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Friday, August 13, 2004

An Icily Rational War

This lengthy article by Stan Goff is from February, 2004. It describes in detail why a military draft appears inevitable, and how preparations are already well under way. But I think the three following paragraphs come closer to saying what is really happening than about anything else I've read:
The Energy War, now concentrated on Iraq, is presenting the Bush administration with a formidable dilemma. The United States military is now bogged down in a quagmire where it appears each day more likely that a military victory is impossible, even as it seems politically impossible for the Bush administration to leave (which they have no intention of doing in any case, or they wouldn't have gone in the first place). Among the myriad reasons for this dilemma is the plain fact that 120,000 troops cannot "pacify" a population the size of Iraq that has no apparent intention of consenting to foreign "pacification." Moreover, the guerrilla resistance in Iraq is creating a steady attrition of troops and materiel, an operational tempo that is unsustainable, and a looming recruitment and retention crisis that threatens the long term health of the armed forces as an institution.

I have said before that by all accounts the preservation of U.S. dominance in the world is ultimately dependent on seizing control of this region. This is not an irrational war. It is an icily rational war, given that the alternative is to relinquish control of the world's economic future – which would be disastrous for political elites in the United States, because our entire economy, under their direction, is now a house of cards built on an international treasury-bill standard that forces the rest of the world to give loans to the U.S. that it never intends to pay back. Control of the world's peaking energy supply is absolutely essential for the U.S. state to maintain its economic arm-lock on China and Europe to enforce their continued complicity in this international extortion racket.

The Bush administration has not the slightest intention of ever leaving Iraq.
Farther down in the article, there's this paragraph:
In the end, it's always about oil. Until people figure that out, they'll continue, as Sydney Shanberg said when Bush the Elder was dropping bombs on Iraqis, to be "the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth."

Thanks to Michelle for the link.