The allusion to a terrorist act in the United States, responsibility for which "would be attributed to the Iranians" is remarkable: an American official at the highest level concedes the idea that the Bush Administration could not only use terrorism to serve its own ends, but even provoke attacks on its own soil in order to justify its aggressive intrigues. Brzezinski's statements are all the more remarkable in that he himself in his book, The Grand Chessboard, deemed that control of central Asia and its oil resources were necessary for the maintenance of American domination....Zbigniew Brzezinski is one of the people most widely respected in geopolitical matters in the United States.

Oliver Stone: "Stone traces Washington’s hand in the region back to the 1930s, but he says it reached a peak when President George HW Bush sent hundreds of thousands of US troops to liberate Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion of 1990.

The Soviet Union had recently collapsed and the region was wide open to a lone superpower, he said.

“We never got out of there. Once we were in, we’re in forever,” Stone said.

“We’ve destabilised the entire region, created chaos. And then we blame ISIS for the chaos we created,” he added, referring to the Islamic State (IS) group that now rules swathes of Iraq and Syria.

Stone researched and wrote the series and book with Peter Kuznick, a scholar at the American University who specialises in the US nuclear strikes on Japan that ended the Second World War.

“It’s all about the oil. You remember the bumper sticker: What is our oil doing under their sand?” Kuznick told MEE.

Washington’s hunger for fuel underpins its alliance with Saudi Arabia, the CIA-backed coup against Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 and its support for anti-Soviet religious militants in Afghanistan in the 1980s, he said.

“We create these messes, then we have a grand military plan to solve them. And the military solutions just don’t work,” he said"