They failed, because they are a bunch of incompetents. They most certainly did try to steal the oil profits; the war was in part sold to us on the premise we could make a profit by selling their oil. The fact that that made it essentially a giant mugging didn’t bother many Americans, naturally.
I think the main reason is that they wanted to experiment with democracy in the Middle East in order to counter the influence of radical Islam. Sure, it was nation-building and liberal social engineering, but by sugarcoating it with a military adventure the neocons were able to cast it as consistent with patriotic American values.
shrug I know that’s your take…you’ve certainly said it enough times. I don’t buy your explanation. While I don’t discount completely that profit would have been a nice side bonus (more likely the nice juicy reconstruction contracts), I don’t think it was the main reason for the invasion. There was never any chance we were going to ‘steal’ the oil for ourselves…that was not ever going to happen.
-XT
We certainly tried, and we certainly intended to. The Iraqis resisted more than we though they would.
World peace.
But not world peace like fuzzy-thinking liberals say it, but real world peace, as imagined by hard-headed realists and shrewd pracititioners of realpolitik.
Iraq secretly seethed with desire to be our BFF. Ahmed Chalabi, Iraqi patriot, told us so. Free them from Saddam, introduce orthodox free-market business, and gasp in wonder as Iraq blossoms with picket fences and Starbucks.
In their eternal gratitude, they will insist on the most favorable possible terms in selling oil to its beloved. They will dance in the streets to celebrate any new announcement of closer military and strategic cooperation. American servicemen will be common sights, wandering the streets of Baghdad, fresh-faced young men politely declining to meet someone’s daughter.
For the moment, this golden opportunity exists, for America to assert its iron benevolence, to bring actual peace to the Middle East, assuring the economic futures of ourselves and our allies. And, of course, putting us in a position to enforce the security of Israel, thus advancing the cause of peace.
World peace. On our terms. You pussy liberals ought to be thrilled, this is what you wanted, right? Give peace a chance, right?
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, the Iraqi’s certainly resisted more than we thought they would…we obviously never counted on the insurgency that we got. However, walk me through how we tried to steal the oil exactly? Did we attempt to grant the oil fields to US companies? Did we start the process to do so? My own recollection is that we never tried to do such a thing…but if you have some evidence that we did and that this was thwarted by a more stubborn Iraqi resistance then I’m all ears. By what mechanism exactly would the US have gone about stealing the oil?
-XT
I would say he believed Iraq was a treat to the U.S. that needed to be dealt with anyway; probably had weapons regardless, of the details of any particular lying expatriate; and freeing the Iraqi people would fight terrorism and bring more democracy to the Middle East.
What steal? Its simply human nature for people to offer generous terms to the nation that has, so recently, sacrificed so much on your behalf! Trade agreements would have flourished in such a friendly atmosphere. Of course Anglo-American petroluem concerns will be favored for reconstruction, who has more experience? And who is better positioned to secure the necessary credit? And of course these efforts may expect reward!
As Don Barzini said, “After all, we are not Communists!”
Yes, we did. The Iraqi pseudo-government refused to go along - it WAS in the news. Probably because propped up collaborators or not they don’t want to be killed when we leave. Plus, the “insurgents” kept blowing up the pipelines.
We would have handed over all the profits to ourselves; the original PNAC plan was to not sell it to anyone, but keep it as our own private oil supply.
Yep. Not just American companies either…all ‘allied’ nations were supposed to share in the juicy reconstruction contracts. There is no doubt about that. But, I seriously doubt this was the primary reason for the invasion…just a happy side benefit (had it worked out that way)…and there is no way we were going to ‘steal’ the Iraqi oil. It was always going to belong to the Iraqi government and was always going to continue to be sold on the world market. People who thought US companies were simply going to take over or that the oil was going to some how be shipped back to the US by the tanker-full were delusional.
-XT
You are kidding, right? You don’t see the contradiction in your assertion here?? How did the ‘Iraqi pseudo-government’ refuse…well, anything early on? Why did the US, bent on stealing Iraqi oil ALLOW the pseudo-government to refuse?? Seriously man…let’s at least try and keep it real here.
:dubious: Again, there is a basic contradiction here.
If we were only interested in the oil we would have simply defended the pipelines and oil infrastructure and allowed the rest of the country to go to hell. The fact that insurgents were blowing the shit out of the pipeline pretty clearly indicates we didn’t have our priorities straight, if an oil heist was the goal.
Again, how? Again, why didn’t we? The Iraqi insurgency didn’t really get rolling until many months after we invaded…we made no move, afaik, to seize the Iraqi oil fields and re-flag them to US (or allied) companies.
I call bullshit on this one. Cite? As far as I know the PNAC plan was about regime change in an effort to propagate governments who would be friendly to the US abroad…I know of no part that is about seizing the resources for our own private use. That is ludicrous…no way we could have done that. Our allies would have turned on us had we attempted to seize the Iraqi oil fields for our own use! Hell, it probably would have lead to a general war for the gods sake!
-XT
Not just any US companies, either : US companies the members of the Bush administration had personnal, direct interest in, either owning them or being major shareholders. Why start a war ? Because you can’t dip into the national treasury directly. It is, after all, sort of illegal, and people tend to not like it.
However, using the nation’s wealth to finance an endeavour that fills your pockets ? Totally legal. And unquestioned if the public happens to buy the pile of crap you set up to justify the endeavour. And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids and their dog (and the Iraqis, and the utter lack of WMDs, and…) !
Because we are hypocrites, and didn’t want to make our motives as obvious as shooting them and replacing them would have been. And the issue didn’t really come up early on, because of the pipeline bombings.
We didn’t defend the pipelines because we couldn’t, especially with our limited manpower there. They are rather long you know. And in case you didn’t notice, we DID let the rest of the country go to hell. And we DID make getting to the Oil Ministry our number one priority, which is how the Iraqi armories got looted ( among other things ).
So ? They wanted to ensure world dominance for the US; they didn’t want allies, they wanted subordinates. We didn’t really HAVE allies, just people we’d bribed and bullied into going along with us ( except for Britain, because Blair was a Bush toady ). And they wanted, and intended a wider war.
You are also ignoring the fact that they WERE “ludicrous”; that’s exactly why they didn’t get what they wanted until an incompetent like Bush took office.
I think you got SnowCrash and Stargate mixed up.
I think this is correct. I actually can sort of understand their thought process. Basically they looked around and said “hey, the middle east is a really fucked up place. We think if we take over Iraq it will turn into a normal functional country and help change the paradigm in the region.” The thinking turned out to be horribly flawed in retrospect, but I would have at least respected Bush if they had just come out and said what their real motivation was.
I think the Bush administration convinced itself that victory would be easy and it had the following “wins”:
- Replaces a brutal dictator with a pro-Western democracy, which gives…
- the US more influence in the region and…
- gives the US (and the world) a more stable oil supply.
- Reduce world-wide terrorism (Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 but they helped fund anti-Israeli groups).
- Show impudent countries like Iran that the US means business.
- Finish what the US started in the First Gulf War.
Some of these are worthy reasons. The dishonesty IMO was trumping up the link with 9/11. The incompetence was completely underestimating the trouble of establishing a peaceful government.
So…we wanted to hide our real motives but then got thwarted years later because we never actually moved…right? And you don’t see the circular logic here, correct?
It never came up at all of course…or you would have shown me a cite showing the progression to taking over the oil and re-flagging the companies and wells to the US.
Which sort of begs the question…why send in such small forces if stealing the oil was our primary goal? The only reason to send in small forces (as we did) was to demonstrate that the US could conquer a nation like Iraq even using limited means. Of course, this turned out to be a monumental fuckup, but if we were REALLY after the oil we would have sent in much heavier forces and their primary objectives would have been to simply take and hold the oil fields…nothing else would have mattered.
Are you seriously telling me that if we had only defended the oil pipelines and oil infrastructure that this would have been beyond our means?? Yeah, the oil pipelines are long (in some places)…but we certainly could have covered them had that been our only (or even primary) objective.
No…we didn’t. We tried to cover the populations centers, political centers AND the oil infrastructure, while also searching for Saddam, WMD and the Easter Bunny for all I know. We tried to do to much with to little…which pretty clearly indicates that stealing the oil wasn’t on the agenda. Again, if stealing the oil was the objective then we would concentrated on this to the exclusion of everything else.
No…we made the oil infrastructure and the Oil Ministry ONE of the primary objectives. Another was capturing Baghdad and destroying the Iraqi political system. Another was finding the elusive WMD. Another was capturing Saddam and his top henchmen. Another was securing the other population centers besides Baghdad. We had a LOT of diverse goals…which, again, is a pretty fair indication that the oil wasn’t our primary goal. At least, it’s a pretty good indication to me. YMMV of course.
Well, the ‘So?’ is that you made a statement that was false…as I suspect you knew when you made it.
I think they wanted the US to be predominant…not to dominate as a subjugator. They wanted the US to have basing rights in the region because it’s of vital strategic necessity to the US.
Oh, come on. We had and have allies…and the fact that many (or even most) of them DIDN’T come along for the ride indicates that the US’s ability to bribe, bully or dominate them is chancy at best.
Well, so you say, and so you maintained pretty much for the last 5 or 6 years. But I don’t think so. I don’t think that an invasion of, say, Iran, was EVER in the cards. I think our invasion of Iraq was supposed to cow Iran into better behavior. Simply put, Iran would have been a whole order of magnitude more difficult as a military problem…and I think that Bush et al were smart enough (barely) to see that. They THOUGHT Iraq would be an easy conquest without all the religious overtones…but they had to KNOW that Iran WOULD be a religious war nightmare. It also has a much larger population, was much more difficult to invade, much more difficult to support logistically…was just a hell of a lot more difficult over all.
You claimed over and over again that the US was poised to invade Iran…but it never materialized. It never came close to materializing. And I seriously doubt it ever would have happened even if Iraq had gone exactly as Bush et al wished it would have. Again, YMMV, but I’m not seeing it.
Yeah…they WERE ludicrous. And incompetent too. And the invasion was a stupid, pointless mess. I’m not denying any of that. But just because all of that is true doesn’t make your assertions true.
-XT
Because we didn’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. Duh.
:downs another Tully & soda:
They didn’t fail because that wasn’t their objective. Keeping China from having oil isn’t a goal. What a simplistic and facile idea.
China makes all of the stuff we buy. How would they make it if they didn’t have oil I wonder?
What circular about it ? They expected the Iraqis to roll over easily, and they didn’t.
It’s more a matter of not wanting to slog through years worth of news stories to find a cite that you’ll just dismiss. We demanded that the majority of their oil profits go to the US and they refused. We also re-wrote their laws so foreign companies - namely our companies - could hold 100% ownership of anything and everything, regardless of the wishes of Iraq.
Incompetence, the assumption that the Iraqis would just roll over, and the refusal to admit error.
No, we couldn’t have. That’s why things like pipeline and railroads are favored objectives in war; they are both valuable, and impossible to effectively defend unless you can keep the enemy out of the region in the first place. Which we couldn’t do since they lived there.
Which is largely what we did ( but I’ll note that I never said that it was the only one, just a major one ). We didn’t try to search for any WMDs, since we knew there wasn’t any from the start.
No, I simply pointed out the well known fact that oil was a known motive from the beginning. From well BEFORE the beginning; I recall the news stories about how Cheney’s response to California’s manufactured energy crisis involved studying maps of Iraq.
Did you pay any attention during the last 8 years ? We made it crystal clear that we wanted everything our way, and would only accept submission in all things, from everyone.
Of course not; you want to pretend that America is better than it is.