Why There Was No Exit Plan
There are people in Washington … who never intend to withdraw military forces from Iraq and they’re looking for 10, 20, 50 years in the future … the reason that we went into Iraq was to establish a permanent military base in the Gulf region, and I have never heard any of our leaders say that they would commit themselves to the Iraqi people that 10 years from now there will be no military bases of the United States in Iraq.
– former President Jimmy Carter, Feb. 3, 2006
For all the talk about timetables and benchmarks, one might think that the United States will end the military occupation of Iraq within the lifetimes of the readers of this opinion editorial. Think again.
There is to be no withdrawal from Iraq, just as there has been no withdrawal from hundreds of places around the world that are outposts of the American empire. As UC San Diego professor emeritus Chalmers Johnson put it, “One of the reasons we had no exit plan from Iraq is that we didn’t intend to leave.”
The United States maintains 737 military bases in 130 countries across the globe. They exist for the purpose of defending the economic interests of the United States, what is euphemistically called “national security.” In order to secure favorable access to Iraq’s vast reserves of light crude, the United States is spending billions on the construction of at least five large permanent military bases throughout that country.
A new Iraq oil law, largely written by the Coalition Provisional Authority, is planned for ratification by June. This law cedes control of Iraq’s oil to western powers for 30 years . There is major opposition to the proposed law within Iraq, especially among the country’s five trade union federations that represent hundreds of thousands of oil workers. The United States is working hard to surmount this opposition by appealing directly to the al-Maliki government in Iraq.
The attack upon, and subsequent occupation of, Iraq can be seen as a direct result of the 2001 National Energy Policy Development Group (better known as vice president Cheney’s energy task force) that was comprised largely of oil and energy company executives. This task force — the proceedings of which have been kept secret by the administration on the grounds of “executive privilege” — recommended that the U.S. government support initiatives in Middle Eastern countries “to open up areas of their energy sector to foreign investment.” As Antonio Juhasz, an analyst with Oil Change International wrote last month in the New York Times, “One invasion and a great deal of political engineering by the Bush administration later, this is exactly what the proposed Iraq oil law would achieve.”
The people of the United States have indicated, in the national election last November and in countless polls, that they no longer support the Bush administration’s war. The Scooter Libby trial revealed that top administration officials, including the vice president, “cherry-picked” and distorted intelligence in order to sell a “pre-emptive” war to a spooked public. The squandering of hundreds of billions of dollars, some billions of which, according to Seymour Hersh writing in the New Yorker, is being siphoned into “black-ops” programs being run out of Cheney’s office (a stunning redux of Iran-Contra carried out by many of the same actors), has also strained the patience and credulity of the American people.
Another betrayal is the “contracting out” of “war-related activities” to corporations such as Halliburton, Bechtel, Chemonics and Blackwater. Halliburton, Vice President Cheney’s previous employer, calls itself an “energy services company” but has tentacles reaching into nearly every aspect of the war (originally dubbed Operation Iraqi Liberation until some bright bulb among the Bushies realized that “OIL” might not be the best handle for this venture). Halliburton has also profited handsomely from no-bid government contracts awarded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the construction at the national embarrassment known as “Gitmo,” and most recently, from the fiasco at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C.
Unfortunately, all this corruption, mayhem and death are good for some (or it wouldn’t go on).
The U.S. military budget, larger than the military budgets of the rest of the world’s nations combined, continues skyward, even without all the “supplementals” passed regularly by Congress to fight the “war on terror.”
The question we must ask as citizens is this: Is the United States a democratic republic or an empire? History demonstrates that it’s not possible to be both.
Dan Hamburg, a former U.S. representative, is executive director of Voice of the Environment.
© 2007 The San Francisco Chronicle
There was no exit plan because there never was a plan to exit.
I wonder…. if the people of the US were asked for permission to invade Iraq to take possession of the oil would we say ” go for it”. After all we need this oil so we can continue to pretend that nothing has changed… so we can continue to drive our SUV’s and generally waste energy reserves just for the hell of it.
I wonder how many American Fascists really exist. It should be obvious to anyone paying attention that the plan was to stay forever.. or as long as the oil lasts.
This “War” was no mistake. It is a premeditated act of piracy, theft, murder. Wake up and smell the carnage.
Nice article Dan, but if you still have to ask the question;”Is the United States a democratic republic or an empire?” then you have not been paying any attention to the continued disregard for ALL US law by this administration. Italy’s former dictator Benito Mussolini coined the phrase Fascism in the late 1930’s and called it the merging of both corporate and government interests.
When you can purchase Senate votes or seats directly through perfectly legal means called campaign contributions fascism is here. When the military is used to secure specific business interests and the media happily calls it “national security interests” fascism is here. If you speak against any of the current policies of this administration you run the risk of being disappeared using legal means called the PATRIOT act, fascism is here.
When the Supreme Court overstepped its Constitutional authority in 2000 and gave the White House to Republicans and Democrats said nothing, we had a fascist state. American Fascists do exist David, they are called Clinton, Lieberman, Gore, Bush, Cheney, Kerry, et al. It is the American Aristocracy which has become fascist and have taken the government for the people and by the people away from them and then gave us the bill. Until we wake up and smell the carnage in our own backyard and realize it was not militant muslims who are attacking us, but our own government, we will continue to suffer the consequences of our own denial.
“Look at you in war…There has never been a just one, never an honorable one, on the part of the instigator of the war.”
~Mark Twain
“The dangerous patriot…drifts into chauvinism and exhibits blind enthusiasm for military actions.”
~Colonel James A. Donovan, Marine Corps
“I am not blaming those who are resolved to rule, only those who show an even greater readiness to submit.”
~Thucydides
We are lead by LYING WEASELS.
Potential implications are chilling. If our government has gone to such lengths to fool us, then it must also be going to lengths to ensure its continued existance at the end of the normal term. It would be logical that the stakes are much too high to allow any effort, legitimate or otherwise that would undo what has been accomplished which explains the lawlessness of this administration. It also mandates that Congress initiate impeachment immediately.
I agree with the first post. We never had any plans to leave until they are out of oil.
“The process of transformation,” the plan said, “is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”- A Project for a New American Century.http://www.newamericancentury.org/
This was a Republican group that planned to dominate the world in the 1990’s by getting control of Persian Gulf oil. A central part of that plan was getting an initiating event that would focus the minds of the american people on defense; “a new pearl harbor.” http://preview.tinyurl.com/ewqzd
The defense department is incredibly misnamed. It’s proper name should be the aquisitions department. We are in Iraq to steal the Oil. That is the only reason we are in Iraq.
Only an imbecile could possibly believe that no terrorists can get into the US when 10 MILLION illegal immegrants manage it just fine. Yet since september 11th 2001 there have been no further terrorist attacks originating outside the US. The math just doesn’t work out.
The White House is holding on in Iraq until 2009 for the sole purpose of keeping Bush from being in office when the US forces retreat in defeat. Short of nuclear weapons being used to destroy the whole population US forces cannot win.
So why did we go in? It seems that Saudi Arabia might have a LOT less oil than they’ve claimed to. http://www.theoildrum.com/ In short the automobiling party is over and the GOP was desperate to secure a few more years at the bar. It didn’t work.
As stated above the USA is funding and committed to 50 bases in Iraq and most of them are permanent bases as my Congressional Representative told me back in the fall of 2005.
“STOP THE KILLING NOW”
Argue about the fine points afterward
neoconned is stating the ugly truth that few want to admit. Just take a look at big Pharma. We sit back and say little about the assault on our republic when drug companies openly pay our politicians to pass medical plans (at 3:00a.m., Friday morning) that rape us and profits them. When lobbyists are actually writing the legislation being passed by our political prostitutes then what in the hell do you think this is? A democracy???
Agree that this is not a democracy, but I have a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that if the Bush Reich had conducted a plebiscite on the real reason for going to war (US takeover of Iraqui oil), I believe the majority would have voted for the war. I think everyone knows on some level that was the reason for going to war. All the lies about WMD and democracy put a moral patina on the enterprise that has made honest dialogue difficult in the MSM, but it was always about oil and eveyone knows that. The opposition to the war that we see today is based on the fact that we are losing, not on the fact that the war was illegal and immoral in the first place.
Do you think most people in the US would be opposed to a private mercenary army paid for by US oil companies, and stationed there indefinitely to protect US oil interests ? I don’t think so. They will just pass the costs on to the US consumer and call it the “free market.”
Chalmers Johnson is usually a very reliable source.
But why do you insist on perpetuating the myth that the U.S. military is deployed around the world to protect “the economic interests of the United States” ?
The United States has no economic interests; individuals ( usually disguised as “corporations”) do.
I’ve had more than one history professor warn us that on an essay or final paper if we ever produced a sentence like “Japan said…” “Germany did…”, “Russia thought…” etc. that it would be an automatic fail. waiguoren underscores a very, very critical point. We can’t anthropomorphize abstract aggregates, grant nebulous concepts the ability to think/act like humans.
While we can point to systems, bureaucracies, etc. none of that stuff actually materializes or instantiates historically in the field of space/time until they’re populated with living individuals. And so I agree wholeheartedly.
And for the same reason, “countries” don’t wage war with one another. Leaders, who command armies, do so.
The media-military-industrial complex has effectively convinced people to ‘be afraid’ if little else. Activists are often demoralized by our situation. You see polls showing widespread disaffection with the status quo, but how can any opposition mobilize when the media is controlled by mega-corporations?
Anyone who works in a bureaucracy knows how silence and obedience is rewarded, being outspoken is seen as ‘out of place’ or a reason to get fired or demoted. The workplace environment has been made more idiotic and blandly patriotic because of 9/11.
How does this machine fall? Will we have a peaceful revolution? Or is this going to be a train wreck?
Historically, it is through demonstrations and strikes, even general strikes, that corrupt regimes often fall. But empires sometimes must be taken down not from the inside, but from other countries banding together. It’s not at all clear how our own empire will fall, or even if the demise is 1 year out, or 20?
For the sake of the planet, the sooner change comes the better. Let us hope that a resurgence of democracy is still possible even with the MSM working against us constantly.
I urge others to research, in painstaking detail, the events of 9/11 and the manner in which these wars and attacks on civil liberties were in the works prior to 9/11. The ruling elite in this country are profoundly evil and driven by an incessant greed that knows no bounds.
Who are the ruling elite? Consider the Council on Foreign Relations: http://www.cfr.org/about/ Consider the Federal Reserve, a private organization posing as a federal one: http://www.federalreserve.gov/bios/
Who really runs this dog and pony show?
Not only did they intend to stay in Iraq until the oil runs dry, they intended to use it as a base for an attack on Iran. However, things didn’t quite work out as planned and you may be seeing the last helicopter off the roof of the palatial embassy in the Green Zone sooner than you think.
Maybe Asia will pull the plug and stop playing enabler to Bush’s spending frenzy. The whole oil issue, as in would Americans still support this obscene heist IF they knew the true motives, would be moot IF the leaders acting AS leaders began to vigorously invest in alternative technologies. And what about the quaint idea of conservation? How many people leave their motors running when they stop at stores, wait for others who go inside shops, or the awful buses left to run all day in tourist parking lots here in Florida. As some engineers and eco-visionaries have noted, there are ways to cut back and create jobs and sustain our lifestyles minus the FAT. America has become an obese nation (30%) as a metaphor of its over-use of all products. The nation needs to go on a comprehensive diet, but of course global corporate capitalism without conscience is an insatiable beast whose incessant greed must be fed with more, bigger, faster, “better.” And the media’s cancerous relationship with the mechants of more means FEW will ever get this message. Nature and wild weather events will thus continue to reverberate its own species of wake-up calls.
We are going to take this country back.
No way are we going to be an empire. We will be a solid member of the international community working to make a better world for eveyone and everything.
That’s what we have to do.
The country has lost its way. Thanks Dan Hamburg and the Greens for shining the light.
The opposition to the war that we see today is based on the fact that we are losing, not on the fact that the war was illegal and immoral in the first place.
That,my dear friends is the most concise and truthful analysis of the Iraq occupation . When the vast majority of the flag-waving , chest-beating , jingoistic Americans admit to themselves that they were conned because they wanted to be,will the process of contrition and restitution to those harmed innocents begin and by harmed innocents I don’t mean Casey Sheehan or any of the other thousands of dead and wounded American military personel ; I mean the Iraqis themselves.
A little over five hundred years a lowly monk,Martin Luther spoke out,solo voce,against the evil practices of the Holy Roman Empire at which time rivalled the hegemony of USA today.His 92 theses attacking those evil practices could be summarized by seven simple words ” According to the Bible,it is wrong ” . Whether the solo voices today are Christian or not is irrelevent because what they are saying echoes Martin Luther with even more moral and legal authority ” According to the Bible and The Constitution of the United States of America and Geneva Conventions and the International Court of Justice and the UN Charter , all of which the White House and Congress are signatory too,it is wrong.
What is so infuriating with this, is that this underlying geopolitical reality has been obvious to many, for years, and yet it is still not part of the national conversation. Instead, we’re feted with a constant sideshow about terrorism, which is really just a cover story, a deadly one, but a cover story nonetheless. It’s a testimony to the pathetic state of the media in this country that they cannot get past surface issues such as this.
Until we can come clean as to why we’re really in Iraq, our country will continue to be pillaged and ruined both by terrorists abroad and by the fascists at home.
4/28/45 the Italian people had enough of Mussolini, 4/30/45 Hitler knew all was lost. When will we have enough?
Thanks for your comments about the quaint notion of conservation, Siouxrose. More years ago than I’d care to recall, I was part of a high school legislature at Purdue University. We each had to submit a “bill” to the “House” for consideration. Mine proposed that conservation of all natural resources be taught in our public schools. I was laughed off the floor (actually, the bill never made it out of committee), and I can still hear the laughs when anyone propose such a thing (and few do). When will we wake up? The time is certainly now.
waiguoren 5:38 pm
“The United States has no economic interests; individuals ( usually disguised as “corporations”) do.”
Picking up on waiguoren’s point: Has anybody looked into the role the American Enterprise Institute (which rented office space to PNAC)has played in the Iraq fiasco? Every step of the way AEI “scholars”, advisors, planners, and economists have participated. They probably helped Wolfowitz draw the conclusion that oil revenues would pay for Iraqi reconstruction. They probably helped Dick Cheney to conclude the insurgency was in its last throes. And they loved Ahmad Chalabi.
It seems to be correct that the Bush-Cheney administration may have planned on a permanent long-term US presence in Iraq.
Oil, a platform for large military bases and other motives seem to have been involved.
I want
By Robert R. Goldsborough III
I want to go somewhere where I can forget all this utter insanity.
Maybe, I can hide in some religious cloister or maybe a cult.
Makeup a whole new world to surround my self
From a world gone mad, as if it ever acting differently.
Sometimes it gets so hard to wake up each morning
To smell the stench of reality. It’s not just oil they want
They just want to globalize and privatize everything.
But I know their tentacles would reach way down to the smallest corner of the Earth and gobble me up, tear me apart
And throw me in to a cell at Guantánamo.
© copyright All rights reserved by Robert R.Goldsborough III May Day 2007.
rrgoldiii@sbcglobal.net
Ronald White: I agree with you; but are you aware that it is primarily fundamentalist Christians who support this war and make up Bush’s supporters? (That and of course the corporate interests that profit from this hellatious quagmire a/k/a war of choice.) Suetink: As to conservation, here’s how I see it. All concept of value has been attributable to paper money; so people think in terms of “what they can afford” as what paper money transacts. I watch my friends leave water running while I also see nature drying up. I studied American Indigenous mysticism and the WASTE of something so sacred makes me more than depressed. I see the flagrant disregard for the BEAUTY of the land as once I drove 35 miles along the Suwannee Preserve to count about 850 pieces of garbage, much of it bear bottles or boxes along the road. Lately I have seen dead deer. If a hunter shoots a deer for food and sees the sacredness of taking that life, it’s ONE thing; but killing for sport? And the engines running. Frankly, the last time I went to Disney it really upset me to see MANY tourist buses in their parking lot just GOING ALL DAY so they would be cool inside when the often grossly overweight passengers returned. The disconnect from nature is a HUGE problem, as is the false sense that “money” pays for all this. I may direct readers to a very important piece published years ago in Mother Jones that spoke of NATURAL CAPITALISM as beginning to log in the probable replacement costs of those things TAKEN from Mother Nature without any accountability. Also, for the poets and mystics out there, google the KOGI, a tribe in Columbia that hid in the jungles after the Spanish came by to do their “compassionate conservative conversions,” and like most indigenous these innocents identify with the land. Their habitat was deep in the jungle where rains were prolific, but little by little the rain stopped, and the land started to dry up. Although they wanted no contact with the modern world, who they term “younger brother,” a small film crew was allowed to come partly up the mountain towards their domiciles and film their teachers speaking. Our own CIA has studied remote viewing, also known as astral projection; and members of this tribe must have been savvy in this aptitude, for they said, “You must stop drilling the mother.” They further explained that if the waters/rain stop at the top of the jungle, so, too, will the rest of the world go fallow. People are not taught to respect the land, the great Mother, the Divine feminine principle, the sacredness of life, etc. And whether we take our lessons from the Bible or otherwise, when societies lose their sense of the sacred and little by little life erodes to the point of dog eat dog aggression (very close to that in the US), then the equalizing forces take over. I wish people could wake up, and this site is a wonderful forum for sharing bold and important ideas and realizations; but as many have stated, our media has been corrupted, and when not enough people are getting the medicine of truth, the disease of greed masked as patriotism, violence masked as righteous cause, spread. There is no karmic free pass. All actions return upon those that sent them. We can pray and do what we can.
Are we helplessly bound to a juggernaut destined to go over the cliff into the sea?
Are we not co-creators?
Why point the finger? Why not source something entirely new?
X and anti-X whirl in a dance locked in each others grasp.
Beyond X and anti-X lies something else.
We are one being. Let us give birth to something beyond…..
The nature of politics in this country began to make major changes with the end of World War II… Eisenhower could see it, thus his speech in 1961 warning us about the growing, festering military-industrial complex.
Jimmy Carter then ordered up “The Global 2000 Report” which showed a darkening future full of world poverty and disease if the U.S. and other affluent countries didn’t take the initiative to develop a “world economy”.
The wealth and power people in the world apparently decided to spread some of the wealth as long as they could skim the majority of it… but they have KEPT the power.
At this point, I’m afraid our political system has become so corrupt, that only a military coup or a civil war will ever derail it from it’s goal of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
still waiting for my moderated comment to show up
oh, there it is, thanks for posting that even though the delay was distubing…
The plan is to control the Iraq oil to release the oil at a time and pace that would keep prices as high as possible without causing change to renewable resources. An effective independent Iraq would sell oil at a faster pace to try to benefit enough of the people to stay in power.
Our permanent occupation is to enrich the already rich at the expense of the poor. This type of thinking leads to violent revolutions, genocide, and guys like Saddam, Pinochet and Marcos.
We are moving to be a more evil empire day by day and step by step. We embrace the methods we punished people for after WW2.
alyosha,
Re : …this underlying geopolitical reality has been obvious to many, for years, and yet it is still not part of the national conversation. Instead, we’re feted with a constant sideshow… It’s a testimony to the pathetic state of the media in this country that they cannot get past surface issues such as this.
Kinda makes you wonder, doesn’t it? It seems a bit odd that the media hustels us from one sensational incident to the next while fundamental issues fester anonymously. Odd enough that one might be promped to ask whose interests are being served by the present situation.
SUPREMEly COURTing a BUSHWACKED Nation.
Kenny LAYed low in Uruguay,
Tom Delayed nothing in redistricting, except Republican Criminal Activity.
Those WARLORDS spoken of in Afghanistan and IRAQ, live it the House of WE THE PEOPLE and Vacation on a Farm at Prairie Chapel Road in Crawford, Texas: 9.2 Miles from the Crawford PEACE HOUSE and 9.747Miles from Camp Casey III where a Memorial is set up for the Infants, Women and Children who left their Shoes Behind as they were ionized by “Shock and AWE”.
THIS IS NOT MY AMERICA
This once was the Land of the Free, now the Land of TORTURE.
This once was the HOME of the Brave; the Brave have been outsourced and the COWARDS rule their roost of Chicken Hawks, Tyrants and Traitors.
This is NOT my America, which I left when “I am not a Thief” was elected a second time. This present Cabel makes that Dick seem like Saint Richard the Watergater: No Murder there, just Lt. William Calley.
Yesterday, Saudi Arabia cried about Terrorists, not ARBUSHCO, I thought that Dick of veep had paid them along with the other “Coalition of the Purchased” cohorts, from Dowing Street Tony to Mexico City Vincinte to Vladimirs’ puttin it to them all.
THIS IS NOT MY AMERICA
NOT WITH 2,649 Dead at the SS Gate of that Western White House Farm, on September 2, 2006.
NOT WITH THE CONTINUUM of hidden FLAG DRAPED COFFINS arriving Daily.
IMPEACH NOW
You just don’t understand, we are no longer a democracy, we lost it when Bush was first elected by our Supreme Court. What we need now is a new king or queen. I would support Kem Bassinger or Nancy Pelosi, Jay Leno, Low Dobbs or myself.
Almost anyone would do better than the king and his sidekicks that we currently have in office. In addition, why make Iraq our 51st state, why not Mexico? They have lots of oil. We could invade them and have a real nice war close to home, great beaches, great food and lots of wonderful eople who love our country. No more Mexican border, no more illegal Mexican immigrants, they’d all be Americans. Take Panama back at the same time, only have a little border then. We could perhaps plead with Haliburton to upgrade the new state.
Dumb? This makes a much or more sense than starting the war with Iraq.
Depraved Indifference versus ‘Support the Troops’
.
It is well documented that the State Department prepared a post Iraq invasion plan that pointed out the likelihood of Sunni on Shia civil strife/slaughter. And now George Tenet painfully divulges that the CIA had a written inteligence section outlining and warning of the likely sectarian carnage. These documents were either shelved and ignored or appended to the tail end of the rigged, or politically “fixed”, intelligence that made the positive case for war; the positive case that the administration demanded.
The Military general staff was forbidden on pain of being fired from preparing a full G-4 or post-invasion plan which would with 100% certainty have warned of this civil slaughter danger. Political expediency demanded that our Marines, our Army and our Navy front line warriors be sent into battle unprepared.
There is a crime in this duplicitous action to send human targets into battle but hide the known consequences to meet political ends.
This action ended up causing thousands of deaths and injuries to purposefully unprepared U.S. troops. This crime is called ‘Depraved Indifference.’
All mankind now knows that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld organized a propaganda network which cherry picked intelligence to deliberately deceive the American public. (That somebody from this large organized propaganda cabal, in this case Cheney’s Chief of Staff, was eventually convicted of felonious behavior should not be surprising. But those who support a Scooter pardon should be made to publicly declare that they are in essence declaring that they support, then and now, the propaganda program that lied American and Iraqi citizens into this spiraling deathtrap called Iraq. But I digress.)
Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld et al not only cherry picked false fear-based intelligence that led to this conflagration they also deliberately buried the the dangers that our troops would face.They put the troops in harms way.
Plenty of documentation exists that the neocon cabal purposely chose not to ‘Support our Troops’ by providing the normal and required prewar planning.
Had the political agenda of the neocon cabal been made subservient to proper war planning, thousands of our troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis would not now be dead or maimed.
This depraved indifference should have its day in court.
Craig Johnson
craig,
Isn’t “depraved indifference” pretty much the Bush/Cheney governing style with regard to everyone outside their “base” — the ultrawealthy and the corporate elite, particularly in the oil, arms, pharmaceutical, insurance, and tobacco industries, and of course Halliburton? And I guess I should mention the few crumbs they throw to religious con-men (the Elmer Gantrys of today) to get their gullible flocks to contribute votes and resources for little to nothing in return.
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/05/01/bush-timetable-2
Enuf said !
I was reading Froomkin at today’s WaPo, and I ran across this interesting Bush quote: “Of the enemy he said, ‘You can attack a nation several ways. One, you can get 19 kids to fly airplanes into buildings, or you can gain control of something a country needs and deny that country access to that, in this case, oil, and run the price of oil up, all attempting to inflict serious economic damage.’”
Umm … okay. However — as far as I know, besides intermittent saber-rattling from Saddam Hussein, there was never any real effort on the part of Iraq to deprive the US or it’s allies of oil. Even if Hussein did decide not to sell to the US, all that would mean is that other countries would buy the Iraqi oil which would mean that they would buy less oil from other countries that the US could then buy oil from. It’s not like Hussein had complete and utter control of the oil fields of the entire planet.
And secondly, isn’t this the administration that has steadfastly denied that there’s any link between their decision to go to war and the desire to secure Iraq’s oil fields for the United States? Viewed through that lens, ‘you can gain control of something a country needs and deny that country access to that, in this case, oil, and run the price of oil up, all attempting to inflict serious economic damage’ becomes a terribly revealing statement.