A long road from Kosovo to Kurdistan

A Very Good Piece
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

"In myriad aspects, Kosovo is the new Kurdistan (and the other way around), as much as Iraq is the new Yugoslavia.

The unilateral independence of Kosovo has nothing to do with "democracy". But then what's the point of this North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) provocation towards Vladimir Putin's Russia - a historic ally of Serbia?

The ongoing saga revolves around two crucial, interrelated facts on the ground: Pipelineistan and the empire of 737 (and counting) US military bases in 130 countries operated by 350,000-plus Americans. In short: it revolves around the trans-Balkan AMBO pipeline and Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, the the largest US base built in Europe in a generation.

It also lays bare continuity from the Bill Clinton to the George W Bush administrations - the US dictating the rules of the game as if in a one-party state.

Yugoslavia and Iraq also "taught" the world two lessons. From Clinton's humanitarian imperialism to Bush's "war on terror", it's all a matter of exclusive Washington prerogative. Blowback, of course, as Putin has warned, will be inevitable.....

Yugoslavia was devastated, fragmented, balkanized and ethnically cleansed into mini-countries. Iraq was devastated, fragmented, pushed towards balkanization and towards ethnic cleansing along sectarian and religious lines....

AMBO is short for Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corp, an entity registered in the US. The $1.1 billion AMBO pipeline (also known as the Trans-Balkan), supposed to be finished by 2011, will get oil brought from the Caspian Sea to a terminal in Georgia and then by tanker through the Black Sea to the Bulgarian port of Burgas, and relay it through Macedonia to the Albanian port of Vlora.....It's all about go-for-broke militarization of the crucial energy corridor from the Caspian through the Balkans, and about trying to isolate or sabotage both Russia and Iran.

Halliburton had to have a deeper hand in the whole scheme, and that's where Camp Bondsteel fits in - the largest overseas US military base built since the Vietnam War. Bondsteel, built by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root on 400 hectares of farmland near the Macedonian border in southern Kosovo, is a sort of smaller - and friendlier - five-star Guantanamo....Taxi to the Dark Side, which has just won an Oscar for best documentary, applies not only to Bagram in Afghanistan but also to Bondsteel in Kosovo....

Neo-colonialism is alive and well in "liberated" Kosovo - which will have to put up with a viceroy and will have no say whatsoever in foreign policy. Think of "liberated" Iraq under the infamous Coalition Provisional Authority run by viceroy L Paul Bremer......

Kurds, especially those in Iraq, might be tempted to believe Kosovo is a meaty precedent pointing to the emergence of an independent Iraqi Kurdistan - their dream, and Turkey's nightmare. Just as in Kosovo, oil is in play (Kirkuk and its pipelines); and Iraqi Kurdistan, since 1991, had been a sort of extended Camp Bondsteel anyway, an American-protected enclave in Saddam's Iraq and then a haven of stable "democracy" in Bush-devastated Iraq. But it's hard to dream about independence when Iraqi Kurdistan has been de facto invaded by 10,000 Turkish troops with the help of US intelligence.....

So much for Kurdistan's dream of independence - inside Iraq as much as for the 12 million Kurds living in Turkey. They are left with a few rumblings, an attempt at downplaying the whole thing, and the obligation of facing the fact that the US, once again, has sold them short......"