From: George Murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Date: Wed Jun 11 2003 - 09:03:44 EDT
Peter Ruest wrote:
>
> Hi, Glenn
>
> some time ago, you expressed your strong conviction that oil was not and
> could not be a major motive for the USA to wage the Iraq war - and I
> gladly accepted this. So what should we think about the following?
>
> Under the headline, "So then 'a war for oil' after all?", "Der Bund",
> one of the leading daylies in Bern, Switzerland, wrote on 7th June (I
> translate the end of the article):
>
> "... these days, Wolfowitz literally poured more oil into the fire. At a
> Asian security summit in Singapore, he declared last weekend that oil
> had been the main reason for the war against Iraq. 'The most important
> difference between North Korea and Iraq is that in Iraq we had no other
> choice, for commercial reasons. The country is floating on a sea of
> oil.' Wolfowitz's most recent disclosures followed shortly after a
> provocative interview with the magazine 'Vanity Fair'. There, he had
> said that, for reasons which have much to do with governmental
> bureaucracy, one had chosen the war motive which all could accept:
> weapons of mass destruction."
>
> Is this another case of badly distorted information by the media, which
> is all too rampant here in Switzerland (and Europe in general, I
> suspect)?
It would be naive to think that oil wasn't among the motives leading up to
war - & that includes motives of nations that opposed the war.
But certainly one - if not the - major difference between North Korea and Iraq
is that North Korea has a great deal of artillery targetted on heavily populated
civilian areas (Seoul &c) of South Korea, and a military strike on North Korean nuclear
facilities would be be followed quickly by tens of thousands of South Korean civilian
casualties.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
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