I just cannot believe how dishonest some Republican leaders are being about the situation in Iraq. Bush is still bloviating about how America is “safer” today than before the invasion, even though he has offered not one shred of data to support his claim. In fact, more than 1.5 *million* Iraqis have fled into neighboring countries to escape the carnage Bush has unleashed in their country, while, inside Iraq, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Iraqis (many of them children) have been physically or psychologically maimed by the violence. Of the latter group, and perhaps even among the former, some will almost certainly seek revenge someday against America, by volunteering to be a suicide bomber. Can anyone seriously believe that the nightmare in Iraq has not done this? I don’t see how, nor has anyone in the Bush Administration offered either an explanation or evidence to the contrary. Instead, all we get is Bush’s mindless rhetoric, echoed through other Administration drones.
What astonishes me even more are people like Colin Powell. He realizes the Iraq fiasco has made America less safe, but he ignores the refugee and casualty problem and, instead, talks about America being less safe because its military is over-extended. Earth to Powell: unless America has a foreign *army* landing on its shores, America’s military is not a significant source of national security. When the threat is *terrorism*, the threat is not a military one, so why would America’s troop deployment matter? What matters is whether America’s foreign policy creates more or fewer angry people who are willing to blow themselves up in order to kill Americans. On that measure, how can America possibly be safer than it was before the Iraq invasion?
There is one…maybe only one…answer: Iraqi oil [1]. Thanks, in part, to Bush’s pandering to Big Oil, American national security heavily depends on having reliable access to oil. Under Saddam, access to Iraq’s vast oil reserves was unreliable, even under the so-called “oil for food” program. Thus, to say, as Bush does, that America is “safer” today than before the invasion, this statement can be seen as true if we add an unstated premise: American “safety” depends on unfettered access to Iraqi oil.
Does it make sense to add this premise, given that Bush never mentions it? Of course it does, because we would not expect Bush to mention it. Sending American troops to die in Iraq “to protect America from global terrorists” is one thing; sending them to die in Iraq to secure raw materials for Bush’s Big Oil pals is another. He mentions the former in every speech; mentioning the latter would be political suicide.
This would explain why Laura Bush last week complained that the American media is not reporting enough “good news” out of Iraq. To the Bushies, Iraqi oil is all that matters; Iraqi lives don’t. Thus, as long as the oil is protected, Iraq is a source of “good news,” no matter what happens to its citizens.
Likewise, George Bush’s “stay the course” policy appears to be virtually oblivious to the toll it takes on the lives of American troops and Iraqi civilians. Why? Perhaps because safeguarding American troops and Iraqi civilians is not Bush’s objective. Maybe safeguarding the oil is.
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