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{mosimage}Remember the good old days when people believed the reason we invaded Iraq was to get cheap oil? How dumb was that? The White House and its happy band of neo-cons sure fooled us. I’ll admit to buying into the cheap oil theory. America was going to get Iraqi oil. We’d finally find out why our oil was buried under their sand. Gas would be too cheap to meter, like electricity from nuclear power plants was supposed to be. Noted geopolitics expert and gas station attendant Dr. Gomer Pyle says “Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!” Dr. Gomer reveals the real reason we invaded Iraq was not to get oil that was less expensive. We invaded Iraq to make oil more expensive.
Who, you might ask, would want expensive oil? Do the names Exxon and BP strike a familiar note? The Olympic-sized level of cynicism required to figure out that invading Iraq was to create more expensive oil makes one marvel at the ability of the neo-cons to hoodoo their fellow gullible Americans. If there were a Nobel Prize for April fool jokes, the old switcheroo between invading for cheap oil morphing into invading for expensive oil would put Presidents W and Cheney in Stockholm next year to receive their prize from the King of Sweden.
After the 9/11 attacks, America logically went after creeps in Afghanistan who planned and staged the attacks on America. It made perfect sense to try to kill the terrorists who killed 3,000 Americans. America once had the support of the world community in its fight against al Qaeda in Afghanistan. But there was a problem with confining the war to Afghanistan. Afghanistan has no oil. Running down and smoking out bin Laden wasn’t going to cause the price of oil to go up. There was no benefit for Big Oil with a war only in Afghanistan. Rummy and the neo-cons needed a war in a country with oil to drive up the price of gasoline. Voila, as the French would say: Invade Iraq and watch the price of oil soar. Afghanistan went to the back burner. Now, with the Iraq war front and center, we find the Taliban resurgent, the opium crops prospering and Pakistan crumbling. Gomer says “Oops.”
Allow me to bore you briefly with some statistics. The day before we invaded Iraq in March 2003, the price of oil was about $37 a barrel. Now the price of oil is somewhere north of $140 a barrel. Halliburton’s stock price before the invasion was about $9 per share. Now it’s $46 a share. Oil company and Halliburton stocks were pretty groovy investments if you bought the day before the invasion. War is good for Big Oil and Halliburton.
President W is a former oil man. President Cheney is a former Halliburton dude. Both of them have buddies in those industries. It’s only natural they would want to help out their compadres. If you can’t help your friends, who can you help? A war that quadruples the price of oil is a small price to pay if you exclude the costs in human life, injuries, materials and money. The Iraq War has been financed by the administration through sub prime loans from the Chinese. America may get foreclosed as a result. The balloon payment to Beijing won’t be due until W and Cheney are both safely out of office and making speeches for $50,000 a pop. Big Oil is making record profits as the lame ducks quacking away in the White House are making plans to give the oil industry one last door prize on their way to political oblivion.
If you really wanted to increase the price of oil overnight to Mount Everest levels what would you do? Dr. Pyle suggests bombing Iran. The Iranians have been test-firing missiles that could reach Israel and American bases in the Middle East. They could shut down the Strait of Hormuz through which about 40 percent of the world’s oil chugs along in very slow moving target oil tankers. What a nice going away present for Big Oil to have the price of oil go to $400 a barrel overnight as a result of a new war with Iran as the Bush administration exits stage right.
Gomer says fasten the seat belt on your bicycle. It’s going to be a bumpy flight.
Bush Advances Big Oil Agenda With War
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