A visitor to the site left me a link to this video by Jim Hightower. In it he explains why we're dragging our feet in Iraq. If we get out, the chaos will escalate to the point where the oil law gets stalled out. And that's the disaster dubya keeps warning of in his speechifying of late. If we let Iraq out from under our thumb before the oil law locks in long-term American access to Iraqi oil, dubya will have failed his masters.

I keep remembering back to when dubya was trying to get the UN to sign off on his pending invasion of Iraq to give it some air of legitimacy. France, Russia and Germany weren't having any of it. Coincidentally, oil companies from those countries had been in negotiations with Saddam Hussein to upgrade Iraq's oil infrastructure when the UN sanctions were eventually lifted. And UN weapons inspectors had been on the ground in Iraq for 4 months (finding bubkus) when dubya set his jaw and did what was right for Amurka, ordering the inspectors out, and sending in our troops. After all, the security of the world was at stake, wasn't it? And hate radio filled the airwaves with patriotic war-mongering. We had to invade to keep the nuclear bombs out of the hands of brown people who want nothing more than to come here and take our jeebus away!! Ah, the good old days.

Now we're stuck in the drudgery of day-to-day, boring, old occupying-army-trying-to-force-a-balky-legislature-to-relinquish-their-only-asset-to-foreign-control stuff. If the Iraqi people had just elected Chalabi like we told them to, we'd have our oil deal and be out of there* by now. Damn democracy anyway!


* Except for the few thousand troops we leave behind to protect the oil pipelines freedom the children the future of Iraq Iraq's fragile democracy.