Where do I start?
Bear with me while I play catch-up.
Cheap oil? At over $3.00 per gallon for gas in some places in the US?
MOA has also responded to this point before I got around to it and I agree with his response.
I've never seen gas priced at $3.00 in the US, but I'm in Texas, where it always seems to be the lowest in the country. Taking your word for it that it is that high in places ... if that's the only thing you can find wrong with my argument, I'm doing OK.
I never said the war was intended to *keep* oil cheap, nor would I try to argue that US control of Iraqi oil would prevent any and all fluctuations. Of course, oil/gas IS cheap in the US by several standards of comparison:
- Relative to the price in most other countries
- Relative to the ever-diminishing supply and ever-increasing demand
- Relative to the difficulty of finding as handy a substitute, and the lack of interest in finding alternatives, or conserving
But I was mainly referring to a long-term intention of keeping the price from rising as fast as it otherwise would/should. This motivation underlay not only the Iraq war but also the attack on Afghanistan and the ouster of the Taliban. And, even this is largely a rationalization or cover intention that elites use to keep from having to acknowledge that they are profit-driven, and to keep their representatives in power. See Three Days of the Condor.
The administration's own intellectual leaders cite control over oil as a primary concern:
"[Saddam]'s unwavering ambition ... was to dominate the Middle East, both economically and militarily, by attempting to acquire the lion's share of the region's oil and by intimidating or destroying anyone who stood in his way. This, too, was a sufficient reason to remove him from power.... "If Saddam 'does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction,' we argued, which eventually he was 'almost certain to do if we continue along the present course,' American troops in the region, American allies, the stability of the Middle East, and the world's supply of oil would all be put at risk." -http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraq-20040217.htm
See also:
"Trans-Caucasus Oil Pipeline Under Way At Last" (
http://www.forests.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=28148)
Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy, Saudi Arabia and the Failed Search for bin Laden
(
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...103-9802606-2386216?v=glance&s=books&n=507846)
Etc. etc. etc.
But the point about oil was only a part of my thesis.
Taurus, thanks for clarifying your position. I realized later I was probably tarring too many people with the same brush on insufficient evidence. Not sure why you would have a preference for the elephant's lies, though. They seem the more mean-spirited of the two major parties' lies.
On this point ... several posts seem to assume that criticism of Bush for lying is out of order because Clinton lied too. A sub-assumption would seem to be that if someone generally opposes Bush, he supported Clinton. Both these assumptions are not true, certainly not true of me. I voted for Nader last time. But I do think lying about war is lot more important than lying about sex. Those who think the entire $30m Whitewater investigation was appropriate and worthwhile should explain why they don't think a similar investigation is called for now with Bush -- not an internal investigation that is sure to be a whitewash and to hang lower-ranking people out to dry.
12 years of UN violations, not obeying the cease fire agreement. It was Saddams responsability to prove he disarmed.
I agree that it seemed perverse of him not to fully cooperate and prove his compliance. But he is/was (forgive me) in some ways a typical Arab leader, very macho and ego-driven. He didn't want to be seen kowtowing to the US or the UN. And he probably didn't think the US could afford to actually come after him again.
Also, it has been coming out recently how often innocent suspects confess during police interrogation to crimes they didn't commit. Obviously on some level they think it's in their interest to do so... Saddam might have thought it was in his interest to partly maintain (and partly deny) the fiction that he had WMDs, as a Nixon-esque loony-tunes intimidation tactic. He certainly had no interest in feeding "his" people. Or maybe he just didn't bother to fund and order careful enough tracking of the destruction of the WMD to provide the documentation of it.
Human rights violations on a massive scale.
Again, Saddam's evils were much more consistent than the US government's response to them. When it suited elites' perceptions of their self-interest to support Saddam's depredations, that's what the USG did. The CIA helped Saddam pinpoint Iranian military forces so he could gas them. (This is not seriously in dispute. Sources on request, though you could go research this yourself if you don't believe me.) And the gas attack on Saddam's "own people" might very well have actually been an Iranian attack.
In any case, when the geo-political winds shifted, so did the policy -- regardless of which political animal controlled the White House. With the Cold War over in 1991 and threat of a peace dividend looming, the US *offense* industry needed a new enemy. US Ambassador April Glaspie assured Saddam right before his invasion of Kuwait that the US had no position on Iraq's border dispute with Kuwait and no defense agreement with them (hehe). Saddam's forces were NOT poised to invade Saudi Arabia next. In fact the US had to bribe Saudi Arabia with a fighter plane deal to get them to ask for the US' help "defending them" and permit basing of US troops there. Which is the main thing that p.o.'d Osama...
I am defending neither the invasion of Kuwait nor terrorist vengeance for the US being in Saudi Arabia. I'm just saying that all the "evildoers" talk on TV is BS. Bush and his type don't really care about evil as a moral issue, only as a a P.R. issue to cover what they want to do for reasons of state.
Add to that his part in the assasination plot against a former President.
How many times did the CIA try to assassinate Fidel Castro? Would the former Soviet Union have been justified in bombing and invading the US -- killing thousands -- to "bring the US president to justice" for those attempts? All you have to do to see the hypocrisy is turn the situation around.
Oh yea, don't forget the importance of stability in the region that supplies us with about 20-25% of our oil.
"Stability" of the kind that the US consistently supports is enforced by autocratic, often brutal regimes. That's why Saddam was supported by the US for so long. If you're going to cite "stability" as a reason for war, you're going to have to stop using the brutality of foreign regimes as another reason. US policy is perfectly content with brutality as long it has the intended results.
Like the President said, we are not going to sit around and wait for the threat to become imminent.
Of course not -- "we" are going to actively create imminent threats, one after another, so "we" can sell the solution: War, war, and more war. Higher and higher offense spending. Curtailment of civil liberties -- including the one we particularly support on this forum!
RGR, do you support Iranian fanatics detonating a nuclear device in Austin Texas?
C'mon, now, keep to the high road.
Echoing a point made by IDD, the best way to prevent WMD proliferation is to stop engaging in it. The US is by far the nation that has historically "crossed the line" the most, in terms of foreign aggression and in terms of letting companies based here sell weapons to bad people. It has invaded another country ever single year (on average) since its founding. I know, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and what's-his-name over in Cambodia certainly killed more of their own. We have a bizarre combination of this being ONE OF the "greatest countries" to live in, in terms of freedom and prosperity, yet having a smugly belligerent foreign policy. However, as we've seen, the heyday of those domestic niceties is clearly waning. The relentless pursuit of profit for the few is becoming harder to manage.
It's easy to jump up and down pointing at Islamic fanatics. Seeing through the propaganda of our own *entirely rational* mass murderers takes a little more discernment.
