Some Thoughts on Iraq

Some Thoughts on the War in Iraq. Even most conservatives now seem willing to admit that our preemptive war in Iraq was ill-conceived and has been badly carried out by this administration. It’s worth pointing out here that Democrats have been saying that all along and that we are pleased to have those on the right join us. Now the apparent Republican position is that however badly our early invasion was conducted, we are now engaged and must fight to the finish. We must, it is said, keep on until we “succeed”. The trouble with this position is that we are not being told what success will look like when we achieve it. The general claim is that when the Iraqi government is strong enough to defend itself, we can “stand down”. But how strong is strong enough? Republicans won’t answer. How soon will that be? There is no answer to that either. My take on all this is that we’ve never been told the truth about why this president and his neoconservative advisors wanted to achieve regime change in Iraq in the first place. We’ve never been told why we are building the largest and best fortified embassy in the world in Baghdad and a dozen or more permanent (the administration calls them “enduring”) bases throughout Iraq’s oil fields. The answers to such questions, it seems to me, are precisely as Alan Greenspan suggested (after his retirement). This war was, is, and will continue to be about petroleum and American oil company access to it. Put another way, this war is about corporate profit, and we have largely destroyed a country in search thereof. An excellent and authoritative critique can be found at www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2007/012007/interview-juhasz.html Oh, and lest you think this bit of political discourse is not “local”, check out the price of gas in Erwin these days!