Cheat Sheet

"Towards the light......walk into the light...........don't worry about the swirling wormhole, just head into the light!" LOL You would think if he managed to keep his foot out of his mouth he could manage something decent to say. LOL

"He's caught in the vortex of the beam."

More like caught in the vortex of the Jim Beam.

Oh quit blaming the Iraqis please. The U.S. destroys their country and poisons countless Iraqis, disbands its military and brings about the situation where sectarian violence gets unleashed because there isn't the rotten Ba'ath Party dictatorship to keep the country together and you want to blame the victims. Iraq didn't want this war, not its people and not its government. This was America's war of aggression launched to have the upper hand in the privatization of Iraqi oil resources instead of letting Russia and France be the main beneficiaries of it with America left out in the cold.

No amount of Iraqi barbarism or incompetence or corruption is going to make this carcinogenic hellhole they have to live in "their" fault as it all horrible outcomes that happened because the U.S. decided it just had to invade Iraq. Everything stems from that. Regardless of what Iraqis themselves on the ground are doing, none of this would be happening had the U.S. not coveted Iraq's oil resources and started a war because of it. I don't wish any harm on anybody but if you're crying in your beer about U.S. troop deaths in Iraq being around the five thousand mark before their country is a model puppet state of the U.S. in the Middle East just remember that as many or more Iraqis were probably killed in an instant when the U.S. wiped out four city blocks of downtown Baghdad in an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Saddam Hussein a few hours before the official start of the butchery. The amount of suffering by the occupation forces doesn't amount to a mouse fart in comparison to what the Iraqis have suffered because of this war that America just HAD to have in their country. Please don't lose sight of who is the aggressor nation in this and who is the victim of that aggression.

Amen!

ConstitutionalRights:

Here's the reason the U.S. invaded Iraq in the first place and it has nothing to do with the triple-stack b.s. sandwich you were fed (the imaginary WMDs, the imaginary "ties to Al Qaeda" and the ultimate howler "to free the Iraqi people".) An excerpt from an article appearing in CorpWatch which was originally from Harper's Weekly:

"Two and a half years and $202 billion into the war in Iraq, the United States has at least one significant new asset to show for it: effective membership, through our control of Iraq's energy policy, in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the Arab-dominated oil cartel.

Just what to do with this proxy power has been, almost since President Bush's first inaugural, the cause of a pitched battle between neoconservatives at the Pentagon, on the one hand, and the State Department and the oil industry, on the other. At issue is whether Iraq will remain a member in good standing of OPEC, upholding production limits and thereby high prices, or a mutinous spoiler that could topple the Arab oligopoly.

According to insiders and to documents obtained from the State Department, the neocons, once in command, are now in full retreat. Iraq's system of oil production, after a year of failed free-market experimentation, is being re-created almost entirely on the lines originally laid out by Saddam Hussein...

And in fact the original scheme for reconstruction, at least the one favored by neoconservatives, was to privatize Iraq's oil entirely and thereby undermine the oil cartel...

Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq adhered to the OPEC quota limit (historically set to equal Iran's, now 3.96 million barrels a day) via state ownership of all fields. Cohen reasoned that if Iraq's fields were broken up and sold off, a dozen competing operators would quickly crank up production from their individual patches to the maximum possible, swiftly raising Iraq's total output to 6 million barrels a day. This extra crude would flood world petroleum markets, OPEC would devolve into mass cheating and overproduction, oil prices would fall over a cliff, and Saudi Arabia-both economically and politically - would fall to its knees.

By February 2003, Cohen's position had been enshrined as official policy, in the form of a hundred-page blueprint for the occupied nation titled, "Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to Sustainable Growth"-a plan that generally embodied the principles for postwar Iraq favored by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and the Iran-Contra figure Elliott Abrams, now Deputy National Security Adviser. Nominally written by a committee of Defense, State, and Treasury officials, the blueprint was in fact the brainchild of a platoon of corporate lobbyists, chief among them the flattax fanatic Grover Norquist. From overhauling tax rates to rewriting copyright law, the document mapped out a radical makeover of Iraq as a free-market Xanadu-a sort of Chile on the Tigris-including, on page 73, the sell-off of the nation's crown jewels: "privatization... [of] the oil and supporting industries."...

Roughly six months before the invasion, the Bush Administration designated Philip Carroll to advise the Iraqi Oil Ministry once U.S. tanks entered Baghdad. Carroll had been CEO of both Fluor Corporation, now a major contractor in Iraq, and, earlier, of Royal Dutch/Shell's U.S. division. In May 2003, a month after his arrival in Iraq, Carroll made headlines when he told the Washington Post that Iraq might break with OPEC: "[Iraqis] have from time to time, because of compelling national interest, elected to opt out of the quota system and pursue their own path. . . . They may elect to do that same thing. To me, it's a very important national question." Carroll later told me, though, that he personally would not have been supportive of privatizing oil fields. "Nobody in their right mind would have thought of doing that," he said.

Soon after Carroll resigned his post in September 2003, the new provisional government appointed an oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum. Uloum (who had been maneuvered into the job by then-neocon favorite Ahmad Chalabi) quickly fired Muhammad al-Jiburi, chief of Iraq's State Oil Marketing Organization, and Thamer Ghadhban, the expert in charge of the southern oil fields, both of whom had been trusted by the Western oil industry. Production faltered from a combination of incompetence, wholesale theft (Iraq's oil was unmetered), sabotage, and corruption that one oilman told me was "rampant," with "direct payoffs to government officials by commercial operators."

With pipelines exploding daily, the fantasy of remaking Iraq's oil industry also went up in flames."

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12726



Something else interesting to note: The machinations of what is usually called the Cheney Energy Task Force, why it's shrouded in secrecy and its role in the motivation to invade and occupy Iraq. Here's an excerpt from an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about this very topic:

"The case Cheney vs. U.S. District Court is scheduled to be heard before the Supreme Court next month and could end up revealing more about the Bush administration's motives for the 2003 Iraq war than any conceivable investigation of U.S. intelligence concerning Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction.

The plaintiffs, the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch, the conservative legal group based in Washington, argue that Vice President Cheney and his staff violated the open-government Federal Advisory Committee Act by meeting behind closed doors with energy industry executives, analysts and lobbyists.

The plaintiffs allege these discussions occurred during the formulation of the Bush administration's May 2001 "National Energy Policy."

For close to three years, Cheney and the administration have resisted demands that they reveal with whom they met and what they discussed.

Last year, a lower court ruled against Cheney and instructed him to turn over documents providing these details.

On Dec. 15, the Supreme Court announced it would hear Cheney's appeal. Three weeks later, Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spent a weekend together duck hunting at a private resort in southern Louisiana, giving rise to calls for Scalia to recuse himself. So far, he has refused.

Why has the administration gone to such lengths to avoid disclosing how it developed its new energy policy?

Significant evidence points to the possibility that much more could be revealed than mere corporate cronyism: The national energy policy proceedings could open a window onto the Bush administration's decision-making process and motives for going to war on Iraq.

In July 2003, after two years of legal action through the Freedom of Information Act (and after the end of the war), Judicial Watch was finally able to obtain some documents from the Cheney-led National Energy Policy Development Group.

They included maps of Middle East and Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, two charts detailing various Iraqi oil and gas projects, and a March 2001 list of "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," detailing the status of their efforts. The documents are available www.judicialwatch.org.

These documents are significant because during the 1990s, U.S. policy- makers were alarmed about oil deals potentially worth billions of dollars being signed between the Iraqi government and foreign competitors of the United States including France's Total and Russia's LukOil.

The New York Times reported the LukOil contracts alone could amount to more than 70 billion barrels of oil, more than half of Iraq's reserves. One oil executive said the volume of these deals was huge -- a "colossal amount."

As early as April 17, 1995, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. petroleum giants realized that "Iraq is the biggie" in terms of future oil production, that the U.S. oil companies were "worried about being left out" of Iraq's oil dealings due to the antagonism between Washington and Baghdad, and that they feared that "the companies that win the rights to develop Iraqi fields could be on the road to becoming the most powerful multinationals of the next century."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/0 3/21/ING0H5LTDA1.DTL