Gen. Petraeus's comments subtext: Israel vs. OIL

The story about General David Petraeus saying Israel's treatment of Palestinians endangers our troops is not remarkable for its insight, people from Noam Chomsky to neocon Fareed Zakaria have said this since 9/11 and even before, but what is remarkable is that someone in Petraeus position SAID it and it was publicly acknowledged.

I don't doubt Petraeus' concern for our troops, but generals work for elected civilians, which means the civilians may have realized the limits of seizing oil and pipeline routes with naked force.

Recall that when Bush invaded Iraq, Cheney's energy task force had been pouring over maps of Iraqi oil fields and foreign suitors who wanted contracts to drill their (and US companies weren't on the list), Condaleeza Rice's memo about merging the seemingly unrelated objectives of fighting terrorism and seizing oil fields, and the US written Hydrocarbon Law that Bush tried to force the Iraqis to pass that would have given 88% of their oil income to foreign oil companies (ours).

The Iraqi parliament refused to pass that bill in spite of offers of millions in bribes to each member because they knew if they voted for it, they were signing their death warrants. The one popular thing Saddam did was nationalize their oil, to keep most of the profits in the country, and the politicians who undid that would be literally torn to shreds by their own people, not to mention they would never win a fair election again.

The result is that the contracts Iraqis have given out pay out far less than the oil companies wanted as the people of Iraq naturally prefer, and many those contracts have gone to non-American companies despite our troops being a literal gun to Iraq's head. Our oil companies probably could have gotten the same deals from Saddam when the sanctions were lifted if we HADN'T invaded.

Likewise in Afghanistan, though we installed a pliant puppet government with a former Unocal consultant as president to oversee the pipeline route and his heroin dealer brother to shepherd that income to Wall Street, our military presence there has not quelled the Taliban and created the peace along the pipeline route necessary to pump natural gas from Turkmenistan through Pakistan to India.

Worse, client state Pakistan has made a deal for a competing pipeline from Iran that reduces the value of "our" pipeline route. So far, our reaction has been to suddenly notice the terrorists in Pakistan who have been there all along and even funded by their government.

But that is at best a holding maneuver.

Somewhere in the corporate board rooms of the oil and gas cartels, they must be realizing that brute force is not working. The natives are not cooperating with the pillage and rape of their own country's oil, gas, and pipeline income.

So what to do? They can't simply walk away from the greatest source of the world's dwindling, easily accessible oil and gas.

Simple.

What they are doing is what they should have done in the first place: offer the natives better deals as occurred in Iraq, and minimize any political offense that would prevent their government from making deals with American companies.

Which circles back to Israel.

In countries where the leaders have to be somewhat responsive to public opinion, doing business with us means tacitly condoning our ally Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the occupied territories. Their leaders can hardly afford to be seen on the front page of their newspapers signing a deal with Exxon or Chevron when the photo next to it is a dead Palestinian child or a bulldozed Palestinian home.

Likewise, even countries our oil companies already have deals with like Saudi, Kuwait, and the various Emirates must react to public opinion when it reaches a certain peak of outrage as happened during the oil embargo during the 70's.

At that point, it is no longer a matter of just padding oil companies profits, but of strategic access to the fuel that runs the world.

After the debacle of Iraq, longstanding plans to invade Saudi Arabia if the royal family is overthrown or another embargo occurred suddenly look less practical.

The only way to keep the oil flowing is to remove the political offense. Make the Israelis behave, pull back to the 1967 borders, give the Palestinians their state and stop the invasions of Lebanon. The Arab governments have said they will recognize Israel in exchange for this and polls of Arab citizens shown the same.

From the Brookings Institute

When those conditions are met, we will be in no danger of having the oil tap turned off.

Our foray into 19th century, British style colonialism in Asia has failed, and now the masters of the universe on Wall Street must swallow their pride and deal with the people of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia as equals and get some of their oil wealth or keep pretending they are inferior races to be herded and exterminated until we are chased out of their countries and get none of the oil money at all.

I think I know which side they'll take, and if it comes to a fight between the Israel Lobby and the Oil Industry, with trillions of dollars in oil income in jeopardy, there is no doubt who will drink whose milkshake.

Questions Obama must ask intel briefers to separate bullshit from reality

Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and presidential briefer posted some question he thought Obama should ask his intel briefers. This inspired me to come up with a list of question of my own, designed to separate the embarrassing, childish propaganda of the Bush administration from our real foreign policy goals and challenges, and send this email to McGovern:

I just read your article and had a couple of things that I would want the next president to know as well:

• How much of what we are doing in Central Asia is motivated by the "War on Terror" and how much is jockeying for control of the world's remaining oil reserves?

• To the extent that we are trying to monopolize the oil in the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea Basin, how much of that is for our national security and how much is strictly for the benefit of oil companies?

• How could Russia potentially retaliate for our efforts to take over the export routes from the Caspian Basin? Would it hurt our national security to leave that to the Russians in exchange for their traditional posture of leaving us the Persian Gulf?

• If we were Russia or China, how would we respond to the United States trying to take control of the two major oil producing regions in the world? Why should we expect Russia or China to respond differently than we would in that position?

• Which business interests are using our foreign policy apparatus to enrich themselves while enflaming animosity in other countries toward the United States? What would our foreign policy look like and how much would we save if we didn't use our military and diplomats as their enforcers? How can we disentangle those business interests from our government and neuter their influence?

• What do we gain by leaving the Israel-Palestine conflict an open wound? Are we just the victims of the best lobbying effort ever, or are we getting something out of it like using Israel as the bad cop and possible having them as a scapegoat when things finally fall apart in the Persian Gulf?

• If a bipolar Cold War produced relative stability for decades, why can't we have a stable multi-polar peace, that gave us, Russia, China, and Europe spheres of influence?

• For you generals and intelligence analysts old enough to have lived through the Cold War, can you tell me with a straight face that Iran or any other country would be stupid enough to use nukes on us or give them to terrorists who might when we have 10,000 warheads to retaliate with and are the only country who has demonstrated the willingness to use them?

• The same question on a smaller scale applies to Israel: how exactly would a nuclear armed Iran be a threat to Israel when Israel has several hundred nukes to respond with, a handful of which could take out all the major cities in Iran?

• What was in those classified pages about Saudi Arabia in the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11's report? Even without those pages being released, there is far more evidence of Saudi government involvement in 9/11 than either of the two countries we invaded, Iraq and Afghanistan. Why did the Bush administration let them off the hook?

• What are the various "off the books" covert activities involving American business and government operatives, whose interests do they serve, and how can we keep them from creating incidents to steer our foreign policy?

The frustration I have with all of these questions is that these are not part of the public debate, and instead we hear our elected leaders talk in childish terms of chasing terrorists, WMD (wasn't the old NBC acronym more precise and less alarmist?), or spreading democracy. We ignore each of those three things when it suits our perceived interests. We don't care about Saudi terrorists or their lack of democracy, and we clearly don't care about nukes in Pakistan, India, or Israel. So other interests are in play that aren't in the debate.

I guess American politicians keep doing it because it works on the American public, but it makes us, and even the politicians themselves, look retarded in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Sincerely,





I'm embarrassed to say I forgot to send Ray a pretty big one:

• To the extent that we have any real interest in strategic access to Iraq's oil, how has the Bush effort to gain favorable terms for US oil companies at the Iraqis expense hurt us there, and what can we do to gain the trust of Iraqis?

On Torture: civilization vs. the lynch mob

Jeremy H posted this question on Yahoo Answers:

For all of you that are against torture?

I want to know what you would do instead?

If we can't use loud noise, sleep deprivation, ect {sic} What can we use?

Do you think sitting them down and demanding an answer by pounding your fist on the table is going to work? What type of interrogation techniques can be used?

My response (as Yurbud):

You are assuming that torture is used like in 24 with the theoretical ticking bomb. Real military and intel people say that almost never happens.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0212/p99s0...

When they really need to get information, the Israelis have found that deception works as well or better than physical torture. In one tactic, they rough a guy up, release him to the prison yard, then other prisoners say they are part of his group and ask him what he didn't tell so they can pass the info to those outside. Instead, they give it to the interrogator and get a plane ticket to the US and a green card.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200310/bo...

Ironically, though the Israelis live with terrorism on a more constant basis, their supreme court has banned torture.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200310/bo...

The purpose of torture is to terrify the people in the country when you release the victim or news of what you did to him gets out, the same way Stalin used it when he had people picked up at random. What kind of useful information could those people possible have? None. But they would be hesitant to get out of line because they knew a neighbor might be picked up and turn them in or turn them in to avoid being taken.
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/prin...

The guy in the most famous photo, where he is wearing a hood and blanket and standing on a box with his hands out and electrodes on his fingers, that guy was innocent. Once they figured out he hadn't done anything, they kept at him to pressure him to become an informant AFTER he was released.
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=15727...

Not incidentally, when Army Maj. Gen. Taguba investigated Abu Ghraib, he found that at least 60% of the inmates were not guilty of ANYTHING, let alone terrorism. The general who ran the prison put the estimate at 90%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/abu_ghraib_...

One method of torture does work: threatening or actually abusing the loved ones of the person you are trying to break. This was done with children at Abu Ghraib. While it may work, using methods like that shows Bush is not fighting FOR democracy, and the only thing it will do to terrorism is inflame more of it.
http://web.archive.org/web/2004081614113...

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middlee...

The one guy running for president who was a POW is also the only GOP candidate who doesn't salivate at the prospect of torture. He knows that the only hope we have of our troops being treated well if captured is if we treat those we have in captivity well. Even if this doesn't work on some religious extremists, it establishes a reputation that will serve us well in future conflicts.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/111305...

In World War II, German soldiers were more likely to surrender to us than fight to the death because they knew we would treat them well. Since the Soviets were retaliating for what the Germans did on the Eastern Front, they were less likely to surrender to them.

Likewise, in the first Gulf War, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who surrendered without firing a shot were probably motivated by our reputation for treating prisoners well as much as our overwhelming force of arms. I wonder if that would have been the case if they knew they would sodomized once captured.

This doesn't seem to occur too often to people on the right. They prefer the logic of the lynch mob that says I am mad and someone else must pay for it. As soon as the mob catches someone who roughly fits the profile of who they are mad at, they convince themselves that person is guilty, take out their wrath on him (or her) and feel their manhood is confirmed.

They don't even wonder why we have left untouched the countries that Congress determined DID fund and have a role in 9/11, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articl...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/...

Besides being ignorant and cruel, that logic (or lack of it) solves no problems and creates more.

A civilized society has to ask why terrorism is occurring, including whether some of our actions are giving people grievances that give them a reason to join terrorists groups (like occupying their country, propping up their dictators, or overthrowing their elected leaders, and controlling their natural resources), what we can do to reduce those grievances without jeopardizing our safety, and finally how we can capture or kill those responsible for attacking us without making unnecessary enemies in the process.

context on YAHOO ANSWERS

VIDEO: who strip searches a 10 year old, a woman with cerebral palsy on her period, and a Holocaust survivor?

Click pics to see youtube flicks:

Part 1




Part 2




Website of the group that post this:
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/about_us/easiesttargets.html


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GRAPHS & VIDEOS: Who exactly is a nuclear threat to us?

With the Bushies trotting out the same nuclear boogey man stories to sell the Iran War that they used in Iraq. The essence of the claim is that if some country gets a couple of dozens nukes or even one, they can blackmail us or even hold the whole world hostage.

We seem to be suffering from collective amnesia of some basic math about nuclear weapons most people, including our enemies, knew during the Cold War.

Here's a quick refresher:

These are the nuclear arsenals of most of the countries in the world.

Damn! They could do us some damage couldn't they?

But it looks a little different when you add us and Russia into the picture:

And if you throw in the extra nukes we and the Russians have in mothballs:

If some country nuked us or gave nukes to a terrorist who nuked us, we have enough nukes to burn that country off the map, and not even miss the warheads we used.

Here's a couple of 60 second videos that put it another way:

It’s worth noting that Israel has some nuclear missile submarines too, so if any of their neighbors nuke them, no matter how successfully, Israel could give them a very bad day.

Every world leader knows that not only do we have enough nukes to destroy the whole world several times over, we are the only country who has ever used them. They know that it would be suicidal to nuke us or give a nuke to terrorists to nuke us. That's why the Soviets never attacked us even when they had roughly as many or slightly more nukes than us.

Someone will say the threat of even one nuke going off here is too great. However, the leaders of countries are like chess players. They got into power by being able to accurately predict how their opponents would react to their actions. That's why there are few any examples in history of numerically, technologically, and economically inferior countries launching attacks on a superior country's home turf.

A nuclear attack on us even if successful in itself, would have zero chance of having positive political or economic results for the country that launched it.

You probably already knew this, but you can send it to your righty friends as Rush, O'Reilly, Hannity, Savage, and the other snake oil salesmen get their knickers in a knot about the threat from Iran.

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Iraq Insurgents locals NOT al Qaeda said 2003 National Intelligence Estimate

If you just relied on the Bush administration and Fox, talk radio, and even mainstream network news, you would think we are fighting primarily foreign al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq.

But as early as 2003, top analysts from various intelligence agencies agreed the insurgency was local and based on real grievances, including the presence of our troops and told the Bushies.

The Bushies chose to lie to us instead.

The same kind of information was why Nixon didn't want the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War published. It wasn't that they revealed our intelligence methods or war plans, but that the presence of our troops was fueling the resistance.

It's possible that some portion of the 72% of our troops who want us to leave within the year have figured this out, that they are killing people who are doing the same thing they would be doing if America was occupied. These 18 to twenty-something year olds are going to carry that with them for a long time.



KEY EXCERPTS:

Intelligence agencies warned about growing local insurgency in late 2003
Posted on Tue, Feb. 28, 2006
By WARREN P. STROBEL and JONATHAN S. LANDAY
Knight Ridder Newspapers

***

Among the warnings, Knight Ridder has learned, was a major study, called a National Intelligence Estimate, completed in October 2003 that concluded that the insurgency was fueled by local conditions - not foreign terrorists- and drew strength from deep grievances, including the presence of U.S. troops.

***

Maples said that while Iraqi terrorists and foreign fighters conduct some of the most spectacular attacks, disaffected Iraqi Sunnis make up the insurgency's core. "So long as Sunni Arabs are denied access to resources and lack a meaningful presence in government, they will continue to resort to violence," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

That view contrasts with what the administration said as the insurgency began in the months following the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion and gained traction in the fall. Bush and his aides portrayed it as the work primarily of foreign terrorists crossing Iraq's borders, disenfranchised former officials of Saddam's deposed regime and criminals.

On Nov. 1, 2003, a day after the National Intelligence Estimate was distributed, Bush said in his weekly radio address: "Some of the killers behind these attacks are loyalists of the Saddam regime who seek to regain power and who resent Iraq's new freedoms. Others are foreigners who have traveled to Iraq to spread fear and chaos. ... The terrorists and the Baathists hope to weaken our will. Our will cannot be shaken."

FULL TEXT:

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/nation/13984788.htm




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