Greg Palast is back as The Guardian columnist, hillariously.
On the third anniversary of the tanks rolling over Iraq’s border, most of the 59 million Homer Simpsons who voted for Bush are beginning to doubt if his mission was accomplished.
But don’t kid yourself — [Bush and Cheney] accomplished exactly what they set out to do. In case you’ve forgotten what their real mission was, let me remind you of White House spokesman Ari Fleisher’s original announcement, three years ago, launching of what he called,
“Operation
Iraqi
Liberation.”O.I.L. How droll of them, how cute.
Right, soon Karl Rove made the giggling boys in the White House change it to “OIF” — Operation Iraqi Freedom. But the objective was OIL, Oil, oil…
“It’s about oil,” Robert Ebel told me. Who is Ebel? Formerly the CIA’s top oil analyst, he was sent by the Pentagon, about a month before the invasion, to a secret confab in London with Saddam’s former oil minister to finalize the plans for “liberating” Iraq’s oil industry […]
And what did the USA want Iraq to do with Iraq’s oil? [The answer] is uglier, more twisted, devilish and devious than anything imagined by the most conspiracy-addicted blogger. The answer can be found in a 323-page plan for Iraq’s oil secretly drafted by the State Department. [The] key thing is what’s inside this thick Bush diktat: a directive to Iraqis to maintain a state oil company that will “enhance its relationship with OPEC.”
[How] strange: the government of the United States ordering Iraq to support the very OPEC oil cartel which is strangling our nation with outrageously high prices for crude.
[There] you have it. Yes, Bush went in for the oil — not to get more of Iraq’s oil, but to prevent Iraq producing too much of it.
[It’s] Economics 101. The oil industry is run by a cartel, OPEC, and what economists call an “oligopoly” — a tiny handful of operators who make more money when there’s less oil, not more of it. So, every time the “insurgents” blow up a pipeline in Basra, every time Mad Mahmoud in Tehran threatens to cut supply, the price of oil leaps. And Dick and George just love it.
[As per Plan Bush,] the conquered nation “enhanced its relationship with OPEC;” and the price of oil, from Clinton peace-time to Bush war-time, shot up 317%.
[On] the third anniversary of invasion, we can say the attack and occupation is, indeed, a Mission Accomplished. However, it wasn’t America’s mission, nor the Iraqis’. It was a Mission Accomplished for OPEC and Big Oil.
Got enough oil?
[Crossposted at European Tribune and Daily Kos .]