Thursday, January 31, 2008

Iniquities of War, Inequities of Life

By Ray McGovern
January 31, 2008

“For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is to have more — always more — even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing. For them, to be is to have and to be the class of the ‘haves.’ ”
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Finally, the truth is seeping out. Contrary to how President George W. Bush has tried to justify the Iraq war in the past, he has now clumsily — if inadvertently — admitted that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was aimed primarily at seizing predominant influence over its oil by establishing permanent (the administration favors “enduring”) military bases.

Read on.

2 comments:

Robert B. Livingston said...

Dear Mr. McGovern,

I am so happy to hear that you had that card in your knapsack.

It is a privilege that America has you!

Gary said...

“You must concede that a few GIs killed every week is a small price to pay for the oil we need. Many more died in Vietnam, and there wasn’t even any oil there.”

Not quite...:

"The result was that the French lost a vast oil-rich property, and the US took over in South 'Nam. After the contrived Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964, for 10 years US oil companies did a secret seismic oil survey offshore of South Vietnam from 1965 to 1975 under the guise of spent bombs dropping and exploding in the sea in "designated areas" from returning US war jets to the offshore carriers.

Less than a decade later, in 1985 when the new independent nation of Vietnam finally opened up the offshore region for oil exploration, only Chevron knew where to put their bids and get the oil-rich undersea tracts. The Vietnamese had gotten a "free" oil survey to make them one of the largest petroleum producers in Asia and Chevron hardly paid a nickel, since Uncle Sam had "paid" for the secret survey under the guise of war."