Six Degrees

Everybody’s played “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” right? OK, let’s play “Six Degrees from the Reality of the Iraq War.”

Our way of life, which VP Cheney says is “non-negotiable,” requires slightly more than 20 million barrels of oil a day, or something in excess of a billion barrels every 50 days. We produce slightly less than six million barrels a day, and domestic production has been declining since the U.S. production peak in 1970. The rest is imported; do the math. In addition, two-thirds of the world’s remaining oil is in the Middle East. That’s one degree.

At the conclusion of Gulf War I in 1991, neocon planners realized we had to either change our way of living and seek alternatives to petroleum, or control the supply of the substance to which we are addicted. They chose the latter course, and set forth their plans here and here. Military presence in the Gulf region – a petroleum-securing “Fort Apache,” if you will, was conceived as the answer. That’s two degrees.

After 9/11, Bush and the neocons saw their opening and moved to implement the PNAC plan linked above. They realized, however, that American voters would reject a war predicated on a naked power-and-resources grab, so they cooked up fairy tales about weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds, and the Iraqi Stalinist dictator’s supposed ties to the al-Qaida terrorists who attacked New York and Washington. That’s three degrees.

At the beginning, some people realized what the war was about, and the slogan ”No Blood for Oil”was heard frequently. However, Americans mostly swallowed the administration’s fairy tales, and at the outset public approval of the war was about 75-25. As the war progressed, however, and went badly, and then worse than badly, and eventually the public turned against it. We began to see things like people driving gigantic Suburban Attack Vehicles sporting “War is NOT the Answer” bumper stickers. Unfortunately, for them, war IS the answer. And that’s four degrees.

With support for the war unraveling, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, et. al. have commenced lying about the lies they told to take us into Iraq. Bush is now rewriting the history of his documented pre-war lies by accusing war critics of rewriting history, and that’s five degrees.

Suddenly, everyone who’s not drinking the Kool-Aid has realized the U.S. must leave Iraq as soon as possible, since the war has become a lose-lose situation (we lose, they lose). A conservative Democratic congressman, John Murtha, makes an impassioned speech pleading the case for a total American pullout from Iraq at the first practicable opportunity. The word “oil,” however, does not appear once anywhere in this speech.

That’s six degrees.

And you may ask yourself
Where is that beautiful house?

And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?

And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go to?

And you may ask yourself
Am I right? ...am I wrong?

And you may tell yourself
My god!...what have I done?

--The Talking Heads: “Once in a Lifetime”

I would humbly submit that the only solution to addiction is to stop. Anything else is nuts.

Incidentally, we need to get out of Iraq right now.