Reply #25: "Oil: So here we are at another of the great, hardly covered stories ...

[understandinglife]

... of the Iraq war.

As Mark LeVine has recently made so clear, the Bush administration, with its former energy industry execs and consultants, was thinking oil - and Iraqi oil in particular - from literally the first moments of its existence. "The few documents that have been made public from (Vice President Cheney's) Energy Task Force... reveal not only that industry executives met with Cheney's staff (in February 2001) but that a map of Iraq and an accompanying list of 'Iraq oil foreign suitors' were the center of discussion." Hmmm... These were people who already had "peak oil" on their minds. They entered Iraq, a nation sitting on untold amounts of oil, thinking about the global control of future energy resources. They sent soldiers to guard the Oil Ministry and the oil fields, while allowing pretty much everything else to be looted as the country fell to them. They have no desire to abandon either their permanent bases or that reservoir of "black gold" to others. But beyond pious statements about preserving the Iraqi "patrimony" (i.e. oil) in the early days of the war, they never broached the subject publicly and the media followed their lead. It's rare today - though a perfectly obvious point to make - for someone to say, as Ambassador Khalilzad did recently, "You could have a regional war that could go on for a very long time, and affect the security of oil supplies." Keep your eyes on this issue. It's what separates Vietnam, which itself contained nothing special for a foreign power, from Iraq.

In the end, ignore (if you can) the whirlwind of withdrawal language that will turn all sorts of non- or semi-withdrawal schemes into something other than what they are, and try to keep your eyes on those shoals of reality. This is not Vietnam, which happened in slow-time. This war, as the historian Marilyn Young claimed in its first weeks so few years ago, is "Vietnam on crack cocaine" and, whatever anyone is saying now, it's a fair bet that events will outpace all administration plans and fantasies in the explosive year to come.

From How (Not) to Withdraw from Iraq By Tom Engelhardt

Much, much more at the link:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=40663

Follow John Murtha.


Peace.