The release of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Committee report might persuade those still holding on to the George Bush approach to Iraq to finally get off that disasterous sinking ship. But don’t count on stupid George. If they needed any convincing it’s that Uncle Jim Baker was finally dispatched to slap some sense into the kid who is running the risk of screwing up American access to the most essential element of life after air, water and pizza—oil. George was supposed to secure us more oil, and things are looking more like it’s going to be less.
© 2006, UrbisMedia
I think it was Doug that finally convinced me. Not that it should have taken so long. I met Doug on a ship recently. He’s in his 80s, speaks like he’s had a little stroke, which goes along with his drawl, walks very slowly with a walker. I had to wonder what the hell he was doing on a ship. But I’ll cut to the chase. Doug flew 77 missions in P-47s in Europe in WWII. He was shot down on No. 77, hence the walker.
Anyway Doug was interesting to talk to about war. Doug says we beat the Germans because we took their oil away from them. That was the main thing. Doug thinks they were superior militarily. “They were always sending us after oil depots and refineries, anything to keep the Jerries from getting fuel for the planes, tanks and ships. When we strangled that they were done. Oil.” That’s what Doug said, and he thinks it’s the same now in the Middle East, and he thinks the Bush’s war is stupid. Oil. If you don’t have it, or access to it, a lot of it, you can’t make war, certainly not convention al war. And if you can’t make war, you can’t be the biggest, baddest kid on the terrestrial block. Oil.
Seems things are something like this. Bush I saved the Kuwaiti’s and the Saudi’s from Saddam Hussein getting their oil. Had we left him alone in Kuwait he would have taken the Saudis next. That would have made him a pretty powerful guy and he wouldn’t have needed our aid anymore to fight his wars or torment his people. Bush I kicked his ass in 100 days and the Kuwaitis and Saudis were accommodating. Oil went down to $10/barrel in the Clinton years. Problem was, it was the Clinton years. He wasn’t supposed to win. So the Neo-cons had to bide their time. They tried everything, eventually getting their thugs to go for Clinton’s groin (Republicans always hit below the belt; wear a cup). But Mr. Bill prevailed.
The Neo-cons must have been dancing a jig when they got a certified idiot like Bush II for president and then, Allah be praised, the Saudi boys went and took out the World Trade Center and a chunk of the Pentagon. Not Iraqis, mind you, but Saudis . But heck, Americans don’t know their asses from third base about the Middle East. If nearly half of them were stupid enough to vote for George Bush, they’ll believe most anything. Iraqis were flying those planes, when they weren’t making their weapons of mass destruction and talking about how much they “hate our freedom” with the guys from Al Qaeda.
So let’s go get ‘em. We’ll call it “The War on Terror, smash the place up real good (so we can let the American taxpayers make Haliburton and Bechtel rich fixing things up), haul Saddam out of a hole and get him whacked, install a flunky like Chalabi in something we could call a “democracy,” build a bunch of military bases all over the place, and, bingo, the oil is ours, and we’re installed in the Middle East so we can intimidate the other bad guys.
Problem is, this one’s going up in the loss column, right under Vietnam. Another Republican debacle in the middle of somebody else’s civil war The problem for Georgie is that, starting off as the most powerful feared, military force in the world, George has produced an army that doesn’t get much respect from guys in flip-flops, old AK-47s, and bombs detonated from cell phones. Rather than control the ME he has Taliban back hounding his heels, in Afghanistan, Ahamadinijad (or however you spell his name) in Iran saying “I’m building a nuke and whaddaya gonna do about it” and Hezbollah brazenly invading Lebanon, and Hamas elected in Palestine. Basically, he can’t do squat; he stretched out, overreached, and everybody knows it. More and more leaders in Central and South America hate his guts and aren’t afraid to say so. In short, people know him for the stupid, ineffectual jerk that he is. And, as the experts have said, he has made more terrorists than he has eliminated, and emboldened them. His arrogant, misdirected, pre-emptive, war is a failure and a loser.
That means that he is, and we are, worse off , not better off, as far as the greasy stuff if concerned. We will be more vulnerable to being squeezed on oil prices and, though, we are unlikely to get into a war like Doug fought in 65 years ago [1] , we will still be dependent militarily, on oil. Today there is China, which is going to need a lot of that oil, and maybe they will call in some of the debt they have been financing for us to buy more and more of it. Then we can pay them back and pay higher gas prices.
More and more Bush is isolated in his delusional world. His dismissed Secretary of State from his first term calls his war a “civil war”; his dismissed Secretary of Defense writes a pissy departing memo saying pretty much they have been screwing up, his new Secretary of Defense says we are “losing the war” and he’s still talking about “victory” but can’t define what the word means or when he would know it. Only “Windsock” McCain seems to still be with him, and then only because he thinks he can win with it. Neither seems to have gotten what the people said with their votes last month.
The shame is that a lot of people, to many of them American soldiers, are going to die in Bush’s lost cause, in his grand delusion. This was never about democracy, or even a war on terror, it was, as it was planned even before 911, a greasy land grab. Like a lot of greasy things, it seemed to just slip through his greedy little fingers.
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©2006, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 12.8.2006)
[1] A war by the way of which Michael Moore writes: “After 1,347 days, in the same time it took us to took us to sweep across North Africa, storm the beaches of Italy, conquer the South Pacific, and liberate all of Western Europe, we cannot, after over 3 and 1/2 years, even take over a single highway and protect ourselves from a homemade device of two tin cans placed in a pothole. No wonder the cab fare from the airport into Baghdad is now running around $35,000 for the 25-minute ride. And that doesn’t even include a friggin’ helmet.” [www.michaelmoore.com]