Chinatown

A young friend of mine currently serving in the military says of Iraq, "I'll be the first to admit it: we were wrong to go in. Personally, I was wrong to support the war. No one talks about weapons of mass destruction anymore! When I think about it, I feel deceived. We were sold "facts" that were completely wrong and these guys played on our patriotism and our fears. Either the intelligence was flat wrong or we were lied to. Either action is inexcusable."

I appreciate the mea culpa, but it's not like our young people in the various theatres of the Persian Gulf are fighting and dying for nothing. And really, the actual reasons for the Iraq War -- all talk of WMD's and 9/11 aside -- are as pure as a 72-dollar drum of Saudi light sweet crude.

Compared with the reasons for Vietnam, which when boiled down amount to little more than a desire for a little light exercise and muscle flexing on the part of belligerent generals, greedy defense contractors, and one U.S. president from Texas, the neocons' motivation for domination of the Middle East are pristine and blameless. And wrong.

The trouble with constantly dealing with the administration's cover story for Iraq is that it short-circuits any effective debate about the real m. o. But it's there for anyone who cares to look hard enough, in Wolfowitz's Defense Planning Guidance of 1992 (be sure to look under the "oil" subhead) and in the Project for a New American Century's white paper, Rebuilding America's Defenses of 2000.

And yesterday, it even showed up on Chris Matthews's MSNBC gabfest, "Hardball," where White House Counselor Dan Bartlett insisted that no one in the administration ever said the Iraq War would give us lower gas prices.

But Matthews countered with a quote from from Larry Lindsay, a senior White House economic adviser back in Bush's early days, which ran the Washington Times in September, 2002:

"As for the impact of a war with Iraq, 'It depends how the war goes.' But he quickly adds that that 'Under every plausible scenario, the negative effect will be quite small relative to the economic benefits that would come from a successful prosecution of the war.'

"'The key issue is oil, and a regime change in Iraq would facilitate an increase in world oil,' which would drive down oil prices, giving the U.S. economy an added boost."

You don't have to be a Rhodes Scholar to figure it out. And you don't have to be Einstein to realize that the neocon response to the already-arrived oil shortages is the kind of desperate and futile strongarm violence that street addicts use.

A real leader -- someone of the caliber of Washington, or Lincoln, or F.D. Roosevelt -- would respond to our present crisis rationally. As far back as the late seventies, we should have been looking for ways to reduce oil consumption in the short run, and implement alternative energy systems in the long run (electricity would probably be the most practical). We're going to have to do precisely those very things eventually anyway.

But George W. Bush is not Abraham Lincoln, and Saddam Hussein was in the unfortunate position of standing between a junkie and his fix.

Ever seen the Roman Polanski movie "Chinatown?" Try looking at things the way the Jack Nicholson character did. It leads to cynical world-view, sure, but illusions never fail to land us in deep kim-che.