Reply #1: If anyone wants to know what the current bunch of Crooks & Liars

[LibertyorDeath]

are up to. This is it.

It is easy to demonstrate that for Bush planners, the threat of terror is a low priority. The invasion of Iraq is only one of many illustrations. Even their own intelligence agencies agreed with the consensus among other agencies, and independent specialists, that the invasion was likely to increase the threat of terror, as it did; probably nuclear proliferation as well, as also predicted. Such threats are simply not high priorities as compared with the opportunity to establish the first secure military bases in a dependent client state at the heart of the world’s major energy reserves, a region understood since World War II to be the “most strategically important area of the world,” “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” Apart from what one historian of the industry calls “profits beyond the dreams of avarice,” which must flow in the right direction, control over two-thirds of the world’s estimated hydrocarbon reserves—uniquely cheap and easy to exploit—provides what Zbigniew Brzezinski recently called “critical leverage” over European and Asian rivals, what George Kennan many years earlier had called “veto power” over them. These have been crucial policy concerns throughout the post-World War II period, even more so in today’s evolving tripolar world, with its threat that Europe and Asia might move towards greater independence, and worse, might be united: China and the EU became each other’s major trading partners in 2004, joined by the world’s second largest economy (Japan), and those tendencies are likely to increase. A firm hand on the spigot reduces these dangers.

Note that the critical issue is control, not access. U.S. policies towards the Middle East were the same when it was a net exporter of oil, and remain the same today when U.S. intelligence projects that the U.S. will rely on more stable Atlantic Basin resources. Policies would be likely to be about the same if the U.S. were to switch to renewable energy. The need to control the “stupendous source of strategic power” and to gain “profits beyond the dreams of avarice” would remain. Jockeying over Central Asia and pipeline routes reflects similar concerns.

http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Jan2005/chomskypr0105.html