Re: SC16

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/36463/

The Great Iraq Oil Grab

.......Oil lust

It was a prize that the first oil presidency -- the president, vice president and national security advisor are all former oil execs -- lusted after long before the attacks of 9/11. The Washington Post reported that even as the Bush transition team prepared to take power in 2001, changing Iraq's regime and seizing its oil were already on the table:


Early discussions among the administration's national security "principals" -- Cheney, Powell, Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice -- and their deputies focused on how to weaken Hussein diplomatically. But Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz proposed sending in the military to seize Iraq's southern oil fields and establish the area as a foothold from which opposition groups could overthrow Hussein.

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill told author Ron Suskind that Dick Cheney also supported an invasion of Iraq before Sept. 11, and the New Yorker's Jane Mayer reported on a top secret National Security Council document dating back seven months before the terror attacks that gave some insight into the vice president's thinking:


It directed the N.S.C. staff to cooperate fully with [Cheney's secretive] Energy Task Force as it considered the "melding" of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies towards rogue states," such as Iraq, and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."

Here is one comment regarding this excellent article:

It has been only 100 years since the develoment of the internal combustion engine based on use of fossil fuels. The region of the world whose countries have the largest oil reserves have been increasingly exploited and dominated in an accelerated manner parallel with the need for oil ever since. The British were the colonialists in the first half of the twentieth century and America became their heir apparent after WWII. But unfortunately our social and political insitutions have not negotiated the issue of conservation, rather, have committed to policies that are entirely consumption oriented. All this happens behind closed doors. Rhetoric and ideology become the essential and cultivated methods to feed public opinion. The difference between the real motives of those secretive groups who have the power and the reasons they give for public dissemination has and will continue to fracture the foundation of our country. The USSR ultimately imploded because they could not sustain economically the military force they had created after WWII. America has a larger military force now and it consumes our economy, and will eventually threaten, as it is now, the infrastructure of our country. And just like the Russians the politicians of this country lie to their people, while suppressing the truth, and just like the KGB, are now using security institutions to spie on and control its own citizens.