President Trump has finally fired his neocon national security adviser, John Bolton.
The decision to show Bolton the door came after Trump suggested a meeting between himself and the Taliban at Camp David.
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….I asked John for his resignation, which was given to me this morning. I thank John very much for his service. I will be naming a new National Security Advisor next week.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 10, 2019
As should be expected, Bolton strongly disagreed—the idea runs counter to the neocon vision of US foreign policy—and Trump, being Trump, fired him.
Rumor has it Trump will talk to Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, although the Iranians say they will not talk with Trump until sanctions are lifted. For the neocons, the mere idea of talking to the mullahs or engaging any kind of diplomacy with Iran is unacceptable heresy. They’d rather kill Iranians than talk with them.
What Iran says is clear: no war, no sanctions, no threats, no bullying; just acting according to the law and fulfilling obligations. Our proposal is clear: commitment for commitment; violation for violation; threat for threat; and step for step, instead of talk for talk. #UNGA
— Hassan Rouhani (@HassanRouhani) September 25, 2018
The latest game of musical chairs at the White House underscores the fact Donald Trump has absolutely no idea what he is doing.
If, as claimed during the campaign, Trump wants to shut down the wars and bring home the troops, why did he hire one of the most violent and scurrilous of neocons to advise him on foreign policy, a guy who penned a New York Times op-ed calling for bombing Iran as a response to its nonexistent nuclear weapons program?
The Taliban were created and nurtured into power by the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI. Phil Gasper writes:
The U.S. government was well aware of the Taliban’s reactionary program, yet it chose to back their rise to power in the mid-1990s. The creation of the Taliban was “actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA,” according to Selig Harrison, an expert on U.S. relations with Asia. “The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban, certainly right up to their advance on Kabul,” adds respected journalist Ahmed Rashid. When the Taliban took power, State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw “nothing objectionable” in the Taliban’s plans to impose strict Islamic law, and Senator Hank Brown, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, welcomed the new regime: “The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at last seems capable of developing a new government in Afghanistan.” “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the consortium of oil companies that controlled Saudi oil], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that,” said another U.S. diplomat in 1997.
That was before 9/11 and the creation of another CIA asset, Osama bin Laden. Neocons rife in the Bush administration decided the Taliban would represent in part the new face of radical Islamic evil, never mind the previous stance of the US government that the Taliban would become good friends like the Saudis.
The Bush invasion of Afghanistan was planned before the 9/11 attack, as former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice admitted during testimony before the 9/11 commission.
Moreover, the US set aside terrorism investigations of al-Qaeda and the Taliban at the behest of transnational oil corporations.
From Julio Godoy of Inter Press Service:
Under the influence of U.S. oil companies, the government of George W. Bush initially blocked U.S. secret service investigations on terrorism, while it bargained with the Taliban the delivery of Osama bin Laden in exchange for political recognition and economic aid, two French intelligence analysts claim… They affirm that until August [2001], the U.S. government saw the Taliban regime ”as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia”, from the rich oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean.
The invasion of Afghanistan had little to do with Osama bin Laden—the Taliban said they would turn him over if his role in 9/11 could be proven—but rather the illegal invasion was part of a plan before 9/11 to secure the impoverished country for an oil pipeline and a hunt for minerals, thus the deal with the Taliban disappeared under a rain of bombs and a deadly fog of depleted uranium.
It was reported that one US official proclaimed during negotiation with the Taliban: “either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”
On October 14, 2001, The Guardian reported:
In Jalalabad, deputy prime minister Haji Abdul Kabir—the third most powerful figure in the ruling Taliban regime—told reporters that the Taliban would require evidence that Bin Laden was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, but added: “we would be ready to hand him over to a third country.”
Prof. Michel Chossudovsky brings the real objective of the invasion into focus.
The economic dimensions of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT) are rarely mentioned. The post 9/11 “counter-terrorism campaign” has served to obfuscate the real objectives of the US-NATO war.
The war on Afghanistan is part of a profit-driven agenda: a war of economic conquest and plunder, “a resource war”.
While Afghanistan is acknowledged as a strategic hub in Central Asia, bordering on the former Soviet Union, China and Iran, at the crossroads of pipeline routes and major oil and gas reserves, its huge mineral wealth as well as its untapped natural gas reserves have remained, until June 2010, totally unknown to the American public.
According to a joint report by the Pentagon, the US Geological Survey (USGS) and USAID, Afghanistan is now said to possess “previously unknown” and untapped mineral reserves, estimated authoritatively to be of the order of one trillion dollars (New York Times, U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan – NYTimes.com, June 14, 2010, See also BBC, 14 June 2010).
John Bolton and the neocons are largely responsible for the numerous wars and violations of international law. They have managed to keep the US in what appears to be an endless war against Wahhabi-inspired fanatics (created by US and Pakistani intelligence).
President Trump wants something else—to be at the center of a historic peace deal ending the longest war in American history—and Bolton was jettisoned due to his disagreement and sticking to his neocon principles, if they can be termed such.
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Kurt Nimmo writes on his blog, Another Day in the Empire, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from the author
