Weekly Analysis – 6/25/03
It’s Oil, Stupid
By Kirt R. Poovey
This column in its March 10th analysis stated – “This war that the U.S. has initiated is NOT about Weapons of Mass Destruction, terrorism, or anything else the administration has put forward. Quite simply it is about three things – Oil, Global Positioning of U.S. troops, and greater control over U.S. citizens.” Non other than U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has confirmed that this is the case. He claimed that oil was the main reason for the U.S. military action against Iraq.
“(W)e just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil,” said Mr. Wolfowitz at an Asian security summit in Singapore as reported by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt. Mr. Wolfowitz is also one of those responsible for writing a paper that calls for the strategic positioning of U.S. forces around the world in the formation of an Imperial American Empire.
At the appropriate time Mr. Wolfowitz will surely confirm that another reason for the Iraqi War was to set up this global positioning for the American Empire. He has also confirmed another treatise of the March 10th analysis. He has claimed that the drumbeat of Iraqi WMDs was nothing more than a “bureaucratic” excuse for going to war. In an interview in Vanity Fair last month, Wolfowitz said that "for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction."
The frightening aspect of all this is that Wolfowitz and the administration believe that it is safe to actually admit the truth, but yet in an off-hand method. Just as disturbing, if not more so, is that many conservatives are now on the bandwagon claiming that no matter the real reason for the war, it was a good thing. After all, look at the horrible dictator that we deposed and we are replacing his tyrannical government with “democracy”. According to these gullible mouthpieces (useful idiots) the end justifies the means. How blind!
The CIA and the DIA have both come out with the claim that the two semi-trailers that have been discovered in Iraq were mobile biological weapons laboratories. President Bush and Colin Powell have been parading this assessment in front of everyone to say – “see I told you Iraq had WMDs in the form of mobile weapons labs.” Unfortunately for the President, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, a small but important agency in the intelligence community, disputes the conclusion of the CIA and DIA.
Both the CIA and DIA claim that they are more intimately familiar with the actual evidence and human intelligence concerning the trailers than the State Department’s intelligence personnel. This they claim makes them more qualified to issue public findings. However, some DIA analysts in the field in Iraq objected to the CIA and DIA report conclusions. Whom are we to believe?
There is evidence that these trailers were designed to be used to fuel missiles in the field. There is no evidence that these trailers were ever used for or equipped with the biological germs that the CIA and DIA claim they were designed for.
Did Saddam Hussein have WMDs when we started the Iraqi War? Did he spirit them out of the country to Syria or (less likely) Iran? Was he actually telling the truth when he said that he had destroyed them all? Did he bury them in some as yet undiscovered location? The answers to these questions are rendered moot by the revelations that WMDs was simply a good excuse and the evidence that Iraq possessed WMDs was apparently shaky at best.
The purported Iraqi WMDs may yet be found, but at the present time they are as illusive as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (or is that a barrel of oil?)
"We will stand, fight, and die to defend our country; but we will not blindly trust it. Even our Founding Fathers distrusted a large, centralized, all-powerful federal government -- so should we. Always be on guard to discern the truth and defend it at all costs."