IRAQ: IT'S ABOUT OIL ... Ypu Bet It Is!

IRAQ: IT'S ABOUT OIL
YOU BET IT IS!

By: John Bender

Friday’s Los Angeles Times published a piece by Antonia Juhasz titled “It’s still about oil in Iraq”. Mr. Juhasz whined that the war with Iraq is about oil.

Well, welcome to the real world Mr. Juhasz. Wars are fought over natural resources and territory. Iraq invaded Kuwait to get the oil. We drove them out of Kuwait to protect the oil.

Nobody in their right mind would spend American lives and treasure protecting a piss ant kingdom in a desert cesspool. We went in to protect the oil, because we need the oil.

Oil is the life blood of the industrialized world. It was British and American oil companies that discovered and developed the oil reserves in the Arab world. A British company first discovered oil in Iran and by 1911 a British/Iranian concern called Anglo-Persian Oil Company, was pumping oil. In 1932 Standard Oil Company of California (SOCAL) discovered oil in commercial quantities in Bahrain. SOCAL then obtained a concession in Saudi Arabia in 1933 and discovered oil in commercial quantities in 1938. Were it not for the Brits and the Americans, most of the Arab world would still be desert waste lands and their “kings” would still be gathering camel dung to cook their food.

As the rulers of the Gulf countries got rich from the payments the Americans and British companies were shelling out for the oil, they started demanding larger and larger shares of the profits. They also started using oil as a political weapon against the West.

On October 16, 1973, the Arab countries announced they were cutting production and placing an embargo on shipments of crude oil to Western countries. The US and the Netherlands in particular were singled out as targets because of their close ties with and support of Israel.

From October 1973 to March of 1974 the economies of the industrialized countries across the globe were damaged by this embargo. By the first quarter of 1974 most of the world was hit by the worst economic slump since the Great Depression of 1932-1940. The raise in oil prices set off the inflation of the late 1970s that affected everything from home loans to the price of bread.

Had Saddam been able to gain control of Kuwait’s oil coupled with its own reserves, it would have been in a position to cripple the U.S. and the other industrialized nations. Mr. Juhasz and the rest of us in America would be looking at the potential of an economic catastrophe capable of being launched by a thug on his whim.

This threat of an economic attack on such a scale as would have make the threat posed by Saddam’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction look puny, was not just theory. It was a very real possibility. Saddam could have inflicted gas lines, inflation at rates at least as high as what we experienced under Carter’s inept administration, business failures, unemployment, 401Ks all but wiped out, and a host of other economic and social ills, on us at any time he wanted.

So we went to war against Saddam and his government. We drove him out of Kuwait but didn’t totally defeat him and remove him from power. Instead, we agreed to a cease fire agreement, signed by both Saddam’s government and ours.

Under that agreement Saddam agreed to obey certain rules. Almost immediately after our withdrawal from Iraq he violated the agreement. He continued to violate that cease fire agreement right up to the time we resumed the war and invaded his country again in March of 2003.

It’s important to understand that in March of 2003 we were still at war with Iraq. They never surrendered and never signed a peace treaty. All there was in place was a cease fire that was contingent upon Iraq’s actions.

So if it makes Mr. Juhasz, and others who live in down a rabbit hole Wonderland, feel better, we went to war to save a tiny kingdom from a dictator who invaded them. When we were nice enough to give the dictator a chance to save his government and his hold on power, he broke the agreement and we went back and finished the job.

I’m sure that makes Mr. Juhasz and the editors of the Los Angeles Times feel better. I’m sure they would rather spill American blood to protect some king of a tiny country in a wasteland than spill American blood to protect our economic stability and our way of life.

Had they been around during Jefferson’s administration I’m sure they would have been all upset that we went to war to protect trade routes against the Barbary Pirates. Blood for trade, Mr. Juhasz? Is that better than blood for oil?

The problem isn’t that Bush the Elder and Bush the younger used the military to protect the oil. The problem is they didn’t say that’s what they were doing.

They were worried about what the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and CNN would say. They were worried about whiners like Mr. Juhasz, Jane Fonda, and others of that ilk would say rather than making the case that they weren’t going to let a scumbag like Saddam have the means to hold our economy hostage.

Did we go into Iraq for oil? You bet we did! We went for oil, jobs, food, housing, our retirement plans, our way of life. If the leftists at the Los Angeles Times don’t like it, that’s too damn bad.




"Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact."