It's the oil, stupid

Daniel Yergen and I are well aware that we have an oil based economy, a failed oil man as a failed president, a nation whose leading corp. is Exxon and a political elite that has recognized for 50 years that control over mid east oil is a strategic imperative.

It's rather naive for folks to respond to say that we are not 'taking' the oil. It is not about taking or plunder, it's about control over a resource rich region, regardless of where the barrels go. The elite is using 20 year old Spcs from Iowa and S Carolina to ensure that Iraq's resources are controlled and controllable. It is a conspiracy theory to deny this.

Paul O'Neil, the appointed and ousted Treasury secretary spoke of administration folks poring over Iraqi oilfield maps in 2002, shortly before the Iraq-WMD charade was literally "rolled out." Noam Chomsky wryly observed that were Iraq's primary export to be pickles we would not be there. A key benchmark for Iraq's so called government is the carving up of oil revenues for picking off by Western companies. In so much as most of Congress exists to serve these companies, few have signed on to Kucinich's attempts to block this provision.

According to striking Iraqi oil workers ( i.e. the only people whose opinions count on this) who visited the US, this hands over Iraq's only resource to the same neo Colonial machine for exploitation. Of course, the eeeevil liberal media has covered their visit in copious detail in an attempt to embarrass Bush, right???? Ultra liberal Harry Reid has invited them to Congress, right? No, this is another failure of the media and so called liberal democrats, where any discussion of oil has been careful relegated to random columns six years too late.

One can also comment on the local interpretation of these events. What is really pathetic and tragic is that 1420 WMAR apologists, concerned with only seeming tougher than the liberal straw men they fantasize about continue to allude to Saddam-UBL links, to "finding" WMDs and, when all else fails, to asserting in meandering theological arguments that killing Arabs and invading their nations is really a plus in a titanic "clash of civilizations."

One should conclude that, as Paul O'Neill and so many others have written, the conquest of Iraq was a choice, not a necessity. The reasons are obvious and have nothing to do with terrorism. That is merely an inconvenience to be borne by citizens.