It Was ALWAYS About The Oil

From Counterpunch.org comes this awesome razor-lined piece:

"And above it all, on his alabaster throne, sits the President, our Supreme Warlord. While even such a scalawag as Lyndon Johnson knew that an unpopular war is a losing hand for a politician to draw, President Bush seems unperturbed by it all. Many columnists have attributed his attitude to intellectual deficiencies, or irrational stubbornness, or megalomania. But if Bush possessed the IQ of Descartes and the wisdom of Aquinas, he could hardly act otherwise.

"As a Texas plutocrat marinated in petroleum, Bush is merely acting out his destiny, and that of his class. Should the reader need reminding, one can always turn to the more iconoclastic foreign press. While the great American dailies are debating whether "we" need 20,000 additional troops or 40,000, or are limning the Napoleonic qualities of the new Iraq commander, General David Petraeus, the London Independent reveals the following:

"'Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

"'The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.'" [6]

"Was Auschwitz a German government-run death camp? Or was it just one of I.G. Farben's synthetic rubber factories, subject to a high employee turnover? One may also ask whether Iraq is the central front of the war on terrorism, or merely a profit center for corporations like BearingPoint and Exxon-Mobil.
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The article starts with a great quote from one of America's most unknown national heroes, Marine General Smedley Butler, who single-handedly stopped a rich-guy industrialist Putsch on Washington D.C. when he refused to lead the 500,000 men the industrialsts were planning to bring together to descend on the Capitol and throw F.D.R. out of the White House in the early days of the New Deal. His brilliant book "War Is a Racket" is available at Amazon.com.

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."
-General Smedley Butler (1935)

I think that just about sums it up. The Republican Spin Machine managed to convince most of the Mainstream Media to shout down anyone who dares suggest that the invasion Iraq might possibly be about their oil, but only a moron would ever believe that America would spend upwards of $2 Trillion dollars on anything BUT oil. Certainly not on freeing people under despotic rule... especially not if the Despot in question is willing to sell us oil on the cheap. After all, we still use Iranian and Saudi Arabian oil, don't we?