OIL

Prompted by Cynthia, let me just say a word about Greenspan's new memoir - which I haven't read, so I'm just going by press reports. Greenspan merely said what was obvious: that Iraq was about the oil. (He also said that Bush and the Republicrooks sold out their principles for politics and graft, but that's not news either.) Even though it's not news that Iraq was (at least in part) about oil, it's nice of him to note that. Even before the war was underway, though, some commentator claimed Iraq was about Oil, Israel, and Logistics - OK, the last one is lame, but he wanted the acronymn to be OIL, and the neo-cons did want a logistical platform from which to attack Iran. That's about oil (and Israel) too, so maybe we should just summarize - OI, as in oi vey.

I do think that oil and Israel were what caused Cheney and his neo-con allies to want the Iraq attack, and that those two factors are the reason they want to stay. Since the American people were not likely to buy into OI as a casus belli, the war had to be sold under false pretenses - a job for which Bush, Cheney, and Rice were admirably suited.

Those lies they told proved less harmless than they doubtless hoped, and played their own part in the catastrophe that unfolded. Like every other Bush-Cheney enterprise, disastrous miscalculation and collosal strategic blunders followed, and a war of lies and treachery developed its own dynamics of destruction.

John Kerry was on Meet the Pinhead Press this morning, and was pretty clear in his analysis: The line about it requiring more time to train the Iraqi military has long outlived any credibility. It takes months to train an American soldier, and we created an army almost from scratch in WW II - so how can it be that four years later we don't have an Iraqi Army. That reason is that politically the Iraqi leaders find it more convenient for us to be there and take casualties.

We need a political strategy. We have potentially tremendous leverage over all the Iraqi parties, leverage that we don't use because our President is pursuing absurd fantasies and refusing to acknowledge reality.

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