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RWMorris
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Absolutely correct, but there will always be those who can explain these away, or even blame them on American hegemony.
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RWMorris
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How would we go about getting nations on board with such an action? The real “plum” would be to get the Vatican involved. I say that, but actually the Vatican is taking the lead in many ways. The Pope has been blunt in his criticisms and yet he is constantly reaching out, trying to dialog with Muslims, trying to find common ground even as he stands his ground. You have to admit, after what John Paul II pulled off against communism (with the help of other nations) maybe Pope Benedict is on the right path. I have a lot of confidence in him; of course I’m Catholic.
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bobzills
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You may think you are skilled at ad hominem smokescreen pro-war rhetoric, but the facts are on my side.
Let’s compare the American casualties in the Vietnam war with the number of American casualties needed to bring down communism in Eastern Europe:
- USA Casualties in the Vietnam war:
58,217 killed
153,452 wounded
1,947 missing in action. - Americans killed during the cold war, trying to bring down communism in Eastern Europe? You mentioned Francis Gary Powers? How is he a casualty of any kind? I thought that that as a spy he was returned alive and in full health to the USA, unlike the sixty thousands of American soldiers who came back dead in coffins from Vietnam.
What was the end result of this massive USA attack on Vietnam?:
Vietnam, after all these thousands of American casualties, is under a communist dictatorship.
Eastern Europe, which was not invaded by the USA, has blossomed and is now experiencings the beginnings of democracy as communism has collapsed of its own weight, without the USA invading the area.
One question which comes to mind is who was it who profited from the war in Vietnam? Really, no one except the war profiteers.
The war in Iraq was an unjust war from the start. It has been known that the Bush administration has given favorite treatment to members of the Bin Laden family, a wealthy family with financial interests in Boeng aricraft. No one was allwed to leave the USA after the 9/11 attack, except for members of the bin Laden family, who were allowed to leave under a special presidential executive order?
"At least 13 relatives of Osama bin Laden, accompanied by bodyguards and associates, were allowed to leave the United States on a chartered flight eight days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a passenger manifest released on July 21, 2004.[16] The passenger list was made public by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), who obtained the manifest from officials at Boston’s Logan International Airport.
Also on board were Akberali Moawalla, an official with the investment company run by Yeslam bin Laden, another of Osama bin Laden’s half brothers. Records show that a passenger, Kholoud Kurdi, lived in Northern Virginia with a bin Laden relative."
"FBI documents uncovered by Judicial Watch include details of the six flights between September 14 and September 24 that evacuated Saudi royals and bin Laden family members. "
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holdencaulfield
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I would say no.
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goofyjim
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If it was so just tog o in and topple the regime in Iraq why are we sitting back and doing nothing about Kenya? The way that government is treating its citizens is just as bad as Saddam Hussein did to his. And Saddam did not harbor the terrorists so we went in because unde the guise of humanitarian reasons. Obviously the only just wars are the ones the Republicans get us into but if the Democrats were to send troops anywhere the Republicans would probably be in an uproar. No, for me the last just war was WWII. We haven’t had one since.
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bobzills
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Does Kenya have the oil reserves that Iraq has?
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estesbob
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I am curious as to how many in CAF recognize your screename. Of course that book would be consoidered mild by todays standards but I remember feeling quite “adult” when assigned it in High School
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holdencaulfield
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I didn’t pick the name because I thought it was “edgy” I merely chose it because I really liked the book. I liked the style and very much enjoyed it.
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estesbob
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It is a great book-I wonder if it is still standard fare in High schools? I was in a minor seminary when assigned it -by Nun!
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goofyjim
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Gee, what does oil have to do with it?
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holdencaulfield
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The high schools that I know of continue to teach it to freshmen.
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bobzills
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London Review of BooksGee, what does oil have to do with it?
18 October 2007
It’s the Oil
Jim Holt
Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.
Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.
www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n20/holt01_.html
Future of Iraq: The spoils of war
How the West will make a killing on Iraqi oil riches
By Danny Fortson, Andrew Murray-Watson and Tim Webb
Published: 07 January 2007
Iraq’s massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.
The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.
The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. They point to statements such as one from Vice-President **** Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. “So where is the oil going to come from?.. The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies,” he said.
news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2132569.ece
New Oil Law Means Victory in Iraq for Bush
By Chris Floyd
t r u t h o u t | UK Correspondent
Monday 08 January 2007
The reason that George W. Bush insists that “victory” is achievable in Iraq is not that he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No, it’s that his definition of “victory” is different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering classes in print and online. …
Bush and his cohorts don’t really care what happens on the ground in Iraq - they care about what comes out of the ground. The end - profit and dominion - justifies any means. What happens to the human beings caught up in the war is of no ultimate importance; the game is worth any number of broken candles.
And in plain point of fact, the Bush-Cheney faction - and the elite interests they represent - has already won the war in Iraq. …
Put simply, the Bush Family and their allies and cronies represent the confluence of three long-established power factions in the American elite: oil, arms and investments. These groups equate their own interests, their own wealth and privilege, with the interests of the nation - indeed, the world - as a whole. And they pursue these interests with every weapon at their command, including war, torture, deceit and corruption. Democracy means nothing to them - not even in their own country, as we saw in the 2000 election. Laws are just whips to keep the common herd in line; they don’t apply to the elite, as Bush’s own lawyers and minions have openly asserted in the memos, signing statements, court cases and presidential decrees asserting the “inherent power” of the “unitary executive” to override any law he pleases.
The Iraq war has been immensely profitable for these Bush-linked power factions (and their tributary industries, such as construction); billions of dollars in public money have already poured into their coffers. Halliburton has been catapulted from the edge of bankruptcy to the heights of no-bid, open-ended, guaranteed profit. The Carlyle Group is gorging on war contracts. Individual Bush family members are making out like bandits from war-related investments, while dozens of Bush minions - like Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and Joe Allbaugh - have cashed in their insider chips for blood money.
The aftermath of the war promises equal if not greater riches. Even if the new Iraqi government maintains nominal state control of its oil industry, there are still untold billions to be made in PSAs for drilling, refining, distributing, servicing and securing oilfields and pipelines. Likewise, the new Iraqi military and police forces will require billions more in weapons, equipment and training, bought from the US arms industry - and from the fast-expanding “private security” industry, the politically hard-wired mercenary forces that are the power elite’s latest lucrative spin-off. And as with Saudi Arabia, oil money from the new Iraq will pump untold billions into American banks and investment houses.
For even in the worst-case scenario, if the Americans had to pull out tomorrow, abandoning everything - their bases, their contracts, their collaborators - the Bush power factions would still come out ahead. For not only has their already-incalculable wealth been vastly augmented (with any potential losses indemnified by US taxpayers), but their deeply-entrenched sway over American society has also increased by several magnitudes. No matter which party controls the government, the militarization of America is so far gone now it’s impossible to imagine any major rollback in the gargantuan US war machine - 725 bases in 132 countries, annual military budgets topping $500 billion, a planned $1 trillion in new weapons systems already moving through the pipeline. Indeed, the Democratic “opposition” has promised to expand the military.
Nor will either party conceivably challenge the dominance of the energy behemoths - or stand against the American public’s demand for cheap gas, big vehicles, and unlimited consumption of a vast disproportion of the world’s oil. As for Wall Street - both parties have long been the eager courtesans of the investment elite, dispatching armies all over the world to protect their financial interests. The power factions whose influence has been so magnified by Bush’s war will maintain their supremacy regardless of the electoral outcome.
[By the way, to think that all of this has happened because a small band of extremist ideologues - the neo-cons - somehow “hijacked” US foreign policy to push their radical dreams of “liberating” the Middle East by force and destroying Israel’s enemies is absurd. The Bush power factions were already determined to pursue an aggressive foreign policy; they used the neo-cons and their bag of tricks - their inflated rhetoric, their conspiratorial zeal, their murky Middle East contacts, their ideology of brute force in the name of “higher” causes - as tools (and PR cover) to help bring about a long-planned war that had nothing to do with democracy or security or any coherent ideology whatsoever beyond the remorseless pursuit of wealth and power, the blind urge to be top dog.]
So Bush and his cohorts have won even if the surge fails and Iraq lapses into perpetual anarchy, or becomes an extremist religious state; they’ve won even if the whole region goes up in flames, and terrorism flares to unprecedented heights - because this will just mean more war-profiteering, more fear-profiteering. And yes, they’ve won even though they’ve lost their Congressional majority and could well lose the presidency in 2008, because war and fear will continue to fill their coffers, buying them continuing influence and power as they bide their time through another interregnum of a Democratic “centrist” - who will, at best, only nibble at the edges of the militarist state - until they are back in the saddle again. The only way they can lose the Iraq War is if they are actually arrested and imprisoned for their war crimes. And we all know that’s not going to happen.
[emphasis added]
www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010807A.shtml
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bobzills
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Bush’s Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq’s OilGee, what does oil have to do with it?
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted October 16, 2006.
Even as Iraq verges on splintering into a sectarian civil war, four big oil companies are on the verge of locking up its massive, profitable reserves, known to everyone in the petroleum industry as “the prize.”
It’s clear that the U.S.-led invasion had little to do with national security or the events of Sept. 11. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill revealed that just 11 days after Bush’s inauguration in early 2001, regime change in Iraq was “Topic A” among the administration’s national security staff, and former Terrorism Tsar Richard Clarke told 60 Minutes that the day after the attacks in New York and Washington occurred, “[Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq.” He added: “We all said … no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan.”
On March 7, 2003, two weeks before the United States attacked Iraq, the U.N.‘s chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, told the U.N. Security Council that Saddam Hussein’s cooperation with the inspections protocol had improved to the point where it was “active or even proactive,” and that the inspectors would be able to certify that Iraq was free of prohibited weapons within a few months’ time. That same day, IAEA head Mohammed ElBaradei reported that there was no evidence of a current nuclear program in Iraq and flatly refuted the administration’s claim that the infamous aluminum tubes cited by Colin Powell in making his case for war before the Security Council were part of a reconstituted nuclear program.
But serious planning for the war had begun in February of 2002, as Bob Woodward revealed in his book, Plan of Attack. Planning for the future of Iraq’s oil wealth had been under way for longer still.
In February of 2001, just weeks after Bush was sworn in, the same energy executives that had been lobbying for Saddam’s ouster gathered at the White House to participate in **** Cheney’s now infamous Energy Task Force. Although Cheney would go all the way to the Supreme Court to keep what happened at those meetings a secret, we do know a few things, thanks to documents obtained by the conservative legal group JudicialWatch. As Mark Levine wrote in The Nation($$):
… a map of Iraq and an accompanying list of “Iraq oil foreign suitors” were the center of discussion. The map erased all features of the country save the location of its main oil deposits, divided into nine exploration blocks. The accompanying list of suitors revealed that dozens of companies from 30 countries – but not the United States – were either in discussions over or in direct negotiations for rights to some of the best remaining oilfields on earth.
www.alternet.org/waroniraq/43045/
September 19, 2007
From Greenspan to Kissinger
Oil Warriors
By ROBERT WEISSMAN
Alan Greenspan had acknowledged what is blindingly obvious to those who live in the reality-based world: The Iraq War was largely about oil.
Meanwhile, Henry Kissinger says in an op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post that control over oil is the key issue that should determine whether the U.S. undertakes military action against Iran.
www.counterpunch.org/weissman09192007.html
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bobzills
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September 5, 2002Gee, what does oil have to do with it?
The Guardian
The real goal is the seizure of Saudi oil
Iraq is no threat. Bush wants war to keep US control of the region
Mo Mowlam
newscientist.com/hottopics/iraq/article.jsp?id=99993327&sub=Background%20to%20the%20crisis
By Fred Pearce New Scientist 29/01/2003
Iraq has the second largest proven reserves of oil in the world, behind only Saudi Arabia. 112 billion barrels lie below the country’s desert sands, together with another probable 220 billion barrels of unproven reserves. What’s more, the US Department of Energy says, “Iraq’s true resource potential may be far greater, as the country is relatively unexplored due to years of war and sanctions.”
This, plus the fact that “Iraq’s oil production costs are among the lowest in the world, makes it a highly attractive oil prospect,” says the department’s latest country analysis. No wonder many critics believe that the campaign to topple Saddam Hussein is really a battle for Iraq’s oil.
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Verisimilitude
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Let Islam show it’s irrationality unprovoked as I think it will in short order. If Muslims prove rational we can avoid the fight/issue. We had the perfect storm in a sense then with Reagan, Thatcher, and the Pontiff. We don’t have that today. I appreciate Mr. Blair and Mr. Howard though I disagree as does the Pontiff.
This is where the beauty of Truth makes the rubber hit the road though. Pope Benedict is on the right path just as John Paul the Great was. the Church by and large always is.
Wisdom suggests we stop our current agression in the Middle East and chart a new and bold course more in line with our faith which happens to agree with our Constitutional Law. This is where we should also heed:
27Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.
Christ gave us the example. I say this with caution and care: He won by giving up. (There is a line in a favorite movie- Jesus Christ Superstar- that has Christ saying to Simon- 'To conqur death, you only have to die.") We should do the same in the same spirit.
Now we (US/Bush administration) fight the WOT not caring how we (a majority of American and world citizens) feel about the war in Iraq though admittedly my reason might be different than some/most. Instead, we should not care what those who have declared war against us think and end our occupation, abandon the dozen or more military bases we have built, donate our new embassy as a hospital and leave Iraq with full military honors. All military and SOTU criteria have been met: Saddam is gone, a new government is in place, satisfaction of all UN Resolutions and no more threat from Iraqi WMD’s.
If peace does not prevail immediately let them beat their chest in bravado shouting allah akbar as the world watches them kill each other like we are observing from a distance in Darfur and did with Rwanda. I will support and protect the Doctors w/o Border and Red Cross type groups that want to help but not militarily*.
We announce our intention to the world that the US is withdrawing our overseas military empire reminding the world that though the bases are gone our presence is not because our Naval vessels will continue to sail international waters and visit our friends and our airpower is without match. We have nothing to fear if we protect our very own borders and not worry about the DMZ or Iraqs borders. IEDs from Syria and Iran going into Iraq are not more dangerous to America than the drugs and human smuggling that takes place on our souther border by our Mexican ‘friends’.
Other nations will see the irrationality of Islamic Republics and shun them if we lead the way. I will take a harder road compared to war and that is sacrificing maybe gas for my car rather than give support to a theocratic oppressive governments if they become unwilling to sell to us. The strongest nation is that which does not resort to war to get her way. Other nations would support doing commerce with us and with our military coming home the manufacturing jobs that we encourage come with it to rebuild our infrastructure and strengthen our economy by keeping our money here.
There is no reason to believe Iran would close the Gulf and hold the world hostage in our spite if they warred with Iraq and won. I’ll buy from them. It is good cause to ween ourselves from them and develope other sources. Let us tackle that instead of fighting a birthrate.
End all foreign military and other aid to all nations to include Pakistan, India, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Japan…you name it…we end it. We subsidize no foreign government for any reason. This puts all nations on a level playing field and the President can negotiate trade agreements like he is limited in doing. I personally find offensive we pay what amounts to the jizya tax to so many Islamic nations no matter how you dress that pig…it is a pig.
If my taxes go anywhere to aid I support more Naval hospital ships and releif aid for famine, earthquakes and other disasters. I would still help Iran if tehy had another earthquake and I would like to help feed those in Darfur. Individuals can give to any cause they choose excluding anyone/group that has declared us harm.
Just as the Pope reaches out to dialog we should too. Our dialog should include a constant denunciation and maybe boycott of goods and services to end harmfull practices like oppression and forced segregation of women, female ‘circumcision’, equal rights for minorities and freedom of belief like we did in South Africa to end Apartheid in the 80’s. If we choose to do business with Islamic countries we should not let them blackmail our integrity so they can remain a bigoted society just to satisfy our energy needs. Our national character should mean something and to support such regimes for political/ecconomic expediency is distatsefull no matter the personal cost. We should understand just suffering better. Think of it as a national Lent devotion.
Even if that sounds a little pie in the sky and idealistic it isn’t any less dangerous than our current actions. It certainly is less expensive in national blood and treasure. Chavez would shut up and we can help the extreme poverty 90 miles off our coast in Cuba. I’d bet a nickle now that capitalism would have defeated Castro long ago had we let people do business instead of boycott them.
I think the world can change for the better but it wont happen at the barrel of our gun in offensive wars. More nations would respond to peace and commerce and dangerous ideologies will be isolated and/or exposed.
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bobzills
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Very true.
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RWMorris
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But that is not what history teaches us. Powerful men rarely respond positively to peaceful gestures. Almost all of our gains in liberty, justice, and democracy have come at great costs. They have come at the “barrel of a gun” even if that barrel wasn’t always smoking. And our forefathers wisdom dictates that such actions will always be necessary.
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goofyjim
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I already suspected all this. Just wanted you to bring in some facts for everyone else in the discussion. So it is an unjust war.
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bobzills
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Of course it is an unjust war.
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seanpdmckenzie
Guest
Many people do not realize that even a war that is OFFENSIVE as opposed to defensive, is also found underneath the just war theology. For example; The Crusades, they were a Holy and JUST cause but this was also an offensive war as well. The reason being is that the Christians were mobilized against the Turks who had “stolen” or conquered The land of Our Lord ie. Jerusalem. This was an offensive war to take back what was rightfully belonging to the Jews and Christians. It was also defensive in nature because they were also sent to protect their land and the people of that land.
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