Genesis of the Iraq War

This is probably old information to some of you.

The roots of the Iraq War go back at least as far as Gulf War I, and maybe farther. It's not hard to prove that the reasons we are in Iraq today have very little to do with Saddam Hussein.

In 1992, when the neocon foreign affairs specialist Paul Wolfowitz, was working as an Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy in the waning days of the Bush I administratin, he supervised the drafting of a defense policy position paper. In it he outlined plans for military intervention in Iraq as an action necessary to give the United States "access to vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil" and to prevent Saddam stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

The paper called for preemptive attacks if necessary, that is to say, if a coalition could not be "orchestrated." The primary goal of U.S. policy, according to Wolfowitz, should be to prevent the rise of any nation that could challenge the United States, either on a global level, or in the all-important Mideast region. This document was leaked to the New York Times. When the Times published it, the resulting controversy forced the Defense Department to rewrite parts of Wolfowitz's paper.

Wolfowitz's policy statement shows that the Bush II policy toward Iraq was fully formed in the minds of neocon analysts even before Bill Clinton took office. His proposed policies were echoed and further elaborated by a report entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses," Published in 2000 by the influential neoconservative thinktank, Project for a New American Century. This report has become the Bush II administration's master plan for the Middle East.

It reads in part: "The U.S. has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in the Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

(Emphasis is mine -- DB)

People associated with PNAC include Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bolton. Bearing this in mind, it's not too difficult to understand why Donald Rumsfeld began calling for the bombing of Iraq on September 12, 2001, offering as justification for this seemingly nonsensical idea that "There are no good targets in Afghanistan."

A person would have to be very blind, very foolish, or very naive to accept the administration's purported reasons for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Consider for a moment that the chief resource of our most reliable supplier of oil, Saudi Arabia, shows every sign of playing out. Ghawar, the largest field ever discovered, is still producing, but they're having to pump so much sea water into it to get the oil out that production has slowed down considerably.

There's only one country left in the world that has large reserves of oil that are, in some places, still unexploited and in others, still unevaluated.

Anybody want to take a wild guess what country that is?