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Is that a mushroom cloud above...,
2005-11-15 20:33:23
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the ministry of love...,
2005-11-16 10:47:06
big oil's energy task force:
the only surprising thing about it is that they tried to deny it:
The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated.
This reminds me of an old story on a 2001 report from James Baker and the Council on Foreign Relations delivered to the Vice President's Office at Cheney's request: "Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century".
The report focused like a laser on Iraq because of Iraq's vast, pent up oil reserves after a decade of sanctions, apparently of the consensus that oil prices were higher in 2001 than they cared for. For those just realizing they've been lied to and are now wondering why the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq, here is, to all extents and purposes, Big Business's foreign policy advice on the matter:
The United States should ... develop an integrated strategy with key allies in Europe and Asia and with key countries in the Middle East to restate the goals with respect to Iraqi policy and to restore a cohesive coalition of key allies. Goals should be designed in a realistic fashion, and they should be clearly and consistently stated and defended to revive U.S. credibility on this issue. Actions and policies to promote these goals should endeavor to enhance the well-being of the Iraqi people. Sanctions that are not effective should be phased out and replaced with highly focused and enforced sanctions that target the regime’s ability to maintain and acquire weapons of mass destruction. A new plan of action should be developed to use diplomatic and other means to support U.N. Security Council efforts to build a strong arms-control regime to stem the flow of arms and controlled substances into Iraq.
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[Gulf states'] populations are dissatisfied with the "no-fly zone" bombing and the sanctions regime against Iraq, perceived U.S. bias in the Arab-Israeli peace process, and lack of domestic economic pressures. A diplomatic dialogue that emphasizes common U.S.-GCC goals and programs should be pursued at the highest levels to minimize the potential for tension over these other issues.
And that's more or less what the Bush administration was doing, until 9/11, the morning of which they apparently put the fucking crazies in charge of policy. Why did the fucking crazies want to invade Iraq? Hell if I know. Wolfowitz made some pretty fucking crazy rationalizations - getting US bases out of Saudi Arabia and flypaper theories and because Iraq "was swimming on a sea of oil" we couldn't neutralize the non-existent threat it poised [1] by economic means - but none of them ever struck me as quite fucking crazy enough.
- The report from the oil industry... I mean Baker & CFR, described the threat as the following:
Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to U.S. allies in the Middle East, as well as to regional and global order, and to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets.
Wolfowitz, we are supposed to believe, believed the threat poised by Iraq was a confluence of non-state actors and non-conventional weapons, not the oil markets. We of course know that he knew that that was a baseless assessment, and democratic pretensions were shelved in action almost immediately so those were lies too, but that doesn't rule out some alternative cause for insanity.
:: posted by buermann @ 2005-11-16 04:28:11 CST |
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