Is the war still all about the oil?

[cracked]

conservative

 

Jay, you should listen to AlpineK, he seems to have a clear and logical explaination.

[JayB]

Yeah. If AK is talking about the editorial page only he'd be right on, but on the whole the Journal has an enviable record with respect to news reporting, and has yet to suffer any of the rather embarrassing episodes that have beset the NYT periodically, most recently the Jayson Blair episode, and most memorably the Pulitzer Prize winning fraud in which a NYT reporter assured the world that all was well in Russia while the government was deliberately starving tens of millions of Ukranians to death.

[Jake]

Just in case there isn't enough unrest here fer everybody, how about this.

"The US, and in fact, much of the advanced world, is dependent on oil for survival. In order to provide for the exixtence of the US as we know it, the US must do whatever it takes to ensure that oil will be delivered."

 

To what agree do you agree or disagree? And you can't say, "Well we should have more hybrid cars and more conservation or whatever." Sure, everybody agrees that would be great. But is oil worth fighting over, given that it is the lifeblood of the US and the world?

[tele_nut]

A year or so ago, certain folks on this very board were convinced the war in Iraq was all about oil. Well I just paid $2 per gallon for some gasoline. You'd think the petrol flood gates would open up after the US took control of Iraq, thus dropping prices significantly, but I don't see it happening. As a matter of fact, I see the opposite happening. Discuss.

 

They haven't even started drilling here yet for various reasons. Oil is being imported from Turkey to Iraq at the moment. If you have ask about that one you'll never know.

 

We discussed some things of this nature in another thread. Here is a link to a macreconomics treatise which succinctly outlines the monetary reasoning behind the push to go to war in Iraq.

 

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html

 

"Facing these potentialities, I hypothesize that President Bush intends to topple Saddam in 2003 in a pre-emptive attempt to initiate massive Iraqi oil production in far excess of OPEC quotas, to reduce global oil prices, and thereby dismantle OPEC's price controls. The end-goal of the neo-conservatives is incredibly bold yet simple in purpose, to use the `war on terror' as the premise to finally dissolve OPEC's decision-making process, thus ultimately preventing the cartel's inevitable switch to pricing oil in euros. How would the Bush administration break-up the OPEC cartel's price controls in a post-Saddam Iraq? First, the newly installed U.S. ruler (Gen. Garner) will convert Iraq's oil exports back to the dollar standard. Moreover, according to a Washington Post article just before the Iraq war, one of the pre-determined decisions of the "Iraqi interim authority" in a postwar economy is to drop the Iraq dinar, and covert Iraq to the U.S. dollar."

 

"It has been said that the vast majority of wars are fought over resources and economics, and even so-called "religious wars" usually have economics or access to resources as a hidden motive. The Iraq war is no different from other modern wars except it appears to usher in `oil currency' as a new paradigm for warfare. However, the world community may not tolerate an imperialist U.S. Hyper-Power that ignores International Law while using military force to conquer sovereign nations. Indeed, the facts suggest additional oil-producing nation states will eventually exercise their sovereign right by pricing their oil exports in euros instead of dollars."

 

For the record. I support American hegemony. We've given to the world for too long and now it's time to take what's ours.

 

 

 

 

[richard_noggin]

What happened to Bush's plan for hydrogen fuel?

Now I here Greenspan says cut SS benefits because of the Bush administrations blow up of the deficit

NO SONOFABUSH IN THE WHITE HOUSE!

YEAH! so i'm off topic big frik'n deal DICK

[whirlwind]

no oil is not worth fighting for,

tele nut if ur serious ur a fucktard as well, nothing was ever ours for the taking. the fact is we can reduce our oil consumption, but people like bush who make billons on oil, he's probly sittn in office right now laughing his ass off, and making even more money

link

[whirlwind]

 

Copyright: Agence France Presse

An Iraqi oil refinery

 

Iraq has the world’s second largest proven oil reserves. According to oil industry experts, new exploration will probably raise Iraq’s reserves to 2-300 billion barrels of high-grade crude, extraordinarily cheap to produce, leading to a gold-rush of profits for international oil firms in a post-Saddam setting. The four giant firms located in the US and the UK have been keen to get back into Iraq, from which they were excluded with the nationalization of 1972. They face companies from France, Russia, China, Japan and elsewhere, who already have major concessions. But in a post-war military governments, imposed by Washington, the US-UK companies expect to overcome their rivals and gain the most lucrative oil deals that will be worth hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars in profits in the coming decades.

[whirlwind]

[Bug]

 

 

Published in the February 20 - 26, 2004 issue of the LA Weekly

Soldier for the Truth: Exposing Bush’s Talking-Points War

by Marc Cooper

 

After two decades in the U.S. Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, now 43, knew her career as a regional analyst was coming to an end when — in the months leading up to the war in Iraq — she felt she was being “propagandized” by her own bosses.

 

With master’s degrees from Harvard in government and zoology and two books on Saharan Africa to her credit, she found herself transferred in the spring of 2002 to a post as a political/military desk officer at the Defense Department’s office for Near East South Asia (NESA), a policy arm of the Pentagon.

 

Kwiatkowski got there just as war fever was spreading, or being spread as she would later argue, through the halls of Washington. Indeed, shortly after her arrival, a piece of NESA was broken off, expanded and re-dubbed with the Orwellian name of the Office of Special Plans. The OSP’s task was, ostensibly, to help the Pentagon develop policy around the Iraq crisis.

 

She would soon conclude that the OSP — a pet project of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld — was more akin to a nerve center for what she now calls a “neoconservative coup, a hijacking of the Pentagon.”

 

Though a lifelong conservative, Kwiatkowski found herself appalled as the radical wing of the Bush administration, including her superiors in the Pentagon planning department, bulldozed internal dissent, overlooked its own intelligence and relentlessly pushed for confrontation with Iraq.

 

Deeply frustrated and alarmed, Kwiatkowski, still on active duty, took the unusual step of penning an anonymous column of internal Pentagon dissent that was posted on the Internet by former Colonel David Hackworth, America’s most decorated veteran.

 

As war inevitably approached, and as she neared her 20-year mark in the Air Force, Kwiatkowski concluded the only way she could viably resist what she now terms the “expansionist, imperialist” policies of the neoconservatives who dominated Iraq policy was by retiring and taking up a public fight against them.

 

She left the military last March, the same week that troops invaded Iraq. Kwiatkowski started putting her real name on her Web reports and began accepting speaking invitations. “I’m now a soldier for the truth,” she said in a speech last week at Cal Poly Pomona. Afterward, I spoke with her.

 

L.A. WEEKLY: What was the relationship between NESA and the now-notorious Office of Special Plans, the group set up by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney? Was the OSP, in reality, an intelligence operation to act as counter to the CIA?

 

KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: The NESA office includes the Iraq desk, as well as the desks of the rest of the region. It is under Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Bill Luti. When I joined them, in May 2002, the Iraq desk was there. We shared the same space, and we were all part of the same general group. At that time it was expanding. Contractors and employees were coming though it wasn’t clear what they were doing.

 

In August of 2002, the expanded Iraq desk found new spaces and moved into them. It was told to us that this was now to be known as the Office of Special Plans. The Office of Special Plans would take issue with those who say they were doing intelligence. They would say they were developing policy for the Office of the Secretary of Defense for the invasion of Iraq.

 

But developing policy is not the same as developing propaganda and pushing a particular agenda. And actually, that’s more what they really did. They pushed an agenda on Iraq, and they developed pretty sophisticated propaganda lines which were fed throughout government, to the Congress, and even internally to the Pentagon — to try and make this case of immediacy. This case of severe threat to the United States.

 

You retired when the war broke out and have been speaking out publicly. But you were already publishing critical reports anonymously while still in uniform and while still on active service. Why did you take that rather unusual step?

 

Due to my frustration over what I was seeing around me as soon as I joined Bill Luti’s organization, what I was seeing in terms of neoconservative agendas and the way they were being pursued to formulate a foreign policy and a military policy — an invasion of a sovereign country, an occupation, a poorly planned occupation. I was concerned about it; I was in opposition to that, and I was not alone.

 

So I started writing what I considered to be funny, short essays for my own sanity. Eventually, I e-mailed them to former Colonel David Hackworth, who runs the Web page Soldiers for the Truth, and he published them under the title “Insider Notes From the Pentagon.” I wrote 28 of those columns from August 2002 until I retired.

 

There you were, a career military officer, a Pentagon analyst, a conservative who had given two decades to this work. What provoked you to become first a covert and later a public dissident?

 

Like most people, I’ve always thought there should be honesty in government. Working 20 years in the military, I’m sure I saw some things that were less than honest or accountable. But nothing to the degree that I saw when I joined Near East South Asia.

 

This was creatively produced propaganda spread not only through the Pentagon, but across a network of policymakers — the State Department, with John Bolton; the Vice President’s Office, the very close relationship the OSP had with that office. That is not normal, that is a bypassing of normal processes. Then there was the National Security Council, with certain people who had neoconservative views; Scooter Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff; a network of think tanks who advocated neoconservative views — the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy with Frank Gaffney, the columnist Charles Krauthammer — was very reliable. So there was just not a process inside the Pentagon that should have developed good honest policy, but it was instead pushing a particular agenda; this group worked in a coordinated manner, across media and parts of the government, with their neoconservative compadres.

 

How did you experience this in your day-to-day work?

 

There was a sort of groupthink, an adopted storyline: We are going to invade Iraq and we are going to eliminate Saddam Hussein and we are going to have bases in Iraq. This was all a given even by the time I joined them, in May of 2002.

 

You heard this in staff meetings?

 

The discussions were ones of this sort of inevitability. The concerns were only that some policymakers still had to get onboard with this agenda. Not that this agenda was right or wrong — but that we needed to convince the remaining holdovers. Colin Powell, for example. There was a lot of frustration with Powell; they said a lot of bad things about him in the office. They got very angry with him when he convinced Bush to go back to the U.N. and forced a four-month delay in their invasion plans.

 

General Tony Zinni is another one. Zinni, the combatant commander of Central Command, Tommy Franks’ predecessor — a very well-qualified guy who knows the Middle East inside out, knows the military inside out, a Marine, a great guy. He spoke out publicly as President Bush’s Middle East envoy about some of the things he saw. Before he was removed by Bush, I heard Zinni called a traitor in a staff meeting. They were very anti-anybody who might provide information that affected their paradigm. They were the spin enforcers.

 

How did this atmosphere affect your work? To be direct, were you told by your superiors what you could say and not say? What could and could not be discussed? Or were opinions they didn’t like just ignored?

 

I can give you one clear example where we were told to follow the party line, where I was told directly. I worked North Africa, which included Libya. I remember in one case, I had to rewrite something a number of times before it went through. It was a background paper on Libya, and Libya has been working for years to try and regain the respect of the international community. I had intelligence that told me this, and I quoted from the intelligence, but they made me go back and change it and change it. They’d make me delete the quotes from intelligence so they could present their case on Libya in a way that said it was still a threat to its neighbors and that Libya was still a belligerent, antagonistic force. They edited my reports in that way. In fact, the last report I made, they said, “Just send me the file.” And I don’t know what the report ended up looking like, because I imagine more changes were made.

 

On Libya, really a small player, the facts did not fit their paradigm that we have all these enemies.

 

One person you’ve written about is Abe Shulsky. You describe him as a personable, affable fellow but one who played a key role in the official spin that led to war.

 

Abe was the director of the Office of Special Plans. He was in our shared offices when I joined, in May 2002. He comes from an academic background; he’s definitely a neoconservative. He is a student of Leo Strauss from the University of Chicago — so he has that Straussian academic perspective. He was the final proving authority on all the talking points that were generated from the Office of Special Plans and that were distributed throughout the Pentagon, certainly to staff officers. And it appears to me they were also distributed to the Vice President’s Office and to the presidential speechwriters. Much of the phraseology that was in our talking points consists of the same things I heard the president say.

 

So Shulsky was the sort of controller, the disciplinarian, the overseeing monitor of the propaganda flow. From where you sat, did you see him manipulate the information?

 

We had a whole staff to help him do that, and he was the approving authority. I can give you one example of how the talking points were altered. We were instructed by Bill Luti, on behalf of the Office of Special Plans, on behalf of Abe Shulsky, that we would not write anything about Iraq, WMD or terrorism in any papers that we prepared for our superiors except as instructed by the Office of Special Plans. And it would provide to us an electronic document of talking points on these issues. So I got to see how they evolved.

 

It was very clear to me that they did not evolve as a result of new intelligence, of improved intelligence, or any type of seeking of the truth. The way they evolved is that certain bullets were dropped or altered based on what was being reported on the front pages of the Washington Post or The New York Times.

 

Can you be specific?

 

One item that was dropped was in November [2002]. It was the issue of the meeting in Prague prior to 9/11 between Mohammed Atta and a member of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence force. We had had this in our talking points from September through mid-November. And then it dropped out totally. No explanation. Just gone. That was because the media reported that the FBI had stepped away from that, that the CIA said it didn’t happen.

 

Let’s clarify this. Talking points are generally used to deal with media. But you were a desk officer, not a politician who had to go and deal with the press. So are you saying the Office of Special Plans provided you a schematic, an outline of the way major points should be addressed in any report or analysis that you developed regarding Iraq, WMD or terrorism?

 

That’s right. And these did not follow the intent, the content or the accuracy of intelligence . . .

 

They were political . . .

 

They were political, politically manipulated. They did have obviously bits of intelligence in them, but they were created to propagandize. So we inside the Pentagon, staff officers and senior administration officials who might not work Iraq directly, were being propagandized by this same Office of Special Plans.

 

In the 10 months you worked in that office in the run-up to the war, was there ever any open debate? The public, at least, was being told at the time that there was a serious assessment going on regarding the level of threat from Iraq, the presence or absence of WMD, et cetera. Was this debated inside your office at the Pentagon?

 

No. Those things were not debated. To them, Saddam Hussein needed to go.

 

You believe that decision was made by the time you got there, almost a year before the war?

 

That decision was made by the time I got there. So there was no debate over WMD, the possible relations Saddam Hussein may have had with terrorist groups and so on. They spent their energy gathering pieces of information and creating a propaganda storyline, which is the same storyline we heard the president and Vice President Cheney tell the American people in the fall of 2002.

 

The very phrases they used are coming back to haunt them because they are blatantly false and not based on any intelligence. The OSP and the Vice President’s Office were critical in this propaganda effort — to convince Americans that there was some just requirement for pre-emptive war.

 

What do you believe the real reasons were for the war?

 

The neoconservatives needed to do more than just topple Saddam Hussein. They wanted to put in a government friendly to the U.S., and they wanted permanent basing in Iraq. There are several reasons why they wanted to do that. None of those reasons, of course, were presented to the American people or to Congress.

 

So you don’t think there was a genuine interest as to whether or not there really were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

 

It’s not about interest. We knew. We knew from many years of both high-level surveillance and other types of shared intelligence, not to mention the information from the U.N., we knew, we knew what was left [from the Gulf War] and the viability of any of that. Bush said he didn’t know.

 

The truth is, we know [saddam] didn’t have these things. Almost a billion dollars has been spent — a billion dollars! — by David Kay’s group to search for these WMD, a total whitewash effort. They didn’t find anything, they didn’t expect to find anything.

 

So if, as you argue, they knew there weren’t any of these WMD, then what exactly drove the neoconservatives to war?

 

The neoconservatives pride themselves on having a global vision, a long-term strategic perspective. And there were three reasons why they felt the U.S. needed to topple Saddam, put in a friendly government and occupy Iraq.

 

One of those reasons is that sanctions and containment were working and everybody pretty much knew it. Many companies around the world were preparing to do business with Iraq in anticipation of a lifting of sanctions. But the U.S. and the U.K. had been bombing northern and southern Iraq since 1991. So it was very unlikely that we would be in any kind of position to gain significant contracts in any post-sanctions Iraq. And those sanctions were going to be lifted soon, Saddam would still be in place, and we would get no financial benefit.

 

The second reason has to do with our military-basing posture in the region. We had been very dissatisfied with our relations with Saudi Arabia, particularly the restrictions on our basing. And also there was dissatisfaction from the people of Saudi Arabia. So we were looking for alternate strategic locations beyond Kuwait, beyond Qatar, to secure something we had been searching for since the days of Carter — to secure the energy lines of communication in the region. Bases in Iraq, then, were very important — that is, if you hold that is America’s role in the world. Saddam Hussein was not about to invite us in.

 

The last reason is the conversion, the switch Saddam Hussein made in the Food for Oil program, from the dollar to the euro. He did this, by the way, long before 9/11, in November 2000 — selling his oil for euros. The oil sales permitted in that program aren’t very much. But when the sanctions would be lifted, the sales from the country with the second largest oil reserves on the planet would have been moving to the euro.

 

The U.S. dollar is in a sensitive period because we are a debtor nation now. Our currency is still popular, but it’s not backed up like it used to be. If oil, a very solid commodity, is traded on the euro, that could cause massive, almost glacial, shifts in confidence in trading on the dollar. So one of the first executive orders that Bush signed in May [2003] switched trading on Iraq’s oil back to the dollar.

 

At the time you left the military, a year ago, just how great was the influence of this neoconservative faction on Pentagon policy?

 

When it comes to Middle East policy, they were in complete control, at least in the Pentagon. There was some debate at the State Department.

 

Indeed, when you were still in uniform and writing a Web column anonymously, you expressed your bitter disappointment when Secretary of State Powell — in your words — eventually “capitulated.”

 

He did. When he made his now-famous power-point slide presentation at the U.N., he totally capitulated. It meant he was totally onboard. Whether he believed it or not.

 

You gave your life to the military, you voted Republican for many years, you say you served in the Pentagon right up to the outbreak of war. What does it feel like to be out now, publicly denouncing your old bosses?

 

Know what it feels like? It feels like duty. That’s what it feels like. I’ve thought about it many times. You know, I spent 20 years working for something that — at least under this administration — turned out to be something I wasn’t working for. I mean, these people have total disrespect for the Constitution. We swear an oath, military officers and NCOs alike swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. These people have no respect for the Constitution. The Congress was misled, it was lied to. At a very minimum that is a subversion of the Constitution. A pre-emptive war based on what we knew was not a pressing need is not what this country stands for.

 

What I feel now is that I’m not retired. I still have a responsibility to do my part as a citizen to try and correct the problem.

 

Copyright 2004 LAWeekly

[E-rock]

Hey Superman.... DUH. You guys are the ones who need to be answering questions. Not detractors of the war.

[chucK]

Awesome article Bug! Thanks.

 

So who thinks she's a liar? If so, what are her motives? Is she one of JayB's bribetakers (wonder who's paying her now?)?

 

What she's saying seems to jibe with lots of other news stories. I wonder whether the committee investigating what went wrong with the intelligence will interview her?

[tele_nut]

no oil is not worth fighting for,

tele nut if ur serious ur a fucktard as well, nothing was ever ours for the taking.

 

Making things personal? I'd be careful about who you're calling names. I don't tolerate that shit. I spoke my opinion and if you don't like it then shove it up your ass. I'm trying real hard to be the shepard here, but like the man says I am the tyranny of evil men and you are the weak. Don't fuck with me.

 

If you want to live like a cave dweller outside the grid then go for it tree hugger. No one is stopping you and your kind. Least of all me.

 

The article written above was penned by some desk jockey non-warrior type who profited off her service in the military and now wants to show her true colors. There is a branch of service for persons of her stripe. It's called the Peace Corps.

 

David Hackworth served with great honor and distinction and found his number was up when he chose to blow the whistle on the effort in Vietnam. Rightfully so, but since then he has made an ass out of himself time and time again. Quack.

[cracked]

I tried to understand wrlwinnnds posts, but failed. Learn to spell, and people might start taking you seriously. Jesus.

[tele_nut]

So we all can agree that the war is about money and oil.

 

Some feel that is a bad thing and others see it as a neccessary evil to continue to make us a great nation we can all grow and prosper in. Now the question is at OUR level, how can we find some kind of common ground without ripping our country apart in the process? I for one vow to be more open to your opinions (Insulting fucks notwithstanding)and listen to what you have to say. I also vow to move to Canada if Kerry gets elected.

[Greg_W]

Eisenhower worked in the Office of Special Plans in the '30's prior to WWII.

[chucK]

Tele_nut,

I think you've probably got a handle on our dislike of Bush. Please elaborate on your beef with Kerry.

Edited February 26, 2004 by chucK

[tele_nut]

I think Kerry has some good common sense ideas, but right NOW we are in a situation where putting him in office will probably do us ALOT of harm. Do you want to tell 545 moms that their kids are dead, and now Kerry is going to go ahead after all and give the oil to France? If you vote for him that's exactly what will happen. Besides that Moby tours with Kerry. That's a big beef if you ask me.

[Jake]

Without oil, our society would cease to exist. Period. No debate. Until new technology comes along, oil is it. The extent that we feel the need to protect our oil supply is the question. I bet that many people here would be more inclined to go to war to ensure the oil supply if, say, OPEC cut off all oil supply.

[tele_nut]

Right on Jake. You da man!

[Jake]

You bet

[chucK]

Yep. I was thinking the other day that you just gotta expect this kind of thing to happen. The USA is now the only superpower. It seems natural that a nation will play to it's strengths and right now one of our strengths is military power. We were headed toward suffering with a possible demise of the dollar. Our economy couldn't do it alone so we are pulling the military card.

 

It's a calculated gamble (well maybe they did some planning, hard to tell ) , figuring that the world community is not gonna stand up to us. Hopefully it won't happen. I'm not sure we could take on the entire world.

[tele_nut]

In all reality what you just said about OPEC is part of the crux of the issue. OPEC has long threatened to decrease production if certain demands were not met. Since we had gotten into bed with Saudi Arabia over Afghanistan we have been tied to their unscrupulous money/oil politics ever since. 9/11 proved the worthiness of the average Saudi's mindset, and now we are moving out of all our bases there. So now, with Iraq, we no longer need Saudi bases, we've dealt OPEC a low card, AND we have Iran pincered between a coalition controlled Afghanistan and Iraq. This is chess at it's finest. What's not to love?

[tele_nut]

I think the benefits of all this will filter down at a later date. I know for alot of people it has created worry and uncertainty about alot of things. I know the war has created tensions. In reality though were some of these 'friendly' nations merely wolves in sheeps clothing? Germany was for a long time a powerful nation. With Russia finally in shambles (thanks to Jihad) they finally have what they have always wanted. A safe eastern border. They are now free to make their move. The fact that France wants to back them in their play is truly one of the sick ironies in life.

[Jake]

You know, the MidEast might actually start to come around over the next bunch of years. Of course, that might not ever happen and it could all implode (even more than it already is), but there have been some encouraging signs. Pakistan is cooperating with us to some extent, and Musharaff is taking a political risk in doing this. The Iranian theocracy is having to deal people who are hating their hard line super religious rule. Syria may be making some limited efforts to get on our good side, and Libya (sorta Mideast) got the shit scared out of em and gave up their nuclear program.

[Jake]

Yeah tele nut. There are definitely probs. What is interesting is that France and Germany bitch, in part I think, because they are jealous in a sense. They don't have the economic or military power, or pretty much any kind of power, to act on their own. Now some people think that France and Germany and the EU will form as a sort of competitor to US. However, I think they will all eventually come back more in line with us. Relations are healing right now - each side needs the other too much to cast it off.

As for Russia, well they are screwed. The russkies may never get it right. Right now, Putin is turning in a de facto dictator. He runs everything - he doesn't even have oppostion in the upcoming presidential election. Downright scary.