Operation
Iraqi
Liberation
the article below explains it about as clearly as it can be explained ... it's not some lefty cliche to say Iraq is all about OIL ... it's not conspiracy theory ...
the article asks the key question: "WHO BENEFITS?" ... it concludes with: "FOLLOW THE MONEY."
since the war began, BIG OIL has had record all-time profits that are directly linked to a highly unstable Middle East ... so who benefitted?
the question is then asked was OIL the primary motivation for bush/cheney to invade Iraq?
several iterations of why we have to take out Saddam were provided ... all of them tried, at their root, to establish the case for Saddam being a threat to the US ... an imminent threat ... aluminum tubes, yellowcake, mushroom clouds, training Al Qaida, drones armed with nukes, agents carrying dirty bombs, anthrax, take your pick ... then we had the noble cause of bringing democracy to a people who want us to get the hell out of their country ...
so, where are the Democrats? it seems to me the choice has to be "binary" - either we are working towards something positive in Iraq or we are not ... the focus here is NOT whether we are being "successful" in achieving the stated goal of helping the Iraqis but whether that is indeed bush's real objective in the first place ...
again, the choice is binary - you either accept the premise that our mission is just or you do not ... bush's (and Rumsfeld's) perceived incompetence is a separate issue ... what exactly is their purpose in Iraq??
it seems to me that those who push for continued "efforts towards progress" implicitly must be accepting the credibility of bush's stated goal of helping the Iraqis ... implicitly, those who "accept the premise of the mission" must disagree with those who believe bush is there to destabilize Iraq to justify maintaining a military presence there to protect American oil interests ...
what are these oil interests? here ya go ... i hope you read the whole article ... it's an important one ...
will Democrats ever challenge bush's motives in Iraq or will they only question his competence and his methods?? the answer to that question is very much what divides us ... by their silence about this, many see the Democrats as complicit ...
source:
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/36463/The Great Iraq Oil GrabThe official reasons the U.S. invaded Iraq don't hold water. So, as the man said, follow the money ... straight to the oil fields. <skip>
It was a prize that the first oil presidency -- the president, vice president and national security advisor are all former oil execs -- lusted after long before the attacks of 9/11. The Washington Post reported that even as the Bush transition team prepared to take power in 2001, changing Iraq's regime and seizing its oil were already on the table:
Early discussions among the administration's national security "principals" -- Cheney, Powell, Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice -- and their deputies focused on how to weaken Hussein diplomatically. But Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz proposed sending in the military to seize Iraq's southern oil fields and establish the area as a foothold from which opposition groups could overthrow Hussein.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill told author Ron Suskind that Dick Cheney also supported an invasion of Iraq before Sept. 11, and the New Yorker's Jane Mayer reported on a top secret National Security Council document dating back seven months before the terror attacks that gave some insight into the vice president's thinking:
It directed the N.S.C. staff to cooperate fully with
Energy Task Force as it considered the "melding" of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies towards rogue states," such as Iraq, and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."
In her new book, “The Bush Agenda,” Antonia Juhasz detailed how, six months before the invasion, the administration brought in a group of oil executives to advise them on Iraqi oil policy (this occurred as President Bush was telling the American people that he had no intention of going to war). The State Department also set up a consulting group under the "Future of Iraq Project" called the "Oil and Energy Working Group." After some back and forth among the various consultants, a consensus was reached that Iraq's oil "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war." <skip>
Iraq has 80 oil fields. Seventeen of them have been discovered. Under the new oil law -- written into the constitution -- those 17 will be under the control of the Iraqi national oil company.
All undiscovered oil fields are now open to the PSAs. That means, depending on how much oil there is in Iraq, foreign companies will have control over at least 64 percent of Iraq's oil and as much as 84 percent.
PSAs are the worst possible deals for countries ...
read the entire article by clicking here ...
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