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Oil

Entry 149, on 2005-03-23 at 15:24:42 (Rating 4, Politics)

I haven't had a good rant about George Bush on my blog recently, so now is a good time to make up for that! I was listening to an interview this morning with the British journalist, Greg Palast. He was commenting on the increasing amount of information confirming the idea that the invasion of Iraq was motivated almost solely by the wish to control oil supplies.

Apparently there were plans to take control in Iraq long before the 9/11 attack. Originally the plan was to overthrow the government through insurgency, but after the military success in Afghanistan, a full military invasion was though to be better. There were even plans created well before the attack to restructure Iraq's economy, although there were no ideas on how to rebuild the infrastructure or ensure political stability.

It seems that the excuse of weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism were totally false, as many people suspected all along, and that the real motivation was to control Iraq's oil, again as many suspected. There was no suggestion before 9/11 that Iraq was a threat in any way through WMDs or as a base for terrorism, and it has been well established since that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

The original plan by the neo-conservative US government was to privatise the oil industry, allowing large US multi-nationals greater control. Unfortunately for this plan, it has been shown that privatisation leads to gross corruption and inefficiency - a classic example is what happened in Russia. So the oil companies actually convinced the government to maintain the control with the Iraqi government, because they would keep prices high and allow the oil companies to maintain their huge profits.

As many people have been saying, the US government is a puppet of large corporations (especially oil companies) in many ways so, of course, they changed their plans and stuck with government control.

The thing that struck me about this is just how incredibly corrupt and deceitful international politics is, and how people accept this sort of behaviour even after it has been revealed. I know it is too late to do anything about the invasion of Iraq now, but it would be good if at least more people accepted the self serving behaviour of the governments involved.

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