THE RETURN OF
THE BAD GUYS!
Back to Square One of the Sixties Cold War and
the Islamic Hot War!
August 23, 2007
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Begin Guardian Article
Re-ordering the world order
World News – The Guardian
Dilip Hiro
August 20, 2007 8:30 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/dilip_hiro/2007/08/reordering_the_world_order.html
It was on the sidelines of the military exercise by the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) – codenamed Peace Mission 2007 – in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region, that Russian president, Vladimir Putin, announced that at on August 17, at midnight, 14 strategic missile-carrying aircraft took off from seven airfields in different parts of Russia, and that “this combat duty will be held on a regular basis”.
Both Putin’s statement and the SCO’s war games were unprecedented.
The Kremlin had stopped long-range nuclear bomber flights in 1992. “Unfortunately not everybody followed suit,” said Putin. “This creates a strategic risk for Russia.” It was as yet another unmistakable sign of the Kremlin’s growing confidence.
Since its establishment in 1996, at Beijing’s behest, chiefly to settle border problems between China and its post -Soviet neighbours
– Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan – the SCO had come a long way.
Three years later it extended its membership to Uzbekistan even though it does not share common frontiers with China or Russia, the two countries at its core.
The regional organisation expanded its mission to countering drug-smuggling and terrorism.
This down-to-earth mission did not inhibit the SCO’s co-leaders, China and Russia, from developing a conceptual doctrine to underscore the fledgling multi-national organisation.
At its summit in August 1999 Chinese President Jiang Zemin and his Russian counterpart Boris Yeltsin expressed their belief in a multi-polar world – a concept at variance with the “sole superpower” status of the United States.
In the diplomatic arena, Beijing and Moscow found their interests converging in central Asia. They shared the common aims of curbing Islamist extremism, maintaining and improving their commercial interests, and frustrating Washington’s agenda to dominate the region which had been an integral part of the Soviet Union for three generations.
In 2003, the SCO broadened its scope by including regional economic cooperation in its charter.
This was shorthand for keeping American and other western oil corporations out of central Asia, an aim Russia and China shared. Then they raised the ante.
At the SCO’s annual summit in July 2005, they called on Washington to name the date of its withdrawal of soldiers and military hardware from its bases in Karshi-Khanabad in Uzbekistan and Manas in Kyrgyzstan which it had acquired on the eve of the Afghanistan War in October 2001. Soon after, Uzbekistan, miffed at Washington’s criticism of its human rights violations, terminated the Pentagon’s lease of its Karshi-Khanabad base.
To widen its influence, in 2005, the SCO granted observer status not only to India and Pakistan (sharing frontiers with China), and Mongolia (adjoining both China and Russia) but also Iran since it shares fluvial border with Russia and Kazakhstan in the Caspian Sea.
At the same time the SCO snubbed the Bush administration by rejecting its application for an observer status for the United States, ostensibly due to America’s lack of common borders with China or Russia.
Washington’s argument that it enjoyed an observer status at the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean) even though America does not abut any of its members fell on deaf ears at the SCO secretariat in Shanghai.
The SCO’s message to America was plain: “stay out”. Equally plain was the fact that the US was not prepared to share its belief in a multi-polar world order – reiterated in the final communique of the latest SCO summit in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek: “Modern challenges and security threats can only be effectively countered through united efforts of the international community”.
To stress the growing convergence of SCO members’ interests, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said that the Pentagon’s planned extension of its missile shield into Poland and the Czech Republic was “a threat to more than one country”, and that it would affect “a large part of Asia and SCO members.” His statement went down particularly well with Putin, fiercely opposed to the Pentagon’s project as he is.
Along with India and Pakistan, Iran has applied for full membership of the SCO.
Once their applications are accepted, the expanded organisation will represent half of the world’s population.
Given this, it is hard to dispute the claim made by Ednan Karabayev, the Kyrgyz foreign minister, that “The SCO is destined to play a vital role in ensuring international security.”
Thus, despite America’s strong disapproval, a multi-polar global order is emerging – slowly but surely.
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