here's the comment area for todays political opinion
http://www.zabkat.com/blog/16Sep07.htm
let's hope it will generate some intelligent argumentation!
blog: after the towers fell
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nikos
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Robert2
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Twin Towers, etc
Hi,
Here is some more food for thought along the same lines.
* From http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/6390/36/ (HARD-WIRED FOR MORAL POLITICS By Gary Olson):
"Cohen and Rogers, in parsing Chomsky’s critique of élites, note that “Once an unjust order exists, those benefiting from it have both an interest in maintaining it and, by virtue of their social advantages, the power to do so.” (For a concise but not uncritical treatment of Chomsky’s social and ethical views, see Cohen, 1991.)
Clearly, the vaunted human capacity for verbal communication cuts both ways. In the wrong hands, this capacity is often abused by consciously quelling the empathic response. When de Waal writes, “Animals are no moral philosophers,” I’m left to wonder if he isn’t favoring the former in this comparison. (de Waal, 2000)
One of the methods employed within capitalist democracies is Chomsky and Herman’s “manufacture of consent,” a form of highly sophisticated thought control. Potentially active citizens must be “distracted from their real interests and deliberately confused about the way the world works.” (Cohen, 1991; Chomsky, 1988)
For this essay and following Chomsky, I’m arguing that the human mind is the primary target of this perverse “nurture” or propaganda, in part because exposure to certain new truths about empathy -- hard evidence about our innate moral nature -- poses a direct threat to elite interests. That is, given the apparent universality of this biological predisposition toward empathy, we have a potent scientific baseline upon which to launch further critiques of this manipulation.
First, the insidiously effective scapegoating of human nature that claims we are motivated by greedy, dog-eat-dog “individual self-interest is all” is undermined. Stripped of yet another rationalization for empire, predatory behavior on behalf of the capitalist mode of production becomes ever more transparent.
Second, for many people, the basic incompatibility between global capitalism and the lived expression of moral sentiments may become obvious for the first time. (Olson, 2006, 2005) For example, the failure to engage this moral sentiment has radical implications, not the least being consequences for the planet. Researchers at McGill University (Mikkelson, 2007) have shown that economic inequality is linked to high rates of biodiversity loss. The authors suggest that economic reforms may be the prerequisite to saving the richness of the ecosystem and urge that “if we can learn to share the economic resources more fairly with fellow members of our own species, it may help to share ecological resources with our fellow species.” While one hesitates imputing too much transformative potential to this emotional capacity, there is nothing inconsistent about drawing more attention to inter-species empathy and eco-empathy. The latter may be essential for the protection of biotic communities.
Third, learning about the conscious suppression of this essential core of our human nature begs additional troubling questions about the motives behind other élite-generated ideologies, from neoliberalism and nationalism to xenophobia and the “war on terror.” Equally alarming for élites, awareness of this reality contains the potential to encourage “destabilizing” but humanity-affirming cosmopolitan attitudes toward the faceless “other,” both here and abroad. In de Waal’s apt words, “Empathy can override every rule about how to treat others.”
Finally, as de Waal admonishes, “If we could manage to see people on other continents as part of us, drawing them into our circle of reciprocity and empathy, we would be building upon rather than going against our nature.” (de Waal, 2005) An ethos of empathy is an essential part of what it means to be human. We’ve been systematically denied a deeper and more fulfilling engagement with this moral sentiment. I would argue that, paradoxically, the relative absence of widespread empathic behavior is in fact a searing tribute to its potentially subversive power.
Is it too much to hope that we’re on the verge of discovering a scientifically based, Archimedean moral point from which to lever public discourse toward an appreciation of our true nature, which in turn might release powerful emancipatory forces?"
** From Frans De Waal's Our Inner Ape (if I had to recommend only one book above all else, it would be this one; illuminating and definitive):
"At the same time that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher preached that greed was good for society, good for the economy and good for those with anything to be greedy about, biologists published books in support of these views. Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene taught us that since evolution helps those who help themselves, selfishness should be looked at as a driving force for change rather than a flaw that drags us down. We may be nasty apes, but it makes sense that we are, and the world is a better place for it.
A tiny problem—pointed out to no avail by nitpickers—was the misleading language of this genre of books. Genes that produce successful traits spread in the population and hence promote themselves. But to call this "selfish" is nothing but a metaphor. A snowball rolling down the hill gathering more snow also promotes itself, but we generally don't call snowballs selfish. Taken to its extreme, the everything-is-selfish position leads to a nightmarish world. Having an excellent nose for shock value, these authors haul us to a Hobbesian arena in which it's every man for himself, where people show generosity only to trick others. Love is unheard of, sympathy is absent, and goodness a mere illusion. The best known quote of those days, from biologist Michael Ghiselin, says it all, "Scratch an altruist, and watch a hypocrite bleed."
...
Attitudes have changed dramatically since Margaret Thatcher postulated her strident individualism. "There is no such thing as society," she proclaimed. "There are individual men and women, and there are families." Thatcher's comment may have been inspired by the evolutionary views of her day, or perhaps it was the other way around. Either way, twenty years later, when huge corporate scandals have delivered the final pinprick to an inflated stock balloon, pure individualism does not sound so hot anymore. In the post-Enron era the public has begun to realize again—as if it had not always known—that unmitigated capitalism rarely brings out the best in people. Reagan and Thatcher's "gospel of greed" went sour.
...
Suddenly books appeared with titles like Unto Others, Evolutionary Origins of Morality, The Tending Instinct, The Cooperative Gene, and my own Good Natured. There was less talk of aggression and competition and more of connectedness, of how societies hang together, of the origins of caring and commitment. What was stressed was the enlightened self-interest of the individual within a larger whole. Whenever interests overlap, competition will be constrained by the greater good. ... "the rational pursuit of self-interest is sometimes an inferior strategy".
The United States used to have the world's healthiest and tallest citizens, but now ranks at the bottom among industrialized nations in terms of longevity and height and at the top in terms of teenage pregnancy and infant mortality. ... In terms of life expectancy, too, the United States is not keeping up with the rest of the world. On this critical health index, Americans don't even rank among the top twenty-five nations anymore.
How to explain this? The first culprit that comes to mind is the privatization of health care resulting in millions of uninsured people. But the problem may go deeper. British economist Richard Wilkinson, who has gathered global data on the connection between socioeconomic status and health, blames inequality. With its giant underclass, the income gap in the United States resembles that of many third-world nations. The top 1 percent of Americans has more income to spend than the bottom 40 percent taken together. This is a huge gap compared with Europe and Japan. Wilkinson argues that large income disparities erode the social fabric. They induce resentment and undermine trust, which causes stress to both the rich and the poor. No one feels at ease within such a system. The result is that the world's richest nation now has one of its poorest health records.
Whatever one thinks of a political system, if it fails to promote its citizen's well-being, it has a problem. And so in the same way that Communism collapsed due to a mismatch between ideology and human behavior, unmitigated capitalism may be unsustainable as it celebrates the material well-being of a few while shortchanging the rest. It denies the basic solidarity that makes life bearable. In doing so, it goes against a long evolutionary history of egalitarianism, which in turns relates to our cooperative nature."
*** Finally, here is another text from Gary Olson (Chair of the Political Science Department at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA.):
"Why is this view so popular? It's because this pathological interpretation provides an elaborate ideological after-the-fact rationale for exploitation and empire. How much easier for those who fear losing their wealth, power and privilege to proclaim, "Hey guys, it's just human nature!" Dr. Will Miller, the late Univ. of Vermont philosopher, noted that these folks are defending their own predatory behavior, actions that are both endemic and required by market capitalism. That is, we're all systemically admonished to buy into this view because it serves the status quo.
But capitalism has only been around for 500 years and only 0.4 percent of the time humans have been on earth, some 200,000 years. As historian Edward Hyam's reminds us, "Capitalism turns men into economic cannibals, and having done so, mistakes economic cannibalism for human nature."
That conventional opinions withstand neither basic tests of evidence nor the historical record should mandate healthy skepticism toward all received wisdom about human nature. It also allows us to imagine that another world is possible. That as we transform our world and its culture we can change our "human" nature and allow our better selves to emerge and flourish."
Cheers,
Robert
Here is some more food for thought along the same lines.
* From http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/6390/36/ (HARD-WIRED FOR MORAL POLITICS By Gary Olson):
"Cohen and Rogers, in parsing Chomsky’s critique of élites, note that “Once an unjust order exists, those benefiting from it have both an interest in maintaining it and, by virtue of their social advantages, the power to do so.” (For a concise but not uncritical treatment of Chomsky’s social and ethical views, see Cohen, 1991.)
Clearly, the vaunted human capacity for verbal communication cuts both ways. In the wrong hands, this capacity is often abused by consciously quelling the empathic response. When de Waal writes, “Animals are no moral philosophers,” I’m left to wonder if he isn’t favoring the former in this comparison. (de Waal, 2000)
One of the methods employed within capitalist democracies is Chomsky and Herman’s “manufacture of consent,” a form of highly sophisticated thought control. Potentially active citizens must be “distracted from their real interests and deliberately confused about the way the world works.” (Cohen, 1991; Chomsky, 1988)
For this essay and following Chomsky, I’m arguing that the human mind is the primary target of this perverse “nurture” or propaganda, in part because exposure to certain new truths about empathy -- hard evidence about our innate moral nature -- poses a direct threat to elite interests. That is, given the apparent universality of this biological predisposition toward empathy, we have a potent scientific baseline upon which to launch further critiques of this manipulation.
First, the insidiously effective scapegoating of human nature that claims we are motivated by greedy, dog-eat-dog “individual self-interest is all” is undermined. Stripped of yet another rationalization for empire, predatory behavior on behalf of the capitalist mode of production becomes ever more transparent.
Second, for many people, the basic incompatibility between global capitalism and the lived expression of moral sentiments may become obvious for the first time. (Olson, 2006, 2005) For example, the failure to engage this moral sentiment has radical implications, not the least being consequences for the planet. Researchers at McGill University (Mikkelson, 2007) have shown that economic inequality is linked to high rates of biodiversity loss. The authors suggest that economic reforms may be the prerequisite to saving the richness of the ecosystem and urge that “if we can learn to share the economic resources more fairly with fellow members of our own species, it may help to share ecological resources with our fellow species.” While one hesitates imputing too much transformative potential to this emotional capacity, there is nothing inconsistent about drawing more attention to inter-species empathy and eco-empathy. The latter may be essential for the protection of biotic communities.
Third, learning about the conscious suppression of this essential core of our human nature begs additional troubling questions about the motives behind other élite-generated ideologies, from neoliberalism and nationalism to xenophobia and the “war on terror.” Equally alarming for élites, awareness of this reality contains the potential to encourage “destabilizing” but humanity-affirming cosmopolitan attitudes toward the faceless “other,” both here and abroad. In de Waal’s apt words, “Empathy can override every rule about how to treat others.”
Finally, as de Waal admonishes, “If we could manage to see people on other continents as part of us, drawing them into our circle of reciprocity and empathy, we would be building upon rather than going against our nature.” (de Waal, 2005) An ethos of empathy is an essential part of what it means to be human. We’ve been systematically denied a deeper and more fulfilling engagement with this moral sentiment. I would argue that, paradoxically, the relative absence of widespread empathic behavior is in fact a searing tribute to its potentially subversive power.
Is it too much to hope that we’re on the verge of discovering a scientifically based, Archimedean moral point from which to lever public discourse toward an appreciation of our true nature, which in turn might release powerful emancipatory forces?"
** From Frans De Waal's Our Inner Ape (if I had to recommend only one book above all else, it would be this one; illuminating and definitive):
"At the same time that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher preached that greed was good for society, good for the economy and good for those with anything to be greedy about, biologists published books in support of these views. Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene taught us that since evolution helps those who help themselves, selfishness should be looked at as a driving force for change rather than a flaw that drags us down. We may be nasty apes, but it makes sense that we are, and the world is a better place for it.
A tiny problem—pointed out to no avail by nitpickers—was the misleading language of this genre of books. Genes that produce successful traits spread in the population and hence promote themselves. But to call this "selfish" is nothing but a metaphor. A snowball rolling down the hill gathering more snow also promotes itself, but we generally don't call snowballs selfish. Taken to its extreme, the everything-is-selfish position leads to a nightmarish world. Having an excellent nose for shock value, these authors haul us to a Hobbesian arena in which it's every man for himself, where people show generosity only to trick others. Love is unheard of, sympathy is absent, and goodness a mere illusion. The best known quote of those days, from biologist Michael Ghiselin, says it all, "Scratch an altruist, and watch a hypocrite bleed."
...
Attitudes have changed dramatically since Margaret Thatcher postulated her strident individualism. "There is no such thing as society," she proclaimed. "There are individual men and women, and there are families." Thatcher's comment may have been inspired by the evolutionary views of her day, or perhaps it was the other way around. Either way, twenty years later, when huge corporate scandals have delivered the final pinprick to an inflated stock balloon, pure individualism does not sound so hot anymore. In the post-Enron era the public has begun to realize again—as if it had not always known—that unmitigated capitalism rarely brings out the best in people. Reagan and Thatcher's "gospel of greed" went sour.
...
Suddenly books appeared with titles like Unto Others, Evolutionary Origins of Morality, The Tending Instinct, The Cooperative Gene, and my own Good Natured. There was less talk of aggression and competition and more of connectedness, of how societies hang together, of the origins of caring and commitment. What was stressed was the enlightened self-interest of the individual within a larger whole. Whenever interests overlap, competition will be constrained by the greater good. ... "the rational pursuit of self-interest is sometimes an inferior strategy".
The United States used to have the world's healthiest and tallest citizens, but now ranks at the bottom among industrialized nations in terms of longevity and height and at the top in terms of teenage pregnancy and infant mortality. ... In terms of life expectancy, too, the United States is not keeping up with the rest of the world. On this critical health index, Americans don't even rank among the top twenty-five nations anymore.
How to explain this? The first culprit that comes to mind is the privatization of health care resulting in millions of uninsured people. But the problem may go deeper. British economist Richard Wilkinson, who has gathered global data on the connection between socioeconomic status and health, blames inequality. With its giant underclass, the income gap in the United States resembles that of many third-world nations. The top 1 percent of Americans has more income to spend than the bottom 40 percent taken together. This is a huge gap compared with Europe and Japan. Wilkinson argues that large income disparities erode the social fabric. They induce resentment and undermine trust, which causes stress to both the rich and the poor. No one feels at ease within such a system. The result is that the world's richest nation now has one of its poorest health records.
Whatever one thinks of a political system, if it fails to promote its citizen's well-being, it has a problem. And so in the same way that Communism collapsed due to a mismatch between ideology and human behavior, unmitigated capitalism may be unsustainable as it celebrates the material well-being of a few while shortchanging the rest. It denies the basic solidarity that makes life bearable. In doing so, it goes against a long evolutionary history of egalitarianism, which in turns relates to our cooperative nature."
*** Finally, here is another text from Gary Olson (Chair of the Political Science Department at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA.):
"Why is this view so popular? It's because this pathological interpretation provides an elaborate ideological after-the-fact rationale for exploitation and empire. How much easier for those who fear losing their wealth, power and privilege to proclaim, "Hey guys, it's just human nature!" Dr. Will Miller, the late Univ. of Vermont philosopher, noted that these folks are defending their own predatory behavior, actions that are both endemic and required by market capitalism. That is, we're all systemically admonished to buy into this view because it serves the status quo.
But capitalism has only been around for 500 years and only 0.4 percent of the time humans have been on earth, some 200,000 years. As historian Edward Hyam's reminds us, "Capitalism turns men into economic cannibals, and having done so, mistakes economic cannibalism for human nature."
That conventional opinions withstand neither basic tests of evidence nor the historical record should mandate healthy skepticism toward all received wisdom about human nature. It also allows us to imagine that another world is possible. That as we transform our world and its culture we can change our "human" nature and allow our better selves to emerge and flourish."
Cheers,
Robert
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wasker
- Gold Member
- Posts: 801
- Joined: 2005 Oct 21, 16:33
- Location: WA, USA
I feel your pain. I traversed twice the subway path which was destroyed in couple days during the terrorist attack in Moscow several years ago. Exactly the point where they planted explosives.I was in manhattan on 9 September 2001, and marvelled at those twin monuments of market capitalism — I kid you not. Two days before the airplanes crashed on them I was in them!
Please no!This just in: the next version of xplorer² will be developed in Guantanamo bay, oh no!
There must be a law which forbids file manager producers to display their political views in public. I'm using Xplorer2 - the only file manager that does not suck. Actually, it rocks!
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Robert2
- Gold Member
- Posts: 700
- Joined: 2004 Jun 17, 15:39
Fresh from the mill, here is from http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2007/091607a.html:
Greenspan Spills the Beans on Oil
By Ray McGovern
September 16, 2007
For those still wondering why President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney sent our young men and women into Iraq, the secret is now “largely” out.
No, not from the lips of former Secretary of State Colin Powell. It appears we shall have to wait until the disgraced general/diplomat draws nearer to meeting his maker before he gets concerned over anything more than the “blot” that Iraq has put on his reputation.
Rather, the uncommon candor comes from a highly respected Republican doyen, economist Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, whom the president has praised for his “wise policies and prudent judgment.”
Sadly for Bush and Cheney, Greenspan decided to put prudence aside in his new book, The Age of Turbulence, and answer the most neuralgic issue of our times—why the United States invaded Iraq.
Greenspan writes:
“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
Everyone knows? Would that it were so. But it’s hardly everyone.
There are so many, still, who “can’t handle the truth,” and that is understandable. I have found it a wrenching experience to conclude that the America I love would deliberately launch what the Nuremburg Tribunal called the “supreme international crime”—a war of aggression—largely for oil.
For those who are able to overcome the very common, instinctive denial, for those who can handle the truth, it really helps to turn off the Sunday football games early enough to catch up on what’s going on.
There they could have seen another of Bush’s senior economic advisers, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill on Jan. 11, 2004, discussing The Price of Loyalty, his memoir about his two years inside the Bush administration.
O’Neill, a plain speaker, likened the president’s behavior at cabinet meetings to that of “a blind man in a roomful of deaf people.” Cheney and “a praetorian guard that encircled the president” would help Bush make decisions off-line, blocking contrary views.
Cheney has a Rumsfeldian knack for aphorisms that don’t parse in the real world— like “deficits don’t matter.” To his credit, O’Neill picked a fight with that and ended up being fired personally by Cheney. In his book, Greenspan heaps scorn on the same Cheneyesque insight.
O’Neill made no bones about his befuddlement over the president’s diffident disengagement from discussions on policy, except, that is, for Bush’s remarks betraying a pep-rally-cheerleader fixation with removing Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq.
Why Iraq? 'Largely Oil'
O’Neill began to understand right after Bush’s inauguration when the discussion among his top advisers abruptly moved to how to divvy up Iraq’s oil wealth.
Just days into the job, President Bush created the Cheney energy task force with the stated aim of developing “a national energy policy designed to help the private sector.” Typically, Cheney has been able to keep secret its deliberations and even the names of its members.
But a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit forced the Commerce Department to turn over task force documents, including a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries, terminals, and potential areas for exploration; a Pentagon chart “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts”; and another chart detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects—all dated March 2001.
On the 60 Minutes program on Dec. 15, 2002, Steve Croft asked then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “What do you say to people who think this [the coming invasion of Iraq] is about oil?” Rumsfeld replied:
“Nonsense. It just isn’t. There—there—there are certain............. things like that, myths that are floating around. I’m glad you asked. I—it has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.”
Au Contraire
Greenspan’s indiscreet remark adds to the abundant evidence that Iraq oil, and not weapons of mass destruction, was the priority target long before the Bush administration invoked WMD as a pretext to invade Iraq.
In the heady days of “Mission Accomplished,” a week after the president landed on the aircraft carrier, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz virtually bragged about the deceit during an interview.
On May 9, 2003, Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair:
“The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason...”
During a relaxed moment in Singapore later that same month, Wolfowitz reminded the press that Iraq “floats on a sea of oil,” and thus added to the migraine he had already given folks in the White House PR shop.
But wait. For those of us absorbing more than Fox channel news, the primacy of the oil factor was a no-brainer.
The limited number of invading troops were ordered to give priority to securing the oil wells and oil industry infrastructure immediately and let looters have their way with just about everything else (including the ammunition storage depots!).
Barely three weeks into the war, Rumsfeld famously answered criticism for not stopping the looting: “Stuff happens.” No stuff happened to the Oil Ministry.
Small wonder that, according to O’Neill, Rumsfeld tried hard to dissuade him from writing his book and has avoided all comment on it. As for Greenspan’s book, Rumsfeld will find it easier to dodge questions from the Washington press corps from his sinecure at the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
Eminence Grise...or Oily
But the other half of what Col. Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff at the State Department, calls the “Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal” is still lurking in the shadows.
What changed Cheney’s attitude toward Iraq from his sensible remark in 1992 when then-Defense Secretary Cheney defended President George H.W. Bush's decision in 1991 not to follow up the expulsion of Iraqi troops from Kuwait with the ouster of Saddam Hussein and the conquest of Iraq.
“How many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?” Cheney asked in August 1992. “Not that damned many. So I think we got it right...when the president made the decision that we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.”
Then, there were Cheney’s revealing, damning remarks as Halliburton's CEO?
“Oil companies are expected to keep developing enough oil to offset oil depletion and also to meet new demand,” Cheney said in autumn 1999. “So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the national oil companies are obviously in control of 90 percent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. The Middle East with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies.”
Not only Cheney, but also many of the captains of the oil industry were looking on Iraq with covetous eyes before the war.
Most forget that the Bush/Cheney administration came in on the heels of severe shortages of oil and natural gas in the U.S., and the passing of a milestone at which the United States had just begun importing more than half of the oil it consumes.
One oil executive confided to a New York Times reporter a month before the war: “For any oil company, being in Iraq is like being a kid in F.A.O. Schwarz.”
There were, to be sure, other factors behind the ill-starred attack on Iraq—the determination to acquire permanent military bases in the area, for one. But that factor can be viewed as a subset of the energy motivation.
In other words, the felt need for what the Pentagon prefers to call “enduring” military bases in the Middle East is a function of its strategic importance which is a function—you guessed it, a function of its natural resources. Not only oil, but natural gas and water as well.
In my opinion, the other major factor in the Bush/Cheney decision to make war on Iraq was the misguided notion that this would make that part of the world safer for Israel.
Indeed, the so-called “neo-conservatives” still running U.S. policy toward the Middle East continue to have great difficulty distinguishing between what they perceive to be the strategic interests of Israel and those of the United States.
Why Are Americans Silent?
Could it be that many Americans remain silent because we are unwilling to recognize the Iraq war as the first of the resource wars of the 21st century; because we continue to be comfortable hogging far more than our share of the world’s resources and will look the other way if our leaders tell us that aggressive war is necessary to protect that siren-call, “our way of life,” from attack by those who are just plain jealous?
Perhaps a clue can be found in the remarkable reaction I received after a lecture I gave two and a half years ago in a very affluent suburb of Milwaukee. I had devoted much of my talk to what I consider the most important factoid of this century: the world is running out of oil.
Afterwards some 20 folks lingered in a small circle to ask follow-up questions. A persistent, handsomely dressed man, who just would not let go, dominated the questioning:
"Surely you agree that we need the oil. Then what's your problem? Some 1,450 killed thus far are far fewer than the toll in Vietnam where we lost 58,000; it's a small price to pay... a sustainable rate to bear. What IS your problem?"
I asked the man if he would feel differently if one of those (then) 1,450 killed were his own son. Judging from his abrupt, incredulous reaction, the suggestion struck him as so farfetched as to be beyond his ken. “It wouldn’t be my son,” he said.
And that, I believe, is a HUGE part of the problem.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. A former CIA analyst, he is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. His e-mail is RRMcGovern@aol.com
Greenspan Spills the Beans on Oil
By Ray McGovern
September 16, 2007
For those still wondering why President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney sent our young men and women into Iraq, the secret is now “largely” out.
No, not from the lips of former Secretary of State Colin Powell. It appears we shall have to wait until the disgraced general/diplomat draws nearer to meeting his maker before he gets concerned over anything more than the “blot” that Iraq has put on his reputation.
Rather, the uncommon candor comes from a highly respected Republican doyen, economist Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, whom the president has praised for his “wise policies and prudent judgment.”
Sadly for Bush and Cheney, Greenspan decided to put prudence aside in his new book, The Age of Turbulence, and answer the most neuralgic issue of our times—why the United States invaded Iraq.
Greenspan writes:
“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
Everyone knows? Would that it were so. But it’s hardly everyone.
There are so many, still, who “can’t handle the truth,” and that is understandable. I have found it a wrenching experience to conclude that the America I love would deliberately launch what the Nuremburg Tribunal called the “supreme international crime”—a war of aggression—largely for oil.
For those who are able to overcome the very common, instinctive denial, for those who can handle the truth, it really helps to turn off the Sunday football games early enough to catch up on what’s going on.
There they could have seen another of Bush’s senior economic advisers, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill on Jan. 11, 2004, discussing The Price of Loyalty, his memoir about his two years inside the Bush administration.
O’Neill, a plain speaker, likened the president’s behavior at cabinet meetings to that of “a blind man in a roomful of deaf people.” Cheney and “a praetorian guard that encircled the president” would help Bush make decisions off-line, blocking contrary views.
Cheney has a Rumsfeldian knack for aphorisms that don’t parse in the real world— like “deficits don’t matter.” To his credit, O’Neill picked a fight with that and ended up being fired personally by Cheney. In his book, Greenspan heaps scorn on the same Cheneyesque insight.
O’Neill made no bones about his befuddlement over the president’s diffident disengagement from discussions on policy, except, that is, for Bush’s remarks betraying a pep-rally-cheerleader fixation with removing Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq.
Why Iraq? 'Largely Oil'
O’Neill began to understand right after Bush’s inauguration when the discussion among his top advisers abruptly moved to how to divvy up Iraq’s oil wealth.
Just days into the job, President Bush created the Cheney energy task force with the stated aim of developing “a national energy policy designed to help the private sector.” Typically, Cheney has been able to keep secret its deliberations and even the names of its members.
But a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit forced the Commerce Department to turn over task force documents, including a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries, terminals, and potential areas for exploration; a Pentagon chart “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts”; and another chart detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects—all dated March 2001.
On the 60 Minutes program on Dec. 15, 2002, Steve Croft asked then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “What do you say to people who think this [the coming invasion of Iraq] is about oil?” Rumsfeld replied:
“Nonsense. It just isn’t. There—there—there are certain............. things like that, myths that are floating around. I’m glad you asked. I—it has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.”
Au Contraire
Greenspan’s indiscreet remark adds to the abundant evidence that Iraq oil, and not weapons of mass destruction, was the priority target long before the Bush administration invoked WMD as a pretext to invade Iraq.
In the heady days of “Mission Accomplished,” a week after the president landed on the aircraft carrier, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz virtually bragged about the deceit during an interview.
On May 9, 2003, Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair:
“The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason...”
During a relaxed moment in Singapore later that same month, Wolfowitz reminded the press that Iraq “floats on a sea of oil,” and thus added to the migraine he had already given folks in the White House PR shop.
But wait. For those of us absorbing more than Fox channel news, the primacy of the oil factor was a no-brainer.
The limited number of invading troops were ordered to give priority to securing the oil wells and oil industry infrastructure immediately and let looters have their way with just about everything else (including the ammunition storage depots!).
Barely three weeks into the war, Rumsfeld famously answered criticism for not stopping the looting: “Stuff happens.” No stuff happened to the Oil Ministry.
Small wonder that, according to O’Neill, Rumsfeld tried hard to dissuade him from writing his book and has avoided all comment on it. As for Greenspan’s book, Rumsfeld will find it easier to dodge questions from the Washington press corps from his sinecure at the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
Eminence Grise...or Oily
But the other half of what Col. Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff at the State Department, calls the “Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal” is still lurking in the shadows.
What changed Cheney’s attitude toward Iraq from his sensible remark in 1992 when then-Defense Secretary Cheney defended President George H.W. Bush's decision in 1991 not to follow up the expulsion of Iraqi troops from Kuwait with the ouster of Saddam Hussein and the conquest of Iraq.
“How many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?” Cheney asked in August 1992. “Not that damned many. So I think we got it right...when the president made the decision that we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.”
Then, there were Cheney’s revealing, damning remarks as Halliburton's CEO?
“Oil companies are expected to keep developing enough oil to offset oil depletion and also to meet new demand,” Cheney said in autumn 1999. “So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the national oil companies are obviously in control of 90 percent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. The Middle East with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies.”
Not only Cheney, but also many of the captains of the oil industry were looking on Iraq with covetous eyes before the war.
Most forget that the Bush/Cheney administration came in on the heels of severe shortages of oil and natural gas in the U.S., and the passing of a milestone at which the United States had just begun importing more than half of the oil it consumes.
One oil executive confided to a New York Times reporter a month before the war: “For any oil company, being in Iraq is like being a kid in F.A.O. Schwarz.”
There were, to be sure, other factors behind the ill-starred attack on Iraq—the determination to acquire permanent military bases in the area, for one. But that factor can be viewed as a subset of the energy motivation.
In other words, the felt need for what the Pentagon prefers to call “enduring” military bases in the Middle East is a function of its strategic importance which is a function—you guessed it, a function of its natural resources. Not only oil, but natural gas and water as well.
In my opinion, the other major factor in the Bush/Cheney decision to make war on Iraq was the misguided notion that this would make that part of the world safer for Israel.
Indeed, the so-called “neo-conservatives” still running U.S. policy toward the Middle East continue to have great difficulty distinguishing between what they perceive to be the strategic interests of Israel and those of the United States.
Why Are Americans Silent?
Could it be that many Americans remain silent because we are unwilling to recognize the Iraq war as the first of the resource wars of the 21st century; because we continue to be comfortable hogging far more than our share of the world’s resources and will look the other way if our leaders tell us that aggressive war is necessary to protect that siren-call, “our way of life,” from attack by those who are just plain jealous?
Perhaps a clue can be found in the remarkable reaction I received after a lecture I gave two and a half years ago in a very affluent suburb of Milwaukee. I had devoted much of my talk to what I consider the most important factoid of this century: the world is running out of oil.
Afterwards some 20 folks lingered in a small circle to ask follow-up questions. A persistent, handsomely dressed man, who just would not let go, dominated the questioning:
"Surely you agree that we need the oil. Then what's your problem? Some 1,450 killed thus far are far fewer than the toll in Vietnam where we lost 58,000; it's a small price to pay... a sustainable rate to bear. What IS your problem?"
I asked the man if he would feel differently if one of those (then) 1,450 killed were his own son. Judging from his abrupt, incredulous reaction, the suggestion struck him as so farfetched as to be beyond his ken. “It wouldn’t be my son,” he said.
And that, I believe, is a HUGE part of the problem.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. A former CIA analyst, he is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. His e-mail is RRMcGovern@aol.com
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lian
- Bronze Member
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- Joined: 2005 Feb 09, 14:17
I went for my hollydays to Tahiti (some of my family live there) and I had to stop for two hours in Los Angeles. Two hours in a transit area. You could think you would have some rest (21 hours of travel between Paris and Papeete) but the US government says not. All men of the plane had to go to another place to answer private questions "Where are you going ?" "For what purpose ?" "Who are you going to see ?" "What's your job ?" and so on... You think "Who are you to ask such things ? I'm not going to stay in the USA, I'm just going to Tahiti. It's my private life and your questions have no sense in a democratic country" but you shout your mouth and be a cool boy. The worst souvenir of my hollydays.
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