To: President of the United States Hillary Clinton
From: Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian
Affairs Ian Judge-Lord
CC: United States Secretary of State Tim Kaine
Madam President,
You served with distinction as
Secretary of State under your predecessor, former President Barack Obama. You
became President Obama’s Secretary of State when he took office in January
2009.
At that time, the United States of
America was losing between seventeen and 120 soldiers per month, at an average
rate of more than two soldiers per day, in the war in Iraq begun in March 2003
by President Obama’s Republican predecessor George Walker Bush.[1]
[2]
According to the Associated Press on November 9, 2006, then-Minister of Health
of Iraq Ali Al-Shemari put the number of Iraqi civilian casualties at 100 per
day.[3]
As United States Senator from the State of New York, you were among the 29
Democratic Senators to vote in favor of Joint Resolution 114: “Authorization
for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution” on October 11, 2002.
When President Obama took office in
January 2009, the United States was also involved in the war in Afghanistan
begun by President Bush on October 7, 2001, following the Al-Qaeda terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan and the Pentagon in
Arlington, Virginia on September 11, 2001. On October 25, 2010, London’s “The Daily Telegraph” put the
number of American and North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO] coalition soldiers
killed in Afghanistan at two per day.[4]
You were among the fifty Democratic Senators to vote in favor of Senate Joint
Resolution 23, the authorization for the use of military force in Afghanistan,
on September 14, 2001.
Having previously served as First
Lady of the United States in the Presidential administration of your husband
William Clinton, you know as well as anyone that the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001 were the result of the “fatwa” or “jihad” against
the United States of America declared by Saudi Arabian billionaire Osama Bin
Laden in August 1996. In it, Bin Laden specifically cited the presence of
United States forces based in Saudi Arabia.
I.
Background
With the United States Central
Intelligence Agency, Bin Laden had aided the Seven Party Islamic Unity of
Afghanistan Mujahedeen Alliance in its 1989 defeating the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics [USSR] after the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan in 1979.[5]
[6]
Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia in time for President of Iraq Saddam
Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait In August 1990, which put the Iraqi Republican
Guard on the Saudi Arabian border and posed a threat to the Saudi royal family.
Bin Laden, in a meeting with King of Saudi Arabia Fahd Al Saud and Sultan
Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, the Minister of Defense and Aviation, offered to defend the
Saudi Arabian cities and Islamic holy sites of Mecca and Medina with his
mujahedeen, called “Al-Qaeda” [“The Foundation”]. His offer was rebuffed
and the Saudi monarch invited the deployment of the United States 82nd
Airborne division in the city of Dhahran, 400 miles from Medina. Bin Laden
publicly denounced Saudi “dependence” on non-Muslim assistance form the United
States Military and was banished to Sudan by the Saudi royal family in 1992.[7]
[22] Saudi Arabia pressured Sudan to expel Bin Laden, and he returned to
Afghanistan on May 18, 1996.
In his “Fatwa”, entitled “Declaration of War Against the Americans
Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Mosques” [Saudi Arabia, in reference
to Mecca and Medina] in London’s “Al-Quds
Al-Arabi” newspaper on August 23, 1996[8],
Bin Laden cited an agreement between President George Herbert Walker Bush and
King Fahd Al Saud that all American forces based in Saudi Arabia would be
withdrawn after the defeat and withdrawal of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Republican
Guard on February 28, 1991. On August 17, 1992, however, President Bush, citing
his decision not to destroy the remnants of Hussein’s regime, launched
Operation Southern Watch for the controlling of air space in Iraq south of the
33rd parallel of latitude [the Southern No Fly Zone] by the United States
Central Command [CENTCOM] to ensure Iraq’s compliance with the April 5, 1991
United Nations Security Council Resolution 688.
Following the signing into law of
the “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution” by
President George Walker Bush on October 16, 2002, the invasion of Iraq begun by
the Bush administration on March 20, 2003 succeeded in overthrowing Hussein’s
regime on April 9, 2003.[9]
[10]
Among the Administration’s many pretenses for the invasion was their assertion
that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his regime had aided and even harbored
Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, and had a hand in Al-Qaeda’s attacks on America in
September 2001. While this claim, like many of Bush’s other justification for
the Iraq War, was later found to have been known to be untrue by the Bush
administration at the time of the invasion[11],
the toppling of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party with the American military
occupation of the Iraqi capitol of Baghdad in 2003 opened the door for the
formation of Al-Qaeda in Iraq on October 17, 2004 by Jordanian Islamist Abu
Musab Al-Zarqawi pledging allegiance to Bin Laden.[12]
[13]
In October 2006, Al-Qaeda in Iraq declared the establishment of the “Dawlat Al-Iraq Al-Islamiyyah” [“Islamic State of Iraq”],[14]
naming Abu Al-Baghdadi; a former Islamic mosque cleric and officer in the Iraqi
Army under Saddam Hussein with a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in Islamic Studies form
the Islamic Al-Iraqia University of Baghdad; as its leader. [15]
As Secretary of State, you were in
the Situation Room in the West Wing of the White House when, on May 1, 2011,
President Obama ordered the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, a
city 68 miles North of Islamabad, capitol of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.[16]
On April 8, 2013, Al-Baghdadi announced the adoption of the name “Ad-Dwalah Al-Islamiyah Fi-I-Iraq Wa-Sh-Sham”,
or “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”
[ISIS].[17]
II.
Plan of Action
On December 14, 2008, President Bush
signed the “Agreement Between the
United States of America and the Republic of Iraq on the Withdrawal of United
States Forces from Iraq and the Organization of Their Activities During Their
Temporary Presence in Iraq”. This “Status
of Forces Agreement” included the date of June 30, 2009 by which United
States combat forces should withdraw from Iraqi cities and established that all
America forces would be completely out of Iraqi territory by December 31, 2011.
In accordance with this agreement, the last 500 soldiers left Iraq on December
18, 2011.
It is the recommendation of the Bureau
of European and Eurasian Affairs that the withdrawal of America forces from
Iraq between December 2007 and December 2011 be used as a model for the
withdrawal of American military bases from Saudi Arabia, in accordance with the
original agreement between former President of the United States George Herbert
Walker Bush and Former King Fahd Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, the violation of
which served as the primary impetus for the jihad of Osama Bin Laden that
resulted in the deaths of 2,606 Americans in Lower Manhattan on the morning of Tuesday
September 11, 2001. The agreement between President Bush and King Fahd had been
made to take affect after the end of the First Persian Gulf War in February
1991. It is the recommendation of this Bureau that it be the policy of the
United States of America to honor that agreement following the end of the
Second Persian Gulf War in December 2011.
As was proven by the scandal at the
Baghdad Central Prison at Abu Ghraib in 2003, American military bases in the
Islamic world can often do more harm than good.
III.
Potential Complications
The military bases in Saudi Arabia were
installed initially to facilitate the American and NATO counter-offensive
against Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. As documented
by NBC News on March 5, 2014, an overwhelming preponderance of evidence now
exists to support that both the first and second Presidents Bush’s reason for
violating the agreement with the Saudi royal family to remove those bases was
to secure American access to Saudi Arabia’s abundant reserves of petroleum.
American oil imports reached a historic high on more than ten and a half
million barrels a day in June 2005 and American oil production hit a low of
less than four million barrels per day in September 2005. The situation under
President Bush’s father in 1990 was similar. Since at least February of 2012, however,
according to the United States Department of Energy’s Energy Information
Administration, the United States of America exports more oil than it imports
for the first time since the mid-twentieth century following the end of the
Second World War, meaning that net American imports of foreign oil are at
historic lows. The price of oil, meanwhile, has hit its all-time high[18]
and concerns about the price of fossil fuels are growing.[19]
[20]
At the same time, prices of renewable alternative energy resources, such as
wind power, are at all-time lows.[21]
[22]
[23]
Other nations, such as Germany, have already taken advantage of this
juxtaposition[24],
dropping the percentage of their energy from fossil fuels to historic lows[25]
and setting new records for the percentages of their energy that comes from
renewable alternatives such as wind power.[26]
As a result, worldwide, both the amount of investment[27]
and growth in renewable alternatives such as wind power has hit an all-time
high.[28]
It is the further recommendation of the
Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs that it be the policy of the United
States to emulate the policies of the governments of Western Europe, such as
Germany, when it comes to our policy toward reliance on fossil fuels, as a
complete American withdrawal from the Middle East and the Arabian peninsula
will only ever be practical if and when we are able to effectively eliminate
American economic interests in that region of the world to as much of an extent
as is practically feasible. Since the end of the Second World War, the Western
world’s foremost primary economic interest in the Middle East has been in its
abundance of fossil fuel reserves.
Both the September 11, 2001 and July 7,
2005 Al-Qaeda attacks on New York and London, England respectively and the
November 13, 2015 ISIS attacks on Paris, France serve to demonstrate the ease
with which the instability that has plagued the Middle East since the breakup of
the Ottoman Empire in 1922 can directly and detrimentally affect the stability
of the western world. Likewise, unrest in the region has had a long history of
disrupting the dependability of western economies, primarily through either
direct or indirect manipulation of the supply and prices of fossil fuels, such
as during the 1967 and 1973 oil embargoes.[29]
[30]
It is the position of the Bureau of
European and Eurasian Affairs that the continued presence of American military
troops stationed in bases near the cities in Saudi Arabia that are holy to
Muslims continues to contribute to and exacerbate the already-volatile and
unstable social and political climate in the Middle East.
Since the installation of bases in Saudi
Arabia for the facilitation of the first Persian Gulf War was a NATO action,
however, a unilateral withdrawal by the United States of America, however much
it may decrease the negativity of attitudes of Islamic Middle Easterners
towards America in particular, will unfortunately be insufficient. If
international Islamic terrorism’s capability to attack New York, London and
Paris alike demonstrates nothing else, it should be that the threat posed by
the anti-Western hostility felt by Middle Eastern Muslims, unarguably made
worse by the presence of Western armed forces near Muslim sacred sites, is one
that is shared equally among all of the nations of the Western world.
Therefore, it is the position of the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs
that it be the policy of the United States to, through diplomacy, enlist the
participation of all interested parties, all Western nations with either a
military presence or a vested economic interest in the Middle Eastern region in
formulating a coordinate multilateral strategy for the withdrawal, however
gradual or eventual, of all Western presence from the Middle East and the
Arabian peninsula by the middle of this century, if not sooner.
As no estimate of when global oil
production will peak puts that date beyond the 2030’s[31]
[32]
[33]
[34],
by mid-century[35],
if oil supplies have not been depleted[36],
then they will at the very least be in decline.[37]
The oil embargoes of 1967 and 1973 demonstrate the extraordinary capability of
fluctuations in Middle Eastern oil supplies to affect Western economies. As it
has the driving force behind industrialization since the late nineteenth
century, the decline and eventual depletion of fossil fuel reserves will have
an economic effect on those nations whose economies are still reliant on fossil
fuels at the time that it occurs that, in even the most charitable and generous
of estimations of economists, will make the Great Recession of 2008 and even
the Great Depression of the 1930’s appear mild by comparison. [38]
Thus, in addition to the threat that the social and political unrest plaguing
the Middle East poses to the safety and security of the citizens of Western
nations, the ticking time-bomb that is the rapidly-diminishing reserves
remaining of Middle Eastern fossil fuels poses what could very well be as grave
a threat to those nations’ economic futures. Just as the American and Western
military presence in the Middle East exacerbates the civil unrest in the region
the longer those troop remain stationed there, so too does the risk of the
economic depression that will inexorably strike the Middle East when its
reserves of fossil fuels are inevitably depleted[39]
also adversely affecting the American economy in turn worsen for every year
that America continues its current rate of reliance on the consumption of
fossil fuels, in contrast to the nations of Western Europe.[40]
IV.
Summary
It cannot be known or stated with
any real degree of certainty whether withdrawing American and Western military
armed forces and bases from Saudi Arabia will diminish the level of civil
unrest in the region, or even the risk this unrest poses to the security of
westerners. Likewise, it also cannot be absolutely said that withdrawing
American economic interests, like our continued consumption of fossil fuels,
from the Middle East will entirely immunize the Western world from having its
economies adversely affected by the economic depression that will result from
worldwide fossil fuel supplies peaking and declining midway through the 21st
century.[41]
[42]
However, it is the position of the
Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs that, in both of these arenas, America
and our Western European allies being less involved, both militarily and
economically, in a region of the world that is as fractious and chaotic
presently, historically and in the foreseeable future, as the Middle East is in
the best interests not only of the citizens of western nations, but also,
ultimately, of the peoples of the Middle East as well.
The famous German-American physicist
Albert Einstein, who saw both sides of both World Wars of the early twentieth
century firsthand, once observed “The definition of insanity is doing the same
thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” Under the first
and second Presidents Bush, the United States of America witnessed and
experienced the consequences of policies of getting the Western world ever more
deeply involved in the affairs of the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula. It
is the recommendation of this Bureau that what is now the third Presidential
Administration of the 21st century not repeat that policy, but
instead seek to pursue the opposite course instead, and see where that leads.
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[2] Morayef, Heba Fatma. “The Politics and Limitation of Counting the
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[3]
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[19] Dutzik, Tony, Figdor, Emily and Payne,
Sarah. “The High Cost of Fossil Fuels”.
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[21] Huffman, Mark, “Price of Wind Energy at All-Time Low”. Consumer Affairs.
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[22] “Study
Finds Price of Wind Energy In US at an All-Time Low, Averaging Under 2.5
Cent/kWh”. United States Department of Energy Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory. August 10, 2015.
[23] Reubold, Todd. “Price of Wind Energy Hits All-Time Low in U.S.”.
Flora Family Foundation. August 15, 2015.
[24] Papandreou, Andreas and Ruzzenenti,
Franco. “On the Effects of Fossil Fuel
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[25] Morris, Craig. “Power from Fossil Fuel Drops to 35-Year Low in Germany”. The
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[26] Kroh, Kiley. “Germany Sets New Record, Generating 74 Percent of Power Needs from
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[27] Musolino, Evan. “Show Me the Money: Renewable Energy Investment Hits New All Time
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