Bush: Okay, some blood for oil

Bush Says U.S. Pullout Would Let Iraq Radicals Use Oil as a Weapon:

"You can imagine a world in which these extremists and radicals got control of energy resources," he said at a rally here Saturday for Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.). "And then you can imagine them saying, 'We're going to pull a bunch of oil off the market to run your price of oil up unless you do the following. And the following would be along the lines of, well, 'Retreat and let us continue to expand our dark vision.' "

Bush said extremists controlling Iraq "would use energy as economic blackmail" and try to pressure the United States to abandon its alliance with Israel. At a stop in Missouri on Friday, he suggested that such radicals would be "able to pull millions of barrels of oil off the market, driving the price up to $300 or $400 a barrel." [WaPo]

After arguing for years that Iraq was largely about oil and Israel and having "sophisticated" liberal commentators sneer at my wild-eyed Chomskyite ravings, it feels good to finally hear the president admit a big part of the truth. I don't think we'll ever know exactly why the US invaded Iraq because there is no single reason. A bunch of powerful people with disparate motivations (mainly greed, idealism, imperialism, fringe theology, and academic curiosity) found each other and made the war happen.

We've gotten used to thinking of wars as having a cause. The first Gulf War had an easily identifiable provocation--Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait. The current Iraq war was an old school imperialist war. The US invaded because it seemed, on balance, that it would be advantageous to do so.

Comments

[shrike]

Bush has already (legally) secured the oil for private interests.

Go to the IMF/World Bank web site and you will see a $685 million loan to Iraq - secured by their oil reserves.

When they default - its all Exxon/BPAmoco/Shell/Texaco's.

Like Halliburton for logistics, they will be the only vertical oil companies "capable of the job".

[tofubo]

http://www.gregpalast.com/project-censored-2007-all-about-the-oil

http://www.gregpalast.com/are-us-corporations-going-to-%e2%80%9cwin%e2%80%9d-the-iraq-war#more-1520

[anon]

I wonder how much a barrel of oil costs if the price of military interventions is factored in. $300 to 400 per barrel?

[Alon Levy]

Not even close, Anon. Global oil production is around 25 billion barrels a year. The Iraq war costs a little over 100 billion dollars a year, i.e. 4 dollars a barrel. The world's combined military spending, about a trillion dollars a year, would only add 40 dollars a barrel even if all of it was about oil.

[revere]

Well you never heard me sneer at you. But then I'm not that sophisticated and a little to the left of liberal.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

I never sneered at you either. Where the sneering, or at least the timidity of leftists in calling out the oil factor, came from, is that during the first Iraq War (what you call the Gulf War), the "No Blood for Oil!" chant was met with haughty, snotty contempt from the grouchy mustache crowd, because it was ostensibly about "naked aggression," viz. the invasion of Kuwait, and that seemed more credible than W's casus-belli-of-the-month club approach to bullshitting us into this one. Of course, it emerged that Saudi Arabia's nervousness about Iraq was a big factor in the Gulf War, and our relationship with them is sure as hell about oil, so it _was_ about oil, just a tiny bit indirectly. However, the feeling we were left with was that the left had erroneously called "oil colonialism," which the Gulf War wasn't, exactly. The simpletons of the world, though, took this to mean that every mention of oil in relation to the new war must be met with knee-jerk charges of oversimplification, no explanation necessary.

Now, this war may not be about establishing an oil plantation colony either, exactly, but it's closer to it; our aim was plainly to install a puppet government there, or at least a government amenable to our interests. It's also plain that we wanted such a huge supplier of oil to be secure. Of course! Oil runs a huge part of our economic engine, and hence, the world's. Some of our soldiers themselves remarked upon the fact that we didn't bother securing the Baghdad Museum, or some more important buildings, but we immediately secured the oil refineries there. It's also true that the insurgents have been very consciously sabotaging the oil pipelines there, for the last three years. Have they done that because oil is unimportant to us?

Was oil the main reason? It's plain that our government sees oil as being of great strategic importance to us, and probably the economic reasons are a big part of that. Others have said that securing Iraq's oil was an important part of a military strategy for us. An article in The Walrus magazine, which I've mentioned before a few times, even opined that it might have been a stone in a wall, of which our alliance with India was the final keystone, dropped into place, and that the wall was being built to defend against China. I'm not so sure about that, but China, of course, has consolidated a mammoth network of new diplomatic initiatives and energy supply-lines, while stepping up the modernization of their military over the last five years or so, so it wouldn't surprise me completely (and it wouldn't seem so hare-brained) if Iraq had been carried out with that in mind. Whatever it was, a less ham-handed approach to public opinion here would have helped.

[Wil Robinson]

Don't forget the highest of reasons - religion. As much as they don't want to admit to this, either, the neo-con hawks all share a vision of fundamental/evangelical Christianity.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Revere and 1984, certainly not! I'm just talking about certain so-called liberals in the mainstream media (and, of course, their conservative counterparts, but that goes without saying) who made fun of people who talked about oil and Israel. It really hurt coming from some people on our side.

I'm not even saying that everyone who discounts oil as a motivation was sneering at people.

I think religion was a big part of it, but not the whole thing. Wolfowitz is a petroleum freak, not a religious fanatic. I doubt he has any religious attachment to the state of Israel.

What does Rumsfeld believe in? Rice and GW are religious fanatics. The Republican base went along with the war for bizarre apocalyptic religious reasons.

[Liam Roy]

Irony strikes again: the Bush cabal wants to secure the last large oil reserve in the world, invades the country that owns it with the intent to stabilise production and guarantee access, and ends up turning said country into a bloodbath where the best possible outcome is now a stable partition along sectarian lines.

Of course, the oil will make that impossible too. And even if we could pump every field in Iraq at maximum capacity, it would only add a small uptick in worldwide production now that we are past the all-time high (85 million barrels a day in December 2005).

Oil has been a corrupting influence wherever it has been discovered. In America it's conditioned us to expect a way of life that has devestating consequences for the rest of the globe. In the middle east and Africa, it has allowed brutal autocracies to exploit the vast working and starving poor and fomented religious fanatacism. And now Iraq has been sacrificed on the altar of our "non-negotiable" suburban nightmare.

In my opinion, we cannot run out fast enough.

[cfrost]

The Iraq war is not about oil. The civil war was not about slavery. The Mexican-American war was not about seizing territory. The Spanish-American war was not about building an empire. The Indian wars were not about genocide.

All myths created by the hate-America liberal fifth-columnists to sap our resolve to bring freedom to the world’s oppressed.

Fill ‘er up with super and check the oil.

[Cardozo]

Linday -

I suppose you are saying that the GOP base went along with the war because they bought the connection between Iraq and WMDs, and the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

I agree, but it's worth keeping in mind, of course, that progressives mostly (notably the elected ones) sat on their heels during the run-up to invasion, and let Bush run absolutely wild. I hope that if we take back the House, we remember to be progressive not just in thought but in action, too. We need to act on principle and change some minds, otherwise we'll be kicked to the curb again in two years!

Also wanted to ask folks: what are people doing personally to reduce oil consumption? (I, for one, am not doing nearly enough. But I did rollerblade to the store today!)

[Alon Levy]

The (American) Indian wars weren't about genocide. I'm sure if the colonists had a way of taking the native Americans' land that didn't involve murdering them, they'd use it...

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

The American Indian wars were about neutralizing Native American resistance. I don't know if the instigators visualized killing an entire people, but they set out to kill enough people to get what they wanted.

Saying that the Iraq war isn't "about" oil is like saying that the US would have preferred to secure an oil supply some other way, but ended up occupying Iraq (unlike in the first Gulf War where they handed control back to the existing regime and crippled it). Eventually, we'll do something similar in the current Iraq. The US doesn't want to seize Iraq's oil fields wholesale. It wants to guarantee a sympathetic government. If the instigators of the Indian Wars had that much control, I'm sure they would have preferred a puppet state, too.

[PG]

"The civil war was not about slavery."

Actually, sophisticated people on the right usually prefer the narrative of the Civil War's being about slavery. If you say it was about states' rights, the fact that the secessionists got their asses whupped would seem to dampen down federalism and state sovereignty a bit, which in turn would allow Congress to create civil rights of action for women whose rapists go unpunished by the state, keep solid waste from being dumped into birds' nesting grounds and all sorts of other heinous things.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

I always thought it was a shame that states' rights, which I support, got irrevocably tied in with such a noxious phenomenon as slavery. Talk about throwing the baby out with the toxic bathwater. But oh well. It worked out well in terms of the civil rights movement. I often wish California could secede these days, though. But then Orange County and Bakersfield would probably counter-secede from us.

>The Republican base went along with the war for bizarre apocalyptic religious reasons.

Many of them did, although I always maintained that if GWB would lie about everything else under the sun (or mislead: "9/11 and Saddam connected? I never saaaaid they were"), then he'd lie like a rug about being Christian, especially if it'd get him elected. I don't think he believes it in the slightest, although I could be wrong.

Rice was also a Cold Warrior. None of these people have a clue as to how to fight against an insurrection, or against the terrorist threat.

[Guest]

Bush's comment doesn't even make sense. At all. The radicals would pull *what* oil off the market? The oil that's not being pumped right now from that shell of a broken non-nation? What a dick.

[herbert browne]

$300. or $400. a barrel? Hey, Osama only asked for $100. a barrel... so who wants it even higherr? Cheney, maybe?
Re the difficulties with the indigenous here, in 'merika: it was just a few bad apples... ^..^

[cfrost]

The (American) Indian wars weren't about genocide. I'm sure if the colonists had a way of taking the native Americans' land that didn't involve murdering them, they'd use it...

If the Russians and the rest of the Slavs had quietly and peacefully agreed to move east of the Urals, Hitler could have had all the Lebensraum he wanted and the Ostsiedlung would have been completed without a shot fired. I’m sure on September 1, 1939 neither the Wehrmacht generals, nor the Nazi leadership, and certainly not the German people had any intention of killing 30 million-plus people. It just worked out that way.

It was never the U.S. Government’s intention to kill all Native Americans. It was however official policy to clear land for settlement by whatever means proved necessary. While very few white Americans at any period in American history advocated universal slaughter of all Indians, it was a common sentiment in the 19th Century and even today, that God, or fate, or whatever, wisely opened the continent to “progress” over the dead cultures (and bodies) of the benighted natives. With the exception of a few incidences of giving pox-infected blankets to Indians, no one deliberately introduced smallpox or measles. Likewise, the spread of alcohol, guns, the plow, a money economy in which native cultures had no place, etc., was not the result of a single, deliberate genocidal plot, but the result was the same. My grandmother told me that they never let Indians into the house because they were, according to her, carriers of fleas and lice. She never condoned the killing of Indians, but she lived on a homestead on land newly taken from the Colville tribe in Washington, and she considered Indians basically just a kind of interesting wildlife. A little racism goes a long way.

One of my ancestors served with the army clearing the Modoc tribe from their land in N. Calif / S. Oregon. No doubt he saw the operation as a response to an initial incident of “terrorism”: the killing of over sixty white wagon train immigrants and continuing harassment of immigrants at Bloody Point on the shore of Tule Lake on the Oregon-California border. Eventually any local Indian assault was blamed on the Modocs. The Modocs had to be controlled. No intention here of killing Indians wholesale. The idea was simply to get the Modocs to settle on a reservation. The result was predictable. (An ironic aside: Tule Lake was later the location of one of the Japanese internment camps where a grandfather on the other side of the family would teach in the camp high school.)

I have personally heard a staffer for an Idaho congresswoman (Chenowith) claim that Native Americans were “freezing in winter, starving most of the time, and giving each other venereal diseases before white people came”, presumably to rescue the Indians from the agony they’ve lived in since the upper Pleistocene. Hearing the occasional slur would make no difference if the standard measures of social distress weren’t so egregiously dreadful for Native Americans. Crime, alcoholism, suicide, infant mortality, school drop-out rate, unemployment, diabetes, fuck – dental caries; all of them: Native American populations are at the top of the chart. Gambling has finally brought money to some tribes, which is probably mostly good. Look what happens though: the exploitation continues in the form of shitty pigs like Jack Abramoff.

So no, the Indian wars were not about genocide, not specifically, but land was valuable and Indian life was (and remains relatively) cheap. And the Iraq war is not specifically about oil, but oil is valuable and Iraqi lives are apparently dirt-cheap.

[Njorl]

Whatever would we do if anti-Israeli forces got control of the oil instead of pro-Israeli regimes like Saddam Hussein, the Iranian clerics and the Saudi royal family. Why civilization would just come to an end, I'm sure.

[Poetry]

Take the Pledge

All Presidential Candidates should make pledges like those below. If they refuse, then you should refuse to vote for them.

1. No More Oil Wars.

2. Work for independence from foreign oil on day one.

3. No more wars for corporate profit.

4. No more secret deals for $4 per gallon gas.

5. No more Chicken Hawks promoting wars of choice when they themselves avoided combat.

6. Make government green--if you can't make what you have the most control over green, I don't care about your plans to make the country green.

7. No more torture.

8. No more lying about torture.

9. No more re-defining torture.

10. No more drunken hunting.

11. No more secret deals with big corporations to divide up the spoils before the war even starts.