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Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Deafening

The relentless and uncritical cheerleading for the illegal immoral invasion of Iraq across the corporate media certainly was differently deafening than is the near-silence with which these same media outlets seem to be marking the beginning of the sixth year of our catastrophic still illegal occupation of that nation.

American Faces of War and Occupation that are Not on Your Tee Vee Right Now.

A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq Originating Out of the Netroots that is Also Not on Your Tee Vee Right Now.

5 comments:

VDT said...

It's worth recalling that the war in "Iraq war" is mostly about how the CIA, the Federal Reserve and the Bush/Cheney administration viewed hydrocarbons at the geo-strategic level, and the unspoken but overarching macroeconomic threats to the U.S. dollar from the euro. The real reasons for this war was this administration's goal of preventing further OPEC momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard, and to secure control of Iraq's oil before the onset of Peak Oil (predicted to occur around 2010). However, in order to pre-empt OPEC, they needed to gain geo-strategic control of Iraq along with its 2nd largest proven oil reserves. To wrap one's head around the complexity (or simplicity) of this war, one must have an acute understanding of the macroeconomics of the petrodollar and the unpublicized but potential threat to U.S. economic hegemony from the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency.

Anonymous said...

I remember when we (of the deeply un-serious, non-grown-up left dontcha know) were saying before it even began that they were mainly after Iraq's oil reserves.

It seemed an obvious truth: I mean, America runs on oil, has little left of its own and Iraq has a ton of it.

Of course we all know the response that got from the serious grown-ups in Washington. We were ridiculed, called naive and 'stuck in the 60s', we were blind to (or worse approved of!) the horrible threat of Saddam's plans to nuke Our Shining Cities with balsa wood hobby planes and so on.

And of course once again the un-serious, naive DFH (dirty Fucking Hippies) crowd was correct and the very serious and sober Wise Old Men were wrong, wrong, wrong.

Well, some were just wrong, but most are really just liars for empire (WMDs! Missle "Defense"!, etc.)

Nowadays, Cheney and the gang openly admit it was, in great part, for the oil after all. Then they smirk, knowing they can get away with it, have gotten away with it before, and that all our rage, however correct, is impotent.

VDT said...

Eric said:

Nowadays, Cheney and the gang openly admit it was, in great part, for the oil after all. Then they smirk, knowing they can get away with it, have gotten away with it before, and that all our rage, however correct, is impotent.

What's even more troubling is that, although plunders like Iraq might be avoided, American foreign policy will not change with a Democrat in the White House. We forget that when it comes to protecting economic interests abroad, Bill Clinton had an even more "hawkish" doctrine than Bush...

jimf said...

Eric wrote:

> Nowadays, Cheney and the gang openly admit it was, in great part,
> for the oil after all. Then they smirk, knowing they can get away
> with it. . .

WYATT: But might not fanaticism, at times, provide
a kind of mainspring for good actions?

RUSSELL: It provides a mainspring for actions, all
right. . .

WYATT: Then, if it gets taken over by, uh, economic
considerations, say the... like the Crusades, then fanaticism
disappears and perhaps does no harm?

RUSSELL: Well, I don't know, I... I can't, uh, think
of any good that the Crusades did. The Crusades had,
of course, two, uh, different streams in them -- a
fanatical stream and an economic stream. The economic
thing was very strong indeed, but it wouldn't have worked
without the fanaticism. The fanaticism provided the
troops, and the economic motive the generals, [Wyatt
laughs] roughly speaking.

-- shrug --

Plus ça change. . .

VDT said...

Earlier I said:

What's even more troubling is that, although plunders like Iraq might be avoided, American foreign policy will not change with a Democrat in the White House. We forget that when it comes to protecting economic interests abroad, Bill Clinton had an even more "hawkish" doctrine than Bush...

It seems I was channeling Noam Chomsky without realizing it. He wrote:

"Take Bill Clinton. He had a doctrine too, every president has a doctrine. He was less brazen about it than Bush, didn't get criticized a lot, but his doctrine was more extreme than the Bush doctrine if taken literally. The official Clinton doctrine presented to Congress was that the United States has the unilateral right to use military force to protect markets and resources. The Bush doctrine said we've got to have a pretext, like we've got to claim they're a threat. Clinton doctrine didn't even go that far, we don't need any pretext. With markets and resources, we have a right to make sure that we control them, which is logical on the principle that we own the world anyway so of course we have that right. You're going to have to look far in the political spectrum to find any deviation from this. So if the oil-rich countries were to try to really take independent control of the resources, there would be a very harsh reaction. The United States, by now, has a military system; more is spent on the military system than the rest of the world put together. There's a reason for that. That's not to defend the borders."