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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (7807)	6/9/2008 6:47:04 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24213

Remind Me Why We Invaded Iraq As we are in our sixth year since the build-up to the Iraq invasion, there are a lot of people who were too young back then, or too stupid to have understood what this was all about at the time. Today, with the power of hindsight, with oil at $125/barrel, with bin Laden still free there are no excuses for being unable to figure it out. This is all on tape people. There are complete (well relatively complete) records of the first year of the Bush administration. What they were up to and what their priorities were. They didn’t make any secret of this at the time. Consider, Dick Cheney was asked to chair two task forces as the administration took office. One was on energy. The other was on terrorism. The energy task force was a major story at the time it was happening. All these top level meetings with all the movers and shakers in the energy sector. All in secret. Many meetings. Lots of man hours. And the terrorism task force? It never met. Not once. That tells you all you need to know about their priorities. One of those who gave Dick Cheney advise during those secret meetings was Matt Simmons, author of ‘Twilight in the Desert’. Simmons argues that Saudi Arabia is about to go into terminal production decline. Why is this important? For a quarter century U.S. energy policy has essentially consisted of kissing Saudi Arabia’s ass. This because Saudi Arabia was the world’s ‘swing producer’ of petroleum. That is, they had enough excess production capacity to open the spigots and lower the price whenever rising prices threatened to negatively impact the world economy. Now, Cheney was hearing that these days were nearly over. Not only that but he was hearing that one of the few places on earth where there were untapped resources that might enable another swing producer to emerge was Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. And if the west were to take off or loosen the sanctions, it is likely that Saddam and his blood thirsty sons could become the next Saudi Royal family. The prospect of a continuing succession of U.S. presidents having to kiss Saddam’s ass was just too much for Uncle Dick. It wasn’t a simplistic grab for oil. Look, we didn’t end up getting the oil to market. It looks like the world may have peaked. But they did prevent Saddam from gaining power over the world economy by virtue of his untapped production capacity. That was the primary goal. It would have been much better if they would have been honest about their motives. But then they would have had to be truthful about peak oil. And they didn’t want to do that. It is counter to the narrative. sweg.blogspot.com