Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix — who recently ridiculed the U.S.’s “faith-based intelligence” — said today that the US-led invasion of Iraq was motivated by oil. “They wanted to secure oil in case competition on the world market becomes too hard,” Blix said. We know that. Here’s the tissue-dissolving section:
Below, we check in on how the new Iraqi government will fit nicely with our need for oil security:
Well, isn’t this a cheery headline:
“Iraq’s New President Jalal Talabani: Ally of CIA, Iranian Intelligence and Saddam Hussein.”
Reports Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman:
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The Iraqi parliament also named outgoing finance minister Adel Abdel Mahdi and outgoing interim president Ghazi Yawar as the country’s two vice presidents. The three men will serve together on the presidency council. They are expected to name Shiite politician Ibrahim Jaafari to the powerful post of prime minister.
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DILIP HIRO: [Talabani] has changed sides so often that I think it would be very boring for me to go through each twist and turn. There’s a very long entry on him in my book, The Essential Middle East: A Comprehensive Guide.
Finally, I notice that he is being described as a greater leader who fought Saddam Hussein. I can tell you, Amy, that after this 1991 Gulf War, when there were uprising of Kurds which was suppressed by Saddam’s regime, he then later on went to head a Kurdish delegation, and in June 1991, actually, they made a deal with Saddam Hussein, and I have a picture of him, Jalal Talabani, kissing the cheeks of Saddam Hussein. That picture appears in my book, Desert Shield, Desert Storm. Anybody can check it out. So, he is being described as a greater leader. Basically, he is, to put it simply, an opportunist.
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AMY GOODMAN: Dilip Hiro, what about Jalal Talabani’s relationship with the C.I.A.?
DILIP HIRO: Well, of course, I have to say not only he has a relationship with the C.I.A., but also he has a relationship with the intelligence agency of Iran. You know, this is one of the amazing things, if you really go into this whole intelligence world, you will be dumbstruck to find these overlappings …
AMY GOODMAN: Sounds a little like Ahmed Chalabi.
DILIP HIRO: Absolutely. Except that Chalabi was never actually living — never lived in Iraq, … Talabani, as well as Barzani, they have been living in not what you may call proper Iraq, but in Iraqi Kurdistan, so in that sense they have more ground support, a proper constituency.
At the same time given this kind of location they have, as I said, you have to look at the map to see the southeastern Kurdistan is next to Iran. There’s no way you can operate in this part of the world without having some good relationship with Iran. And the other thing to remember, of course, all these guys now, of course, claim secularism, and they’re so much against Iranian mullahs, but remember in the 1980 to 1988 Iran-Iraq war, the Kurdistan — the Kurdish militia run both by Talabani and Barzani fought alongside the Iranians and against the Iraqi soldiers. [Y]ou could say that they committed, in quote, “treason” to be fighting their own national army, while — and working with the enemy. So I think they have such a long and checkered and opportunistic background. [O]thers point out he was a guerrilla leader, I mean, I find really hard to take in. Of course, the relationship with the intelligence agencies is all over the place [and] the one man who really comes out on top in that business who is right now technically the prime minister of Iraq is Iyad Allawi. He publicly said, I have saved money from twelve intelligence agencies. I think he should go down in the Guinness Book of Records.
Read the full interview.
See-sawing back from the opportunists in both Iraq and Washington, D.C. to Blix’s crucial statement today — “the greatest threat in the long term is the greenhouse effect” — we can look to the Sierra Club of Canada’s statement:
As early as the 1970s, scientists began to warn that humanity’s ever-increasing production of greenhouse gas emissions would change the Earth’s climate. In 1992, the world’s leaders began to heed their warnings at the Rio Summit when Canada and 186 other countries signed the United Nations – Framework Convention on Climate Change. Signatory countries agreed to a long-term objective to “stabilize GHG concentrations in the atmosphere.”
By ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on December 17, 2002, Canada committed to lowering its greenhouse gas emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by 2012.
But Kyoto is only the first step. …
This is what matters. Even if our governments don’t know it while they play empire-building and puppet-installation.
Transform our energy dependency, and we stop the madness.