Thread: Iraq/Dinar News. 09/05 to 01/14/07

: nakr2004 on Monday, 08 January 2007-9:32 PM BT

Saudi authorities arrested the Director of the Office of External Relations Sadr
An official source mass chest that the Saudi authorities arrested today, Monday, Director of External Relations of the Office of the Martyr al-Sadr, Sheikh Hassan Alzerkani city Medina.
He said the member of the House of mass chest Bahaa Al-Araji News Agency (Voices of Iraq) independent telephone that Saudi security forces had arrested Alzerkani during his visit to Bqia in Medina after perform Hajj without knowing the reasons.
Al-Araji added that the Iraqi government is a series of contacts to the Saudi authorities know the reasons for the arrest Alzerkani and released.
Sheikh Alzerkani is representative of the Martyr Al-Sadr's office in Lebanon and resides in Beirut has traveled this year to the Holy Land to perform the Hajj.

Iraqi parliamentarians stake in the success of the security plan for Baghdad Dimension sectarianism
Pending the success of Iraqi parliamentarians new security plan for Baghdad, away from sectarian and not allowed to intervene in the political currents application and cooperation of citizens and the security agencies responsible for their implementation.
He said Abdul al-Jabouri Matalk member of the House of Representatives from the Iraqi Accord Front that the new Baghdad security plan will be very successful if it all favorable factors that will help to ensure their success.

full story follow link: Translated version of http://www.aswataliraq.info/

09 January 2007 (Al-Sabaah)
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It's expected that 2007 would witness more of procedures aimed to decrease peoples' loads socially, economically and service that would join with local regional and international political effort to face security situations in Iraq.

On the other hand experts said that budget of recent year includes plan to put down unemployment as economic reports mentioned that economic programme would applied in 2007 includes rerunning stopped factories to give opportunity for unemployed Iraqis.

Meanwhile, Iraqi officials think that hardship and loss jobs lead to force youths to hold arms and accept allures of terror groups which offer money for them, while Ministry of Labor renewed its resolution to employ thousands of unemployed and support who wish to carry out small projects

Easing unemployment problem in 2007 | Iraq Updates

Planning Minister: many measures to treat inflation

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09 January 2007 (Al-Sabaah)
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The Minister of Planning and Development Cooperation Ali Ghaleb Baban has specified two entrances to treat the consumer price indexes inflation happened in Baghdad.

In statement to as-Sabah newspaper, Baban said: that the first entrance would be on the level of the cash system through rising the interest in the banks. He added that Planning Ministry had approved that the solving of inflation is coming through relive and activity to the productive sectors, referring that the ministry has not found response from the other ministries concerning this project

Easing unemployment problem in 2007 | Iraq Updates

Anger mounts on decision to deploy Kurdish militias in Baghdad
By Nidhal al-Laithi and Marsi abu Tareq

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09 January 2007 (Azzaman)
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Kurdish leaders have decided to deploy their own militias in the current fighting in Baghdad where government troops aided by U.S. forces have launched yet another campaign to secure the restive city.

The move comes as U.S. President George W. Bush is set to announce his much-awaited for new strategy for Iraq in which he is expected to announce a surge in the number of U.S. troops in the country.

Iraqis are skeptical about U.S. plans and experience shows that any fresh initiatives by the U.S. since its 2003 invasion have mostly been counterproductive.

The latest campaign to secure Baghdad comes following the failure of several others in which tens of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops took part.

Criticism of the current campaign has come mainly from Sunni leaders who say that the Shiite-dominated government is solely targeting Sunni-dominated quarters in Baghdad.

The current campaign has so far avoided the Sadr City, a stronghold of Mahdi Army, a powerful Shiite militia group said to be behind much of the current sectarian violence.

As government troops and U.S. forces were moving to flush out armed groups from Sunni areas, Madhi Army units were reported to have attacked Sunni villages in Baghdad outskirts killing 10 people, injuring many others and burning 10 houses.

The current campaign is certainly doomed like its predecessors despite the deployment massive forces, including battalions from Kurdish militias, locally known as Peshmerga.

Kurdish militias have not yet arrived in Baghdad but sources said their deployment was expected to coincide with the stationing of at least 20,000 more U.S. troops in the city.
It will be the first time for Kurdish armed groups to fight in Baghdad and specifically against their co-religionists, Arab Muslim Sunnis. The majority Kurds are Sunni Muslims.

Many inside the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, particularly the few Sunni groups who have opted to take part in the political process have come out against the move.

In a sectarian-tainted city like Baghdad it will be hard to see whether the Kurds will put up a fight amid religious decrees from top Iraqi Sunni clerics, many of who are Kurds, banning taking arms against the resistance and denouncing U.S. troops and the Iraqi government.

The Mahdi Army itself is a sworn enemy of the Kurdish Peshmerga militias and is currently spearheading resistance of Kurdish moves to annex the oil-rich city of Kirkuk to their autonomous region.

To order Kurdish militias to fight in Baghdad is seen by many a dangerous step that is bound to further deepen the ethnic divisions and add more fuel to the current sectarian fire.

Mahmoud Othman, a prominent member of the Iraqi Kurdish Coalition, grouping the region’s two main factions of Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, said he was against sending Kurdish militias to fight against Arabs anywhere in Iraq.

“There are fears that a fight like this pitting Kurds against the Arabs is bound to add an ethnic touch to the conflict,” Othman said.

Othman added,”The deployment of Kurdish forces in Arab areas is wrong and will create sensitivities and accusations that Kurds are killing the Arabs.

“I am against the move … and there are many in the Iraqi parliament who are against it, too.”

Anger mounts on decision to deploy Kurdish militias in Baghdad | Iraq Updates

Bush's 'New Way Forward'



Arab News - 09/01/2007




(Menafn-Arab News) Linda Heard

Tomorrow George W. Bush is expected to announce a new strategy for Iraq. By all accounts, he's about to tear up the Iraq Study Group report and ignore the wishes of a war-jaded electorate in favor of "a surge." Put simply, instead of drawing down US troops and crafting what might pass for an elegant exit, the US president is likely to bolster American military manpower by up to 20,000 troops. Most will be based in and around Baghdad.

"A New Way Forward" is the official name of the game, which is one of high risk for both the administration and Republicans keen to shore up their chances of a win in 2008. For the president, who has reluctantly admitted the US is neither winning nor losing in Iraq, the stakes are high. On the line are his reputation, his ideology and his place in history.

Few US generals, or politicians for that matter, believe increasing troops will quell the insurgency or lessen sectarian violence. Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the newly appointed hawkish senior commander in Iraq is one of a dwindling number that believes more force might turn things around.

Sheer force of numbers might have worked in the early months of 2003 if coupled with a hearts and minds policy and a will to retain the integrity of Iraqi institutions. But most believe an increased US military presence now will only exacerbate tensions. Indeed, some 70 percent of attacks are directed at occupation soldiers. More visible troops could end up as sitting ducks. So why is Mr. Bush so insistent on taking this route?

As former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld advised in a memo, just days before he was asked to resign, the administration must give the appearance of a win. Iraq isn't the only consideration here.

If the US were to be forced out of Iraq with its tail between its legs, its deterrent capability would be severely reduced. Jeers of paper tiger would haunt Washington perhaps for decades to come. Internally, there would be a severe reckoning for the more than 3,000 dead US soldiers not to mention $320 billion wasted.

Faced with the choice of following the Iraq Study Group recommendations — dubbed a surrender document by the right-wing US media — or sticking with the program by injecting more troops and more billions into Iraq, it seems the president has chosen the "stay the course" course.

From Mr. Bush's personal perspective, this has to be the preferable option. He is a man with almost an unshakeable belief in his own infallibility. Announcing a pullout plan when none of the original US objectives have been achieved — apart from the disgusting spectacle of Saddam's hanging — would have been judged not only failure but abject failure. The commander-in-chief's ego would have taken a severe battering, but worse, the new Democratic wolves in Congress would soon have been baying for blood in the form of impeachment, especially so since America would no longer be "at war" and shows of patriotism no more an absolute priority.

On Friday, Democrat leaders wrote to Bush in an attempt to persuade him from the "surge." "Surging forces is a strategy that you have already tried and that has already failed," they wrote. "We believe that trying again would be a serious mistake."

Yet the Democrats, who now control the House and the Senate, have also previously indicated they will refrain from starving the war effort from funds. Some $70 billion as already been approved for 2007 but the White House now seeks a further $ 97.7 billion.

As long as the president can remain gung-ho and engaged until the 2008 presidential elections, he can hand the entire mess lock, stock and barrel over to his successor and blame him or her for the eventual outcome. Or so goes one school of thought. However, there are others, far more sinister.

The US is currently massing naval, air, marine and nuclear-armed forces within the region, and it is believed that the new strategy will not entertain Iranian or Syrian influence within Iraq.

Couple this with the recent expose in the London Times that Israel has drawn up plans to use nuclear bunker busters to destroy Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment plant and conventional weapons against the Arak and Isfahan facilities.

Naturally Israel has denied that it has any such intention, but if the Times is correct, then Tehran would retaliate against both Israel and its master the United States. In this case, the Americans are not in a position to display weakness by walking away from Iraq.

There is another consideration too. On Sunday, the Independent disclosed that Iraq's "massive oil reserves, the third largest in the world, are about to be thrown-open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies" throughout a 30-year-period under a controversial law drawn-up by the US.

The paper rightly points out that this move gives critics of the war, who said it was waged for oil, renewed ammunition. If oil was, indeed, what the war was all about — it sure as heck wasn't about WMD or Saddam's links to Al-Qaeda — then the White House and its corporate cronies are not about to leave their baby unattended.

James Baker, Lee Hamilton and the others who helped produce the Iraq Study Group report failed to see the big picture. If the Bush administration's priority was to save American lives and balance the books it would be poised to exit with as much dignity as it could muster. But if it's salivating over cheap Iraqi oil, with knives drawn against Iran and Syria, this region should brace itself for a bumpy ride ahead.


MENAFN - Middle East North Africa . Financial Network News: Bush's 'New Way Forward'

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT WOMAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!!! (Heard)

Originally Posted by mewannapeg

Bush's 'New Way Forward'
Arab News - 09/01/2007




(Menafn-Arab News) Linda Heard

Tomorrow George W. Bush is expected to announce a new strategy for Iraq. By all accounts, he's about to tear up the Iraq Study Group report and ignore the wishes of a war-jaded electorate in favor of "a surge." Put simply, instead of drawing down US troops and crafting what might pass for an elegant exit, the US president is likely to bolster American military manpower by up to 20,000 troops. Most will be based in and around Baghdad.

"A New Way Forward" is the official name of the game, which is one of high risk for both the administration and Republicans keen to shore up their chances of a win in 2008. For the president, who has reluctantly admitted the US is neither winning nor losing in Iraq, the stakes are high. On the line are his reputation, his ideology and his place in history.

Few US generals, or politicians for that matter, believe increasing troops will quell the insurgency or lessen sectarian violence. Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the newly appointed hawkish senior commander in Iraq is one of a dwindling number that believes more force might turn things around.

Sheer force of numbers might have worked in the early months of 2003 if coupled with a hearts and minds policy and a will to retain the integrity of Iraqi institutions. But most believe an increased US military presence now will only exacerbate tensions. Indeed, some 70 percent of attacks are directed at occupation soldiers. More visible troops could end up as sitting ducks. So why is Mr. Bush so insistent on taking this route?

As former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld advised in a memo, just days before he was asked to resign, the administration must give the appearance of a win. Iraq isn't the only consideration here.

If the US were to be forced out of Iraq with its tail between its legs, its deterrent capability would be severely reduced. Jeers of paper tiger would haunt Washington perhaps for decades to come. Internally, there would be a severe reckoning for the more than 3,000 dead US soldiers not to mention $320 billion wasted.

Faced with the choice of following the Iraq Study Group recommendations — dubbed a surrender document by the right-wing US media — or sticking with the program by injecting more troops and more billions into Iraq, it seems the president has chosen the "stay the course" course.

From Mr. Bush's personal perspective, this has to be the preferable option. He is a man with almost an unshakeable belief in his own infallibility. Announcing a pullout plan when none of the original US objectives have been achieved — apart from the disgusting spectacle of Saddam's hanging — would have been judged not only failure but abject failure. The commander-in-chief's ego would have taken a severe battering, but worse, the new Democratic wolves in Congress would soon have been baying for blood in the form of impeachment, especially so since America would no longer be "at war" and shows of patriotism no more an absolute priority.

On Friday, Democrat leaders wrote to Bush in an attempt to persuade him from the "surge." "Surging forces is a strategy that you have already tried and that has already failed," they wrote. "We believe that trying again would be a serious mistake."

Yet the Democrats, who now control the House and the Senate, have also previously indicated they will refrain from starving the war effort from funds. Some $70 billion as already been approved for 2007 but the White House now seeks a further $ 97.7 billion.

As long as the president can remain gung-ho and engaged until the 2008 presidential elections, he can hand the entire mess lock, stock and barrel over to his successor and blame him or her for the eventual outcome. Or so goes one school of thought. However, there are others, far more sinister.

The US is currently massing naval, air, marine and nuclear-armed forces within the region, and it is believed that the new strategy will not entertain Iranian or Syrian influence within Iraq.

Couple this with the recent expose in the London Times that Israel has drawn up plans to use nuclear bunker busters to destroy Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment plant and conventional weapons against the Arak and Isfahan facilities.

Naturally Israel has denied that it has any such intention, but if the Times is correct, then Tehran would retaliate against both Israel and its master the United States. In this case, the Americans are not in a position to display weakness by walking away from Iraq.

There is another consideration too. On Sunday, the Independent disclosed that Iraq's "massive oil reserves, the third largest in the world, are about to be thrown-open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies" throughout a 30-year-period under a controversial law drawn-up by the US.

The paper rightly points out that this move gives critics of the war, who said it was waged for oil, renewed ammunition. If oil was, indeed, what the war was all about — it sure as heck wasn't about WMD or Saddam's links to Al-Qaeda — then the White House and its corporate cronies are not about to leave their baby unattended.

James Baker, Lee Hamilton and the others who helped produce the Iraq Study Group report failed to see the big picture. If the Bush administration's priority was to save American lives and balance the books it would be poised to exit with as much dignity as it could muster. But if it's salivating over cheap Iraqi oil, with knives drawn against Iran and Syria, this region should brace itself for a bumpy ride ahead.


MENAFN - Middle East North Africa . Financial Network News: Bush's 'New Way Forward'

Originally Posted by dinartank

hey bigslick any word from your contacts?

Nothing new, just what I have stated in some of my last posts. It looks like it's all coming together.

Claiming the Prize: Bush Surge Aimed at Securing Iraqi Oil

Written by Chris Floyd
Tuesday, 09 January 2007
This is my latest piece for Truthout.org, with some updating.

I. The Twin Engines of Bush's War
The reason that George W. Bush insists that "victory" is achievable in Iraq is not because he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No, it's that his definition of "victory" is different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering classes in print and on-line. For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned "surge" of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand.

At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" essentially drawn up by the Bush Administration and its UK lackey, the Independent on Sunday reports. The new bill will "radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world," say the paper, whose reporters have seen a draft of the new law. "It would allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972." If the government's parliamentary majority prevails, the law should take effect in March.

As the paper notes, the law will give Exxon, BP, Shell and other carbon cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing them to pump gargantuan profits from Iraq's nominally state-owned oilfields for decades to come. This law has been in the works since the very beginning of the invasion – indeed, since months before the invasion, when the Bush Administration brought in Phillip Carroll, former CEO of both Shell and Fluor, the politically-wired oil servicing firm, to devise "contingency plans" for divvying up Iraq's oil after the attack. Once the deed was done, Carroll was made head of the American "advisory committee" overseeing the oil industry of the conquered land, as Joshua Holland of Alternet.com has chronicled in two remarkable reports on the backroom maneuvering over Iraq's oil: Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil and The U.S. Takeover of Iraqi Oil.

[Update: Bush will make explicit the connection between the "surge" and the oil law when he reveals his "New Way Forward" on Wednesday, the New York Times reports. According to senior Bush minions talking up the plan for what is not a surge but a long-term escalation of urban warfare that the U.S. ground commander in Iraq says will likely last for years, Bush's new "stratergery" includes "benchmarks" that the natives must meet to keep in favor with their colonial master. One of the most prominent of these is the demand that Iraq "finalize a long-delayed measure on the distribution of oil revenue." As we can see by the Independent stories quoted here, that benchmark should be done and dusted within weeks.]

From those earliest days until now, throughout all the twists and turns, the blood and chaos of the occupation, the Bush Administration has kept its eye on this prize. The new law offers the barrelling buccaneers of the West a juicy set of production-sharing agreements (PSAs) that will maintain a fig leaf of Iraqi ownership of the nation's oil industry – while letting Bush's Big Oil buddies rake off up to 75 percent of all oil profits for an indefinite period up front, until they decide that their "infrastructure investments" have been repaid. Even then, the agreements will give the Western oil majors an unheard-of 20 percent of Iraq's oil profits – more than twice the average of standard PSAs, the Independent notes.

Of course, at the moment, the "security situation" – i.e., the living hell of death and suffering that Bush's "war of choice" has wrought in Iraq – prevents the Oil Barons from setting up shop in the looted fields. Hence Bush's overwhelming urge to "surge" despite the fierce opposition to his plans from Congress, the Pentagon and some members of his own party. Bush and his inner circle, including his chief adviser, old oilman Dick Cheney, believe that a bigger dose of blood and iron in Iraq will produce a sufficient level of stability to allow the oil majors to cash in the PSA chips that more than 3,000 American soldiers have purchased for them with their lives.

The American "surge" will be blended into the new draconian effort announced over the weekend by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki: an all-out war by the government's Shiite militia-riddled "security forces" on Sunni enclaves in Baghdad, as the Washington Post reports. American troops will "support" the "pacification effort" with what Maliki says calls "house-to-house" sweeps of Sunni areas. There is of course another phrase for this kind of operation: "ethnic cleansing."

The "surged" troops – mostly long-serving, overstrained units dragooned into extended duty – are to be thrown into this maelstrom of urban warfare and ethnic murder, temporarily taking sides with one faction in Iraq's hydra-headed, multi-sided civil war. As the conflict goes on – and it will go on and on – the Bush Administration will continue to side with whatever faction promises uphold the "hydrocarbon law" and those profitable PSAs. If "Al Qaeda in Iraq" vowed to open the nation's oil spigots for Exxon, Fluor and Halliburton, they would suddenly find themselves transformed from "terrorists" into "moderates" – as indeed has Maliki and his violent, sectarian Dawa Party, which once killed Americans in terrorist actions but are now hailed as freedom's champions.

So Bush will surge with Maliki and his ethnic cleansing for now. If the effort flames out in a disastrous crash that makes the situation worse – as it almost certainly will – Bush will simply back another horse. What he seeks in Iraq is not freedom or democracy but "stability" – a government of any shape or form that will deliver the goods. As the Independent wryly noted in its Sunday story, Dick Cheney himself revealed the true goal of the war back in 1999, in a speech he gave when he was still CEO of Halliburton. "Where is the oil going to come from" to slake the world's ever-growing thirst, asked Cheney, then answered his own question. "The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."

And therein lies another hidden layer of the war. For Iraq not only has the world's second largest oil reserves; it also has the world's most easily retrievable oil. As the Independent succinctly notes: "The cost-per-barrel of extracting oil in Iraq is among the lowest in the world because the reserves are relatively close to the surface. This contrasts starkly with the expensive and risky lengths to which the oil industry must go to find new reserves elsewhere - witness the super-deep offshore drilling and cost-intensive techniques needed to extract oil form Canada's tar sands."

This is precisely what Cheney was getting at in his 1999 talk to the Institute of Petroleum. In a world of dwindling petroleum resources, those who control large reserves of cheaply-produced oil will reap unimaginable profits – and command the heights of the global economy. It's not just about profit, of course; control of such resources would offer tremendous strategic advantages to anyone who was interested in "full spectrum domination" of world affairs, which the Bush-Cheney faction and their outriders among the neocons and the "national greatness" fanatics have openly sought for years. With its twin engines of corporate greed and military empire, the war in Iraq is a marriage made in Valhalla.

(Continued after the jump.)

II. The Win-Win Scenario
And this unholy union is what Bush is really talking about when he talks about "victory." This is the reason for so much of the drift and dithering and chaos and incompetence of the occupation: Bush and his cohorts don't really care what happens on the ground in Iraq – they care about what comes out of the ground. The end – profit and dominion – justifies any means. What happens to the human beings caught up in the war is of no ultimate importance; the game is worth any number of broken candles.

And in plain point of fact, the Bush-Cheney faction – and the elite interests they represent – has already won the war in Iraq. I've touched on this theme before elsewhere, but it is a reality of the war that is very often overlooked, and is worth examining again. This ultimate victory was clear as long ago as June 2004, when I first set down the original version of some of the updated observations below.

Put simply, the Bush Family and their allies and cronies represent the confluence of three long-established power factions in the American elite: oil, arms and investments. These groups equate their own interests, their own wealth and privilege, with the interests of the nation – indeed, the world – as a whole. And they pursue these interests with every weapon at their command, including war, torture, deceit and corruption. Democracy means nothing to them – not even in their own country, as we saw in the 2000 election. Laws are just whips to keep the common herd in line; they don't apply to the elite, as Bush's own lawyers and minions have openly asserted in the memos, signing statements, court cases and presidential decrees asserting the "inherent power" of the "unitary executive" to override any law he pleases.

The Iraq war has been immensely profitable for these Bush-linked power factions (and their tributary industries, such as construction); billions of dollars in public money have already poured into their coffers. Halliburton has been catapulted from the edge of bankruptcy to the heights of no-bid, open-ended, guaranteed profit. The Carlyle Group is gorging on war contracts. Individual Bush family members are making out like bandits from war-related investments, while dozens of Bush minions – like Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and Joe Allbaugh -- have cashed in their insider chips for blood money.

The aftermath of the war promises equal if not greater riches. Even if the new Iraqi government maintains nominal state control of its oil industry, there are still untold billions to be made in PSAs for drilling, refining, distributing, servicing and securing oilfields and pipelines. Likewise, the new Iraqi military and police forces will require billions more in weapons, equipment and training, bought from the U.S. arms industry – and from the fast-expanding "private security" industry, the politically hard-wired mercenary forces that are the power elite's latest lucrative spin-off. And as with Saudi Arabia, oil money from the new Iraq will pump untold billions into American banks and investment houses.

But that's not all. For even in the worst-case scenario, if the Americans had to pull out tomorrow, abandoning everything – their bases, their contracts, their collaborators – the Bush power factions would still come out ahead. For not only has their already-incalculable wealth been vastly augmented (with any potential losses indemnified by U.S. taxpayers), but their deeply-entrenched sway over American society has also increased by several magnitudes. No matter which party controls the government, the militarization of America is so far gone now it's impossible to imagine any major rollback in the gargantuan U.S. war machine – 725 bases in 132 countries, annual military budgets topping $500 billion, a planned $1 trillion in new weapons systems already moving through the pipeline. Indeed, the Democratic "opposition" has promised to expand the military.

Nor will either party conceivably challenge the dominance of the energy behemoths – or stand against the American public's demand for cheap gas, big vehicles and unlimited consumption of a vast disproportion of the world's oil. As for Wall Street – both parties have long been the eager courtesans of the investment elite, dispatching armies all over the world to protect their financial interests. The power factions whose influence has been so magnified by Bush's war will maintain their supremacy regardless of the electoral outcome.

[By the way, to think that all of this has happened because a small band of extremist ideologues – the neocons – somehow "hijacked" U.S. foreign policy to push their radical dreams of "liberating" the Middle East by force and destroying Israel's enemies is absurd. The Bush power factions were already determined on an aggressive foreign policy; they used the neocons and their bag of tricks – their inflated rhetoric, their conspiratorial zeal, their murky Middle East contacts, their ideology of brute force in the name of "higher" causes – as tools (and PR cover) to help bring about a long-planned war that had nothing to do with democracy or security or any coherent ideology whatsoever beyond the remorseless pursuit of wealth and power, the blind urge to be top dog.]

As I noted earlier this year:

Bush and his cohorts have won even if the surge fails and Iraq lapses into perpetual anarchy, or becomes an extremist religious state; they've won even if the whole region goes up in flames, and terrorism flares to unprecedented heights – because this will just mean more war-profiteering, more fear-profiteering. And yes, they've won even though they've lost their Congressional majority and could well lose the presidency in 2008, because war and fear will continue to fill their coffers, buying them continuing influence and power as they bide their time through another interregnum of a Democratic "centrist" – who will, at best, only nibble at the edges of the militarist state – until they are back in the saddle again. The only way they can lose the Iraq War is if they are actually arrested and imprisoned for their war crimes. And we all know that's not going to happen.

So Bush's confident strut, his incessant upbeat pronouncements about the war, his complacent smirks, his callous indifference to the unspeakable horror he has unleashed in Iraq – these are not the hallmarks of self-delusion, or willful ignorance, or a disassociation from reality. He and his accomplices know full well what the reality is – and they like it.

Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque - High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium - Claiming the Prize: Bush Surge Aimed at Securing Iraqi Oil

Thanks for the info BigSlick...Keep us posted..Pogo

Originally Posted by Bigslick116

Nothing new, just what I have stated in some of my last posts. It looks like it's all coming together.