are issue threads still allowed here?

[welshTerrier2]

well, here's one anyway.

you know how there's all this talk that Iraq was all about oil. you know how we keep hearing that "we" have strategic interests in the Middle East. you know how the US is being run by a bunch of oilmen? there's an old zen koan that says something like: if you don't have room in your living room for an elephant, don't make friends with the elephant trainer.

well, the oily elephants are stomping all over the Iraqi people. some military families say "how dare you say those troops died for nothing." they're right of course. they died for something all right. they may have had the noblest objectives for serving in Iraq. we should honor that. but, that does not change the reality of what bush's real motives were for the mission. O-I-L.

it's the perfect definition of treason really: selling out your own country. so many have died. it's all so senseless. you wonder whether we all have become so numb to it it's just becoming talking points and argument. what's being done is unconscionable. it is inhuman. not just inhumane, inhuman. in my court, those responsible would never see the sunshine again. put them all in the deepest, darkest hole and just leave them to their own foul stench.

source: http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0222-21.htm

Throughout nearly four years of the daily mayhem and carnage in Iraq, President Bush and his aides in the White House have scoffed at even the slightest suggestion that the U.S. military occupation has anything to do with oil. The President presumably would have us all believe that if Iraq had the world's second-largest supply of bananas instead of petroleum, American troops would still be there.

Now comes new evidence of the big prize in Iraq that rarely gets mentioned at White House briefings. A proposed new Iraqi oil and gas law began circulating last week among that country's top government leaders and was quickly leaked to various Internet sites - before it has even been presented to the Iraqi parliament. Under the proposed law, Iraq's immense oil reserves would not simply be opened to foreign oil exploration, as many had expected. Amazingly, executives from those companies would actually be given seats on a new Federal Oil and Gas Council that would control all of Iraq's reserves. In other words, Chevron, ExxonMobil, British Petroleum and the other Western oil giants could end up on the board of directors of the Iraqi Federal Oil and Gas Council, while Iraq's own national oil company would become just another competitor.<skip>

The big British and American companies had been shut out of Iraq, thanks to more than a decade of U.S. sanctions against Saddam. But if the new law passes, those companies will be the ones reviewing those very contracts and any others. "Iraq's economic security and development will be thrown into question with this law," said Antonia Juhasz of Oil Change International, a petroleum industry watchdog group. <skip>

The main religious and ethnic groups are all pushing to control contracts and oil revenues for their regions, while the Bush administration is seeking more centralized control.

While the politicians in Washington and Baghdad bicker to carve up the real prize, and just what share Big Oil will get, more Iraqi civilians and American soldiers die each each day - for freedom, we're told.