Kosovo privatisation enriches NATO warmongers

Remember how berserk neo-conservative or “liberal hawkish” supporters of George W Bush’s and Tony Blair’s Iraq war became, whenever someone mentioned the word “oil” in an Iraq context?

This video from the USA says about itself:

Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich: “Privatizing Iraq’s Oil is Theft!”

When George W. Bush and Tony Blair started the bloody Iraq war, government propaganda, slavishly echoed by the corporate media, said the war was because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction … oops, it did not have those arms … the war was because secularist Saddam Hussein had links to ultra-religious Al Qaeda … oops, that was a lie as well … the war was because Saddam was a dictator and it would bring human rights … oops, Saddam was one of many dictators, most of them supported by Bush’s USA and by Blair’s UK (like used to be the case for Saddam); and torture, killings, and other human rights violations got worse, not better, after Bush and Blair had invaded Iraq.

When someone dared to say “No blood for oil“, the Bushite and Blairite apologists for the Iraq war went hysterical. Their lovely baby, their lovely Iraq war, could never ever be about something as prosaic as oil corporations’ profits (or arms dealers’ profits … oil was and is a major factor in a complex of causes, not the sole 100% cause).

Well, the Australian conservative government, Bush and Blair allies in the Iraq war, admitted that oil did play a role in the Iraq war. Alan Greenspan, George W. Bush’s economic “czar”, admitted the major role of oil.

Both George W. Bush and Tony Blair profited personally from oil from Iraq which they invaded. And US ex-Iraq occupation bigwig Peter Galbraith grabbed hundreds of millions in Iraqi oil money. So much for that “humanitarian” war.

Oh yeah, that other “humanitarian” war, in Afghanistan, supposedly did not have anything to with pipelines or minerals. Yeah right. And pigs fly.

Back in time to another “humanitarian” war. The 1999 NATO war against Yugoslavia. How “humanitarian” was that?

By John Glaser in the USA:

Empire Pays For Corporatist US Diplomats in Kosovo

December 12, 2012

The New York Times published an article yesterday detailing how top former US officials who helped spearhead the Clinton administration’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 are now deeply embedded in lucrative rent-seeking activities with Kosovo’s corrupt semi-government.

Beneficiaries include: former Secretary of State Madeline Albright; General Wesley Clark, who led the NATO bombing campaign; James W. Pardew, the Clinton-era special envoy to the Balkans; Mark Tavlarides, legislative director at the Clinton White House’s National Security Council; and countless others not specifically named in the article.

These crafters of US foreign policy now benefit off the unscrupulous state structure their discretionary war helped establish. US aid since the war has been cultivating a “thugocracy.”

Clark “is chairman of Envidity, a Canadian energy company seeking to explore Kosovo’s lignite coal deposits and produce synthetic fuel,” the Times reports.

Albright founded Albright Capital Management, which “has been shortlisted in the bidding for a 75 percent share in the state telecommunications company, PTK,” a venture that “is expected to bring in between $400 million and $800 million.”

Albright is chair of the NATO committee planning more “humanitarian” wars. The committee includes a Shell oil fat cat. It used to include Tony Blair’s ex-Secretary of War … oops-a-daisy … “Defence” Geoff Hoon. It does not include Hoon any more. Hoon disappeared because of his corruption.

Pardew has had his eyes on PTK too, though, and has “lobbied top Kosovo officials on behalf of a competing consortium, Twelve Hornbeams S.a.r.l /Avicenna Capital LLC.”

So many former American officials have returned to Kosovo for business — in coal and telecommunications, or for lobbying and other lucrative government contracts — that it is hard to keep them from colliding.

Foreign policy experts say the practice of former officials’ returning for business is more common than acknowledged publicly. Privately, former officials concede the possibility of conflicts of interest and even the potential to influence American foreign policy as diplomats who traditionally made careers in public service now rotate more frequently to lucrative jobs in the private sector.

Indeed, it goes beyond the telecom company:

The biggest infrastructure project in Kosovo’s post-Yugoslav history, a 63-mile stretch of highway connecting Pristina to the Albanian border, was awarded in 2010 to Bechtel of San Francisco in a joint venture with a Turkish company, Enka.

At the time, the prime minister estimated the deal at $1 billion.

Bechtel had help getting the contract from Mr. Tavlarides, the legislative director at the National Security Council during the 1999 Kosovo intervention. According to a lobbying report filed with the United States government, Mr. Tavlarides lobbied on behalf of Bechtel in Kosovo on “highway-related issues” while working for Van Scoyoc Associates, a Washington-based lobbying firm.

Mr. Tavlarides now works at the Podesta Group, which signed a $50,000 monthly contract with the Kosovo government on Jan. 1, advising it on communications and strengthening Kosovo’s ties to the United States government. The Podesta Group was co-founded by John Podesta, White House chief of staff in Mr. Clinton’s second term. Mr. Podesta left the firm in 1993. It is still owned by his brother, Anthony.

In an interview with the Times, Clark said it was “insulting” to suggest there’s any conflict of interest. “My business is aboveboard, transparent and helps the Kosovar people,” he said. His business ventures are benefiting from the thuggish administrators in Kosovo as they “privatize” state-corporate entities – and he thinks he’s still doing the humanitarian thing? The Kosovo government, according to the Times, also denies that any of these former US officials are getting special treatment.

But a leaked memo from a meeting between Pardew and Kosovo’s prime minister tells a different story:

The choice of Mr. Pardew as their emissary was “vitally important,” the memo noted, because Kosovo’s elite “know and love him for his role on the ground during the war.”

After the memo became public, Mr. Pardew withdrew from lobbying for the consortium, and he declined to comment.

It’s quite a set up these American statists have: launch a war to become heroes in a secessionist province of Serbia, and then reap endless financial benefits via crony corporatism going on 13 years hence.

Related articles

• The Chilcot Inquiry as Comic Opera
• UK covers up full account of Blair-Bush Iraq talks
• Tony Blair “We must stop warmongering religious fanatics except me”

• Asking: Whatever Happened To The Chilcot Inquiry Into The War In Iraq? (stirringtrouble.wordpress.com)
• Tony Blair jeered by students (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• That Crush at Kosovo’s Business Door? The Return of U.S. Heroes (nytimes.com)
• | TruthTeller: Why it is Tony Blair and not me who should be in the dock on 16 November! (truthaholics.wordpress.com)
• Diplomats Who Freed Kosovo Return as Entrepreneurs (politicalwire.com)
• Lord Mandelson: Tony Blair was wrong to invade Iraq (express.co.uk)
• The Right Disappeared The Iraq War. We Can’t Let Them. (thedailybanter.com)