Asia Times wrote:In far from accidental timing, the good old "war on terror" is back from the grave (nobody really related to the "long war" newspeak). After all, the galleries had to be reminded that there's a Pentagon-concocted "arc of instability" running from the Horn of Africa to the Middle East and then to the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Himalayas. The "war on terror" has expanded to the business of killing Africans, now afforded membership of the ever-expanding "axis of evil".
Bush, in front of a stack of books he never reads, blamed al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni Arab resistance and "Shi'ites supported by Iran" for his failures; committed five more brigades to Baghdad and 4,000 extra troops to guerrilla and al-Qaeda-controlled al-Anbar province. As if these shock troops will be enough to pursue the "fight against terror". Bush's plan ultimately breaks down to a slightly bulkier US militia in Iraq capable of killing more Arabs.
The basic fact remains that Bush's escalation is designed to smash Muqtada's Mehdi Army. That can only mean, in practice, a mini-genocide of vast masses of unruly, extremely dispossessed Shi'ites: the coming battle of Sadr City, which the Pentagon has been itching to launch since the spring of 2004. The Pentagon is actually declaring war on no fewer than 2.2 million (poor) people. A sinister symmetry still applies: the Pentagon will attack dispossessed Shi'ite masses - just as the Israeli Defense Forces attacked dispossessed Shi'ite masses in southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006.
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Grabbing those oil fields by the horn
Washington's successive divide-and-rule tactics - facilitating a possible genocide of Sunnis, contemplating a mass slaughter of Shi'ites, betting on a regional Sunni/Shi'ite war - never for a second lose sight of the riches of Iraqi. For Big Business, an Iraq eaten alive by Balkanization is the ideal environment for the triumph of Anglo-American petrocracy.
A new Iraqi oil law will most likely be voted on in Parliament in the next few weeks, before the arrival of Bush's 21,500 men, and it should be in effect in March. The law is Anglo-American Big Oil's holy grail: the draft has been carefully scrutinized by Washington, Big Oil and the International Monetary Fund, but not by Iraqi politicians. The profit-sharing agreements enshrined by the law are immensely profitable for Big Oil. And crucially, the law prevents any Iraqi government from nationalizing the oil industry - as the majority of Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) member states did. In essence, it's a game of "if you nationalize, we invade you - again". So the law fulfills the early-2003 neo-con boast of "we are the new OPEC".
Iraq's petrodollars will turn to mush - or rather, as with Saudi Arabia, be recycled back to US banks. Security company Blackwater will make a killing "protecting" Iraqi pipelines. Bechtel and Halliburton will get myriad fat contracts to rebuild everything the US has bombarded since 1991.
But what's the use of an oil law in a 100-cadavers-a-day hellhole? Enter the escalation as a way of providing "stability". Whichever way the coming surge goes - ethnic cleansing of Sunnis, the battle of Sadr City - what matters is not the piling up of Arab Muslim (or American) bodies, but how much less cumbersome is the path toward the holy oil grail. Big Business will make a deal with anyone that facilitates the passing of the oil law, be it Maliki's Da'wa Party, the SCIRI, or - in a wildest-dream version - the Sadrists or al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Posting an article like this used to guarantee me an online fight from my more flag-waving brethren, but no more. Everyone has become a cynic.
Today, I was watching "Hardball" on MSNBC at the same time as reading this article. They were talking about how Hillary Clinton might spin her stance on the war when she finally comes out as a presidential contender. Hillary has just gone over to Iraq to cower with everyone else in the Green Zone on her pre-announcement fact-finding tour. What is she going to discover?
They were saying things like, "Well, she can't apologize for her pro-war vote", "She's a woman so she's gotta be tough", "She can't afford to sound like a Liberal", etc.
But I was thinking to myself, "What if Hillary came out with the truth about the war - something like the above article discusses? What if Hillary also came out with the full-blown Peak Oil idea and began explaining the energy facts-of-life to the American public? What is she started taliking about the Petrodollar system and the consequences for America if it crashed? What if she came out saying that it was imperative for the US to establish a permanent presence in Iraq so that it could simultaneously protect its economy while continuing to exert supreme worldwide political and economic influence?
And what if the discussion also involved Global Warming and the dire need for a tremendous effort to dramatically conserve hydrocarbon resources, , research and develop renewable energies and otherwise begin following a Heinbergian plan for sustainability? Maybe she might recommend a $1.00/gallon gas tax to start implementing some of these things?
Hillary is absolutely aware of Peak Oil; Husband, Bill, read "The Party's Over" during the summer and has mentioned the idea a couple of times in speeches. Al Gore has been very vocal about global warming...
But I already know the answer - politicians can never actually discuss the realities of the world. So we elect them on their ability to shout platitudes and dance around the truth. But wouldn't it be great if, just for once, one of them actually did get up and start talking real talk?
