24 Comments

1. 

   Sterling on March 18, 2005 at 1:59 am

   Metalordie –
   Regarding my need to see the world: When I said that 83% of Americans don’t have a passport, it wasn’t my intent to suggest that I was among that number.
   Regarding the phrase “Iraqi tesistance”: HAhahahaha. Zarqawi is Jordanian, OBL is a Yemeni/Saudi, and out-of-uniform Syrian and Iranian military personnel are being arrested every week. The Iraqis have bought into voting. They’re not resisting. Even the Sunnis admit they made a mistake in boycotting the vote. It’s just clueless radicals like yourself who can’t accept the truth: the invasion worked. Iraqis are better off, and will have a responsive government for the first time. Bush was right.
   Regarding the oil question: North America has a lot of oil, too – more than Arabia – the problem is that it is more expensive to extract. But as the price per barrel climbs, suddenly Alaskan and Canadian oil sources look more attractive. I’m sure that’s true in other places, too, like Russia. So the price per barrel can only climb so high before additional oil sources are brought online and increase supply to establish a price plateau. I’m not sure OPEC is particularly relevant any longer, and I doubt the Bush administration worries too much about OPEC these days. It’s firing blanks.

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2. 

   metalordie on March 17, 2005 at 1:52 pm

   Hmmm….next time someone says Saddam and 9/11 in the same breath.

   “Secret U.S. Plans For Iraq’s Oil

   By: Greg Palast Reporting for BBC Newsnight
   Thur Mar 17, 2005 08:25 AM ET
   MACON,GA.- The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq’s oil before the 9/11 attacks sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC’s Newsnight has revealed.
   Two years ago today – when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad – protestors claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq’s oil once Saddam had been conquered.
   In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of “Big Oil” executives and US State Department “pragmatists.”
   “Big Oil” appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants.
   Insiders told Newsnight that planning began “within weeks” of Bush’s first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US.
   An Iraqi-born oil industry consultant Falah Aljibury says he took part in the secret meetings in California, Washington and the Middle East. He described a State Department plan for a forced coup d’etat.
   Mr Aljibury himself told Newsnight that he interviewed potential successors to Saddam Hussein on behalf of the Bush administration.
   Secret sell-off plan
   The industry-favored plan was pushed aside by yet another secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq’s oil fields. The new plan, crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq’s oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas.
   The sell-off was given the green light in a secret meeting in London headed by Ahmed Chalabi shortly after the US entered Baghdad, according to Robert Ebel. Mr. Ebel, a former Energy and CIA oil analyst, now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, flew to the London meeting, he told Newsnight, at the request of the State Department.
   Mr Aljibury, once Ronald Reagan’s “back-channel” to Saddam, claims that plans to sell off Iraq’s oil, pushed by the US-installed Governing Council in 2003, helped instigate the insurgency and attacks on US and British occupying forces.
   “Insurgents used this, saying, ‘Look, you’re losing your country, your losing your resources to a bunch of wealthy billionaires who want to take you over and make your life miserable,” said Mr Aljibury from his home near San Francisco.
   “We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, built on the premise that privatization is coming.”
   Privatization blocked by industry
   Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq’s oil production for the US Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme.
   Mr Carroll told us he made it clear to Paul Bremer, the US occupation chief who arrived in Iraq in May 2003, that: “There was to be no privatization of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was involved.”
   The chosen successor to Mr Carroll, a Conoco Oil executive, ordered up a new plan for a state oil company preferred by the industry.
   Ari Cohen, of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation, told Newsnight that an opportunity had been missed to privatize Iraq’s oil fields. He advocated the plan as a means to help the US defeat Opec, and said America should have gone ahead with what he called a “no-brainer” decision.
   Mr Carroll hit back, telling Newsnight, “I would agree with that statement. To privatize would be a no-brainer. It would only be thought about by someone with no brain.”
   New plans, obtained from the State Department by Newsnight and Harper’s Magazine under the US Freedom of Information Act, called for creation of a state-owned oil company favored by the US oil industry. It was completed in January 2004, Harper’s discovered, under the guidance of Amy Jaffe of the James Baker Institute in Texas. Former US Secretary of State Baker is now an attorney. His law firm, Baker Botts, is representing ExxonMobil and the Saudi Arabian government.
   View segments of Iraq oil plans at http://www.GregPalast.com/opeconthemarch.html.
   Questioned by Newsnight, Ms Jaffe said the oil industry prefers state control of Iraq’s oil over a sell-off because it fears a repeat of Russia’s energy privatization. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, US oil companies were barred from bidding for the reserves.
   Jaffe said “There is no question that an American oil company … would not be enthusiastic about a plan that would privatize all the assets with Iraq companies and they (US companies) might be left out of the transaction.”
   In addition, Ms. Jaffe says US oil companies are not warm to any plan that would undermine Opec, “They [oil companies] have to worry about the price of oil.”
   “I’m not sure that if I’m the chair of an American company, and you put me on a lie detector test, I would say high oil prices are bad for me or my company.”
   The former Shell oil boss agrees. In Houston, he told Newsnight, “Many neo-conservatives are people who have certain ideological beliefs about markets, about democracy, about this that and the other. International oil companies without exception are very pragmatic commercial organizations. They don’t have a theology.”
   ==============================
   Greg Palast’s film – the result of a joint investigation by BBC Newsnight and Harper’s Magazine – will broadcast on Thursday, 17 March, 2005.
   You can watch the program online – available Thursday, March 17 after 7pm EST for 24hrs – from the Newsnight website:
   http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/default.stm.
   You can also read the story in greater detail in the latest issue of Harper’s magazine – now available at your local newsstand.”

   Now you know why EVERY single day a pipeline is blown up in Iraq. It’s not terrorists. It’s Iraqi resistance who know full well what would happen to their oil and oil fields.

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3. 

   metalordie on March 17, 2005 at 1:48 pm

   Man this guy is a work of art.
   I told Rivda to get some but I think Sterling hasn’t had booty in ages. I suggest you leave the US for a while, travel around. Go to France. See what they think of you there. Or to a Pub in Scotland, maybe. Then go to Berlin. Try Moscow.
   Belgrade would be hella place to visit. Libya, Algeria and Nigeria. Then go through Pakistan and Bangladesh. Wherever you go pass out pamphlets of what you’ve been regurgitating here.
   Or, conversely, go to the Sinai. Hang out with the Beduins in Dahab. Smoke some hashish, have some excellent mint tea and some roast lamb for dinner. Watch a bellydancer melt your prejudices away.
   Sit and talk with an Arab family. Break bread with them. Then go to a Cairo cultural festival. And then go back to the US.
   We’ll see if you haven’t changed your mind by then.

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4. 

   Sterling on March 17, 2005 at 1:12 pm

   Webster’s defines “imperialism” thusly:
   1 : imperial government, authority, or system
   2 : the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation especially by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas; broadly : the extension or imposition of power, authority, or influence [union imperialism]
   Imperialism is the practice of empire-building and -running. Imperial is the adjective form of “empire”. That is, as I have said, not what the United States is doing. And hegemony is hegemony – they are different things, which is why they are different words, and I don’t deny hegemony. I also don’t think hegemony is necessarily a willful thing – it just happens when one country wields a disproportionate amount of influence. The United States is the hegemon. And if you’re using that skewed definition of “imperialism” – probably written by some 60s radical English professor – then OK, we’re imperialists and I don’t have a problem with it. I’m not going to apologize for what we’ve done in Iraq – I’m proud of it.
   aka Jeff: It is presumptive. It’s also factual. Do you remember that cover of the Economist from a few years back, which depicted America’s view of the world? North America was gigantic and all the rest of the world dwindled almost to nothing. We’re a large country, self-sufficient in all the cultural and entertainment “stuff” that most people ever need. Most Americans, something like 83%, don’t even have a passport. The United States is very nearly its own world and the people in it, by and large, don’t pay very much attention to what goes on beyond the borders. The most popular song about 9/11 had this line in the refrain: “I watch CNN, but I’m not sure I could tell you the difference in Iraq and Iran.”
   When the tsunami hit, American private charity to the affected areas was enormous – everyone I know gave at least a few dollars – but most Americans would be hard pressed to point out on a globe where it happened. Americans don’t want bad things to happen to people in other countries and we want to help when they do, but we’re just not interested in the rest of the world most of the time. Some Americans actually relish the hatred the French feel for us, and use French opposition as a contrarian indicator.
   From our perspective, other countries are forever suffering problems that they can’t handle on their own, and so we have to step in and clean it up. Sometimes it’s an act of God, like the tsunami, other times it’s just a screwed up political system, like the Middle East. Whenever something needs to be fixed, who does everyone look to? The United States.

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