I used to admire Sammy Sosa.
Sigh...there was a time I admired Colin Powell, too. I worry that if he can become a pimp for a blathering fool then anyone might. Oh well, at least I've got an extra 5% capital gains I can give to charity this year. (I feel badly enough burning gasoline like I was spending blood money.)
So, let me see if I've got this the way the 13s see it. (I'm a long, long time lurker.)
N.B. I am responsible for these opinions and in no way speak for other contributors to this thread.
W is a fool with a "gentleman's diploma" from Yale who tossed off his military obligation and drank and snorted his way through the 70s and 80s to find God and money in the 90s. With the sum total of six years of executive political experience he is now the chief executive of the United States. W cannot pronounce "nuclear" or string 3 coherent sentences together but he understands two things very well, viz., oil and money.
Iraq is a sand slick on top of a sea of oil that, up until March of 2003, was ruled by a typical Enron executive. As one of the two largest remaining undeveloped reservoirs of oil left in the world (the other is Iran) it has caught and held W's attention since Daddy blew his chance to gain it in 1991. Now, world oil production will peak sometime within the coming decade after which even our friends and allies will cut our throats and stab us in the back to bid up the price of crude to never before seen heights. At this point Saddam would have been able to buy anything he wanted, e.g., the entire Red Army of China wielding one half of the nuclear arsenal of the former Soviet Union. While this scares the bejesus out of me it does not phase W because he thinks it's really cool to have control of "Our Armed Forces."
Now what would scare W? Well, he has been "borrowing" money all of his life (Daddy's, Texas's, Daddy's fiends, er friends ...) and he knows that there is always a way to get out of paying it back provided that the people who control the money continue to become very rich. Two years ago OPEC floated the idea that it would really irk infidels if they severed the connection between the largest commodity market in the world and the dollar, replacing dollar payments for oil with the Euro. Suppose nobody wants dollars anymore? Suppose the Japanese and everybody else start buying Euros instead of stockpiling dollars? Well the Fed would have to raise interest rates to make dollars more appealing so that they can sell dollars to pay the interest on the national debt. If this goes too far the U.S. would have to start paying back the borrowed money. That scares W, a whole lot. Gosh, didn't he just run up a 300 billion dollar deficit and put a boatload of former tax money into the hands of the wealthy in order to spur the economy?
Well W may not know much but he knows that he can't continue the borrowing game if the dollar isn't the supreme currency of the world. And he knows that the U.S. economic miracle will unravel without oil that is just cheap enough. “Oh look Daddy! If we crush Iraq (like you started to do) I think we can keep OPEC in line, maintain the supremacy of the dollar, get a whole lot more oil and make anybody who seriously dislikes the U.S. soil their clothing. Wouldn't that be really fun?" |
