Current Events Watch

If you think it is cynical to suggest big oil — and its champion, Vice President Dick Cheney — played a significant role in getting us into the Iraq war, think again. Even as the country is disintegrating, big oil is charging in to take over the oil reserves.

According to a Saturday story in The Independent, “Iraq’s massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.â€?

According to the story, the U.S. has drafted the law for the Iraqi legislature which will give big oil companies like BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts “to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972.�

Now flash back to 1999 when Cheney was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton. He said at the time that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. “So where is the oil going to come from? The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies,” he said.

So, we move on to part 2 of the 6 years of evil that have resulted from the election of George W. Bush.

JUSTIFYING A WAR BUILT ON LIES

Did the attack on the World Trade Towers set off the chain of events that ultimately led us into Iraq? Notwithstanding that Iraq had nothing to do with the attack on the World Trade Towers — we’ll get to that in a bit — we now know that the Bushies were planning on how they could invade and take over Iraq from the day they took over the controls in the ship of state.

At its first National Security Meeting on January 30, 2001, Bush and company opened discussions on Iraq. We now know that at its second meeting, the issue of regime change in Iraq took center stage. According to the web site Cooperative Research, officials at this meeting “discuss a memo titled ‘Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,’ which talks about troop requirements, establishing war crimes tribunals, and divvying up Iraq’s oil wealth.�

This was more than seven months before the World Trade Towers were attacked. If you don’t think that the Bushies had their sights set on Iraq and its oil wealth from the day George moved into the White House — if not before — I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn you may want to purchase.

But, to get there, Bush and company had to find — or fabricate — a justification. We now know that they chose the fabrication route.

“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised,” Bush told the nation two days before he launched his war on Iraq.

Today, there is not one shred of evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. We also know that Bush was warned that any intelligence indicating WMD did exist in Iraq was faulty at best, if not a totally untrue. The result of these and other lies: As of today, 3,292 courageous American troops have died in Iraq and another 24,476 have been wounded, many with life-altering injuries. If this isn’t a true definition of evil, I don’t know what is.

Bush and company also like to continue purporting that the attack on the World Trade Towers is “proof� — a word W has used many times — that we had to take the war on terrorism into Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein because he harbored terrorists.

Last week, the Pentagon issue a report that put an end to any lingering doubts that Iraq had played any role in the attack on the World Trade Center.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, the “declassified report by the Pentagon’s acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble provides new insight into the circumstances behind former Pentagon official Douglas Feith’s pre-Iraq war assessment of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection — an assessment that was contrary to US intelligence agency findings, and helped bolster the Bush administration’s case for the Iraq war.â€?

Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who released the report, said, “It is important for the public to see why the Pentagon’s Inspector General concluded that Secretary Feith’s office ‘developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaeda relationship,’ which included ‘conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community.’ ”

Despite the release of the report, the Associated Press reports that Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday appeared on a conservative radio show and reiterated his stance that Al Qaeda had links to Iraq before the US invasion in 2003.