Plebiscite on an Outlaw Empire

[bemildred]

Long, Mr. Englehardt is worth the read though.

--- Some ways down ---

Oil wars

After September 11, 2001, President Bush and his advisers were determined to run an invasion of, and war against, Iraq that would be the anti-Vietnam conflict of all time. From the draft to the body count, they were going to reverse all the United States' Vietnam "mistakes". Above all, they were going to win quickly and decisively. The result? In no time at all, they had brought the US deep into the Iraqi "big muddy" (as the Vietnam-era phrase went). Now, looming in the distance - think of it as the dark at the end of this particular horror-fest of a tunnel - is the worst Vietnam nightmare of all: defeat. Just check Juan Cole's Informed Comment website for his "Top Ten Ways We Know We Have Lost in Iraq" if you don't believe me.

Unlike in Indochina, however, this time there's something essential at stake. Whatever the US was doing in the largely peasant land of Vietnam, in terms of global wealth and resources, it was just what Henry Kissinger and other frustrated US policymakers of that era always called it, a third- or fourth-rate power of no real value to anyone (other, of course, than its own inhabitants).

In Iraq, where a continuing US presence only ensures a deeper plunge into chaos, mayhem, blood and horror as well as fragmentation and potential dissolution, departure nonetheless remains largely inconceivable. After all, Iraq has something everyone desperately values: oil. In quantity. A "sea" of oil in the words of former deputy secretary of defense Wolfowitz. In a backhanded way, Bush has finally acknowledged the obvious - that his war in Iraq was, in significant part, an oil invasion, an oil occupation (remember it was only the Oil Ministry that the US guarded in otherwise looted Baghdad), and so is also bound to be an oil defeat.

As energy-obsessed Bush administration planners saw it, Iraq was to be the linchpin - hence those permanent bases that were on the drawing boards as US troops invaded - of administration strategy for dominating the oil heartlands of the planet.

Asia Times