FYI: Austin's local PBS affiliate KUT has asked for listeners'
opinions regarding the Bush administration's Iraq policy. This was my
response. --jr
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GOOD OIL BOYS
George W. Bush and his clique of good-oil-boy champions of America
über alles constitute the only really credible threat to world peace
and stability at the present time. Driven by bloodlust for the vast
oil reserves in Iraq and its neighbors, the Bush team
opportunistically dissembles, deceives, and inflames deep-rooted
ignorance and prejudice in order to advance its imperialistic
ambitions while trying to isolate and/or neutralize opposition here
and throughout the world.
"War with Iraq" works as a multipurpose smoke-and-mirrors device to
deflect our attention from the Bush administration's serious
credibility problems. First of all, George W. Bush has the ongoing
problem of convincing people here and abroad that he really is the
President of the United States, not some dull-witted happy-face
pitchman for a right-wing presidential coup. Secondly, George W. Bush
seems to be hypersensitive to the lingering whispers about his
father's failure to remove Saddam Hussein during the last war with
Iraq. Thirdly, Bush is commander-in-chief of the world's most
powerful and scientific military yet has failed to capture Osama bin
Laden and/or eradicate the al Queda infrastructure and/or bring peace
and stability to Afghanistan. Fourthly, the Bush team has botched all
attempts to restart a national economy that is in apparent freefall.
Now the administration is faced with the task of "selling" future
generations to a "way of life" demanding greater personal sacrifices,
higher costs and taxes, lower wages, and a greatly diminished
standard of living as the price for "homeland security" (though
reason might suggest the nation's best "homeland security" might be a
truly fair, even-handed Middle East policy at a relative cost of
almost nothing to American taxpayers). Finally, the White House must
cover up recent foreign policy blunders in Korea, Palestine, Iran,
Venezuela, and who knows where else.
One cannot look deeply into the current situation -- i.e., try to
understand its extraordinary historical nuances dating back some 900
years -- without seeing the emerging implication that the Washington
regime has domination of the world oil market at the top of its
private agenda. With this realization, one must also confront the
terrible possibility that a U.S.-sponsored armed crusade against
Islamic peoples and cultures to gratify this avarice for oil could
too easily trigger World War III, an event which suggests an even
more horrifying possibility: a real "war to end all wars" in which
our planet is transformed into a smoldering wasteland for the next
several million years.
Saddam Hussein is a bad guy...no argument here. But the Bush
administration has offered nothing to show that Saddam poses any
viable threat beyond Iraq's borders (unless, of course, he is
attacked). He is even less a threat with U.N. weapons inspectors and
CIA covert ops roaming the Iraqi countryside, peeking under rocks and
behind closed doors. On the other hand, the
Bush-Chaney-Rumsfeld-Ashcroft cabal threaten to pour gasoline on
flames already burning in the Middle East, bully our historical
allies in Europe with the spectre of a U.S.-Britain-controlled world
oil market, and blithely trump the nuclear card in the Far East. This
constitutes, in my thinking, a REAL threat to world peace and
stability.
James Retherford
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