The Oil Wars

The talk today is that the US is entertaining the idea of pulling out of Iraq. Let me state why this is never going to happen, and why the opposite situation is much more likely—that the US Administration is already planning to escalate its military involvement there during the next few months.

The next few months are going to change the course of World events, and set the stage for how the Crisis of Mankind will unfold. The war in Iraq is coming apart at the seams for the US Administration, yet they have no option of withdrawing or losing control over the region. Therefore they will be forced to take some decisive actions, and those will undoubtedly be military ones, rather than diplomatic ones.

The reason the US army is there is oil. There is no other argument left to any rational person who is apprised of the facts. The United States and the Western World will dissolve away, at least in the form we know them now, when inexpensive oil and gas are no longer available. So the Power Possessing Beings know that day must be put off for as long as possible, and at any costs. It’s neither love of nation, nor love of democracy that drives them, it’s simply that the fortunes of the institutions that they head are so inextricably rooted in the Western way of life and laws. The unfortunate irony, as you’ll see in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Oil Wars, is that the hydrocarbon energy reserves that it can’t live without are so disproportionately concentrated in the hands of people whose world-view and way of life greatly contrasts with the Western one. In the past decade, this situation has become untenable for the Power Possessing Beings of the world, because without direct control of a substantial portion of Man’s most potent resource, they will always find themselves, as they say, “over a barrel”. The way out of this situation, in the minds of the Power Possessing Beings, is to “rebuild” the Middle East in the image of the Western World. To do this, they had to first take control by force. Then the US Administration would use US taxpayer money to freely finance the investments of large corporate owners, allowing them to set up business there and begin employing the cheaply-available labor force and simultaneously indoctrinate them to the Western way of life.

The idea made sense on paper, and had been fleshed-out over the past decade since it first began to take form in what we now call the Neo-Conservative mindset. After all, every other culture and society in the world has been climbing all over themselves to adopt the Western-Consumer lifestyle. If the OPEC countries hadn’t followed suit, it was undoubtedly because many of them were controlled by fundamentalist or anti-Western authorities. The best way to exercise control over people is obviously to make them want to be controlled—and American Capitalism does just that, by employing them. Surely the Middle Eastern people themselves would jump at the chance to work for corporations, and spend the money they earn on exciting and convenient products sold by other corporations. And for the most part that is true. But what they are finding now is that there is indeed a substantial number of Islamic people who understand and reject our way of life. These people have mounted a substantial guerilla resistance movement, especially in regard to their recent use of media-image iconism to turn the US people against their own government administration. They've begun to target the workers and corporate figures involved in the “rebuilding” operation. And now the US has received an unexpected shot in the foot with the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, which has further eroded world support, and bolstered anti-western resistance.

Now the majority of Iraqis no doubt do favor a more democratic society, and its apparent that the resistance movement there is not overwhelmingly popular among these people. But the cause they’ve undertaken strikes a chord with Islamic peoples worldwide. Islamic peoples see through a lot of the lies that are plaguing the West: un-backed “fiat” currencies, interest lending, and a media driven by desire-creation. They know that there is a difference between embracing Democracy, and embracing Capitalism. So Bremer’s offer to leave if they are asked is a serious gamble, because while the Iraqi people are glad to be free of Saddam, they also want to be free of the West. Civil War might ensue, but it will be far less severe than what is occurring presently.

If the American occupation of Iraq continues to unravel politically, strategically, and morale-wise—and seeing as how the US Presidential election is approaching and it’s beginning to look as though the current Administration will not get a second term—there is going to be incredible pressure on them to pull something out of a hat in the next two or three months. There’s not enough time, and the groundwork is not currently in place, for a diplomatic resolution. They cannot leave the oil, and they cannot continue the current course—the troops are just too tired and dispirited. In the Administration’s shoes, what is clearly needed to fulfill the objective is something brash, definitive and unexpected. What that will be is anyone’s guess, but it will almost certainly involve Israel. Anothe factor to keep in mind is that the Saudi Royal Family is caught in the crossfire, sitting between the Western Scylla and the fundamentalist-revolutionary Charybdis, while atop what is far-and-away the largest controlling interest of hydrocarbon reserves in the world. So the success of the US Administration’s next gambit may be uncertain, but it is very hard not to believe that it will come—and it will be the catalyst for initiating the collapse of the economic house of cards that the Federal Reserve Bank has created for America and the World.