An Interview with the author of Crude Politics, Paul Sperry
Barnes & Noble.com: Crude Politics
is subtitled "How Bush's Oil Cronies Hijacked the War on Terrorism."
Who are these "cronies"?
Paul Sperry: They include onetime Caspian
energy industry lobbyist Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush's broker for regime
change in Kabul and now Baghdad; Dick Cheney, whose Halliburton Co. has
long been a player in both the Caspian and in Iraq; Condi Rice,
longtime director of ChevronTexaco, the Caspian's biggest investor and
also a player now in Iraq; Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage,
formerly a powerful Caspian lobbyist in Washington; commerce secretary
Don Evans, whose former oil firm is partly owned by Unocal, the
original lead investor in the trans-Afghan pipelines that Khalilzad
lobbied for and which are now on the fast track to development...the
rest of the cronies are listed in the "Players & Power Brokers"
section in the front of Crude Politics. Many of them were among
the principals who crafted the post-9/11 war strategy.
B&N.com: You're politically
conservative, yet you criticize the approach Bush has taken to the war
on terror. At what point did you start to feel that Bush wasn't doing
the right thing?
PS: My doubts really crystallized in
December 2001, when Osama bin Laden escaped from Afghanistan and many
of my Special Ops and CentCom sources began griping about the Bush
administration's odd military strategy of focusing on the Taliban and
"regime change," while using local Afghan proxy fighters to hunt down
bin Laden.
B&N.com: You cite our relationship with
Pakistan, an ostensible "ally" in the war on terror, as an "unholy
alliance." Why is that?
PS: Pakistan is the world's epicenter of
anti-American terror. As I document in Crude Politics, almost
every terrorist act against the U.S. or its interests abroad has had a
Pakistani connection. That includes September 11th. Pakistan is where
terrorists, including senior members of al-Qaida, meet, train, study
and hide out -- all under the nose of Pakistani strongman, Musharraf.
Why is Bush so deferential to Musharraf? Why has
he bought him off with billions of dollars in U.S. aid? One reason is
he agreed to sign a deal with U.S. puppet Hamid Karzai in Kabul, also a
onetime energy consultant, to develop the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline
(TAP), which continues on through Pakistan. The Taliban, which
Musharraf backed, was blocking its development. The multibillion-dollar
gas pipeline is now on the fast track -- unlike the hunt for bin Laden.
B&N.com: Should Saudi Arabia be
included in any "axis of evil" when it comes to harboring and fostering
terrorism? Why did the administration whisk Osama's relatives out of
the country only days after 9/11?
PS: If the Bush Doctrine were applied
evenly and apolitically, which it isn't, we would count Saudi Arabia
among our enemies, not allies. In fact, there is far, far more evidence
linking Riyadh to al-Qaida and September 11th than Baghdad. Of course,
don't tell that to Bush, who has fudged the evidence in both cases. The
main reason he allowed Osama's relatives to be whisked out of the
country after September 11th is the same reason he won't declassify
those 28 pages on Saudi in the 9/11 report: Prince Bandar. He and the
Bush family go way back, and it was Bandar who lobbied the White House
to spirit the bin Ladens out of the country, and it is Bandar and his
wife and brother-in-law, Prince Turki, who are cited in the 9/11 report
as possible co-conspirators. What's more, it's a fact, not a rumor,
that Bush's father and consigliere James Baker personally have done
business with the bin Laden family. In Crude Politics, I
produce a secret letter between a top Bush administration official and
a Saudi official that reveals the alarming degree of access and clout
the royal family has with this administration. Bottom line: Bush is
covering for the Saudis, and it's not just for strategic geopolitical
reasons.
B&N.com: Is Bush guilty of exploiting
one of the worst American tragedies of all time?
PS: I'm afraid so. The book's subtitle is
not just for effect. They really did hijack this war to pursue their
hidden agendas. But that doesn't mean they didn't want to bring
al-Qaida leaders to justice, their royal benefactors notwithstanding.
They did, and still do, it's just that the war provided a golden
opportunity to do other things at the same time -- namely, to open up
new oil frontiers -- and that's where they blew it. Trying to kill two
birds with one stone sewed such a high degree of complexity into the
operation that it caused them to take their eye off the main quarry,
bin Laden, and now he's still threatening us two years after he
attacked us.
I pray we get him tomorrow, before he can order
another major hit on us. That would be the real victory, though it
would still be somewhat pyrrhic. If we had caught him in the winter of
2001 -- when we had a bead on him in southern Afghanistan, and a golden
chance to take him out -- I doubt the American people would have
countenanced this messy Iraqi dogleg in the war on terror, or the
further erosion of our civil liberties. And I'm certain our economy and
mutual fund balances would look better.
B&N.com: Why didn't Bush send a massive
number of ground troops into Afghanistan to get Osama, as he later did
to get Saddam? Was it fear of a "quagmire," something we may well now
be facing in Iraq?
PS: Well, that's the reason he gave,
anyway. But the Afghan plan as drafted by senior White House security
adviser Khalilzad, who staffed the Pentagon during the early 2001
transition, called for using local Afghan proxies to give the different
tribal factions a stake in the new U.S.-approved regime. Unfortunately,
they betrayed us by letting Osama escape across the border into
Pakistan. Bush followed Khalilzad's blueprint right down to installing
him as Afghan envoy and lifting the Pressler Amendment and other
sanctions on Pakistan. The blueprint is documented in two policy white
papers Khalilzad wrote, one of which is revealed for the first time in Crude
Politics.
And now Bush is following Khalilzad's plan in
Baghdad, where he's grooming an oil-tied Iraqi defector to replace
Saddam Hussein. The influential Khalilzad, an Afghan native and a
Muslim, is not exactly a household name, and the White House likes it
that way. He is a shadowy operator. He gets no mention whatever in Bob
Woodward's book on the war, but readers will become well acquainted
with Mr. Khalilzad in Crude Politics.
B&N.com: The question of whether the
Bush administration lied about the threat Iraq posed to us is running
rampant in the headlines. Do you feel Bush and his people deliberately
misrepresented the situation in order to get the American people behind
the Iraq war?
PS: Absolutely, there is no question now
that Bush sold the American people a bill of goods about the alleged
Iraqi threat to them. And even if they stumble on some evidence of a
weapons of a mass destruction program or a clear al-Qaida link at this
late juncture, it still won't confirm Bush's prewar rhetoric, because
we now know the intelligence underlying the rhetoric was soft -- and in
some cases fabricated. The cat's officially out of the bag: We went
into Baghdad on a hunch, not on hard intelligence. Any evidence we find
now in Iraq isn't confirmation, it's luck.
That's no way to prosecute a war, and certainly no
way to start a war. And it's the height of irresponsibility to do so in
the middle of a war on al-Qaida, the real threat to America. Bush
diverted resources -- such as troops, intelligence assets, Arabic
translators -- from the hunt for bin Laden and his top henchmen like
Dr. Zawahiri. That's inexcusable, and Bush supporters with any modicum
of intellectual honesty should be mad as hell about it. And that's
coming from someone who voted for Bush.
B&N.com: Considering that both Bush and
Vice President Cheney, as well as and a fair number of their
appointees, have worked in the oil business, should we be all that
surprised that they seem so eager to establish oil supplies in both
Afghanistan and Iraq?
PS: Actually, as cynical as I am, I thought
this would be one crisis in which politicians would shove their
ulterior motives, hidden agendas, and special interests down a deep
dark hole and just do what's right for the country for a change. But
the oil motive is something antiwar protesters assumed right off the
bat -- and it turns out they were right. They've been easy to dismiss,
however, because they've failed to articulate the
who-what-when-where-why-and-how when they have charged, "It's about
oil!"
Crude Politics documents it, chronicles it,
provides new dots, makes all the connections, providing the actual road
map to the conspiracy. But again, the war has not been all about oil,
as many protesters charge, and I should note that I viewed the
Afghanistan counterstrikes as morally justified, and am more hawk than
dove, but it certainly has been a good piece of it. To make any real
sense of the administration's war strategy, you have to follow the oil.
It really is that simple, although how they've gone about it is quite
complicated. The political and corporate connections alone are
fascinating.
B&N.com: Both Afghanistan and Iraq seem
to be falling apart, after U.S. intervention was supposed to stabilize
things there and "liberate" the civilians. What will both countries
look like a year from now, in your opinion?
PS: The only thing that will be liberated
in those Islamic nations is the UN economic sanctions on their rogue
regimes -- sanctions that until now had precluded U.S. oil companies
from investing there. That's why "regime change," something you'll
recall that candidate Bush considered a bad word, suddenly became so
important. Though there have been some successes, all we've really done
in Afghanistan is scatter al-Qaida terrorists, like so many angry red
ants, without killing their queen. Bush might as well have just taken a
big stick and stirred up a giant anthill.
Same goes for Iraq, though we didn't even scatter
al-Qaida there. We displaced a lot of Iraqi citizens, families,
children, many of them Shiites who weren't at all a part of Saddam's
regime and who are growing increasingly resentful of the U.S.
occupation. But there's too much oil money at stake in both countries
for us to leave. Our military will be there to provide security for
U.S. investments for decades to come. Tragically, instead of just
getting bin Laden and getting out, Bush only drove us deeper into a
part of the world that already hates us.
I pray there will be no Bush blowback, like the
blowback from his father's Saudi-centric actions in the Gulf 12 years
earlier. I pray our young soldiers whom Bush put in harm's way over
there won't continue to be sitting ducks. But I am not optimistic.
B&N.com: With Bush running hard for
reelection, is it safe to assume he won't be getting your vote? Do you
see anyone on the Democratic side you'd feel comfortable voting for
instead?
PS: Like I said, I voted for Bush, but I
don't plan to vote for a Republican or a Democrat this time. Both
parties disgust me now, quite frankly.
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