From: Rich Blinne (e-lists@blinne.org)
Date: Wed Jun 11 2003 - 12:23:09 EDT
On Wed, 11 Jun 2003 06:49:14 +0200, "Peter Ruest"
<pruest@pop.mysunrise.ch> said:
>
> 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."
Even with just the information provided you can see a non sequiter.
Wolfowitz was describing the differences between Iraq and North Korea.
One has natural resource, the other doesn't. The U.S. has more options
with a country without resources, because sanctions would be more
effective with such countries.
Even if WMD was not the "real" causus belli, it doesn't make oil the
reason. This is because for the Bush Administration regime change was an
end in itself. Regime change was the first articulated reason for war.
It was regime change and not oil that Wolfowitz was referencing in the
Vanity Fair interview. Note the following October 10, 2002 Christian
Science Monitor story:
-------------
UNITED NATIONS – For months, whenever President Bush spoke of "regime
change" in Iraq, the assumption was he meant Saddam Hussein had to go.
Now, Mr. Bush is signaling he could accept a world where Mr. Hussein –
though a fully disarmed Hussein – remains the man in charge in Iraq.
Just as the president shifted in the months after 9/11 from a focus on
Osama bin Laden to saying the chief enemy was not one man but
international terrorism, he seems to be saying now that the aim is not
removing one man but disarming Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.
The new stance, hinted at in a buried line in Bush's speech Monday,
suggests a retreat from the ambitious – and for some critics worrisome –
goals that the president had previously set out for Iraq, including
democracy and full respect for human rights. Indeed, for both domestic
and foreign skeptics, a disarmed Iraq is one thing, but an Iraq remade in
America's image is quite another.
----This was not even a change in policy between the Bush and Clinton administrations. In October 1998, the Congress passed and President Clinton signed a bill that stated that:
It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime. --Public Law 105-338 Section 3
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