Harold Pinter acknowledgement speech

[Occhidiangela]

I interpret `control' as meaning that the Bush administration

Stop right there. That has been American Security policy since 1991, note the bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Gulf, that have been built since the end of the '91 Gulf War, most of it constructed under the Clinton Administration. The Saudi bases closing was a set back to the over all policy, but it made sense given that the Saudi's were never our friends: we were mutually useful to one another, and in some respects remain in that relationship.

For that matter, American Security Policy since 1974, to include Carter's stand up of the Rapid Reaction Force in 1979 that eventually grew to become Central Command, has had as a consistent 30 year focus a policy protecting or influence the world's major oil producing region due to 1) oil's criticality to the global economy 2) which includes America's oil addiction. I'll leave 30 years of piss poor energy policy for another thread. (More nukes, less kooks, thanks.)

wanted to establish military bases in the middle-east, as well as a pro-western political ally --- instead of being forced to rely on highly repressive Arab regimes, like Saudi-Arabia, that fomented (and continue to foment) the idealogies leading to 9/11. The administration used 9/11 in a shamelessly dishonest way to sell the invasion of Iraq. It was clear long before the war, not just in hindsight, that they were determined to invade, and that they were fixing the `facts' around this policy.

I understand the PNAC is your point of departure here? <_< Use of the 9-11 emotional leverage needs no further comment.

Why? There are no doubt secondary reasons, such as supporting Israel and opposing Al Qaida, but the main goal of the Iraq invasion was surely to secure US (and other corporate) access to middle-eastern oil.

I refer you to 30 years of American security policy. I will argue that the Israeli security is far more important than is generally achkowledged, since it is the biggest bone of contention between US, and Arab and Muslim governments, and has been since 1948. The decision to undertake the war was, and is still, incredibly risky. The ripple effects have immense potential to backfire in terms of how they benefit Iran in the long term, and the risk the Iraq is more unstable, not less, when the dust settles -- which it hasn't yet. The current problems are still chump change, IMO, compared to the long term pitfalls.

As an anti-terrorism policy, the Iraq war made as much sense as using gasoline to put out a barely smoldering fire. (The use of torture is a disasterous policy also.)

Nice troll in parentheses. I suggest you take great care in defining that term. That said, the political risk taken on the Gitmo "isolation ward" has become an immense failure in the war of perception, which the Bush Administration has been losing since March of 2003: Shock and Awe and the missed "decapitation strike."

As a policy to topple an isolated, despotic, and vulnerable regime, and install a pro-western democracy that would host US forces in the heart of the middle-east, it made sense. (At least, from a certain perspective, and if one believes that the use of miitary force is justifiable for such ends.)

Made sense only if one believed one could install democracy at the point of a bayonet. <_<

Never mind that the head of the Pakistani nuclear program was shopping nuclear technology to all and sundry, or that there is god-knows how much untracked nuclear material missing from the states of the former USSR.

Separate but no less thorny problems, as is North Korea.

It may be that the Iraquis (at least the Kurds and the Shia -- I would be worried as a Sunni in Iraq right now), not to mention Iran, will be the ultimate benefactors of this misbegotten and costly adventure.&nbsp; The ultimate irony for the hubris of the Bush administration is that, given the unpopularity of the occupying forces, the US may never secure a long-term military presence in Iraq, despite the 14 (?) permanent military bases under construction there.

Yes, I think you are right there.

I don't expect to here very much about the latter bases in the US media coverage of the `withdrawal' that is certainly coming soon.

It doesn't take much searching to find out where they are, open source, if one is interested in such things. A bitter irony is that the BRAC is closing bases in the US while bases are being built in Iraq. Who is saving a buck? No one in Washington at this time, that is for sure. :angry:

Occhi