Toolie
06-05-2005, 09:55 PM
I've talked to a few servicemen who have recently returned from their tour in Iraq, and most cases I heard a slightly different story then that of what a lot of the media will tell you is going on over there.
A former Army guy that lives near me vividly described atrocities that Americans were commiting against civilians over there. Random shootings, screwing around with people at checkpoints (involving rifles and death, of course), et cetera. His viewpoint is that he is absolutely convinced that whatever reason we went in there for is gone now - at this point it's only to stabilize the region and bring in oil to power our economy.
And that's close to my opinion. Not quite, because I think we went in there for oil to begin with along with some other secondary objectives - like counter-terrorism and "democracy".
North Korea, a far greater risk with a far more psychotic and unstable dictator in a far more sensitive region of the world is left alone in his oil-free country, while we amass a force to secure energy where it's available under the flag of "Freedom (tm)" and counter-terrorism. I'm sure they are added benefits as well that are hardly overlooked, but it's obvious the main driving reason to be there is energy.
...Not that I disagree with that, though....
Our country will absolutely fall apart - torn from our warm economic womb and slaughtered - without the gooey placenta that is energy. The EU and China would have no problem in aborting us once our economy starts slowing to a grind and crumbling without energy.
Unfortunately, since most American's would rather spend thier money on Alex Rodriguez and the new Jay-Z CD (or whatever), we are stuck using a centuries' old commodity to produce energy - petroleum. We could unshackle ourselves from this with our amazing resources and manpower and smarts in our country to develop fusion, hydrogen, and other sources of energy. But, we're just fucking lazy like the average American, and like the average American, it's biting us hard on the ass now.
So, with petroleum as our only source of energy, we're stuck relying on one thing to keep our country alive. Which wouldn't be too bad of a thing, except we're so fucking huge and thirsty, like some massive tumor, that we completely consume every petroleum resource we have here. So now look at the boat we're in. Our life - our very nation's existence - requires something that we don't have enough of. Alright.. don't worry, it gets worse.
A group of countries that have oil coming out of their ears and nothing better to do with it made an orginazation, OPEC, with the sole intention of bringing the industrialzed world to their knees with outlandish prices and complete control (see 1980s oil crunch). Tthe Middle East, where most of these countries are, has been hating us for decades , ironically over something that was Europe's fault and not ours (see: Postwar partition of the Ottoman Empire), but we get the blame since we back Israel.
Now, these people that hate us have the complete ability to crush us, and would love to do it, but can't risk it because once we're faced with too high prices, we'd either invade them, or stop paying them and do something else - something they can't afford. So, they give us the oil.. but make sure to charge as high as they can before we flip out. This puts America in a hard spot for a long time.. until an opportunity arises. Say, maybe, an OPEC country with a shit load of oil that's been doing naughty things so we can take their oil straight from the warehouse without being fucked by the retailer?
Nevermind that we really honestly don't give a fuck what Ali-whoever and Saddam what's-his-name have been doing to their own people and their neighboors. Since when has American cared about Middle-Easterners anyway? Honestly? But, when they have a bunch of oil, and we've got an excuse, it would be stupid not to put the plan into action. So now with a reason to invade - knowing full well that we'll be the occupational force in the aftermath - and with a good reason to feed the UN and the American people to get permission for it, the plan goes into action.
Except one glitch - the rest of the world isn't as stupid as the American people. Sure, we bought the excuse. But a lot of people didn't, namely giant things like.. oh.. the UN, some powerful nations in Europe, Asia, South America, so on and so forth. Nope. They didn't buy it.
But us.. the American sheep, yep. We bought it. 9/11, while being a nasty hit on the American morale, worked pretty favorably to gather up the Nationalistic bandwagon in support of killing Middle-Easterners... er.. I mean terrorists. Oh, you think that's funny? I do - because even our president tried to pull that off on the people - telling them Saddam had links to al Qaeda (the people behind 9/11), when those links were never found to be true. He even tried relating this more to 9/11, which he knew we all hated, by saying Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and that they - oh gosh no - in some act of complete stupidity launch a few at the US (forgetting that makes no sense for a State to do, seeing as how the US would retaliate like none other).
These excuses turned out to be bullshit, but we believed it. We rode the post-9/11 wave of Nationalism right into the sands of Iraq, killed a bunch of people quickly, and took control over the government. But now, look where we are... being sabotaged in our efforts to get energy to help our starving nation.. uh.. and make democracy... by these god damn relentless rebels who wont stop messing with the Empire... er.. America.
It's like Vietnam... except it's a lot worse. In Vietnam, we were defending our prestige and our honor behind our capitalistic ways and our strength by not letting a capitalist country fall to our sworn enemy communist believers. Our survival wasn't directly on the line, just our face. But this Iraq business... yeah. Our ass is on the line. Sure, the war isn't on the homefront, but if we don't secure some lucrative oil deals here soon, then we're going to have to pull a hydrogen rabbit out of our asses in the next 20 years to save ourselves from "going Roman".
In the end.. do I agree with it? No. We shouldn't have gotten to this spot to begin with. But we did. And now we're in it - and we have no choice but to press forward. It's hard to tell young American soldiers that they're gonna go out there and lose their lives, and kill a bunch of fathers and really pissed off young boys that just want us to get the hell out over something as abstract as oil. Which is why we aren't telling them that (look at the morale in Vietnam for Christs's sake, capitalism wasn't really a warm fuzzy thing to die for). But we slap freedom and counterterrorism on there, and yeah.. we can send people to die for that.
Oh well. I hope we get our oil and live on a little longer. But in the end, after the depleted uranium dust settles, we're still going to need hydrogen or fusion or whatever. But in the historic terms of things, if we can shape shit up there quick, secure things, and get out of there with a fascist pro-American government in place - then we did good.
A former Army guy that lives near me vividly described atrocities that Americans were commiting against civilians over there. Random shootings, screwing around with people at checkpoints (involving rifles and death, of course), et cetera. His viewpoint is that he is absolutely convinced that whatever reason we went in there for is gone now - at this point it's only to stabilize the region and bring in oil to power our economy.
And that's close to my opinion. Not quite, because I think we went in there for oil to begin with along with some other secondary objectives - like counter-terrorism and "democracy".
North Korea, a far greater risk with a far more psychotic and unstable dictator in a far more sensitive region of the world is left alone in his oil-free country, while we amass a force to secure energy where it's available under the flag of "Freedom (tm)" and counter-terrorism. I'm sure they are added benefits as well that are hardly overlooked, but it's obvious the main driving reason to be there is energy.
...Not that I disagree with that, though....
Our country will absolutely fall apart - torn from our warm economic womb and slaughtered - without the gooey placenta that is energy. The EU and China would have no problem in aborting us once our economy starts slowing to a grind and crumbling without energy.
Unfortunately, since most American's would rather spend thier money on Alex Rodriguez and the new Jay-Z CD (or whatever), we are stuck using a centuries' old commodity to produce energy - petroleum. We could unshackle ourselves from this with our amazing resources and manpower and smarts in our country to develop fusion, hydrogen, and other sources of energy. But, we're just fucking lazy like the average American, and like the average American, it's biting us hard on the ass now.
So, with petroleum as our only source of energy, we're stuck relying on one thing to keep our country alive. Which wouldn't be too bad of a thing, except we're so fucking huge and thirsty, like some massive tumor, that we completely consume every petroleum resource we have here. So now look at the boat we're in. Our life - our very nation's existence - requires something that we don't have enough of. Alright.. don't worry, it gets worse.
A group of countries that have oil coming out of their ears and nothing better to do with it made an orginazation, OPEC, with the sole intention of bringing the industrialzed world to their knees with outlandish prices and complete control (see 1980s oil crunch). Tthe Middle East, where most of these countries are, has been hating us for decades , ironically over something that was Europe's fault and not ours (see: Postwar partition of the Ottoman Empire), but we get the blame since we back Israel.
Now, these people that hate us have the complete ability to crush us, and would love to do it, but can't risk it because once we're faced with too high prices, we'd either invade them, or stop paying them and do something else - something they can't afford. So, they give us the oil.. but make sure to charge as high as they can before we flip out. This puts America in a hard spot for a long time.. until an opportunity arises. Say, maybe, an OPEC country with a shit load of oil that's been doing naughty things so we can take their oil straight from the warehouse without being fucked by the retailer?
Nevermind that we really honestly don't give a fuck what Ali-whoever and Saddam what's-his-name have been doing to their own people and their neighboors. Since when has American cared about Middle-Easterners anyway? Honestly? But, when they have a bunch of oil, and we've got an excuse, it would be stupid not to put the plan into action. So now with a reason to invade - knowing full well that we'll be the occupational force in the aftermath - and with a good reason to feed the UN and the American people to get permission for it, the plan goes into action.
Except one glitch - the rest of the world isn't as stupid as the American people. Sure, we bought the excuse. But a lot of people didn't, namely giant things like.. oh.. the UN, some powerful nations in Europe, Asia, South America, so on and so forth. Nope. They didn't buy it.
But us.. the American sheep, yep. We bought it. 9/11, while being a nasty hit on the American morale, worked pretty favorably to gather up the Nationalistic bandwagon in support of killing Middle-Easterners... er.. I mean terrorists. Oh, you think that's funny? I do - because even our president tried to pull that off on the people - telling them Saddam had links to al Qaeda (the people behind 9/11), when those links were never found to be true. He even tried relating this more to 9/11, which he knew we all hated, by saying Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and that they - oh gosh no - in some act of complete stupidity launch a few at the US (forgetting that makes no sense for a State to do, seeing as how the US would retaliate like none other).
These excuses turned out to be bullshit, but we believed it. We rode the post-9/11 wave of Nationalism right into the sands of Iraq, killed a bunch of people quickly, and took control over the government. But now, look where we are... being sabotaged in our efforts to get energy to help our starving nation.. uh.. and make democracy... by these god damn relentless rebels who wont stop messing with the Empire... er.. America.
It's like Vietnam... except it's a lot worse. In Vietnam, we were defending our prestige and our honor behind our capitalistic ways and our strength by not letting a capitalist country fall to our sworn enemy communist believers. Our survival wasn't directly on the line, just our face. But this Iraq business... yeah. Our ass is on the line. Sure, the war isn't on the homefront, but if we don't secure some lucrative oil deals here soon, then we're going to have to pull a hydrogen rabbit out of our asses in the next 20 years to save ourselves from "going Roman".
In the end.. do I agree with it? No. We shouldn't have gotten to this spot to begin with. But we did. And now we're in it - and we have no choice but to press forward. It's hard to tell young American soldiers that they're gonna go out there and lose their lives, and kill a bunch of fathers and really pissed off young boys that just want us to get the hell out over something as abstract as oil. Which is why we aren't telling them that (look at the morale in Vietnam for Christs's sake, capitalism wasn't really a warm fuzzy thing to die for). But we slap freedom and counterterrorism on there, and yeah.. we can send people to die for that.
Oh well. I hope we get our oil and live on a little longer. But in the end, after the depleted uranium dust settles, we're still going to need hydrogen or fusion or whatever. But in the historic terms of things, if we can shape shit up there quick, secure things, and get out of there with a fascist pro-American government in place - then we did good.