As many of you know Kosovo declared independence from Serbia yesterday, and today the U.S., Britain, and France became the first countries to recognize Kosovo. The speed with which the chimp endorsed this independence made me suspicious, as he never does anything without an ulterior motive.
My usual search terms when intrigued--haliburton, cheney, brown and root, natural resources--yielded of course the reason the commander guy recognized Kosovo:
Its about the oil, coal, and corporate profits.
And war. China and Russia have opposed this recognition. The resources are going either east or west, and the Trojan Horse just might be Kosovo independence.
While much has been said about the ethnic tensions between Serbs, Croats, and Albanians and the ethnic cleansing, one of the underlying issues in the region that causes war, in my opinion, is access to natural resources. In Kosovo's case, resources include zinc, coal (hundreds of millions of tons), coal bed methane, oil, lead, tungston....the virtual "glory hole" for the military industrial complex. More estimates of resources can be found here. One explanation of Serbia's resistance to independence (not ethnic cleansing, unforgiveable imo) for Kosovo is clearly natural resources, as Serbia is not blessed with the same concentration of resources.
And certainly one of bushco's reason's for "immediate" recognition of Kosovo, despite all the pleadings on democracy, independence, the ethnic cleansing....the exploitation of oil will come in the form of "democracy".
But of course this is not new information to several US administrations, as one of the largest U.S. military bases in the world is located in Kosovo. According to the link provided here,
Camp Bondsteel, the biggest "from scratch" foreign US military base since the Vietnam War is near completion in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. It is located close to vital oil pipelines and energy corridors presently under construction, such as the US sponsored Trans-Balkan oil pipeline. As a result defence contractors - in particular Halliburton Oil subsidiary Brown & Root Services - are making a fortune.
In June 1999, in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Yugoslavia, US forces seized 1,000 acres of farmland in southeast Kosovo at Urosevac, near the Macedonian border, and began the construction of a camp.
Camp Bondsteel is known as the "grand dame" in a network of US bases running both sides of the border between Kosovo and Macedonia. In less than three years it has been transformed from an encampment of tents to a self sufficient, high tech base-camp housing nearly 7,000 troops — three quarters of all the US troops stationed in Kosovo.
Apparently this military camp was planned before the first bomb was even dropped on Serbia:
According to Colonel Robert L. McClure, writing in the engineers professional Bulletin, "Engineer planning for operations in Kosovo began months before the first bomb was dropped. At the outset, planners wanted to use the lessons learned in Bosnia and convinced decision makers to reach base-camp ‘end state’ as quickly as possible."
Initially US military engineers took control of 320 kilometres of roads and 75 bridges in the surrounding area for military use and laid out a base camp template involving soldiers living quarters, helicopter flight paths, ammunition holding areas and so on.
McClure explains how the Engineer Brigade were instructed "to merge construction assets and integrate them with the contractor, Brown & Root Services Corporation, to build not one but two base camps [the other is Camp Monteith] for a total of 7,000 troops."
So enter Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld in 2001, with Rumfeld clearly laying out the mission and role of US troops in the economic development of the United States (wait, where was he?):
On June 5, 2001 US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld explained to troops at Camp Bondsteel what role they played in the new administration’s economic strategy. He declared, "How much should we spend on the armed services? ...My view is we don’t spend on you, we invest in you. The men and women in the armed services are not a drain on our economic strength. Indeed you safeguard it. You’re not a burden on our economy, you are the critical foundation for growth."
One month later, President George W. Bush made his first trip abroad to see US troops at the camp. He traveled directly from the Rome G8 summit, where tensions with European governments had come to the fore. In a speech described as a ‘retrenching’ of the US in Europe, he insisted that US troops were in Kosovo to stay, had gone in together and would "leave together". In a break from normal procedure, in front of cheering troops, Bush signed into law a Congress-approved increase in military spending of $1.9 billion.
Since then Camp Bondsteel has continued to grow, as it spearheads the first phase in a realignment of US military bases in Europe and eastward. The Bondsteel template is now being applied in Afghanistan and the new bases in the former Soviet Republics
According to leaked comments to the press, European politicians now believe that the US used the bombing of Yugoslavia specifically in order to establish Camp Bondsteel. Before the start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the Washington Post insisted, "With the Middle-East increasingly fragile, we will need bases and fly over rights in the Balkans to protect Caspian Sea oil."
I thought we'd seen the Iraq war before: platitudes of democracy and threats of annihilation to cover the quest for natural resources, at unfathomable expense.
According to the US Trade and Development Agency,
The scale of US oil corporations investment in the exploitation of Caspian oil fields and the US government demand for the economy to be less dependent on imported oil, particularly from the Middle-East, demands a long term solution to the transportation of oil to European and US markets
. This agency has has financed initial feasibility studies, with large grants, and more recently advanced technical studies for the New York based AMBO (Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria Oil) Trans-Balkan pipeline.
Brown and Root is now the largest employer in Kosovo, with more than 5,000 local Kosovo Albanians and another 15,000 on its books.
So enter independence! And I think you'd be interested to know who is going to Kosovo to enforce the peace:
E.U. Police and Military Intervention to enforce Secession from Serbia
Yes, Blackwater and Haliburton.
Why the trojan horse? Because Bush can declare an emergency any where in the world that threatens vital american "interests" (oops, I mean oil,no, I mean security!)...that is, the corporate interests that run this government.
We are in deep, deep, trouble. I am interested in whether this needs to be discussed or not as we shape our country's future.