including Grover Norquist who wrote part of the privatization plan. Jay Garner said on film that he objected to privatizing the oil and putting off elections to make that easier since it would incite an insurgency and he was fired.
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Palast said the oil execs DID want to just replace Saddam with a different dictator, which may or may not have worked, but the Bushies wanted hegemony too--to be in a position to seize more oil and even if they didn't to coerce other countries to follow their lead on pricing--which is higher than it would probably have been if Saddam was left in power.
You can go watch the stuff yourself at his website:
http://www.gregpalast.com/iraqmeetingstimeline.htmlFor a more extensive background on the oil issue in the Iraq War:
http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2006/04/on-iraq-bush-agenda-invading-world-one.htmlWhile those reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post were calling vote rigging and black voter purges in Florida a conspiracy theory or flat out ignoring it, Greg Palast covered it and when the mainstream press finally grew a pair and did their job (six months too late in the case of the LA Times) they confirmed for American audiences what the rest of the world saw as it was happening.
Probably the only semi-mainstream American journalist with near the credibility of Palast is Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker.
Which other motives do you think would cow the Congress into spending over half a trillion dollars and starting a war that will ultimately piss off their constituents? If it was just a PR stunt as part of their bullshit war on terror, Democrats would have come out a lot sooner against it, when public opinion turned against the war. Instead, they are painfully out of step with the public. If they are ignoring their own constituents, there has to be some counterweight, something they fear more than voters, and it is not just Karl Rove.
Do you think those asswipes in the White House wouldn't put an asset worth tens of trillions of dollars at the top of their list of reasons to invade? Hasn't everything else they've done been about stuffing the pockets of their corporate friends? Why do you suppose they are so bent out of shape about Hugo Chavez mildly leftist government?
Read your history. Nearly all our military involvements have had a primary economic motive with the possible exceptions of Korea and more ambiguously, Vietnam.
Steve Kinzer wrote a great book called OVERTHROW about the governments we have overthrown since the 19th century, and every one was at the behest of some business interest and often to the detriment of the locals.
In 20 years, Americans will see that this is no different than knocking off Mossadegh for the oil companies, Arbenz for United Fruit, or the queen of Hawaii for sugar plantation owners. Or do you want to say that our government thought Hawaiians were going to come over in their outriggers and attack us with pineapples of mass destruction.
Or if you think I'm only citing lefties, read the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Daniel Yergin, THE PRIZE, a history of oil. That guy is such a far out lefty that he went to work with Papa Bush at the Carlyle Group. His book made it clear that when oil company execs call presidents and senators, they don't ask for favors, they give orders. In one of his later stories, Palast recounts how the oil companies began to get a whiff of what a shitty job the Bushies were doing of the occupation and sent their own guy over to work on oil deals who ignored and over-ruled Bremer.
Those other authors sidestep the issue and essentially deal with variations of the public argument. They simply don't address oil well if at all. They essentially take Al's tactical approach (how could we have done this better?) rather than looking at the underlying motives. And just as fighting terrorism without examining the causes will make it worse, trying to stop the war without being honest about the causes means we either won't stop it or if we do, we won't create a mechanism to prevent the next one.
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