There's a lot of demoralized Republicans in my office today.

[Raster]

11. And make NO MISTAKE, bush* and cheney* were planning on invading Iraq...

Last edited Fri Aug 31, 2012, 01:15 PM - Edit history (1)

...long before the SCOTUS appointed them pResident and Vice pResident. The fix was in. Iraq would be invaded so gee-Dubya* could fondle his "daddy issues," and darth cheney* could give his petroleum mafia buddies access to all of that lovely Iraqi oil.



http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/08/24

Published on Friday, August 24, 2012 by TomDispatch.com

You Were Right When You Waved That “No Blood for Oil” Sign. Iraq Was About Oil
by Tom Engelhardt

It was never exactly rocket science. You didn’t have to be Einstein to figure it out. In early 2003, the Bush administration was visibly preparing to invade Iraq, a nation with a nasty ruler who himself hadn’t hesitated to invade another country, Iran, in the early 1980s for no purpose except self-aggrandizement. (And the Reagan administration had backed him in that disastrous war because then, as now, Washington loathed the Iranians.) There was never the slightest evidence of the involvement of Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 9/11 attacks or in support of al-Qaeda; and despite the Bush administration’s drumbeat of supposed information about Saddam’s nuclear program (which was said, somehow, to threaten to put mushroom clouds over American cities), the evidence was always, at best, beyond thin and at worst, a potage of lies, concoctions, and wishful thinking. The program, of course, proved nonexistent, but too late to matter.

There was only one reason to invade Iraq and it could be captured in a single word, “oil,” even if George W. Bush and his top officials generally went out of their way to avoid mentioning it. (At one point, post-invasion, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz did point out that Iraq was indeed afloat “on a sea of oil.”) Unfortunately, oil as a significant factor in invasion planning was considered far too simpleminded for the sophisticated pundits and reporters of the mainstream media. They were unimpressed by it even when, as the looting began in Baghdad, it turned out that U.S. troops only had orders to guard the Oil Ministry and Interior Ministry (which housed Saddam’s dreaded secret police).

Mind you, far more than Iraqi oil was in the administration’s crosshairs, though that country, with its then-crippled energy sector, was considered a giant oil reservoir just waiting for Big Oil to set it free. To conquer and garrison -- “liberate” -- Iraq would put the U.S. in a position of ultimate domination in the oil heartlands of the planet, or so thought the top officials of the Bush administration, a number of whom had been in or associated with the energy business before scaling the heights of Washington. As Dick Cheney put it to the Institute of Petroleum Engineers in 1999, when he was still running the energy company Halliburton, "The Middle East, with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."

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