Are You Sure You Can Handle the Truth?
Petraeus Report Cooks the Books with Deft Kabuki Spin.
Benefactor: Big Oil.
April 28th, 2008
Reading the General Petraeus report on the Iraq debacle reminded me of nothing so much as Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men yelling, "You can't handle the truth!"
The report goes to great lengths to paint a picture of progress in Iraq, but the truth is a far different story. As the New York Times and the Washington Post have reported, the declining number of deaths in Iraq that Petraeus cites depends on a few accounting tricks: like not counting a death as an assassination if you're shot in the front of the head, and not counting deaths by car bombs.
So, what are we really doing in Iraq?
We're building and maintaining permanent military bases from which our military will ensure a near-monopoly of the world's second-largest oil reserve. All this... for a small cadre of corporate fatheads, including the top members of Bush, Inc. The American taxpayer will be burdened with footing the bill for security in Iraq ($2 billion PER DAY!) to provide stable working conditions for Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Halliburton, not to mention the dozens of corporations feeding off the military spend bosom.
But this White House clearly believes you can't handle the truth.
Well, those of us in the energy world can handle it, and here it is: because the U.S. could not tolerate the possibility that the second-largest oil bonanza on Earth might be held beyond our reach by a dictator who hated us.
The fact is, the U.S. uses fully one-quarter of the world's oil, but we possess only about two percent of its reserves, and we rely on imports for about 60% of our consumption.
Meanwhile, Peak Oil is either just behind us, or nearly upon us...
Without guaranteed access to Iraq's oil, we absolutely could not maintain our military and economic dominance of the world. Vice President Cheney has known this, even spoken publicly about it, for many years. And why else would he have convened a meeting of Big Oil representatives within his first month in the White House to pore over maps of Iraq's oil fields, as if that were the top priority of the administration?
We at EnergyAndCapital.com have prepared a full report, called "The Truth about Oil," and we're happy to share these truths with you.
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