President Bush's special envoy in Afghanistan and Iraq, now US Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad talked to Lyse Doucet on The BBC Interview.

Below is a preliminary transcript (highlighting added) of the most striking statements that were made just at the beginning of the interview.

Doucet: First question, has the neocons' project failed?

Khalilzad: I don't know what the neocon' project is. I think this is a label that some are giving to a group of people that work(ed) in president Bush administration …

I think there haven't been a meeting where a group of us came together and said we'd be a movement who call ourselves the neo-conservatives and we'll pursue these … objectives. That has not happened.

Doucet: But what did happen was in 1997 You signed what was called Statement of Principles of the Project for the New American Century. It was a case for global American leadership. My view on was (?) just to point that these ideals just failed in practice …

Khalilzad: When I was in president Bush senior administration, … when the world changed with the end of the cold war, we did a document about what America's role, mission should be now and what we decided at that time, was that America ought to make it as its mission to preclude the rise of bipolar or multipolar system, that we didn't wanna go back to either of those sort of model, but to maintain American preeminence …

Doucet: … so superpower (?) … by taking preemptive action to prevent any threats to America, it hasn't worked out so easy in practice …

Khalilzad: Well, but the goal was for America to be so powerful militarily to deter the rise of a rival and prevent the domination of critical region where resources … by single hostile power dominated that region a(nd) global rival for America (to prevent those)

I believe that so forth, I think there is no global rival as such that has emerged. We have prevented a domination of critical region by a hostile power …


Well, the American official could not have been clearer! According to Khalilzad, the reason why America invaded Iraq was not the alleged weapons of mass destruction or links with Al-Qaida, the real strategic reason was to “prevent domination of a critical region by a hostile power”.

Such hostile power was Iraq at that time, now it is Iran…

Even Alan Greenspan, former head of the US central bank and a long-time republican holds the same view: “Mr Greenspan said it was clear to him that Saddam Hussein had wanted to control the Straits of Hormuz and so control Middle East oil shipments through the vital route out of the Gulf. He said that had Saddam been able to do that it would have been "devastating to the west”, as quoted from the British daily The Guardian.

And what about the missile “defense”? How is it connected to the overall American aim of deterring the rise of a global rival? In any case, Iran cannot become such a global rival, but Russia or China definitely could and perhaps are striving to. American missile defense systems built on both edges of Eurasia (another critical region, in fact the most critical one) are obviously meant to deter the rise of Russia and China.


Source (Czech): Britské listy