People can be so ungrateful, sometimes. Why, if we hadn’t of gone in and stabillized the situation, no telling how much gasoline might cost now!
Clearly you missed the media coverage, when the thousands took to the streets, banners aloft:
**“I was wrong”
“Them lefties’re smarter”** and
"I knew but lied".
This differs in marginal and definitional respects from certain claims posted by you, pre-war
Look, you did some kind of blind search and thought you came up with a nugget. That discussion was about whether the US went into Iraq to grab the oil for us. If you want to think you’ve found some hypocritical stance from me, then have at it.
I stand by what I said in this thread, and if you want to argue with it, go ahead. We go to war for reasons related to our strategic interests. If something isn’t of strategic interest, then maybe we intervene and maybe we don’t. All you have to do is look around to see that is true.
This doesn’t really have anything to do with Iraq. McCain’s not talking about the past - he’s supposedly stating a future policy decision: we become independant of foreign oil and the Middle East will no longer have any strategic interests for us. And as I wrote, that’s way to broad. We could become completely self-sufficient in energy needs but I still don’t think we’d want Iran to develop nuclear weapons or to have Egpyt taken over by a fundamentalist government or to have a war between Syria and Israel. We have important interests in the region that not based on oil.
Hmm. So our glorious victory in Grenada? Was that strategic, or humanitarian?
I did, thanks, and I think my point was reasonable.
(Although I wouldn’t, and didn’t, describe your stance on the Iraq-and-oil issue as “hypocritical” per se; more like “modified over time”.)
I completely agree. However, I think it’s useful in a discussion like this one to note how the presentation of different rationales for war has undergone changes in the political discourse.
Now that the more urgent and/or humanitarian goals originally emphasized by our leaders as the chief aims of the invasion (neutralizing Saddam’s WMD, destroying the Iraq/al-Qaeda connection, establishing a stable peaceful Iraqi democracy, etc.) have been shown to be much less relevant and/or successful than originally supposed, more space is opening up for more consciously “realpolitik” perspectives that lay more stress on the importance of oil.
I agree we certainly wouldn’t want such things to happen even if petroleum resources were a non-issue, but would we be likely to send in US troops to avert them or affect their outcomes?
When this campaign becomes one between John McCain and Barack Obama, it’s going to be ugly for the GOP. McCain’s constant misstatements will become more and more difficult to walk back or to clarify with conditionals that are divorced from reality.
One other minor aspect of note is that John McCain’s proposals always seem to be something that they are going to be talking about. The rare occasions that he does lay out something specific in regards to policy, they are inevitably really bad ideas (e.g. the gas tax holiday), or are also bad ideas that are simple reiterations of the current administrations policies (e.g. 100 years in Iraq).
Heck, it might not take that long even, if we’ve stopped talking about Jeremiah Wright:
Is that a senior moment, or a Bush-like marble-mouthed explanation of a policy, or something else?
McCain Implies Iraq War Is For Oil: Watch Video | HuffPost Latest News Heres the speech. Not hard to understand at all.
Whatever he knew, and whenever he knew it, John McCain wants to be president, and going to war for oil is so much a part of his philosophy, an energy independence policy is a step to prevent him from going to war for oil, in his own opinion. How factual, accurate, knowledgeable, admirable, or truly Republican that makes him are side issues. The man assumes that going to war to obtain oil was not only the right thing to do, but will continue to be the right thing to do until other energy sources make it less desirable. For him, war is an acceptable energy policy, until we can develop another.
Tris
Really? Like what?
Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
The whole thing would be laughable if it were not so tragic: not only have we NOT secured the Iraqi oil supply, had we spend one percent of what we are blowing on this idiotic war (on alterate energy) we woul be so much ahead.
Plus, we wouldn’t have 4000 American soldiers in graves.
McCain has proven himself incompetent; I’m voting “none of the above”! :smack:
Our interest in the Middle-East overall is purely about oil. Our interest in Iraq is about the balance of power in the Middle-East. Ever since mechanized shipping and the Suez and Panama Canals, the Middle-East has had no global political significance outside of oil. Part of the point of our Middle-East policy is to make Muslim nation’s antagonistic to each other, and too weak for any single one of them to become dominant. This is why we shake our sabers at Iran right now and Iraq before. It’s standard Divide and Conquer. The Neo-Cons are the first to enter into lovely ideal that Democracy can bring about world peace and take it genuinely seriously in the Middle-East. If we’d taken it seriously before, Shah Reza Pahlavi would not be as well known today as he is, and we’d all be talking about President Mossadegh. We support Saudi Arabia because the Saudis couldn’t exist without our help, so their weakness is a chit in their favor in terms of our relations. Now, Saddam could have provided for the balance of power act, and he did just fine ever since Pappy Bush contained him, but the Neo-Conservative dream of a Democratic Baghdad was a bit more of a Romantic fantasy. We didn’t go into Iraq over Iraq’s oil, but Oil is the number one priority in our Middle-East policy. The point is to suck their oil dry and then abandon them while we still have reserves in the US.
I think people in this thread don’t understand just how incompetent Arabs are. Neither Saudi Arabia nor Egypt could become a serious power-house without American help. They are dependent upon American know-how at every step. From refining tech, to civil infrastructure to weapons, they are dependent upon us. Of course they could find a new patron in China or Russia, but then the fundamentalists would have a beef with those nations. Islamic fundamentalists cannot run a modern state. Arabs were great warriors at the beginning of the Islamic Empire, but even then they relied on Jewish and Persian thinkers to build most of their technical achievements. Iran could be a great nation without western patronage, but Saudi Arabia and Egypt would just fall into disrepair. There is a huge problem in the Arab world, Arabs think they are too good for menial tasks and would rather be broke than say a mechanic. When the US no longer needs them, they’ll have to turn to China, India and developing nations. One of the major parts of American foreign policy is to create a technical dependence. If we were ever to go to war with them, we’d instantly stop repairing their F-16s, and they’d have to retool their entire military along the lines of Soviet or Chinese tech at huge expense. We recently pulled this trick on Venezuela who lost many planes by virtue of the fact that we simply wouldn’t sell them parts. Dubai is going to be filled with Western and Eastern business people by and large, it’s not going to be genius Arab financiers that staff it.
This thread characterizes exactly why I want the Dem’s to win the next election in November. I can’t take another 4-8 years of these much ado about nuffin type thread whenever a Republican speaks. Although realistically if Obama wins in November we’ll probably see a rash of similar threads aimed at Democrats…but since most of the Republicans (at least the knee jerk kind that start this kind of thread) have been weeded out from these parts at least it shouldn’t be nearly as annoying.
-XT
Hell, XT, they didn’t get weeded out, they got embarassed.
Oh, to be sure. I agree completely. The funny thing about life though is it’s dynamic…and tables tend to turn. Not that I think if Obama becomes president there are likely to be as many things as a target rich environment like Bush has been…but it will be nice to get some peace and quiet in GD for the next few years. Relatively speaking of course.
-XT
So is this an indication of a McCain presidency…