GREENWALD: Bush speechwriter Frum latest to admit Iraq War for OIL

[yurbud]

Last edited Tue Mar 19, 2013, 12:24 PM - Edit history (1)

Probably the only insider who has talked about this in much detail is Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who laid out the broader agenda of controlling the world's oil.

But I would like to hear somebody in leadership in the Democratic Party be as honest and as detailed as Wilkerson and stop talking to us like children or pretending that they were simply "misled" themselves.

Anyone old enough to remember the Cold War with an IQ over room temperature should have known that even if Saddam had NUKES, he could never dare use them on us or give them to terrorists who might because he knew (like every other world leader), that the result would be his entire country being reduced to a radioactive parking lot.

Money talks in Washington, and it's time our elected representatives tell us what exactly it demanded of them before the Iraq War and what the outcome was they wanted.

Frum's most interesting revelation comes from his discussion of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile whom many neocons intended to install as leader of that country after the US took over. Frum says that "the first time [he] met Ahmed Chalabi was a year or two before the war, in Christopher Hitchens's apartment". He then details the specific goals Chalabi and Dick Cheney discussed when planning the war:

"I was less impressed by Chalabi than were some others in the Bush administration. However, since one of those 'others' was Vice President Cheney, it didn't matter what I thought. In 2002, Chalabi joined the annual summer retreat of the American Enterprise Institute near Vail, Colorado. He and Cheney spent long hours together, contemplating the possibilities of a Western-oriented Iraq: an additional source of oil, an alternative to US dependency on an unstable-looking Saudi Arabia."

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Yet few claims were more stigmatized in the run-up to the Iraq War, and after, than the view that oil was a substantial factor. In 2006, George Bush instructed us that there was a "responsible" way to criticize the US war effort in Iraq, and an "irresponsible" way to do so, and he helpfully defined the boundaries:

"The American people know the difference between responsible and irresponsible debate when they see it. They know the difference between honest critics who question the way the war is being prosecuted and partisan critics who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people. And they know the difference between a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/18/david-frum-iraq-war-oil

[yurbud]

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