From the Evil Empire to the Axis of Evil
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result. The Western public, above all in the United States, was told by establishment media that the problems were all a result of a corrupt Belgrade dictatorship. The American media chose rarely if ever to mention the provocative Washington actions, or the IMF policies which were driving events in the Balkans.5 In 1995, the Dayton accord brought an end to the war in Bosnia. This coincided with the point at which the Clinton administration became convinced of the strategic importance of Caspian oil, and the extent of EU efforts to secure that oil for Europe via Balkan pipelines. Washington decided apparently that peace in the region was needed to develop oil routes from the Caspian into Europe. But it was to be ‘peace’ on Washington’s terms. After Dayton, Bosnia, once multiethnic, was established as a de facto Muslim state, in effect a client state under control of the IMF and of NATO. The Clinton administration had largely financed the arming of the Bosnian Muslim army. The depiction of the war in the international media maximized the impression of European Union powerlessness to settle a major war on its borders without America’s intervention. Washington’s argument for extending NATO eastward advanced significantly in the process. Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic became prospective NATO partners, something inconceivable just five years earlier. Soon the Clinton administration went to work on the next stage of dismantling any nationalist residue in the Balkans that might have a different agenda for the region than that of Washington. American and British oil companies scrambled to exploit the potentially vast oil reserves believed to lie under the Caspian Sea off Baku, and bordering Kazakhstan in central Asia. Geologists spoke of a ‘new Kuwait or Saudi Arabia’ there. The U.S. government estimated oil reserves could be in excess of 200 billion barrels—if true, the largest oil discovery in decades. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a well-paid Washington lobbyist, represented the interests of BP, the Anglo-American oil giant with a major stake in the Caspian oil region. U.S. OIL GEOPOLITICS IN THE BALKANS No sooner had the Berlin wall come down than the European Union, backed by France, Italy and Holland, announced a major EU energy security strategy. The stability of the Balkans was a central part of that strategy. In a June 1990 EU summit, the Dutch prime minister, Ruud Lubbers, unveiled a proposal for a European energy community, to
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