Making Iraq Safe for Oil and Black Tar

Opiates - and cannabis - produced in Afghanistan transit through Iraq before being distributed in Europe. Their consumption is growing in Baghdad and elsewhere.

Repeat yet again. Although Washington took the lead thirty years ago in the global anti-drug war, narcotics seem to stubbornly want to surge through the wake of the American Army.

Thus, in 2001, following the prohibition of poppy cultivation by the Taliban, Afghanistan had seen its opium production fall by 185 tons... to shoot up to 3,200 tons (or a 1,700% increase) immediately after the United States' intervention, a scenario that is finding an echo today in Iraq. According to the Iranian Hamid Ghodse, President of the OICS (Organe international de contrôle des stupéfiants, an expert group headquartered in Vienna charged with applying UN conventions relating to drugs), Iraq is in the process of becoming an important transit country on the route for Afghan heroin. Opiates and cannabis produced in Afghanistan "are brought through Iraq to Jordan from where they are sent on to the European markets of the East and West," he declared during a press conference given Thursday in Vienna.

This tendency is confirmed by the rise in narcotics seizures along the Iraqi-Jordanian border the last twelve months. "This situation is made possible by the domestic situation in Iraq, where border controls have been loosened and traffickers can come through disguised as pilgrims" going to the great Shiite cities, propounded Hamid Ghodse, for whom the situation is comparable to that of most countries emerging from a conflict situation...

Like Afghanistan.

Like Central America during the Reagan years. Like the Central America and its struggles for democracy against covert operations today.

Like Viet Nam, which is where the Black Ops folks first got their fondness for Black Tar.

Through an accident of history, the southern borders of China and the Soviet Union, a major fault line of Cold War confrontation, happened to parallel the Asian opium zone. Since the 18th Century, opium has been cultivated as a cash crop in a highland zone that extends for 5,000 miles across the southern rim of Asia from Turkey to Thailand. During the forty years of the Cold War, the coincidence super power confrontation and opium cultivation made geo-political pressures a real force in shaping the political economy of this zone.

As various national intelligence agencies mounted special operations along the Asian zone, they found that the region's opium brokers and ethnic warlords were their most effective covert-action assets. Surveying the steady increase in world opium production since the end of World War II, we can thus discern periodic surges in opium supply that coincide with ethnic conflicts or special operations in the drug zones.

The sudden growth of Golden Triangle opium production in the 1950s appears, in retrospect, a response to two stimuli. Reacting to international pressures, governments abolished legal opium sales and thereby created a sudden demand for illicit opiates in the Southeast Asia's cities.

Moreover, an informal alliance among four intelligence services--Thai, American, French and Nationalist Chinese--played a catalytic role in promoting the production of opium in northern Laos and the Shan Plateau of northern Burma. In particular, the Nationalist Chinese (Kuomintang, or KMT) occupation in 1950, combined with the Shan secessionist revolt after 1958, transformed the Shan States into a region of conflict that reduced government control and allowed a marked expansion in local opium production.

During the First Indochina War (1947-54), French intelligence officers integrated their covert warfare with the Golden Triangle opium trade through a motivation that seems, on its face, simple. Denied funds by National Assembly, French intelligence merged the opium supply of Laos with the drug demand of Saigon to fund covert operations against Vietnam's communists.

After the French colonial regime abolished the Opium Monopoly in 1950, military intelligence took control of the drug trade. French paratroopers fighting with Hmong guerrillas in Laos and Tonkin shipped their clients' opium south to Saigon on French military aircraft where it was sold in smoking dens run by the Binh Xuyen bandits, a criminal syndicate that controlled the city. Through this operation, French intelligence, particularly the SDECE, integrated narcotics into Indochina's political economy and its anti-Communist political forces.

Across the Mekong in Burma and Thailand, an alliance of intelligence services--Taiwan, Thailand, and US--fought a purer kind of covert warfare by operating indirectly through their local clients...

By the mid-1960s, Southeast Asia had a self-contained narcotics industry producing enough raw opium to sustain addicts in the region's cities. Following a pattern seen elsewhere, local demand raised the region's opium harvest to levels sufficient for an eventual entry into the world market, and then sustained it during periodic downturns in global demand. Although Hong Kong's chemists had been producing heroin from Southeast Asian opium since the mid 1950s, heroin laboratories did not open in the Golden Triangle until the US military presence in South Vietnam created a local demand for No. 4 heroin.

In 1968-1969, Hong Kong syndicate chemists opened a cluster of heroin laboratories at the epicenter of the Golden Triangle. Controlled by the Nationalist Chinese generals in Thailand and the Commander of the Royal Lao Army, these laboratories produced substantial quantities of 90 percent pure heroin.

Fueled by these nearly limitless supplies, heroin use among US troops in South Vietnam reached epidemic proportions. In September 1970, Army medical officers questioned 3,103 soldiers of the American Division and found that 11.9 percent had used heroin since their arrival in Vietnam.

In November, an Army Engineers battalion in the Mekong Delta reported that 14 percent of its troops were regular heroin users. In 1972, the White House Office for Drug Abuse Prevention interviewed 900 enlisted men who had returned from Vietnam in September 1971, the peak of the epidemic, and found that 44 percent had tried opiates while in Vietnam and 20 percent regarded themselves as having been addicted. The full extent of the problem was not revealed until 1974 when the Office for Drug Abuse Prevention published later surveys showing that 34 percent of US troops in Vietnam had commonly used heroin...

As American troops were withdrawing from Vietnam in 1972, President Richard Nixon inadvertently created a new market for Southeast Asian heroin by declaring a war on drugs in the Mediterranean.

As the progenitor of the three drug wars the US has fought over the past 20 years, Nixon's effort commands close attention. Despite a short-term victory, there were two long-term consequences of this drug war:
(1.) increased global opium production; and,
(2.) rising heroin consumption.

Acting on reports that Turkey's poppy fields and France's laboratories supplied 80 percent of America's heroin, Nixon pressed these two allies to eliminate the drug trade. By 1973, Turkey, supported by $35.7 million in U.S. aid, had eradicated all opium production and the French government had closed most of the heroin laboratories in the Marseilles region.

Within months, the street price of heroin in New York had tripled and purity dropped by half--both indicators of a serious shortage. Indeed, the DEA estimated that the U.S. addict population dropped from some 500,000 in 1974-1975 to only 200,000 by the end of the decade. Clearly, President Nixon had scored a major victory in his war on drugs.

Ironically, President Nixon's victory in Turkey increased global drug demand, unleashing market forces that would ultimately expand both production and consumption of illicit narcotics...

A curious relationship the CIA and their covert ops had with substance abuse. And have. And continue to develop as a matter of covert policy.