Anyone paying attention knows the war in Iraq is, will be, and always was about one thing. Oil.
Iraq is sitting on top of the second largest proven oil reserves in the world. And if the geologists’ guesses are right, the oil under the western desert should make Iraq’s oil supply the largest.
WMDs? Democracy? The end of terror? Horsehockey! This war was never about anything but oil. Ask Dick Cheney and the un-named folks who took part in his energy task force meetings that were held back in early 2001.
So what to do? If we bail from Iraq as George McGovern suggests, we lose control of the oil. And we need it. Hmmm… this could be a problem.
What if we decided to stop ripping off the people of Iraq, (and the gasoline consumers in the US) and actually produced and sold the Iraqi oil at a fair price.
And gave the people of Iraq their fair share of the profits?
And put an end to the unspeakably obscene profits enjoyed by the Anglo-Anerican Oil Company and its descendents?
(all of whom, by the way, are friends ((and sometimes relatives)) of the current administration.)
Would this be so wrong? To actually treat another country and its people fairly? I know it would break a two hundred plus year history of exploiting the rest of the world, but it just might solve two problems: our short-term need for oil, and our long-term need for stability in the middle east.
I think it would be a serious mistake to abandon the oil to our newest and biggest economical competitor, China. A big push by the new Democratic majority in congress to ‘cut and run’, to coin a phrase, will simply hand over a resource that we still need to our competition. (long term – we need alternative energy sources – but short term we drive gasoline-powered cars!)
Why won’t anyone in Washington ‘fess up and admit that our economic well-being (and the obscene profitability of big oil) is the real reason why we are in Iraq. We can’t hope to remedy this situation and get our troops out of harm’s way without a better understanding of why they were sent there in the first place.
Steve
politics at cantondailynews dot com