Risky Geopolitical Game: Washington Plays ‘Tibet
Roulette’ with China
[or Dalai Lama's odd friends]
by F. William Engdahl, Apr 10, 2008
Dalai Lama
Washington has obviously decided on an
ultra-high risk geopolitical game with Beijing’s
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. It’s 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 China’s 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 America’s 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, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s
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
Poland’s 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 hadn’t 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 Beijing’s
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 CIA’s 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 Lama’s 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 Lama’s 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 1930’s 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
Himmler’s 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 Harrer’s
private lessons, the two remained friends until
Harrer died a ripe 93 in 2006.1
That sole friendship, of course, does not define
a person’s 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 Chile’s 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 Lama’s eldest
brother, Thubtan Norbu, playing an active role
in the group. The Dalai Lama’s 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 1980’s, on the recommendation of
Bill Casey, Reagan’s 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
naďve 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 Lama’s
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?
Tibet’s raw minerals treasure
Tibet is of strategic import to China not only
for its geographical location astride the border
with India, Washington’s 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 Region’s 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 world’s 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
Tibet’s 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.
Washington’s ‘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
Sharp’s 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
Helvey’s 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 1970’s 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 Washington’s “Saffron revolution”
attempts to destabilize Myanmar. It includes the
ongoing effort to get NATO troops into Darfur to
block China’s access to strategically vital oil
resources there and elsewhere in Africa. It
includes attempts to foment problems in
Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan and to disrupt China’s
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.
It’s 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 China’s 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
Russia’s 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 world’s reserve currency, are in the
worst crisis since the 1930’s. 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 world’s 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.
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.
8 Barker, Michael,
’Democratic Imperialism’: Tibet, China and the
National Endowment for Democracy, Global
Research, August 13, 2007,
www.globalresearch.ca.
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