Bush on Rush Limbaugh’s show:
Give me a second here, Rush, because I want to share something with you. I am deeply concerned about a country, the United States, leaving the Middle East. I am worried that rival forms of extremists will battle for power, obviously creating incredible damage if they do so; that they will topple modern governments, that they will be in a position to use oil as a tool to blackmail the West. People say, "What do you mean by that?" I say, "If they control oil resources, then they pull oil off the market in order to run the price up, and they will do so unless we abandon Israel, for example, or unless we abandon allies.
Surprise! The war is about oil!
For years, the Bush Administration has been shouting that this war isn’t about oil. It’s about WMDs, and making Iraq safe for democracy, and making the Middle East a paradise, or something.
I think that having Bush come right out and admit that it’s all about oil should really surprise some people. Not just because he finally admitted it, but because there are lots of people who believed what he said earlier. (Including, according to a recent report, a fairly significant number of soldiers in Iraq, who believe that Iraq possessed WMDs and was a threat to the US.)
Oil is a concern because, hey, how much more are we going to sink into Iraq, in terms of lives and money? We’re looking at $500 billion and 3000 American lives (military and civilian) lost in Iraq/Afghanistan. I’m not sure how much of that went towards Iraq (I’m sticking with my support for knocking out the Taliban and rooting out al Qaeda in Afghanistan), but even a small portion of it would have gone a long way towards researching alternative energy.
We’ve been given a false choice: Defend our oil interests, or watch our economy collapse. While research certainly doesn’t come with guarantees of success, research and conservation measures are clearly the only way to reduce our demand for oil, which, by Bush’s own logic, reduces the threat posed by unfriendly governments.
On the other hand, putting a meager amount of money into research and rejecting all calls for conservation is a plan for keeping us dependent on oil, or even increasing that dependency. Bush has done nothing to even remotely encourage US automakers to increase fuel efficiency. Because, of course, any such regulation would be a terrible, terrible blow to the economy.
So we’ve been told that any change, at all, would be a bad economic move. Even if that notion was anywhere near the truth, avoiding such changes will lead to certain problems in the future, and make us all less safe now. Why fight terrorists there, or here, or wherever, when we can cut our imports of Mideast oil, and thereby stop funding these governments that either hate us, or see the advantage of using us as scapegoats in order to distract their populace from their own corrupt rulership?
So, first thing: No more denying that this conflict is about oil. Bush got us into Iraq, and he’s the one saying that we’re there to protect our oil interests. No more crap about defensive or idealistic motives to justify our invasion: It was about oil, is about oil, and is not doing a damned thing to solve the dependence on oil that led to this mess in the first place.