Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.
The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.
The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years.
How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions.
There is more, of course, but you get the idea.
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If you remember back to the precision missile and bomb attacks preceding the invasion, the Coalition of the Willing (Sick, eh?) destroyed principally civilian targets, not military targets. Rummy wiped out their phones, electrical power, water supply, transportation, and sewage system. The civil government collapsed, and criminals and warlords emerged as the new civil government.
The 'war' (actually 4+ years of occupation after the 6-week war) is supposedly against the insurgency, or al-Qaeda, or the ghost of Saddam, or whatever, but it is Iraqis we are killing, yet somehow the Iraqi people are our friends? Friends? Is that like allies? Do we put ammunition out as bait for Canada's poor children to 'select' them for our snipers as targets?
The whole thing is and was preposterous from the planning stages in the early days of the Project for a New American Century.
Posted by: Globle Warren Terrism | October 12, 2007 9:28 AM