source: the CIA Factbook

Let me start out with a cutting from a November 15, 2007 WSJ.com article that talks about Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC):

Most Americans already know more about the IRGC than they’d like to. In September the Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of a nonbinding resolution urging President Bush to label the IRGC a terrorist group. He did so a month later and has since implemented harsh new sanctions targeting the business interests of the IRGC. As Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told the press recently, “It is increasingly likely that if you are doing business with Iran you are doing business with the IRGC.”

This all just cracks me up because it’s a wonderful example of how full of shit the USGovernment really is, here. Because a fraction of the terrorism going on in Afghanistan and Iraq seem to be caused with the help of the IRGC, we label them terrorists and start making it hard for them to do business.

What if the favor were returned?

What if the Republican party were labeled a terrorist organization?

“Oh, yeah, the Republicans were behind the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Neither country did anything directly aggressive yet, the Republican in charge of the US military ordered invasions! We’re banning all business with America because if you’re doing business with America, you’re probably doing business with a Republican.”

Yeah, not so cool when you look at it from the other side, is it?

Of course, the reverse scenario will never happen because America is too powerful.

What happens to the most powerful country on the planet when it is left unchecked and begins to abuse the massive power it holds?

Nothing.

It just gets more and more abusive. Why should it stop?

No, seriously, why should it stop?

Sorry to get political ^_^ but I saw this on Democracy Now (DemocracyNow.org) last Friday and thought it was so important that I should share it. It’s a clip that shows Dick Cheney in 1992, the then Sec of Defense, explaining why Bush 42 and Pals didn’t go all the way into Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein after kicking his butt out of Kuwait. In his address at the Economic Club of Detroit, Cheney predicts everything that has happened since the Iraq Invasion of 2003.

Every

Last

Detail

…Cheney knew in 1992.
The above was a Mobile post sent by thepete using Utterz.  Replies.

Now, what this means is that he DID know that Iraq in 2003 would be a mess and just didn’t care. Why? My guess is because he stands to make a shitload of money as soon as he gets out of office in 2009. He ran Halliburton for a time, and I seriously doubt they won’t repay him for the mess in Iraq that Halliburton has made huge buckets of cash off of. These military industrial companies don’t forget their benefactors and Cheney and his boss, Bush, have made a mess of Iraq on purpose so they can rake in the cash.

Yes, I’m saying they’re both sociopaths. I blogged about Bush being diagnosed as a paranoid meglomaniac in a book back in 2004 and this new/old video shows us that Cheney is no fool–he knew and agreed with all of us “hate America firsters” back in 1992 but chose to disagree with us in 2003.

No, we’ve got some serious psychos on our hands and the Dems are too spineless and protective of their jobs to actually do their jobs.

Oh and in case you don’t want to sit through the above video, check out the transcript of the clip taken from the full transcript of the Friday, November 16, 2007 edition of Democracy Now. I’ve added emphasis to save you even more time:

AMY GOODMAN: As we talk about how President Bush and Vice President Cheney made the case for war in Iraq, I want to turn to comments made by Dick Cheney in September of 1992. At the time, he was President George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense. During an address at the Economic Club of Detroit, Cheney was asked why the United States didn’t bury Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. This is how he responded close to fifteen years ago.

DICK CHENEY: At the end of the war in the Gulf, when we made the decision to stop, we did so because we had achieved our military objectives — that is, when we decided to halt military operations. Those objectives were twofold: to liberate Kuwait and, secondly, to strip Saddam Hussein of his offensive military capability, of his capacity to threaten his neighbors. And we had done that.

There is no doubt in my mind, but what we could have gone on to Baghdad and taken Baghdad, occupied the whole country. We had the 101st Airborne up on the Euphrates River Valley about halfway between Kuwait and Baghdad. And I don’t think, from a military perspective, that it would have been an impossible task. Clearly, it wouldn’t, given the forces that we had there.

But we made a very conscious decision not to proceed for several reasons, in part because as soon as you go to Baghdad to get Saddam Hussein, you have to recognize that you’re undertaking a fairly complex operation. It’s not the kind of situation where we could have pulled up in front of the presidential palace in Baghdad and said, “Come on, Saddam. You’re going to the slammer.” We would have had to run him to ground. A lot of places he could have gone to hide out or to resist. It would have required extensive military forces to achieve that.

But let’s assume for the moment that we would have been able to do it, we got Saddam now and maybe we put him down there in Miami with Noriega. Then the question comes, putting a government in place of the one you’ve just gotten rid of. You can’t just sort of turn around and away; you’ve now accepted the responsibility for what happens in Iraq. What kind of government do you want us to create in place of the old Saddam Hussein government? You want a Sunni government or a Shia government, or maybe it ought to be a Kurdish government, or maybe one based on the Baath Party, or maybe some combination of all of those.

How long is that government likely to survive without US military forces there to keep it propped up? If you get into the business of committing US forces on the ground in Iraq to occupy the place, my guess is I’d probably still have people there today, instead of having been able to bring them home.

We would have been in a situation, once we went into Baghdad, where we would have engaged in the kind of street-by-street, house-to-house fighting in an urban setting that would have been dramatically different from what we were able to do in the Gulf, in Kuwait in the desert, where our precision-guided munitions and our long-range artillery and tanks were so devastating against those Iraqi forces. You would have been fighting in a built-up urban area, large civilian population, and much heavier prospects for casualties.

You would have found, as well, I think, probably the disintegration of the Arab coalition that signed on to support us in our efforts to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait, but never signed on for the proposition that the United States would become some kind of quasi-permanent occupier of a major Middle Eastern nation.

And the final point, with respect to casualties, everybody, of course, was tremendously impressed with the fact that we were able to prevail at such a low cost, given the predictions with respect to casualties in major modern warfare. But for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it was not a cheap or a low-cost conflict. The bottom-line question for me was: How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? The answer: Not very damn many. I think the President got it right both times, both when he decided to use military force to defeat Saddam Hussein’s aggression, but also when he made what I think was a very wise decision to stop military operations when we did.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Dick Cheney, speaking in September of 1992 at the Economic Club of Detroit.

Crazy–absolutely crazy. He said in 1992 that getting Saddam out of power was worth “not very damn many.” But maybe 911 changed all that. Maybe Cheney just wanted to get rich.

Maybe it’s both.

About three weeks ago, I blogged about how TheUSMil was building a new base on the Iraq/Iran border in order to defend against Iranians coming over the border to help the cause of evil in Iraq. In my post I suggested it was posturing for an American invasion of Iran, but it looks like the reason for the base might be a bit more straightforward.

While looking for an article explaining that Iranians make up 20 percent of the terrorists in Iraq (I KNOW I saw that article SOMEplace) I stumbled across an October 7, 2007 opinion piece at KoreaTimes.co.kr (here: urltea.com/1onw) that explains a fun coincidence about this new base. Check it out:

Coincidentally, the U.S. is to build another vast base in Wasit Province, to protect Iraq from “insurgents” coming in from Iran. As the gimlet-eyed analyst Sarah Meyer points out coincidentally, another vast oilfield, it seems, has just been discovered there.

The piece refers to a Sarah Meyer who blogged about this very oil field back in September of this year. Here’s a cutting from her post:

Hassan Jumaa Awad, Iraqi union leader, was recently travelling to raise awareness of the US attempts to grab Iraq’s oil. Among the interesting points that he raised: “There is a newly discovered field in Wasit province in central Iraq with the potential to fill millions of barrels of oil. Under the law this new field will be given over to multinationals.”

Iraq revenue watch (pdf file) notes: “This field lies in the two provinces of Baghdad and Salaheddin, and probably extends southward within the province of Wasit.1 Hence, it should be jointly managed by the provinces of both Baghdad and Salaheddin, and perhaps that of Wasit too. … initial production has averaged 20,000 barrels per day from its Baghdad section compared with a potential production of about 120,000 barrels daily.”

What’s really interesting to me is that the opinion piece from the Korea Times mentions Smedley Butler. You may remember my post from last month about a corporate-sponsored planned coup on the American government that was foiled when Marine Major General Smedley Butler held a press conference announcing that he wouldn’t take part in said plan. This is the third online reference to this story that I’ve found since last month–funny how no one’s really heard of this and I’ve stumbled across mentions this many times in just a few weeks. Well, actually, the Korea Times piece doesn’t mention the planned coup, but it does talk about how Butler felt being a Marine and essentially being a shill for Big Business. Here’s another cutting from the opinion piece:

`There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its `finger men’ (to point out enemies) its `muscle men’ (to destroy enemies) its `brain guys’ (to plan war preparations) and a ‘Big Boss’ (super-nationalistic capitalism.)

“It may seem odd, for me, a military man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to do so. I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service in one of our country’s most agile forces _ the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General.

“During that period I spent most of my time being a high class muscle man for Big Business and Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

So, it’s just a case of same shit, different day/country. What’s worse is that the American people just aren’t cynical enough to see through this. Sure, the average Amerishmuck on the street might admit to knowing the Iraq Attack was all about oil, but he probably would grasp the depth of this corrupt corporatism.

Think about it: first it was 911, then it was nukes, then it was freedom for the Iraqi people–all of that were lies to get this new oil law passed that would promise a lion’s share of Iraq oil profits go to foreign oil companies.

There are three angles that, I feel, explains the US government’s attitude here. Any or all of them could be at play here:

1) Peak Oil - This is the theory (more and more believe it’s no theory) that the planet Earth is very near to reaching it’s highest level of oil production. What happens after that highest level of production? Well, production goes down, of course. In other words, the Earth begins to run out of oil. As a result, oil companies around the world need to find new oil fields (like the one in Wasit, Iraq) to exploit to stay fluid (literally and figuratively) while they try to come up with some way to make money after the oil begins to run out and becomes prohibitively expensive.

2) Capitalism is Like A Shark - Capitalism is like some beast that has to keep moving at all times or it will die. This is not the truth, since capitalism is not alive in the first place and is a concept that can get discarded or re-adopted. However, a lot of power is tied up in capitalism and even more can be gained by keeping capitalism around and thriving. Any chance this shark can get to feed it will take and that’s what getting more oil for the oil interests (US and otherwise) would do–feed the capitalist shark.

3) The Petro-Dollar - I’ve blogged about the Petro-Dollar many many times. In a nutshell, Petrodollars are American cash that is bought by anyone on the planet to use when buying oil from any OPEC country. See, OPEC (generally) only sells oil in USD, so when you consider how much oil is bought every day around the world you get the idea of how much USD is tied up in OIL. More oil sold for an OPEC nation (like Iraq) means more American dollars being bought up, which means our economy is invested in. Incidentally, I’ve read that some experts believe Petro-Dollars make up about 60 percent of the US economy.

In the end, you need to remember that the number of dead American GIs in Iraq is higher than the number of Americans killed on 911. This isn’t really about avenging 911, or making America safe. This is about keeping oil and capitalism and oil-capitalism strong.