"Globalresearch.ca" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Risky Geopolitical Game:
Washington Plays Tibet Roulette with China
function resizeImages() { var i = 0; for(i=0; i 400) {
var ratio = 0; var newH = 0; ratio = 400 / document.images[i].width;
newH = document.images[i].height * ratio; document.images[i].width = 400;
document.images[i].height = newH; } } return true; }
Risky Geopolitical Game: Washington Plays Tibet Roulette with China
By F. William Engdahl
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8625
Global Research, April 10, 2008
Washington has obviously decided on an ultra-high risk geopolitical game with
Beijings by fanning the flames of violence in Tibet just at this sensitive
time in their relations and on the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. Its part
of an escalating strategy of destabilization of China which has been initiated
by the Bush Administration over the past months. It also includes the attempt
to ignite an anti-China Saffron Revolution in the neighboring Myanmar region,
bringing US-led NATO troops into Darfur where Chinas oil companies are
developing potentially huge oil reserves. It includes counter moves across
mineral-rich Africa. And it includes strenuous efforts to turn India into a
major new US forward base on the Asian sub-continent to be deployed against
China, though evidence to date suggests the Indian government is being very
cautious not to upset Chinese relations.
The current Tibet operation apparently got the green light in October last
year when George Bush agreed to meet the Dalai Lama for the first time
publicly in Washington. The President of the United States is not unaware of
the high stakes of such an insult to Beijing. Bush deepened the affront to
Americas largest trading partner, China, by agreeing to attend as the US
Congress awarded the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal.
The immediate expressions of support for the crimson monks of Tibet from
George Bush, Condi Rice, Frances Nicolas Sarkozy and Germanys Angela Merkel
most recently took on dimensions of the absurd. Ms Merkel announced she would
boycott attending the August Beijing Summer Olympics as her protest at the
Beijing treatment of the Tibetan monks. What her press secretary omitted is
that she had not even planned to go in the first place.
She was followed by an announcement that Polands Prime Minister, the
pro-Washington Donald Tusk, would also stay away, along with pro-US Czech
President Vaclav Klaus. It is unclear whether they also hadnt planned to go
in the first place but it made for dramatic press headlines.
The recent wave of violent protests and documented attacks by Tibetan monks
against Han Chinese residents began on March 10 when several hundred monks
marched on Lhasa to demand release of other monks allegedly detained for
celebrating the award of the US Congress Gold Medal last October. The monks
were joined by other monks marching to protest Beijing rule on the 49th
anniversary of the Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule.
The geopolitical game
As the Chinese government itself was clear to point out, the sudden
eruption of anti-Chinese violence in Tibet, a new phase in the movement led by
the exiled Dalai Lama, was suspiciously timed to try to put the spotlight on
Beijings human rights record on the eve of the coming Olympics. The Beijing
Olympics are an event seen in China as a major acknowledgement of the arrival
of a new prosperous China on the world stage.
The background actors in the Tibet Crimson revolution actions confirm that
Washington has been working overtime in recent months to prepare another of
its infamous Color Revolutions, these fanning public protests designed to
inflict maximum embarrassment on Beijing. The actors on the ground in and
outside Tibet are the usual suspects, tied to the US State Department,
including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the CIAs Freedom House
through its chairman, Bette Bao Lord and her role in the International
Committee for Tibet, as well as the Trace Foundation financed by the wealth of
George Soros through his daughter, Andrea Soros Colombel.
Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has accused the Dalai Lama of
orchestrating the latest unrest to sabotage the Olympic Games in order to
achieve their unspeakable goal, Tibetan independence.
Bush telephoned his Chinese counterpart, President Hu Jintao, to pressure
for talks between Beijing and the exiled Dalai Lama. The White House said that
Bush, raised his concerns about the situation in Tibet and encouraged the
Chinese government to engage in substantive dialogue with the Dalai Lamas
representatives and to allow access for journalists and diplomats.
President Hu reportedly told Bush the Dalai Lama must stop his sabotage of
the Olympics before Beijing takes a decision on talks with the exiled Tibetan
spiritual leader, foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said.
Dalai Lamas odd friends
In the West the image of the Dalai Lama has been so much promoted that in
many circles he is deemed almost a God. While the spiritual life of the Dalai
Lama is not our focus, it is relevant to note briefly the circles he has
chosen to travel in most of his life.
The Dalai Lama travels in what can only be called rather conservative
political circles. What is generally forgotten today is that during the 1930s
the Nazis including Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler and other top Nazi Party
leaders regarded Tibet as the holy site of the survivors of the lost Atlantis,
and the origin of the Nordic pure race.
When he was 11 and already designated Dalai Lama, he was befriended by
Heinrich Harrer, a Nazi Party member and officer of Heinrich Himmlers feared
SS. Far from the innocent image of him in the popular Hollywood film with Brad
Pitt, Harrer was an elite SS member at the time he met the 11 year old Dalai
Lama and became his tutor in the world outside Tibet. While only the Dalai
Lama knows the contents of Harrers private lessons, the two remained friends
until Harrer died a ripe 93 in 2006.1
That sole friendship, of course, does not define a persons character, but
it is interesting in the context of later friends. In April 1999, along with
Margaret Thatcher, and former Beijing Ambassador, CIA Director and President,
George H.W. Bush, the Dalai Lama demanded the British government release
Augusto Pinochet, the former fascist dictator of Chile and a longtime CIA
client who was visiting England. The Dalai Lama urged that Pinochet not be
forced to go to Spain where he was wanted to stand trial for crimes against
humanity. The Dalai Lama had close ties to Miguel Serrano2, head of Chiles
National Socialist Party, a proponent of something called esoteric Hitlerism.
3
Leaving aside at this point the claim of the Dalai Lama to divinity, what is
indisputable is that he has been surrounded and financed in significant part,
since his flight into Indian exile in 1959, by various US and Western
intelligence services and their gaggle of NGOs. It is the agenda of the
Washington friends of the Dalai Lama that is relevant here.
The NED at work again...
As author Michael Parenti notes in his work, Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet
Myth, during the 1950s and 60s, the CIA actively backed the Tibetan cause
with arms, military training, money, air support and all sorts of other help.
The US-based American Society for a Free Asia, a CIA front, publicized the
cause of Tibetan resistance, with the Dalai Lamas eldest brother, Thubtan
Norbu, playing an active role in the group. The Dalai Lamas second-eldest
brother, Gyalo Thondup, established an intelligence operation with the CIA in
1951. It was later upgraded into a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits
parachuted back into Tibet, according to Parenti.4
According to declassified US intelligence documents released in the late
1990s, for much of the 1960s, the CIA provided the Tibetan exile movement
with $1.7 million a year for operations against China, including an annual
subsidy of $180,000 for the Dalai Lama. 5
With help of the CIA, the Dalai Lama fled to Dharamsala, India where he
lives to the present. He continues to receive millions of dollars in backing
today, not from the CIA but from a more innocuous-sounding CIA front
organization, funded by the US Congress, the National Endowment for Democracy
(NED). The NED has been instrumental in every US-backed Color Revolution
destabilization from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine to Myanmar. Its funds go to
back opposition media and global public relations campaigns to popularize
their pet opposition candidates.
As in the other recent Color Revolutions, the US Government is fanning the
flames of destabilization against China by funding opposition protest
organizations inside and outside Tibet through its arm, the National Endowment
for Democracy (NED).
The NED was founded by the Reagan Administration in the early 1980s, on the
recommendation of Bill Casey, Reagans Director of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), following a series of high-publicity exposures of CIA
assassinations and destabilizations of unfriendly regimes. The NED was
designed to pose as an independent NGO, one step removed from the CIA and
Government agencies so as to be less conspicuous, presumably. The first acting
President of the NED, Allen Weinstein, commented to the Washington Post that,
A lot of what we [the NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the
CIA. 6
American intelligence historian, William Blum states, The NED played an
important role in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, funding key components
of Oliver North's shadowy "Project Democracy." This network privatized US
foreign policy, waged war, ran arms and drugs, and engaged in other equally
charming activities. In 1987, a White House spokesman stated that those at NED
"run Project Democracy." 7
The most prominent pro-Dalai Lama Tibet independence organization today is
the International Campaign for Tibet, founded in Washington in 1988. Since at
least 1994 the ICT has been receiving funds from the NED. The ICT awarded
their annual Light of Truth award in 2005 to Carl Gershman, founder of the
NED. Other ICT award winners have included the German Friedrich Naumann
Foundation and Czech leader, Vaclav Havel. The ICT Board of Directors is
peopled with former US State Department officials including Gare Smith and
Julia Taft. 8
Another especially active anti-Beijing organization is the US-based Students
for a Free Tibet, founded in 1994 in New York City as a project of US Tibet
Committee and the NED-financed International Campaign for Tibet (ICT). The SFT
is most known for unfurling a 450 foot banner atop the Great Wall in China;
calling for a free Tibet, and accusing Beijing of wholly unsubstantiated
claims of genocide against Tibet. Apparently it makes good drama to rally
naïve students.
The SFT was among five organizations which this past January that
proclaimed start of a "Tibetan people's uprising" on Jan 4 this year and
co-founded a temporary office in charge of coordination and financing.
Harry Wu is another prominent Dalai Lama supporter against Beijing. He
became notorious for claiming falsely in a 1996 Playboy interview that he had
videotaped a prisoner whose kidneys were surgically removed while he was
alive, and then the prisoner was taken out and shot. The tape was broadcast by
BBC." The BBC film showed nothing of the sort, but the damage was done. How
many people check old BBC archives? Wu, a retired Berkeley professor who left
China after imprisonment as a dissident, is head of the Laogai Research
Foundation, a tax-exempt organization whose main funding is from the NED.9
Among related projects, the US Government-financed NED also supports the
Tibet Times newspaper, run out of the Dalai Lamas exile base at Dharamsala,
India. The NED also funds the Tibet Multimedia Center for information
dissemination that addresses the struggle for human rights and democracy in
Tibet, also based in Dharamsala. And NED finances the Tibetan Center for
Human Rights and Democracy.
In short, US State Department and US intelligence community finger prints
are all over the upsurge around the Free Tibet movement and the anti-Han
Chinese attacks of March. The question to be asked is why, and especially why
now?
Tibets raw minerals treasure
Tibet is of strategic import to China not only for its geographical location
astride the border with India, Washingtons newest anti-China ally in Asia.
Tibet is also a treasure of minerals and also oil. Tibet contains some of the
world's largest uranium and borax deposits, one half of the world's lithium,
the largest copper deposits in Asia, enormous iron deposits, and over 80,000
gold mines. Tibet's forests are the largest timber reserve at China's
disposal; as of 1980, an estimated $54 billion worth of trees had been felled
and taken by China. Tibet also contains some of the largest oil reserves in
the region.10
On the Tibet Autonomous Regions border along the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous
Region is also a vast oil and mineral region in the Qaidam Basin, known as a
"treasure basin." The Basin has 57 different types of mineral resources with
proven reserves including petroleum, natural gas, coal, crude salt, potassium,
magnesium, lead, zinc and gold. These mineral resources have a potential
economic value of 15 trillion yuan or US$1.8 trillion. Proven reserves of
potassium, lithium and crude salt in the basin are the biggest in China.
And situated as it is, on the roof of the world, Tibet is perhaps the
worlds most valuable water source. Tibet is the source of seven of Asia's
greatest rivers which provide water for 2 billion people. He who controls
Tibets water has a mighty powerful geopolitical lever over all Asia.
But the prime interest of Tibet for Washington today is its potential to act
as a lever to destabilize and blackmail the Beijing Government.
Washingtons nonviolence as a form of warfare
The events in Tibet since March 10 have been played in Western media with
little regard to accuracy or independent cross-checking. Most of the pictures
blown up in European and US newspapers and TV have not even been of Chinese
military oppression of Tibetan lamas or monks. They have been shown to be in
most cases either Reuters or AFP pictures of Han Chinese being beaten by
Tibetan monks in paramilitary organizations. In some instances German TV
stations ran video pictures of beatings that were not even from Tibet but
rather by Nepalese police in Kathmandu. 11
The western media complicity simply further underlies that the actions
around Tibet are part of a well-orchestrated destabilization effort on the
part of Washington. What few people realize is that the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED) was also instrumental, along with Gene Sharps misnamed Albert
Einstein Institution through Colonel Robert Helvey, in encouraging the student
protests at Tiananmen Square in June 1989. The Albert Einstein Institution, as
it describes itself, specializes in "nonviolence as a form of warfare." 12
Colonel Helvey was formerly with the Defense Intelligence Agency stationed
in Myanmar. Helvey trained in Hong Kong the student leaders from Beijing in
mass demonstration techniques which they were to use in the Tiananmen Square
incident of June 1989. He is now believed acting as an adviser to the Falun
Gong in similar civil disobedience techniques. Helvey nominally retired from
the army in 1991, but had been working with the Albert Einstein Institution
and George Soros Open Society Foundation long before then. In its annual
report for 2004 Helveys Albert Einstein Institution admitted to advising
people in Tibet. 13
With the emergence of the Internet and mobile telephone use, the US Pentagon
has refined an entirely new form of regime change and political
destabilization. As one researcher of the phenomenon behind the wave of color
revolutions, Jonathan Mowat, describes it,
...What we are seeing is civilian application of Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld's "Revolution in Military Affairs" doctrine, which depends on highly
mobile small group deployments "enabled" by "real time" intelligence and
communications. Squads of soldiers taking over city blocks with the aid of
"intelligence helmet" video screens that give them an instantaneous overview
of their environment, constitute the military side. Bands of youth converging
on targeted intersections in constant dialogue on cell phones constitute the
doctrine's civilian application.
This parallel should not be surprising since the US military and National
Security Agency subsidized the development of the Internet, cellular phones,
and software platforms. From their inception, these technologies were studied
and experimented with in order to find the optimal use in a new kind of
warfare. The "revolution" in warfare that such new instruments permit has been
pushed to the extreme by several specialists in psychological warfare.
Although these military utopians have been working in high places, (for
example the RAND Corporation), for a very long time, to a large extent they
only took over some of the most important command structures of the US
military apparatus with the victory of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon of
Donald Rumsfeld.14
Goal to control China
Washington policy has used and refined these techniques of revolutionary
nonviolence, and NED operations embodied a series of democratic or soft
coup projects as part of a larger strategy which would seek to cut China off
from access to its vital external oil and gas reserves.
The 1970s quote attributed to then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a
proponent of British geopolitics in an American context comes to mind: If you
control the oil you control entire nations...
The destabilization attempt by Washington using Tibet, no doubt with quiet
help from its friends in British and other US-friendly intelligence
services, is part of a clear pattern.
It includes Washingtons Saffron revolution attempts to destabilize
Myanmar. It includes the ongoing effort to get NATO troops into Darfur to
block Chinas access to strategically vital oil resources there and elsewhere
in Africa. It includes attempts to foment problems in Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan
and to disrupt Chinas vital new energy pipeline projects to Kazakhstan. The
earlier Asian Great Silk Road trade routes went through Tashkent in Uzbekistan
and Almaty in Kazakhstan for geographically obvious reasons, in a region
surrounded by major mountain ranges. Geopolitical control of Uzbekistan,
Kyrgystan, Kazakhstan would enable control of any potential pipeline routes
between China and Central Asia just as the encirclement of Russia controls
pipeline and other ties between it and western Europe, China, India and the
Middle East, where China depends on uninterrupted oil flows from Iran, Saudi
Arabia and other OPEC countries.
Behind the strategy to encircle China
In this context, a revealing New York Council on Foreign Relations analysis
in their Foreign Affairs magazine from Zbigniew Brzezinski from
September/October 1997 is worth quoting. Brzezinski, a protégé of David
Rockefeller and a follower of the founder of British geopolitics, Sir Halford
Mackinder, is today the foreign policy adviser to Presidential candidate,
Barack Obama. In 1997 he revealingly wrote:
Eurasia is home to most of the world's politically assertive and dynamic
states. All the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia.
The world's most populous aspirants to regional hegemony, China and India, are
in Eurasia, as are all the potential political or economic challengers to
American primacy. After the United States, the next six largest economies and
military spenders are there, as are all but one of the world's overt nuclear
powers, and all but one of the covert ones. Eurasia accounts for 75 percent of
the world's population; 60 percent of its GNP, and 75 percent of its energy
resources. Collectively, Eurasia's potential power overshadows even America's.
Eurasia is the world's axial super-continent. A power that dominated
Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's three most
economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the
map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost
automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as
the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one
policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of
power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America's
global primacy....15 (emphasis mine-w.e.).
This statement, written well before the US-led bombing of former Yugoslavia
and the US military occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, or its support of the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline, puts Washington pronouncements about ridding
the world of tyranny and about spreading democracy, into a somewhat different
context from the one usually mentioned by George W. Bush of others.
Its about global hegemony, not democracy. It should be no surprise when
powers such as China are not convinced that giving Washington such
overwhelming power is in Chinas national interest, any more than Russia
thinks that it would be a step towards peace to let NATO gobble up Ukraine and
Georgia and put US missiles on Russias doorstep to defend against threat of
Iranian nuclear attack on the United States.
The US-led destabilization in Tibet is part of a strategic shift of great
significance. It comes at a time when the US economy and the US dollar, still
the worlds reserve currency, are in the worst crisis since the 1930s. It is
significant that the US Administration sends Wall Street banker, former
Goldman Sachs chairman, Henry Paulson to Beijing in the midst of its efforts
to embarrass Beijing in Tibet. Washington is literally playing with fire.
China long ago surpassed Japan as the worlds largest holder of foreign
currency reserves, now in the range of $1.5 trillions, most of which are
invested in US Treasury debt instruments. Paulson knows well that were Beijing
to decide it could bring the dollar to its knees by selling only a small
portion of its US debt on the market.
Endnotes:
1 Ex-Nazi, Dalai's tutor Harrer dies at 93, The Times of India, 9 Jan 2006,
in
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1363946,prtpage-1.cms.
2 Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and
the Politics of Identity, New York University Press, 2001, p. 177.
3 Goldner, Colin, Mönchischer Terror auf dem Dach der Welt Teil 1: Die
Begeisterung für den Dalai Lama und den tibetischen Buddhismus, March 26,
2008, excerpted from the book Dalai Lama: Fall eines Gottkönigs, Alibri
Verlag,, new edition to appear April 2008, reproduced in
http://www.jungewelt.de/2008/03-27/006.php.
4 Parenti, Michael, Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth, June 2007, in
www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html.
5 Mann, Jim, CIA funded covert Tibet exile campaign in 1960s, The Age
(Australia), Sept. 16, 1998.
6 Ignatius, D., Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups, The
Washington Post, 22 September 1991.
7 Blum, William, The NED and Project Democracy, January 2000, in
www.friendsoftibet.org/databank/usdefence/usd5.html
8 Barker, Michael, Democratic Imperialism: Tibet, China and the National
Endowment for Democracy, Global Research, August 13, 2007,
www.globalresearch.ca.
9 McGehee, Ralph, Ralph McGehee s Archive on JFK Place, CIA Operations in
China Part III, May 2, 1996, in www.acorn.net/jfkplace/03/RM/RM.china-for.
10 US Tibet Committee, Fifteen things you should know about Tibet and China,
in
http://ustibetcommittee.org/facts/facts.html.
11 Goldner, Colin, Mönchischer Terror auf dem Dach der Welt Teil 2: Krawalle
im Vorfeld der Olympischen Spiele, op cit.
12 Mowat, Jonathan, The new Gladio in action?, Online Journal, Mar 19, 2005,
in
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/printer_308.shtml.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, A Geostrategy for Eurasia, Foreign Affairs, 76:5,
September/October 1997.
Please support Global Research
Global Research relies on the financial support of its readers. [input]
[input] [input] [input] [input] [input] [input] [input]
Your endorsement is greatly appreciated
---------------------------------
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole
responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the
Centre for Research on Globalization.
To become a Member of Global Research
The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on
community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The
source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global
Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites,
contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such
material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an
effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social
issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who
have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational
purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than
"fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.
For media inquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
© Copyright F. William Engdahl , Global Research, 2008
The url address of this article is:
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8625
---------------------------------
© Copyright 2005-2007 GlobalResearch.ca
Web site engine by Polygraphx Multimedia © Copyright 2005-2007
Forward email
This email was sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED], by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Update Profile/Email Address | Instant removal with SafeUnsubscribe |
Privacy Policy.
Email Marketing by
GlobalResearch.ca | v | montreal | Canada
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
Lal Salam (Red Salute)
P (India)
www.geocities.com/marxistfront
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I
asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist."
--Dom Helder Camara
*****
---------------------------------
Meet people who discuss and share your passions. Join them now.
_______________________________________________
Marxist-Leninist-List mailing list
[email protected]
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxist-leninist-list
