We will leave Iraq when the Iraqis ask us to leave.

[Octafish]

Courtesy of the Bartcop Collection

[Jack Sprat]

1. You know it, Octofish.

That goes for Afghanistan and Libya too. We'll leave when our corporate looters can't find anything more to scavenge from their land and resources.

[Octafish]

2. History Rhymes and all That Rots

War is Big Business. For generations.



"Money Trumps Peace." -- George W Bush

[Rage for Order]

3. LOL! Most excellent!

And sad but true.

[Octafish]

5. It was first published four years ago...

Remember Adnan Khashoggi and Richard Perle got together to talk about investing in a new Carlyle like private investment bank, specializing in war spending -- before the war in Iraq got going Big Time.

LUNCH WITH THE CHAIRMAN

Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2003-03-17
Posted 2003-03-10

EXCERPT...

Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq.

The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay, include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review and assess the country’s strategic defense policies.

Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in Delaware. Trireme’s main business, according to a two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

The letter mentioned the firm’s government connections prominently: “Three of Trireme’s Management Group members currently advise the U.S. Secretary of Defense by serving on the U.S. Defense Policy Board, and one of Trireme’s principals, Richard Perle, is chairman of that Board.” The two other policy-board members associated with Trireme are Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State (who is, in fact, only a member of Trireme’s advisory group and is not involved in its management), and Gerald Hillman, an investor and a close business associate of Perle’s who handles matters in Trireme’s New York office. The letter said that forty-five million dollars had already been raised, including twenty million dollars from Boeing; the purpose, clearly, was to attract more investors, such as Khashoggi and Zuhair.

CONTINUED...

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/03/17/030317fa_fact

...BORS copyright reads 2007. And here we are in 2011.

[Hugabear]

4. "You don't want us to leave, do you? Hate to think of what might happen if we leave"

Sounds like an extortion racket

[Octafish]

6. It is exactly like an extortion racket.

Wonder how many Americans know about Smedley Butler, a two-time Medal of Honor winning two-star USMC General who felt that way?

[David__77]

7. "The Afghans" wanted to Soviets there too.

It all depends on who's doing the telling.

[Octafish]

8. Some Afghans want America to leave, too. Like the guy we installed.

You know, the former UNOCAL executive.

Obama Lacks Clarity on Afghan War

By Ray McGovern
March 28, 2011

EXCERPT...

For instance, in 1997, representatives of the Taliban government were wined and dined in Texas amid hopes that the huge U.S. energy company UNOCAL could conclude a multi-billion dollar contract to build a natural gas pipeline across Afghanistan, according to the British newspaper The Telegraph.

The route for delivering the gas would come out of Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan to India and eventually to the warm-water Arabian Sea/Indian Ocean (nullifying the need to transit Russia or the Strait of Hormuz).

In 1998, Dick Cheney, then CEO of pipeline services vendor Halliburton, gushed: “I can’t think of a time when we’ve had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.”

Halliburton grabbed a Caspian Sea drilling contract. And President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was quoted as saying that shaping that region’s policies was “one of the most exciting things we can do.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/032811b.html

A lot of dying for oil n minerals n strategery and stuff.