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Saw a newsclip last night - something about
Cheney running for President when Bush's time is up. Could that really
happen?
Ed
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 4:07 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Little lies and
big lies
Ed,
At 13:15 16/05/2005 -0400, you
wrote:
We Canadians have always been a little
naive about our politicians. Above all else, we want to trust
them. Recent revelations at the Gomery Inquiry about where out tax
dollars went have greatly raised our level of sophistication about
them. Canada will never be quite the same again. Still, we'll
get over it. The lies our politicians told were not of catastrophic
consequences.
Lies told by George Bush and Tony Blair were. At issue is the
now infamous "Downing Street Memo", the minutes of a British prime
minister's meeting on July 23, 2002, during which officials reported on
talks with the Bush administration about Iraq. The memo, which was
leaked to The Times of London during the British election campaign, and
whose authenticity has not been denied, confirms that the Bush
administration had cooked up a case for a war it wanted well before the
Americans invaded Iraq. Knowing full well that Saddam did not have
WMDs in dangerous quantities, the Bush Administration said he did.
Knowing full well that the links between Saddam and Al Qaeda were at best
tenuous, the Bush Administration said they were firm and dangerous. As
Paul Krugman puts it in today's NYTimes:
- Why did the administration want to invade Iraq, when, as the memo
noted, "the case was thin" and Saddam's "W.M.D. capability was less than
that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran"? Iraq was perceived as a soft target;
a quick victory there, its domestic political advantages aside, could
serve as a demonstration of American military might, one that would shock
and awe the world.
But there was of course
another reason for invading Iraq. It contains a lot of oil and sits in
the middle of a large region which contains much of the world's oil
resources. To keep domestic consumers happy and to feed a huge
military apparatus, Americans need an awful lot of oil, and because a lot of
people outside of the US do not like Americans, they need to make sure they
have control of over the oil producing regions.
Compared to the lies
Bush told, the Gomery lies seem trivial. Gomery may result in a few
fines and a few jail sentences and, for a time, a disenchanted voting
public. Bush's lies have resulted in the death of about a million
civilians, many of them women and children, the death and mutilation of many
soldiers, the destruction of a functioning society (even if we didn't like
it how it was run), and the rise of a level of hostilities between the
Islamic world and the west that has not been seen since the Crusades.
America has indeed become "the Great Satan" and has taken a lot of the
western world with it. As lies go, Bush's were
catastrophic.
And the lies continue. Appearing before American
soldiers this past Sunday in one of Saddam's former palaces, Condoleezza
Rice said, "This war came to us, not the other way around."
If you
want to read the Downing Street Memo, go to http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/index.html
.
Ed
I don't think we are going to get the real
smoking gun until Cheney's discussions with Enron are revealed. "Iraqi oil"
would have been mentioned there. I have the impression that they were planning
a big role for Enron in Iraq after the invasion. Perhaps it was for this
reason that the US and UK oil corporations refused to develop the oilfields
within a couple of months of the invasion? They would have regarded Enron as a
jumped-up outfit! They probably already suspected that Enron was a hollow
company. A business that had grown so fast in the energy field as Enron would
have been subjected to very close scrutiny by the big oil corporations.
Anyway, so far, Cheney has managed to persuade the courts not to release the
transcripts. (Further, I wonder whether the trial of Kenneth Lay is being
postponed for so long that Bush will be able to give him a Presidential Pardon
-- a privilege given to Presidents at the end their
reign.)
Keith
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Keith
Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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