Reply #18: If I were one of those artificial persons, I wouldn't be happy with Goss

[Jack Rabbit]

I suppose that multinational corporations have found a way to make money in Iraq, but it's not the way they'd like to make money. Contrary to what a lot of their critics claim, they don't like wars. The oil companies would rather be getting the oil out of the ground, transporting through the Persian Gulf and selling to consumers in America filling their gas guzzlers. They can't do that when insurgents are blowing up pipelines. Insurgents will continue to blow up pipelines as long as the most effective government in Baghdad is one centered in the US embassy. It also squeezes their profits when Lloyd's of London raises their insurance rates for transporting oil through war zones.

As cruel as it might seem, those transnationals had a better deal with Saddam in power.

There seems to be one part of their own propaganda that the neoconservatives really believed: that the Iraqi people would be so happy to see Saddam's back that they would cheerfully allow their natural resources to be stolen from them in broad daylight. It hasn't worked that way.

Yet we have documented cases where the intelligence community had information from Iraqis on the ground that there was no weapons program. We also know that any post-Saddam planning was done in conjunction with a convicted embezzler who left Iraq as a teenager and lived most of his life in the West. There was no input from cab drivers in Baghdad or longshoremen in Basra.

In the film Wall Street, Gordon Gecco wants information. That's what he can really use. He didn't become a successful crook by fantasizing about how easy it would be to take over small or medium-sized companies. He found information that he could use to accomplish his goals, as nefarious as they were. He couldn't engineer a takeover with inaccurate information any better than with no information.

Wall Street would have been a comedy if Gecco had been fed misinformation and been left holding the bag in the end. It would have been funny, perhaps, if Gecco were so willfully self-deluded. The neoconservative misadventure in Iraq, too, would make a comedy, except that tens of thousands of people are dead. That's not funny.