July 30th 2008
Entering The Heart Of Darkness: Bill-Moyers-land
Co-authored with Jim
A
bit more than month has passed since Bill Moyers and Michael Winship penned their column It Was Oil, All Along. I missed it when it came out, and not very many bloggers have posted on it in the interim, so let’s set the Wayback Machine to June 27, 2008 and have some fun!
It Was Oil, All Along
By Bill Moyers & Michael WinshipOh, no, they told us, Iraq isn’t a war about oil. That’s cynical and simplistic, they said. It’s about terror and al Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire, and ashes. And now the bottom turns out to be….the bottom line. It is about oil.
Shiver me timbers! Terror … al Qaeda … toppling Hussein … democracy in Iraq … all up in smoke! I missed that somehow. But then I never saw them as concocted, either.
Alan Greenspan said so last fall. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, safely out of office, confessed in his memoir, “…Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” He elaborated in an interview with the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, “If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands, our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first gulf war.”
What one word best describes oil? To a lefty, it’s probably “pollution.” To a realist, it’s “strategic.” Were it not so, but it is so. Would they have us not make any effort to protect the world’s largest oil reserves from falling into the hands of a ruthless, anti-American despot? The Left would like everyone to believe that the US was out to steal the region’s oil, and they have convinced the most simpleminded among us.
Remember, also, that soon after the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, told the press that war was our only strategic choice. “…We had virtually no economic options with Iraq,” he explained, “because the country floats on a sea of oil.”
What’s not true about that statement?
Shades of Daniel Plainview, the monstrous petroleum tycoon in the movie THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Half-mad, he exclaims, “There’s a whole ocean of oil under our feet!” then adds, “No one can get at it except for me!”
No wonder American troops only guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior in Baghdad, even as looters pillaged museums of their priceless antiquities. They were making sure no one could get at the oil except… guess who?
Would someone please name me a war in which the victorious army immediately dispatched troops to guard museums?
Here’s a recent headline in the NEW YORK TIMES: “Deals with Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back.” Read on: “Four western companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.”
There you have it. After a long exile, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP are back in Iraq. And on the wings of no-bid contracts – that’s right, sweetheart deals like those given Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater. The kind of deals you get only if you have friends in high places. And these war profiteers have friends in very high places.
Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, BP … well, one of those is a U.S. company. Is Moyers really comfortable with the argument that we went to war for the French and the Dutch?
Let’s go back a few years to the 1990’s, when private citizen Dick Cheney was running Halliburton, the big energy supplier. That’s when he told the oil industry that, “By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.”
Fast forward to Cheney’s first heady days in the White House. The oil industry and other energy conglomerates have been headed [sic] backdoor keys to the White House, and their CEO’s [sic] and lobbyists were trooping in and out for meetings with their old opal [sic], now Vice President Cheney. The meetings are secret, conducted under tight security, but as we reported five years ago, among the documents that turned up from some of those meetings were maps of oil fields in Iraq – and a list of companies who wanted access to them. The conservative group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club filed suit to try to find out who attended the meetings and what was discussed, but the White House fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the press and public from learning the whole truth.
This all sounds quite far-fetched to me, but let’s play along. When enviros met with Al Gore in his first heady days as VEEP, the meetings were secret and under tight security, and I bet there were maps involved, showing lands the Greenies wanted the Feds to nationalize, forests they wanted the Feds to remove logging rights and roads from, and sheafs of draft regs they wanted the VEEP to get behind. All that was far more detrimental to the U.S. economy than discussions of Middle Eastern oil reserves, including those in Iraq.
And by the way, the oil tycoons must not have been very effective because it’s over five years since we toppled Saddam, and no fat oil contracts have been gifted to any of Cheney’s buddies.
Think about it. These secret meetings took place six months before 9/11, two years before Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq. We still don’t know what they were about. What we know is that this is the oil industry that’s enjoying swollen profits these days. It would be laughable if it weren’t so painful to remember that their erstwhile cheerleader for invading Iraq – the press mogul Rupert Murdoch – once said that a successful war there would bring us $20 a barrel of oil. The last time we looked, it was more than $140 a barrel. Where are you, Rupert, when the facts need checking and the predictions are revisited?
Six months before 9/11?! Do you mean Cheney, Halliburton and Big Oil were behind 9/11, Bill? Oh, yeah. That makes sense.
In the month since this column ran, President Bush rescinded the Executive Orders that prohibited much of the exploration and drilling here, sending oil prices which way, class? If the Democrats, headed by NanPo and Dirtbag Harry, would allow a VOTE on the subject (you know, the way our government is SUPPOSED TO WORK), we would be on our way towards more domestic production, and prices would fall even further.
At a congressional hearing this week, James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who exactly twenty years ago alerted Congress and the world to the dangers of global warming, compared the chief executives of Big Oil to the tobacco moguls who denied that nicotine is addictive or that there’s a link between smoking and cancer. Hansen, who the administration has tried again and again to silence, said these barons of black gold should be tried for committing crimes against humanity and nature in opposing efforts to deal with global warming.
Do a Google search on James Hansen and discover just how effective the government has been at silencing him – I’ll spare you the electrons: A search of James Hansen and NASA yields 1,190,000 hits. Man, that Bush is is just destroying the Constitution! Unlike Hansen, who advocates stripping free speech rights from those of us who deny global warming – which, BTW, is a perfectly sound idea to the likes of Moyers.
Perhaps those sweetheart deals in Iraq should be added to his proposed indictments. They have been purchased at a very high price. Four thousand American soldiers dead, tens of thousands permanently wounded for life, hundreds of thousands of dead and crippled Iraqis plus five million displaced, and a cost that will mount into trillions of dollars. The political analyst Kevin Phillips says America has become little more than an “energy protection force,” doing anything to gain access to expensive fuel without regard to the lives of others or the earth itself.
Care to posit a world without an “energy protection force?” Wonder how China might act if its access to oil were threatened? Moyers can simplify (stupefy?) the situation to the extreme that allows him to say 4,000 of our finest died for oil – but what they died for was to keep the world’s most strategic asset from falling into the hands of terrorists.
There are a few things more valuable than oil today. Air, water, food. If our air were at risk, would it be worth fighting for? If a crazed despot was threatening to continue his historic track record of trying to seize more of the world’s supply of water or food, do you think we’d hesitate before redirecting his energies a bit? The only way one would exclude oil from this list of strategic assets is if one were anti-progress, anti-human, anti-markets. Oh … like Bill Moyers, maybe.
One thinks again of Daniel Plainview in THERE WILL BE BLOOD. His lust for oil came at the price of his son and his soul.
And Bill Moyers’ lust for climbing to the top of the Bush-hating pacifist pyramid came at the price of his losing all capability for rational thought.
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Comments
August 3rd, 2008 at 8:39 pm
Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.PabloPicassoPablo Picasso
August 5th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis has won the war. This is the Sixth Reich.HunterS.ThompsonHunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas