Tuesday, January 21, 2003

I thought y'all were better than this. First up, how does that article tell me it's "DEFINITELY NOT about oil"? Yes, it may take a while to tap into some of the Iraqi junk...but that's the fun of installing your own puppet regime -- less negotiation time. Iraq is not really any less export-ready than the Stans are, and we know how big of a tug of war that spot is. No one said we're fighting for the gas that's gonna fill me up in May...oil companies always have an eye toward the future. And Iraq, ready to move it or not, still has the world's second largest proven reserves. Your article states that..."Once things are clear, companies will be eager to get in line to sign contracts with a country that has 11 percent of the world's proven reserves. But they will be very cautious when it comes to spending billions of dollars until they are pretty confident about security and stability." But who do you think will INSTALL the new regime? We're probably going to see a US-occupied Iraq for at least a minute, and Shrub's oil homies will be more than willing to come politic with Not Saddam. On a somewhat related topic -- yes, Bubba, in this case 1 + 1 does equal 2. Yes, it's a PR thing to be able to say "I took out the evildoer." Yes, it's very much about avenging Daddy. But yes, it's also very much about oil. Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction" can't destruct that much mass -- and only one nation on earth has ever gone atomic. That's us, by the way. Yes, Saddam is a threat -- to his OWN people. But does he threaten us? Only when we act up (now) or when he decides he wants to line his pockets with what we see as "our" oil (1991). He's attacked two countries in 30 years. Iraq will be Bush's second in two years. You've said it yourself -- his army is weaker than it was in '91, when we went in there and only had to miss half of a Simpsons episode to win. So what's the fucking dire need now? Texas tea and Cold Revenge. As for one of the other 250-plus attacks we've made: - Stalin was definitely NOT a threat. Not when the Cold War started. ONE country had atomic capability (us). The other was extremely decimated and torn up by WWII -- Stalin lost more men and more artillery fighting Hitler than anyone did. He even attempted to diffuse the situation with the US before it started, largely because he KNEW it was like Shaq against Verne Troyer. Over the years, Russian scientists helped the military rebuild and catch up -- sort of -- but they were not the immediate threat in the early '50s that Truman and his successors led us to believe. It's like Saddam being a threat NOW. Me? Isolationist? You're damn right. Staying the fuck out of Asia altogether would certainly be the best solution to our "war on terror," and I'd MUCH rather see the government handle the millions and millions of underpaid, undereducated, undereverythinged people living here on our own turf before we do anything to ruin the lives of people in a country that only matters to us because of what's under their soil. Part of the trouble with y'all DC-area heads is that you've grown up so close to the military that you really want to believe we need to do all of this "making the world safe for freedom" crusading. But what has all of it accomplished? More dependence on oil. Less personal freedom. More hatred from other nations. Less money for everyone but the top 5-10 percent. We need to take care of home first...and that problem isn't solved by carpet-bombing the rest of the world. -- O 4:04:24 PM    comment []

Thanks to DDDM for a beautiful find on that article. However, I could've told you that before even reading it. Ryan, for all your "don't take the government at face value", you should stop and realize that assuming this situation is about oil is doing exactly the same thing. Bush the Texas Republican + war on country with 2nd largest oil reserves = war for oil. 1 + 1 = 2, right? But no, not in this case.  These are simply coincidences that are hiding the real reasons for this conflict. Don't feel bad.  I rode the Metro Saturday with thousands of people who are under the same misguided assumption. This war is about "evildoers", but that doesn't mean it's not a sham. Saddam is an easy target, both militarily and politically. Politically, because he's the only living head of state whose military has used weapons of mass destruction. Because he's been caught in lies time and again swearing that he's stopped research on them and that he no longer possesses them. Because it is patently obvious to the rest of the world that Saddam desires one thing: consolidation of power in Southwest Asia, accomplished by building the world's fourth largest military to invade neighboring states. Because he is infamously cruel in how he deals with opponents, both outside and inside (mostly inside) his own country, and notoriously unfair and arbitrary in how he chooses those "opponents".  And because it is now obvious that he will extend that cruelty against the people of his own nation if he thinks it will further his political causes internationally. Militarily, because his "army" is a shadow of what it formerly was, that 75% of it has equipment that largely can't move, troops that are ill-trained, disloyal to Saddam, and probably don't even have boots on their feet (seriously), and that even the 25% that is loyal and does have the best equipment couldn't defeat even one US Army heavy division on its best day. Because his "Air Force", hahahahahaha, is non-existent. Because even if Saddam gave the order to launch WMD against invading forces, the Generals that would have to execute that order would probably be too afraid of War Crimes trials that they wouldn't order their soldiers to do it, and even if they did, the soldiers are so untrained in firing weapons of that sort and so afraid of screwing it up and killing themselves that they would probably refuse the order. Taking out Saddam is something that in one stroke, Bush can say, "I've corrected a mistake my dad made, I've rid the world of an evil and dangerous leader, I've made America safer by deposing a regime that supports terror." That's what this war is about. Are those statments true? To an extent. Saddam is an evil and unpredictable leader, and the world probably is a safer place without him in power. To say that taking out Saddam improves our stance in the "War on Terror" is hideously false, although that is what Bush would like nothing more than for everyone in the US to believe. But more on that later. -- Sparxxx 4:00:59 PM    comment []

Sorry, folks...DDDM's post was a response to one that I thought went up last night. Apparently, my computer sucks. So here it is... ------------------ More fun with political ass-reamings... Over the weekend, I breezed through Gore Vidal's "Dreaming War," an intriguing set of essays on the general history of US imperialism dating back to Truman and, well, even before that...but really Truman. Everything from the Cold War to our current fake war is handled to some extent, and the end result is a very chilling picture. Have We The People really lost any and all control over our way of life? We've found that elections can be manipulated...first by the media, and then if all else fails, the Supreme Court. A guy who less than one third of Americans voted for runs the show now...so much for representation. We've also found that our nation's not-so-democratically elected leaders apparently feel that because of our climbing debt, the only way our economy can survive is if we're in a perpetual state of war. Obviously the Clinton Era proved a peacetime economy can thrive, but when faced with a recession, manufactured conflict certainly works as a better fix than real solutions. The evidence linking dirty Administration hands to nyneleven has continued to grow, Osama has a) still not been proven guilty and b) not been found -- or at least not brought to "justice"...yet we HAD to hit up the Afghan rubble field just because, well, they support evil. Bush unveiled his Afghanistan/Iraq plans WHILE CAMPAIGNING (at least Time said so last year), but our ADD-afflicted populace doesn't realize that -- we just know that we, well, have to support the fight against evil or we're unpatriotic. You can take the government's word at face value, but a lot of shit doesn't add up. Historical facts get distorted, truth gets buried and we're stuck with the consequences -- usually without knowing any better. Stalin was not a threat to us. Korea? No. Vietnam? No. Iraq the first time? No. Afghanistan? No. Iraq again? No. Yet we continually find ways to create these garganutan colossi that we must eradicate in the name of all that is well and good and rich and white. There is NO reason for us to go into Iraq, and the world knows it...but half of our own people don't have a clue. The United States has launched more unilateral, unprovoked military attacks in the last 56 years than Yao Ming launched shots in his first 30 NBA games. Yes, it's a number somewhere above 250...most against such daunting superpowers as Guatemala, Grenada and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Yet we refuse to accept allegations of imperialism? If it walks like a duck, and it talks like a duck, it's a duck. If it walks like an empire, and talks like an empire, it's an empire. You don't see ducks saying "we're not a duck"...yet in the same breath that we say things like "we must make the world safe for democracy (which we've all but abandoned, by the way)," we'll flatly deny any imperial dreams. We wanted to rule the world in 1943, and three score later, we have the same vision. We're just doing it under the guise of something else. Other countries can exist, so long as we can pick a leader for them that will best suit our international interests. If we spent as much money on alternative energy sources as we did fighting for oil, we wouldn't need to bother with the Middle East. If we spent as much time trying to improve education as we do trying to shoot down affirmative action, we might not need to give minorities a helping hand anymore. But we've made our choices. We cause our own problems, make no effort to solve them and then bitch when they don't get solved. Each of us could easily be rocking an electric whip right now, and the Arabs wouldn't matter. We could easily provide minorities a fair and proper education, and white folks wouldn't have to spend money on security systems to protect themselves from "that element." Stuff like this could change in a real democracy. But we haven't had one for years. As long as the country is run by the rich, the poor won't get a fair shake. And despite the fact that 19 percent of Americans think they rank in the top 1 percent of the income bracket, most of us are poor whether we admit it or not. You'd think we'd want to enact change. That's the ideal this country was founded on. If we all worked at it, we could overcome the wealthy folks in power. But a coup takes unity and drive, and right now the lower class (read: the bottom 90 percent of us) lack both. The system is designed to keep us at war with one another so we don't team up against a common enemy. As the wise Jay Bulworth said: "Rich people have always stayed on top...by dividing white people from colored people. But white people have more in common with colored people than they do with rich people...we've just got to eliminate them." He was referring to the elimination of race, but I'm referring to the elimination of the police state and the corporate superpower guys that help keep the whole show in order. If we all band together, we can overthrow the oppressors, just like our founding fathers did some 225 years ago. We just need to get off our lazy asses and get it done. Read Gore Vidal. Rent "Bulworth" if you haven't already seen it. And if you live in Georgia, start spreading the word -- vote Sparxxx in 2006. Start getting your friends involved in the revolution. Because we need another one...bad. -- O 3:57:39 PM    comment []

First of all, you're on crack.  The Soviet Union not a threat?  Maybe by the late 1980s, true, but in the 1950s and 60s??  Second of all, who knew that you were the isolationist par excellence?  Only direct threats are reasons for us to emerge out of our little cocoon?  That's not very progressive, you know...   And on the oil tip -- I gave you credit a while back for stoking my interest in petroleum.  Well, I must now give the full-on endorsement to "The Prize" by Daniel Yergin, which was actually given to me as an Xmas present by Sparxxx himself.  (Many, many thanks.)  The history of petroleum, from Rockefeller onward.  Simply put, you MUST read it if you want to have even half a clue about the Middle East, oil, and basically half of 20th century history.  And with that, I'll give you this link to a WaPo article by Yergin, talking about why war in Iraq is definitely NOT about oil.   http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&;node=&contentId=A21166-2002Dec6&notFound=true   -- DDDM 3:52:36 PM    comment []

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