Powell aide says war about OIL so we can't leave

Colin Powell's chief of staff has been speaking out on the workings of the Bush administration, and confirming what critics on the left have been saying about Bush since the beginning: that they have subverted the way our government works, and that the checks and balances which Bush ignores are actually needed for our security.

More importantly though, he openly acknowledges the significance of OIL in the decision-making process to go to war and why policy-makers will not seriously consider a pullout, regardless of their public statements or party affiliation.

This article also recounts what Former Bush Treasury Secretary John O'Neill said about the extent of the oil planning before the war and even before 9/11.

Totally apart from whether we should stay in Iraq or go, it's a sad comment on our democracy that NONE of the real debate is going on in public, not by the rubber stamp republican congress, and not even by the supposed opposition Democrats.

I don't know what good it does, but I'm going to send this to every Democratic senator and bust their balls about lying to us as much as the Republicans do on Iraq.

KEY EXCERPTS:

So Iraq Was About the Oil
By Robert Parry
November 8, 2005

While bemoaning the administration’s incompetence in implementing the war strategy, Wilkerson said the U.S. government now had no choice but to succeed in Iraq or face the necessity of conquering the Middle East within the next 10 years to ensure access to the region’s oil supplies.

“We had a discussion in (the State Department’s Office of) Policy Planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields of the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N. trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly,” Wilkerson said. “That’s how serious we thought about it.

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Active preparations for war with Iraq were soon underway. Behind the scenes, O’Neill said he watched as the administration refined its plans for how to divvy up Iraq’s oil reserves after the invasion.

“Documents were being prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency, (Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld’s intelligence arm, mapping Iraq’s oil fields and exploration areas and listing companies that might be interested in leveraging the precious asset,” Suskind wrote in The Price of Loyalty.

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On Feb. 3, 2001 – only two weeks after Bush took office – an NSC document instructed NSC officials to cooperate with Cheney’s Energy Task Force because it was “melding” two previously unrelated areas of policy: “the review of operational policies towards rogue states” and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”

FULL TEXT:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/110705.html

TRANSCRIPT OF WILKENSON SPEECH:
http://www.newamerica.net/Download_Docs/pdfs/Doc_File_2644_1.pdf

GREG PALAST OVERVIEW OF OIL MOTIVE:
http://www.gregpalast.com/iraqmeetingstimeline.html


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