Contrary to the huge amount of media spin and blatant propaganda, much of the current US global military strategy is motivated by two concerns: securing the world’s last remaining oil reserves, and preventing those reserves from being traded in Euros. This explains the lack of support for, even outright opposition to, the US invasion of Iraq in the EU. The opposition is strongest in the states with the most at stake in the Euro currency: France and Germany.
The US dollar gains a good portion of its ballast by being the prime currency that oil, drugs and arms are traded in. The War On Terrorism is just a convenient pretext, mere smoke and mirrors to hide this sad fact from a public that would not support such action if the true motive were known.
Bush points to his draconian domestic and foreign anti-terrorism measures and says, “See? We must be doing the right thing by removing your civil liberties and rights because we haven’t had a terrorist event in the 3 years since 9/11.” Well, there wasn’t a terrorist event in the three years preceeding it either. The fact is, terrorist attacks of any significant magnitude on US soil are quite rare.
Some are thanking Bush for going in to bat to keep our NZ petrol prices low. This is, at the very least, a cynical kick in the teeth for the families of the 100,000 Iraqi civilians (UN, Red Cross figures) that have died as a direct result of the illegal US invasion.
The reason Kerry was a more hopeful prospect for the recent US presidential election was that his administration would have almost certainly not contained the rabidly fundamentalist, uneducated philistines (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Pearle, and so on) behind the blatantly fascist thinktank Project For The New American Century. The website speaks for itself. In particular, their manifesto Rebuilding America’s Defenses states among their goals such things as global “full spectrum dominance”, “US global leadership” and “securing America’s national interests”. No mention is made of what exactly these “national interests” are, but the evidence seems to suggest that they include other people’s oil and financial markets.
Let us not forget that a large proportion of the American people have been completely brainwashed by the blatant propaganda machine of Fox News and other TV networks.
Newsflashes: The US dollar has been in decline since 2000, and is now at its weakest (as of 3 December 2004) in over twenty years. 9/11 and Iraq are not related. There are no WMD in Iraq, and the US government knew it before 9/11 happened. Among other terrorist organisations, Al Qaeda was funded, trained, and armed by the CIA throughout the 1980s to help bring about the fall of the USSR. According to Brzezinski, adviser to Reagan and Bush I, this was accomplished by overextending their military industrial sector by enticing them to invade Afghanistan, which helped to bring about the Soviet economic collapse.
Reading list:
Chomsky, N. Hegemony Or Survival
Brzezinski, B. The Grand Chessboard
Klare, M. Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict