Sometimes history is spelled in large block letters, on the front page of the newspaper.
From the New York Times:
Photo: taisau, Creative Commons, Flickr
JUNE 19, 2008 — BAGHDAD — Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.
The succinct end of the Times piece, which really best sums up five years of trauma:
In an interview with Newsweek last fall, the former chief executive of Exxon, Lee Raymond, praised Iraq’s potential as an oil-producing country and added that Exxon was in a position to know. “There is an enormous amount of oil in Iraq,” Mr. Raymond said. “We were part of the consortium, the four companies that were there when Saddam Hussein threw us out, and we basically had the whole country.
Which calls to mind this thoughtful analysis on why we went to Iraq in the first place. Many people are still perplexed by exactly what moved Bush-Cheney to invade and occupy Iraq… Alan Greenspan, in his just published memoir, is clearer on the matter. ‘I am saddened,’ he writes, ‘that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.’
That meshes with military historian John Lewis Gaddis, in 2002:
In my own view — definitely not something the administration is saying for publication — this is a strategy that’s ultimately targeted at the Saudis and at the Egyptians and at the Pakistanis; these authoritarian regimes that, in fact, have been the biggest breeders of terrorism in recent years. Iraq has not been; Saudi Arabia actually was. And I think the administration is thinking over the long term about that problem, too. And properly so; they should be thinking about that.
Why wouldn’t they be able to talk about that in public?
Well, you can’t talk about this in public as long as you want the Saudis as your allies and as long as you want to use Saudi bases for the war against Iraq and as long as you are relying on Saudi oil. But, of course, if they can pull off Iraq, if they can accomplish this as successfully as many people in the administration think they can, then they have less need for Saudi bases and they have less need for Saudi oil. And so the two parts of it fit together.
OK, OK, it’s the oil. We get it! Bor-ing But then, an interesting question — why are we unhappy with a war that is giving us what we want? Are, perhaps, our consumer souls in conflict with our souls as citizens? Benjamin Barber writes about that here, especially useful in describing the travails of a monkey with a nut:
There is a fiendishly simple method of trapping monkeys in Africa that suggests the paradoxes which confront liberty in this era of consumerism. A small box containing a large nut is affixed to a well-anchored post. The nut can be accessed only through a single, small hole in the box designed to accommodate an outstretched monkey’s grasping paw. Easy to reach in, but when the monkey clasps the nut, impossible to get out. Of course, it is immediately evident to everyone (except the monkey) that all the monkey must do to free itself is let go of its prize. Clever hunters have discovered, however, that they can secure their prey hours or even days later because the monkey—driven by desire—will not release the nut, even until death.