its the oil!

Enforcer Talen · Post by **Enforcer Talen** » 2003-04-26 10:20pm

thots? : http://truthout.org/docs_03/042603I.shtml

Anarchist Bunny · Post by **Anarchist Bunny** » 2003-04-26 10:25pm

That is so much bullshit, I have to go to the bathroom.

Nathan F · Post by **Nathan F** » 2003-04-26 10:26pm

Yeah, that just keeps proving that that website is so full of crap, the author's eyeballs are brown.

BTW, take a look at the little disclaimer at the bottom:

Ted Rall is the author of "Gas War: The Truth Behind the American Occupation of Afghanistan," an analysis of the underreported Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline project and the real motivations behind the war on terrorism.

Lemme tell ya, that really lends an aire of credibility to the author.

BTW, I know that might be construed as an ad hominem, but, I think that it also gives an idea of the mindset of the author.

Ralnia · Post by **Ralnia** » 2003-04-26 10:32pm

[sarcasm]It is?[/sarcasm]
I didn't see anything in there that's *false* - it's just slanted a little. I'd rather point to our absolutely stellar example in Afghanistan.
Q: Does anyone know how much money the Bush "administration" put in its budget for rebuilding Afghanistan?
A: $0.00. They "forgot" - the Senate had to write it in.

Post by **Sea Skimmer** » 2003-04-26 10:43pm

I'm not wasting my time reading the crap that site puts out

Nathan F · Post by **Nathan F** » 2003-04-26 10:44pm

Ralnia wrote:[sarcasm]It is?[/sarcasm]
I didn't see anything in there that's *false* - it's just slanted a little. I'd rather point to our absolutely stellar example in Afghanistan.
Q: Does anyone know how much money the Bush "administration" put in its budget for rebuilding Afghanistan?
A: $0.00. They "forgot" - the Senate had to write it in.

You DO realize that the Senate is the one that makes out the budget, don't you?

Joe · Post by **Joe** » 2003-04-26 10:49pm

Time for another fisking.

Iraq is going to hell. Shiites are killing Sunnis, Kurds are killing Arabs and Islamists are killing secular Baathists. Baghdad, the cradle of human civilization, has been left to looters and rapists. As in Beirut during the '70s, neighborhood zones are separated by checkpoints manned by armed tribesmen. The war has, however, managed to unite Iraqis in one respect: everyone loathes the United States.

Someone certainly has a talent for hyperbole. I'm sure things were much better under Saddam, though.

Some Iraqis hate us for deposing Saddam Hussein. No dictator remains in power without the tacit support of at some of his subjects. Now that we've committed the cardinal sin of conquest--getting rid of the old system without thinking up a new one--even those who chafed under Saddam blame us for their present misery.
Others resent our Pentagon-appointed pretender, 58-year-old banker/embezzler Ahmed Chalabi. The State Department points out that Iraq's new puppet autocrat has zero support among Iraqis, having lived abroad since 1958. But who knows? Maybe he was a really popular kid.

You could say the same thing about Germany after the Allied invasion.

Yeah, it's not always easy to transfer from a brutal dictatorship one day to a Western democracy the next, but we've barely gotten started; give us a chance, asshole.

Thousands of Iraqis have been reduced to poverty, raped and murdered by rampaging goons as U.S. Marines stood around and watched. Wanna guess how long it will take them to "get over it"? We watched the plunder of museums in Mosul and Baghdad safe at home with our tisk-tisk dismay, but Iraqis will remain outraged by the wanton devastation we wrought through war, permitted through negligence and shrugged off through arrogance. ("We didn't allow it," Rumsfeld shrugged. "It happened.") Imagine foreign troops sitting idly, laughing as hooligans trashed the Smithsonian, stole the gold from Fort Knox and burned down the Department of the Interior.

Thousands of Iraqis, eh? How 'bout some evidence?

But let's forget this penny ante stuff. Let the real looting begin! George W. Bush's bestest buddies, corporate executives at companies which donate money in exchange for a few rounds of golf and a few million-dollar favors, are being handed the keys to Iraq's oil fields.

Here we go.

Bush's brazen Genghis Khan act seems carefully calculated to confirm our worst suspicions. First he appoints retired general Jay Garner, president of a GOP-connected defense contractor, SYColeman Corp., as viceroy of occupied Iraq. "The idea is we are in Iraq not as occupiers but as liberators, and here comes a guy who has attachments to companies that provided the wherewithal for the military assault on that country," marvels David Armstrong, a defense analyst at the National Security News Service. A smart and/or decent president would have picked a civilian for a civil administration post.

A retired GENERAL, eh? Probably with some experience in the Middle East and all around the world? The kind of experience that would make him a desirable candidate both to lead a defense contracting company and to serve as viceroy (and please don't pull terms out of your ass, give us the ACTUAL title the Bush administration has given him) of Iraq during its rebuilding? There may be some favoritism here (welcome to politics), but prove that Mr. Garner is unqualified for his job.

Then Bush slips a $680 million contract to the Bechtel Group, whose Republican-oriented board includes such Reagan-era GOP luminaries as secretary of state George Schulz and defense secretary Caspar Weinberger (the late William Casey, Reagan's CIA director, was a Bechtel executive). The deal puts the company in position to receive a big part of the $100 billion estimated total cost of Iraqi reconstruction. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bechtel gave Republican candidates, including Bush, about $765,000 in PAC, soft money and individual campaign contributions between 1999 and 2002.

Nice red herrings. Prove that Bechtel is unqualified for whatever the Bush administration has given them a contract to do (not listed here, of course). Favoritism is nothing new in politics; JFK appointed his fucking BROTHER Attorney General when he was elected President. It was clearly favoritism, but it wasn't irresponsible; RFK was clearly qualified to be Attorney General.

Finally, refusing to accept bids from potential competitors, Bush grants a two-year, $490 million contract for Iraqi oil field repairs to Halliburton Co., the Houston-based company where Dick Cheney worked as CEO from 1995 to 2000. "It will look a lot worse if Halliburton gets the USAID [Agency for International Development] contract, too," Bathsheba Crocker, an Iraq specialist for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, warned in March. "Then it really starts looking bad." Guess what! Halliburton has since scored a piece of that $600 million USAID contract.

Halliburton is quite qualified for the tasks assigned to it. Favoritism? Perhaps. Irresponsible? No.

Only Bush's most intimate friends were invited to bid for these contracts. Even businesses based in Great Britain, where Tony Blair risked his political career to support Bush, have been excluded from a rigged process where only U.S.-based, Republican-led, Bush-connected companies need apply.
Two senior Democratic Congressmen, Henry Waxman and John Dingell, are asking the General Accounting Office to look into these sleazy kickback deals. "These ties between the vice president and Halliburton have raised concerns about whether the company has received favorable treatment from the administration," their letter reads. Well, duh. But don't count on appropriate action--like impeachment proceedings--from the do-nothing Dems.

Of course they've received favorable treatment; this is how politics works. But unless Halliburton and the other companies given contracts are UNBELIEVABLY unqualified to do their tasks, there is nothing irresponsible about this behavior.

Bush's right-wing Gang of Four--Cheney, Rummy, Condi and Wolfy--saw Operation Iraqi Freedom as a chance to line their buddies' pockets, emasculate the Muslim world, place U.S. military bases in Russia's former sphere of influence and, according to the experts, lower the price of oil by busting OPEC. "There will be a substantial increase in Iraqi oil production [under U.S. occupation], and I wouldn't be surprised if schemes emerged to weaken, if not destroy, OPEC,"

Busting OPEC will not be good for American oil companies. If Bush really was in the pocket of the oil companies, destruction of the OPEC cartel and the stable oil prices caused by it would be the last thing on the agenda.

The cartel's member nations, ten of 11 of them predominantly Muslim, would suffer staggering increases in poverty as a result of falling oil revenues, plunging some into the political chaos that breeds Islamist fundamentalism.

Give me a fucking break; abundance of commodities and lower prices of goods lead to poverty. Time to crack an economics book, kiddo.

Meanwhile, the people of Iraq, whose self-flagellating Shias already make the evening news look like a rerun of Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, would starve as foreign infidels raked in billions thanks to the oil beneath their land.

Unfortunately for your case, as the Bush administration has stated over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, the oil reserves are going to the new Iraqi government. There is no evidence, none whatsoever, that the fields are going to go to American oil interests. For sure, the U.S. will eventually benefit from the release of Iraqi oil to the market (the same benefits that would have been had by simply dropping the UN sanctions), and you and your ilk will cry imperialism, as you always do, but that will not make it true.

Joe · Post by **Joe** » 2003-04-26 10:51pm

Can a mod please fix my last paragraph?

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-04-26 10:54pm

Durran Korr wrote:Can a mod please fix my last paragraph?

Done.

Joe · Post by **Joe** » 2003-04-26 10:55pm

Thanks.

Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi · Post by **Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi** » 2003-04-26 11:25pm

I knew it all along! We were only in Afghanistan for the supplies of dirt and rocks! It's all about corporate interests!

Nathan F · Post by **Nathan F** » 2003-04-26 11:32pm

Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi wrote:I knew it all along! We were only in Afghanistan for the supplies of dirt and rocks! It's all about corporate interests!

Well, DUH. You have to be a SHEEP of the corporate government whores to believe that we were there to take out Osama bin Laden!

Peregrin Toker · Post by **Peregrin Toker** » 2003-04-27 12:59pm

If the US wanted oil, they'd invade Venezuela or Saudi Arabia instead of Iraq.

Joe · Post by **Joe** » 2003-04-27 01:01pm

Simon H.Johansen wrote:If the US wanted oil, they'd invade Venezuela or Saudi Arabia instead of Iraq.

Or just petition for the lifting of the U.N. sanctions on Iraq and avoid a costly war altogether.

Post by **NecronLord** » 2003-04-27 01:27pm

Durran Korr wrote: Someone certainly has a talent for hyperbole. I'm sure things were much better under Saddam, though.

Of course it was. Order is better than Chaos. Dislike the order as much as you will, but it is still an order.

Shinigami · Post by **Shinigami** » 2003-04-27 06:24pm

NecronLord wrote:
Durran Korr wrote: Someone certainly has a talent for hyperbole. I'm sure things were much better under Saddam, though.
Of course it was. Order is better than Chaos. Dislike the order as much as you will, but it is still an order.

Necron's got a point. Love or hate him, the Iraqi people were better off in a day-to-day sense. <sarcasm>I'm sure the Iraqi people were hoping and praying to be bombed and shot at by foreigners, then have their possesions and history stolen day-by-day by random numbskulls</sarcasm>. We have to know better than that. Getting rid of Saddam's regime won't get too many complaints, but rampant lawlessness in it place is far worse. Personally, I think there were a number of real motivations for this "war". Oil is probably one of them, but not the main one. Saving face with a war against an Arab nation seems to be a bigger factor than oil. Most of the American public is ignorant enough to think Saddam Hussein is responsible for 9/11(a number combination I'm sick of hearing). Almost as if he were Osama Bin Laden. Give those idiots their bad guy by lumping all Islamic people into the "Terrorists" category, and the Bush administration has done precisely that. In no way have they specified a link or lack thereof, which is what really makes the US look bad. The government shouldn't really have to spell out the difference between the two, but they shouldn't go out of their way to make them seem like one and the same.

Admiral Johnason · Post by **Admiral Johnason** » 2003-04-27 06:29pm

And another conspiricy freak bites the dust.

Joe · Post by **Joe** » 2003-04-27 06:49pm

Sorry, I just feel that these reports of anarchy in Iraq are vastly exaggerated. I don't believe the U.S. military is that incompetent.