank of England was sometimes relaxed in its approach, so too were the intelligence agencies themselves. In 1990, an unnamed source told them that BCCI's Gibraltar office was involved in a vast money-laundering exercise which the Gibraltar government itself was happy to tolerate. This disclosure was described by the British Embassy in Madrid as 'important and depressing', but there is no evidence that the UK acted on it.

According to Bingham, spy chiefs also discovered that Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist, held accounts worth at least $50m in a London branch of BCCI (see below), but decided to discreetly monitor the accounts rather than freeze them.

The US authorities disagreed with this tactic. But the British insisted that they should not step in, even when it became apparent that the accounts were being used to sell military equipment to Poland, in breach of arms export controls.

In the end, however, the affair ended embarrassingly: Nidal's organisation got wind of the British surveillance and emptied the accounts before they could be seized.

A mole in the bank

Bingham's newly declassified intelligence archive reveals a ham-fisted attempt by British intelligence to 'turn' a senior BCCI employee in an attempt to get details of what was going on inside the crime-riddled bank.

This employee was Ghassan Qassem, the Jordanian manager of BCCI's branch in Sloane Street, London. Part of Qassem's job was to look after multi-million-dollar accounts held on behalf of Warsaw-based SAS Trade. This company, Bingham reports, wassecretly identified by Western intelligence agencies in 1986 as a front for the Abu Nidal terrorist organisation.

For a time, Qassem was not approached by intelligence agencies, because he had been arrested in Syria in connection with a kidnapping. Some of the details Bingham gives of this bizarre episode remain classified, but apparently the BCCI man was not charged, and returned to London.

In July 1987, he was contacted by MI5 and MI6 officers, who told him what they had discovered about the SAS Trade accounts. A surprised Qassem agreed to pass on information about the accounts.

He turned out to be a loose cannon, however. From the start, Bingham writes, Qassem failed to disclose all he knew. By June 1989 'the Security Service [MI5] were becoming a little unsure that they were receiving Qassem's full co-operation, and thought that an additional source would be valuable'.

They recruited his assistant, but he 'did not prove a satisfactory informant' and was eventually suspended by BCCI for alleged misconduct.

At the end of that year, Qassem began to claim his life was in danger as a result of his co-operation with the intelligence services.

He also became involved in a dispute with his line manager and filed an employment tribunal case against BCCI, claiming the bank was victimising him 'for his role in looking after the [Abu Nidal] accounts and the accounts of drug traffickers, even though he had acted in accordance with the bank's wishes'.

Before these allegations could be made public, BCCI - to the likely relief of British intelligence - settled the case out of court, paying Qassem £36,700 if he agreed not to publicise his claims.

He did not stay silent for long, however. In July 1991, Qassem caused a stir by appearing on BBC Panorama, describing his MI5 contacts. 'Much of what he said,' concluded Bingham, 'was factually correct.'

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/economics/story/0,11268,1125478,00.html 

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Bank of Credit and Commerce International
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/BCCI.htm

Bank of England ordered to release files in BCCI case
http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/03-04-04/discussion.cgi.93.html

The Barreling Bushes
http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/01-11-04/discussion.cgi.33.html

Senator "Cash & Carry"
http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/02-07-04/discussion.cgi.138.html


New World Order’s Planned Agenda for Global Mass Slaughter
As for George W. Bush, his limited ties are said to have come through investments in, and buyouts of, several of his oil businesses by CIA- and BCCI-connected firms and individuals.
http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/02-09-04/discussion.cgi.15.html

The House of Bush
http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/01-07-04/discussion.cgi.28.html

The Saudi European Investment Corp., (Part of BCCI-Bank of Credit and Commerce International)
which included members of the Saudi Royal Family, Kuwait, Pakistan,
including former Texas Governor John Connelly. Connelly had been the passenger in
the Presidential Limousine when President John F. Kennedy was Murdered.
http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/01-06-04/discussion.cgi.74.html