IRAQ FOREVER
Oil and Blood

From the New York Times' Bob Herbert courtesy of Eschaton:

The Bush administration has no plans to bring the troops home from this misguided war, which has taken a fearful toll in lives and injuries while at the same time weakening the military, damaging the international reputation of the United States, serving as a world-class recruiting tool for terrorist groups and blowing a hole the size of Baghdad in Washington's budget.

A wiser leader would begin to cut some of these losses. But the whole point of this war, it seems, was to establish a long-term military presence in Iraq to ensure American domination of the Middle East and its precious oil reserves, which have been described, the author Daniel Yergin tells us, as "the greatest single prize in all history."

Click here for the rest.

This is very much the same conclusion I've come to. It's not like I'm brilliant or anything; in fact, it's pretty easy to dope this out. None of the Bush administration's stated reasons for the invasion make any sense at this point, so we have to look elsewhere for answers. It's pretty obvious that the only real US interest in the Middle East is oil. Indeed, all US foreign policy toward the region since World War II has been in terms of oil. Israel, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, all American relationships with these nations and others are negotiated with the politics and power of oil as the overwhelming backdrop. Like I said, obvious.

What's slightly more complicated is the simplistic notion that invading Iraq is about enriching the oil companies that created Bush and making sure that supply disruptions don't hurt the US economy. That's a part of the equation, yes, but the American power elite have a much more compelling motivation. They want to control the spigot. With US economic power slowly declining, American influence stands to be substantially eroded in the coming decades. However, as Noam Chomsky has observed many times, the one dimension in which the United States is still without peer is military might. Ultimately, the permanent American occupation of Iraq is about transmuting military power into economic power: once global oil extraction has peaked, and many experts believe that has either already happened or will happen very soon, oil prices will steadily increase; if the US controls the lion's share of oil reserves, all nations must kiss its ass in order to function.

The Iraq invasion, then, is one of the ballsier moves in world history, one of the great power plays of all time. If it succeeds, it will guarantee the existence and strength of the American empire for many years to come. That's why neither Bush nor any of his successors, Republican and Democrat alike, will ever pull out of Iraq. It really is blood for oil. And oil for power.

I know there's no such thing as Hell, but sometimes I wish there was.

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