This war is for oil - the escalation is all about the oil
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Posted on March 7, 2007
Filed Under Deep ecology, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Earth spirituality, Ecology of war and peace, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Is it a coincidence that the Bush war escalation in Iraq comes at the same time as the government we manipulated into being is about to finish writing the new law for the Iraq oil industry? We don’t think so.
Recent articles make this clear, and I have links to a few of them at the end of this post. We simply must be better informed about what is at stake here, what people are being killed and maimed for — tens of thousands of US soldiers, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Remember that while rampant looting followed the US invasion, devastating among other things Iraq’s precious antiquities, US soldiers secured the oil ministry, revealing from day one the priorities of this war. The chaos that followed, when our invasion became an occupation, the chaos that has now become a complex, multi-player civil war, undoubtedly dismayed the war-planners, for whom the invasion was to accomplish a quick and easy resolution to the neo-cons long-sought goal of securing US access to a big chunk of Middle Eastern oil, that land cursed with the world’s greatest abundance of oil reserves. 9/11 provided their excuse for a war that never had anything to do with protecting the homeland.
The moral repugance one feels about 9/11 being exploited this way… Well, it defies words to adequately express it.
But the occupation soured quickly, and continues to sour. Folks [the media, for example, or Democrats] wonder at the president’s stubbornness, at the dark shadow of an unmoveable Cheney (approval rating of 16%), and wonder why they don’t change course when clearly this policy is not working. But this is not about the psychological illness of stubbornness in the face of the evidence, related to an addictive personality — this is about securing access for the US oil corporations to Iraq’s oil reserves. They have their eye on their prize and not all the bloody horror in the world shakes them from that goal.
Oil is about the global economy and the US’s lion’s share of that economy. Big oil wants access to Iraq’s oil. They want control; they want profits; they want favorable terms for their investment.
They want to keep the engine of our economy running — gasoline for our cars, jet fuel for our vacations and conferences, fuel for the ships and trucks that transport all our consumer goods and our food from far-away places — because this is cheaper for them — and the profits huge by comparison — than switching to a renewable energy economy.
If we want to keep living as we do, this is what they will do to keep us going as we are. 
If we don’t want to have a lifestyle supported by war and environmental destruction, than we have to do our part to change this economy. And we have to stop being naive about this war. The debate over the best way out of a bad situation — stay or go, redeploy now or later, as if people merely disagree on war strategy and tactics — completely misses the point. We are there to secure the oil for Big Oil corporations, and when you see it from this vantage point, it all makes sense. Bush and Cheney are not engaged in a war of futility, they are engaged in a war for oil.
Why this matters for ecological hope is this: this fossil-fuel-based way of life requires war and other forms of international conflict, as well as environmental destruction, to support it. That’s another reason why the future for this planet and human society within it depends upon the lifestyle choices we are willing to make.
A final note to punctuate this reflection: the Bush administration has driven the US military budget to a level not seen since World War II - $622.4 BILLION!
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Folks, this kind of budget is not about hunting down terror groups in the mountains of Pakistan, or finding the estimated 2,000 or so Al-Qaeda linked militants in Iraq. This is about securing US energy interests around the world.
This is wrong, and this is about us. This will stop when enough people reject the human and ecological cost of supporting this oil-based way of life.
Articles:
Claiming the Prize: War Escalation Aimed at Securing Iraqi Oil, AlterNet
Future of Iraq: the Spoils of War, The Independent UK
Crude Designs: the Rip-Off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth, Global Policy Forum
Iraq Labor vs. ExxonMobil, BP and Shell, Op-Ed News
Photos credit: Found them here. Warning, many of them are not for the faint of heart.
Technorati Tags: war for oil, Iraq war, Bush war escalation, Iraq oil law, Big Oil
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