What should we do about Iraq? Should we follow Cindy Sheehan’s advice and pull the troops out ASAP? Or do we listen to Congressman Murtha and redeploy the troops to a nearby staging area where they can respond to ad hoc threats? Or what about the Bush/Republican party line to “stay the course?”
Who knows? How does a random citizen sitting in any corner of the USA gather enough information to know which plan to support given the state of the media? How does any citizen know which of the many options carries the highest promise of success and the least danger of failure? In short, who does one vote for in the upcoming Congressional elections? Those who are determined to stay the course? Or those who want to either pull out or redeploy?
There’s probably enough information around to put two and two together and come up with something resembling four.
The first thing that we have to consider is that George W Bush has never disclosed the real reason for invading Iraq in the first place. It strains credulity to believe that the CIA and other intelligence services didn’t have a clearer view of reality inside Iraq around the time of the invasion. If that is in fact the case, then their incompetence exceeds even the most exaggerated estimates. True, there were many with ample reason to want Saddam gone and Iraq under new management, but for those groups to orchestrate such a successful fraud as presented by Colin Powell to the UN simply beggars the imagination and certanly ain't consistent with their subsequent laughable performance.
So if the WMD tale is camouflage, then that leaves Oil. While an oil grab is not beyond the Bush Administration, that alone wouldn't justify a full scale invasion. It was doubtless a contributing factor, but an oil grab would be too obvious and the rest of the world would be very unhappy. But don't count it out completely, at least not yet. There’s got to be more to the story.
Saddam Hussein was one of the bad guys. Nobody disputes that. He had taken a pot shot at George H.W. Bush and was definitely not an asset to the neighborhood. Given the opportunity he certainly might start reconstituting his WMD programs and thus should be taken out while he was weak, the “oppose Hitler before he marches into the Rhineland” argument. There may have been a glimmer of attention paid to this issue, but it probably wouldn't have been particularly compelling given the huge disparity between the US’s capabilities and anything that Iraq could ever mount.
Yet another side of the oil picture, however, might bring us some clarity. However strenuous Bush and oil companies’ denials, oil is a finite commodity. X-number of barrels of oil exist and once those are found and consumed, they are gone, gone, gone. Oil company executives must have some idea where things stand in the consumption of their product. When you consider the two oil company executives who are respectively President and Vice-president of the United States, then you know that this knowledge is found at the highest levels of the US government.
With India and China industrializing and their economies growing at double-digit rates, the quest for oil has the potential to get real ugly real soon. Consider that pre-World War II Japan resorted to military action when FDR turned off their oil. Oil is the lifeblood of industrial nations. They’ve got to have it or droop and die.
So are we in Iraq because Bush’s Neocons factored in the rising geo-political need for oil thinking that it would be worth weathering domestic criticism and overseas ill-will if that would put the US government in a position to exercise influence over Iraqi oil?
If that’s the case, then that explains Bush’s “stay the course” policy in Iraq. By various reports coming out of Iraq, the US is busily building bases across the country. The cynic would conclude that Bush and the Republicans feel that they can (must) hang on to control of both houses of Congress in the 2006 elections, and then they can fully consolidate their penetration of Iraq; get the US so fully committed that pulling out would be inconceivable no matter which party was in power.
That way, when China, India et al come looking for oil, they will have to do business, not with an unpredictable Saddam Hussein, but with an American puppet government in Iraq.
Plausible? Frankly, I don’t know. But nothing else about Bush’s open-ended commitment to Iraq makes sense either.
The Democrats need to harp on Republican incompetence and total lack of any plan to gain traction against the "conventional wisdom" that the Republicans will keep us safer. The fact that three plus years after the invasion we still don’t have a clear idea why we went there in the first place, what “victory” might look like if and when we ever get it, or how in the hell to get out in any case, tells us that there never was much of a plan. There was a military plan in the beginning and it worked beautifully, but there was clearly no political plan and things went to hell very quickly and have plumbed deeper the depths of hell ever since.
How dumb is that…to invade Iraq against the expressed wishes of most of the rest of the world and not even have a plan for what to do with the country once it is conquered? The mind reels.
2 comments:
Certainly oil was the objective of many promoters of the Iraq war, but you should not have left out Rove's desire to have a war in progress befroe the 2004 presidential election. He was supposedly quoted as saying something to the effect of "Gvie me a war and I guarantee to get Bsuh re-elected".
PS: Your blogs are dead center in my book.
Certainly oil was the objective of many promoters of the Iraq war, but you should not have left out Rove's desire to have a war in progress befroe the 2004 presidential election. He was supposedly quoted as saying something to the effect of "Gvie me a war and I guarantee to get Bsuh re-elected".
PS: Your blogs are dead center in my book.
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