Editor's Note: The Tibet riots in March have been played in some Western media with little regard to accuracy. Their biased remarks are seen as part of a strategy of destabilization of China in the eyes of F. William Engdahl, an eminent U.S. economist. His article "Why Washington plays "Tibet Roulette"with China"reveals the driving force behind the U.S. support for the Dalai Lama and has been published in many newspapers and Web sites. The following is an excerpt from the article.
F. William Engdahl
WASHINGTON has obviously decided on an ultra-high risk geopolitical game with Beijing 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 George W. Bush Administration over the past months.
The current Tibet operation apparently got the green light in October last year when 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 U.S. Congress awarded the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal.
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 background actors in the Tibet actions confirm that Washington has been working overtime in recent months to prepare another of its infamous Color Revolutions. The actors on the ground inside and outside Tibet are the usual suspects tied to the U.S. State Department, including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the CIA’s Freedom House, as well as the Trace Foundation, financed by the wealth of George Soros.
Dalai Lama’s odd friends
When the Dalai Lama was 11, he was befriended by Heinrich Harrer, a Nazi Party member and officer of Gestapo chief 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 Dalai Lama and became his tutor in “the world outside Tibet.”
In April 1999, the Dalai Lama demanded the British government release Augusto Pinochet, the former fascist dictator of Chile. 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 has been surrounded and financed in significant part, since his flight into Indian exile in 1959, by various U.S. and Western intelligence services.
The NED at work again
As author Michael Parenti notes in his work, “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth,” “during the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA actively backed the Tibetan cause with arms, military training, money, air support and all sorts of other help.”
The U.S.-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.
According to declassified U.S. intelligence documents released in the late 1990s, “for much of the 1960s, the CIA provided the Tibetan exile movement with US$1.7 million a year for operations against China, including an annual subsidy of US$180,000 for the Dalai Lama.”
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 U.S. Congress, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) of the United States.
The NED has been instrumental in every U.S.-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.
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 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 more than 80,000 gold mines. Tibet’s forests are the largest timber reserves at China’s disposal. Tibet also contains some of the largest oil reserves in the region.
And situated where 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 of 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 have been played in Western media with little regard to accuracy or independent cross-checking.
The Western media’s 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 NED was also instrumental, along with Gene Sharp’s misnamed Albert Einstein Institution through Colonel Robert Helvey. The institution, as it describes itself, specializes in “nonviolence as a form of warfare.”
With the emergence of the Internet and mobile telephone use, the U.S. Pentagon has refined an entirely new form of regime change and political destabilization.
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 that would seek to cut China off from access to its vital external oil and gas reserves.
Behind the strategy
to encircle China
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 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. Collectively, Eurasia’s potential power overshadows even America’s.”
It’s about global hegemony, not democracy.
Editor’s Note: The Tibet riots in March have been played in some Western media with little regard to accuracy. Their biased remarks are seen as part of a strategy of destabilization of China in the eyes of F. William Engdahl, an eminent U.S. economist. His article “Why Washington plays ‘Tibet Roulette’ with China” reveals the driving force behind the U.S. support for the Dalai Lama and has been published in many newspapers and Web sites. The following is an excerpt from the article.
About the author
F. William Engdahl, U.S. economist and writer, has written on issues of energy, politics and economics for more than 30 years. He is author of the best-selling book on oil and geopolitics, “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,” which has been translated into many languages. He has contributed regularly to a number of publications and also spoken at numerous international conferences on geopolitical, economic and energy subjects.
