Oil, war, lies and bullst’**
By Cyrus Bina
There’s hardly any doubt that the George W Bush administration lied rather consciously about the cause of invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. President George W Bush also has been deliberately untruthful to the American public on a number of domestic issues, such as illegal, indiscriminate wiretapping of US citizens, torture of foreign detainees and American political prisoners, and limitless encroachment on civil, human, and legal rights of the American citizenry at large.
As a consequence, at least on the issue of the invasion of Iraq, there’s no discernable disagreement about the Bush administration’s appalling lies. However, what is still questionable within the public (particularly, the anti-war) discourse is the mistaken belief that oil has been the primary cause of the US warin Iraq. This belief, as I shall demonstrate below, is but a harmful ploy that essentially belittles the truth; this belief plays as a de facto cover-up that inadvertently, but sadly, conceals the Bush administration’s scandalous tracks in this bloody colonial adventure, and consequently trivializes the real cause of the invasion of Iraq.
For instance, this supposedly “progressive” view is boon to the Israel lobby in the United States, whose singular aim today is to justify the Bush administration’s mindless warmongering and to distract the public from the real cause of war in the Middle East.
In this critical sense, I will argue, rather regretfully, the anti-war movement itself has indeed played a significant part in the Bush administration’s reckless and frantic foreign policy. Moreover, I contend that speaking of oil as the cause of war is clumsily out of context and thereby distracts our attention from the neoconservative /militarist/Christian Zionist vision of the Bush-Cheney administration.
And, particularly, by invoking “No Blood for Oil”, the anti-war left - including radicals and certain self-proclaimed “Marxists” - is, advertently or inadvertently, blameworthy of sweeping the real cause of war under the carpet..