Monday, March 20, 2006

O.I.L./Yeats/National Debt


(P1) Political

Operation Iraqi Freedom (O.I.L.)


Read what fearless Guardian (UK) investigative reporter Greg Palast discovered about the real reason for the invasion of Iraq.


by Greg Palast

Bush Didn't Bungle Iraq, You Fools
THE MISSION WAS INDEED ACCCOMPLISHED
The Guardian
Monday, March 20, 2006




Get off it. All the carping, belly-aching and complaining about George Bush's incompetence in Iraq, from both the Left and now the Right, is just dead wrong.

On the third anniversary of the tanks rolling over Iraq's border, most of the 59 million Homer Simpsons who voted for Bush are beginning to doubt if his mission was accomplished.


But don't kid yourself -- Bush and his co-conspirator, Dick Cheney, accomplished exactly what they set out to do. In case you've forgotten what their real mission was, let me remind you of White House spokesman Ari Fleisher's original announcement, three years ago, launching of what he called,

"Operation

Iraqi

Liberation."

O.I.L. How droll of them, how cute. Then, Karl Rove made the giggling boys in the White House change it to "OIF" -- Operation Iraqi Freedom. But the 101st Airborne wasn't sent to Basra to get its hands on Iraq's OIF.

"It's about oil," Robert Ebel told me. Who is Ebel? Formerly the CIA's top oil analyst, he was sent by the Pentagon, about a month before the invasion, to a secret confab in London with Saddam's former oil minister to finalize the plans for "liberating" Iraq's oil industry. In London, Bush's emissary Ebel also instructed Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, the man the Pentagon would choose as post-OIF oil minister for Iraq, on the correct method of disposing Iraq's crude.

Now read the full article and discover how
"Bush went in for the oil -- not to get more of Iraq's oil, but to prevent Iraq producing too much of it. " Here's a link to the full Palast article


Please Post Your Comments Here about the above or any below and/or Read the Comments of Others.You can sign in as "blogger" or "other" but please add your name or initials to your text. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net. We need your feedback.


(P2) Poetical

Oil and Blood

IN tombs of gold and lapis lazuli

Bodies of holy men and women exude

Miraculous oil, odour of violet.

But under heavy loads of trampled clay

Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood;

Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.


(William Butler Yeats - 1929)

(P3) Philosophical (sort of)


Could This Be True?


Randi Rhodes opines that the right-to-life folks might well want to rally against "stealing from the unborn." If, in fact, the unborn, possess a basic set of constitutional rights, aren't they entitled to protection against the robbery occurring as the national debt increases exponentially. You and I won't suffer as directly as our offspring and their children...and, if, in fact, the unborn are human beings too, and if the national debt increase will result in a de facto tax of $30,000 to each human American, where are the cries against this on behalf of the unborn? The first 42 presidents of this country COMBINED borrowed $1.2 trillion from other nations. George Bush, in only 4 years borrowed $1.05 trillion! What's going on here? I thought we were supposed to not trust John Kerry with our fiscal future. Bush has an MBA! So much for MBA's. Anyhoo, our "president" inherited incredible fiscal SURPLUSES, and, well...look at us now!



Please Post Your Comments Here about the above and/or Read the Comments of Others.You can sign in as "blogger" or "other" but please add your name or initials to your text. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net. We need your feedback.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes, the "operation" was handled incompetently. Let me suggest we should have marched in with twice as many troops, freed the Kurds, created Kurdistan, freed the Southern areas now policed by the Brits, created a country for those people, "protect" the oil and let those in the so-called "traiangle" kill themselves. Instead, we have promised to let them have a resource that belongs to the World as much as trees and oceans and their busy killing us! They do not undrstand "Liberation"and should not have been "liberated!" What shoould have been liberated is the civilized world's energy supply. MISSION NOT ACCOMPLISHED!

Ed Coletti said...

My Dear Anonymous,

But the point of the piece was that "incompetence" was NOT what the oil issue was about. Rather, Palast demonstrates that the plan was to sieze the oil, conspire with the Saudis, and keep the prices up by keeping much of the Irqi oil off the market. Thanks for commenting. Please continue, but, in the future, at least add your first name.

Thanks,

Ed C.

Anonymous said...

I love seeing that Yeats made your Blog!

k

joe said...

Hi Ed -
A very powerful piece by Mr. Palast. Thanks for posting it. The "oily-gopolists" are, indeed, doing well, as are Haliburton and a variety of our "defence" contractors.
I read, recently, that the major US export is now arms. If it was shoes, we'd sponsor a myriad "walks" and races and marathons around the world. If it was furniture, we'd see huge "home-shows" popping up all over the globe. If it was swimming pools, we'd sponsor innumerable swimming sports, and races, and community baths. However - it's arms. It makes one wonder what, then, we sponsor, in order to sell our goods to the world.

Thanks to you - and Katherine, for the Yeats piece. You're right, Ed, he's an awesome poet...

Here's a little something of his that has always stunned me:

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

( Ah, to write a single such paragraph in a lifetime... )

By the way - I enjoyed the "Demos Song." I even sang some of it to my wife. I guess I didn't do it justice, tho - she threatened to hit me!"