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Edited on Sat Oct-21-06 07:15 PM by marekjed
At least, it's not about oil for everybody involved in planning, executing and supporting this war. For one thing, Bush could have had cheap Iraqi oil without going to war. For another, he could have listened to many high-ranking civilian and military advisors who knew how this could be done with less bloodshed and less chaos. If Iraq had a functioning, respected government and the country were developing peacefully, the US would have been reaping rewards, oil being one of them. It certainly wasn't about oil for the neocons. It wasn't about oil for corporations, who need a safe place to do business in (paraphrasing Greg Palast here).
What was it about? Perhaps we do not know yet - perhaps it's still to be seen. But I think it was a mix of the following:
1. The weapons industry looked at the end of the cold war and shuddered. "Peace dividend" is written in red ink on their annual reports. It's getting harder to sell weapons anywhere, because the countries most willing to buy weapons are also those that cause you no end of bad PR when you do. So the industry needs a war - the likes of Lockheed Martin and many others, as do the private "security" companies, i.e. mercenaries like Blackwater, Custer Battles et al.
2. For the army, it's an exercise. There was a whole generation of professional soldiers who had never seen combat. Whole weapons systems that had never been tested in the field. And they need to show they're still needed.
3. For the neocons, many reasons, all of them having nothing to do with oil. The war is a display of power for the benefit of potential adversaries (including several South American countries). Watch what we can do, we don't care, we don't even need a reason that stands to scrutiny. At the same time, the neocons were on a power trip themselves. How often does someone who lives their life penning policy papers get to have their ideas tested in real life, in their lifetime? (I'm being generous to them, only because to a degree they seem to have that academic streak. Whatever their other reasons, I'm pretty sure they were genuinely curious as to how their concepts would turn out in practice. This is entirely separate from our human, moral and political assessment of the neocon agenda.)
4. I strongly believe this is also a huge exercise in population control - the US population. To what extent can we control or manipulate the media? Can we do PR good enough to obscure the facts, to blind the majority of the people to the real issues? Can we "create our own reality"? (That hair-raising quote by way of Ron Suskind, remember?) How far can we have our way with all the various "security" regulations? (They are almost invariably CONTROL regulations, note, having little to do with real security of the US population. They are about the security of the government). That part went pretty well for them, didn't it, with even habeas corpus gone and only the lone voice of Olbermann protesting. it's a huge social exercise, as was the non-response to Katrina.
5. Did Bush want oil? Yeah, I guess - he wanted it _expensive_. This is how his family makes money, after all.
These are just off the top of my head.
There's probably going to be a full-blown civil war in Iraq, it's already happening. Is this part of the plan, too? I have no opinion about it, and you'd have to ask, whose plan. But I do believe there has been some Western involvement in fostering the conflict. (Remember those British special forces agents who were driving around in Basra, in Arabic attire, shooting people?) The military policies, the way the occupation forces treat the Iraqis - that too is part of the picture. It was not inevitable, it did not have to happen that way. But somewhere, someone preferred it that way.
It's not like this was run by one, tightly-knit group of people with a focused agenda. Between Bush, who most likely doesn't know what he wants until Condie tells him, Cheney and his gang, Rumsfeld and the military command, neocons, weapon makers, CIA and other spooks, Israel, Britain, Iran (Chalabi)... you're going to find a lot of agendas.
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