SCRIPTOIDS: Welcome to the military-petroleum complex, Kosovo

You know you’re getting the bullshit-wrapped-in-cellophane story when some eruption of “anti-Americanism” -- let’s say, the storming and burning of a US Embassy building in Belgrade -- is attributed to Serbian thugs, vandals, hooligans, and marauding youths who are kinda sorta pissed off over Kosovo’s declaring independence from Serbia and the US government’s rapid, enthusiastic, and unilateral recognition of the “new” country.

They hate us for supporting Kosovo’s freedoms.

Not. The Serbs are justifiably angry at their country’s being broken apart all because of -- well, is there really any other reason these days? -- military bases, pipelines, and oil.

Across this last weekend, the Western propaganda machine was working overtime, celebrating the latest NATO miracle: the transformation of Serbian Kosovo into Albanian Kosova. A shameless land grab by the United States, which used the Kosovo problem to install an enormous military base (Camp Bondsteel) on other people's strategically located land, is transformed by the power of the media into an edifying legend of "national liberation".

And what is it about the land that makes it so strategic? It’s the AMBO Trans-Balkan Pipeline. The pipeline will be built by the US-registered Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corporation (AMBO). Once the pipeline is completed in 2011 or 2012, the huge US military base, Camp Bondsteel, will sit astride it.

A bit of luck, that.

The US based AMBO pipeline consortium is directly linked to the seat of political and military power in the United States and Vice President Dick Cheney's firm Halliburton Energy. The feasibility study for AMBO's Trans-Balkan Oil Pipeline, conducted by the international engineering company of Brown & Root Ltd. [Halliburton's British subsidiary] has determined that this pipeline will become a part of the region's critical East-West corridor infrastructure which includes highway, railway, gas and fibre optic telecommunications lines.

And upon completion of the feasibility study by Halliburton, a senior executive of Halliburton was appointed CEO of AMBO. Halliburton was also granted a contract to service US troops in the Balkans and build "Bondsteel" in Kosovo, which now constitutes "the largest American foreign military base constructed since Vietnam".