Debate Over: War-For-Oil People Win

[Nbadan]

Bush was on the Rush Limbaugh show. He seemed to imply that we will be at war in the Middle East indefinitely, because if we leave, those nations might withhold their oil from us as a blackmail tool. Transcript snippet below, link to full transcript at the bottom. This confession has the potential to be HUGE. Bush admitted that we are (partially) at war to protect our own oil interests.

PRESIDENT: My thoughts are that we face an enemy that will kill innocent people. They murder to achieve their objectives, and they use propaganda in order to do two things. One: proclaim their might, and secondly to discourage us. Obviously the idea of their propaganda being displayed is something that bothers me in the sense that I don't want the American people to become discouraged. One: I want them to understand the stakes in this war; and, two, that we're going to win this war and not to be discouraged about the violence and the propaganda that they see. Obviously, some of the violence is not propaganda, but these tapes that they put out are all aimed at shaking our confidence.

Osama Bin Laden himself has said that it's just a matter of time before the United States loses its will and retreats. Give me a second here, Rush, because I want to share something with you. I am deeply concerned about a country, the United States, leaving the Middle East. I am worried that rival forms of extremists will battle for power, obviously creating incredible damage if they do so; that they will topple modern governments, that they will be in a position to use oil as a tool to blackmail the West. People say, "What do you mean by that?" I say, "If they control oil resources, then say they pull oil off the market in order to run the price up, and they will do so unless we abandon Israel, for example, or unless we abandon allies. You couple that with a country that doesn't like us with a nuclear weapon and people will look back at this moment and say, 'What happened to those people in 2006?' and those are the stakes in this war we face." On the one hand we've got a plan to make sure we protect you from immediate attack, and on the other hand we've got a long-term strategy to deal with these threats, and part of that strategy is to stay on the offense. Part of the strategy is to help young democracies like Lebanon and Iraq be able to survive against the terrorists and the extremists who are trying to crush their hopes, and part of the democracy is for a freedom movement, which will help create the conditions so that the extremists become marginalized and unable to recruit."

Rush

The Iraq War has always been about 2 things:

1. The oil and hemogamy (Bush: "Do not destroy the oil wells") and the original name of the invasion Operation Iraqi Liberation.

2. The Neo-Con's dream of creating a free-market economy in Iraq. (Grover Norquist's 101 "orders" for Iraq, one of which was privatizing and selling off, every business sector in Iraq - including the oil fields.

[PixelPusher]

I don't think it's proper for our President to associate with an Oxycontin addict.





You know, a really visionary leader might insist we put forth the same national effort we exhibited in WWII or the space race to ridding ourselves of oil dependency...ah, screw it - Dancing with the Stars it on right now.

[boutons_]

"they pull oil off the market in order to run the price up"

This is still a lie (although dubya is so simplistic and stupid I doubt he completely realizes it). Running the price of oil up was always a no-brainer reason why to start phony war for false reasons, since the oilco employees/proxies in the WH love to dump 10s of $Bs of windfall profits into the pockets of their oilco masters. Higher oil prices was certainly one of the "plauisibly deniable" pleasant side-effects (but really a key objective) of the Iraq war and about the only real obejctive that was achieved by the Repug Iraq war.

The real problem would not be high prices alone, but truly restricted volumes well below world needs. The Saudis always are on the tightrope of how much to restrict oil to keep the price up high to optimize their profits, but not high enough to actually send the industrial countres into serious recession that would cause a drop in demand.

dubya, less than a week before the election, is just campaigning with the tactic of scaring people into believing Repugs make us safer (but can't make us safe, by dubya's earlier statement weeks ago) while the Dems make us unsafe. All scary, all the time.

We simply CAN"T lose Iraq and Afghanistan, but we simply can't win Iraq with these cynical, evil, incompetent mother ers in the WH. Their own incompetence and penny-pinching and rummy's armchair war-making have most probably bungled any window of opportunity to stablize Iraq in the West's favor.

Even re-starting conscripton and doubling the US military forces in Iraq will not now be enough to win the "minds and hearts" of the Iraqis whose "short and curlies" are in the hands of the civil warriors.

Maliki ordering the US troops to stop cordoning off Sadr city while searching for a captured US soldier? and the US respecting that order? GMAFB