Awash in naivete...

Like many Americans, I was skeptical of nearly every justification we were given for the war in Iraq. So many to sift through, WMD's, retribution for the attempted assassination of the elder Bush, strategic base placement, and, of course, oil. I never thought any of these reasons were just cause for bombing then occupying Iraq, and I still don't. Perhaps what I should have done, instead of becoming mired in the propaganda from all sides, was to look beyond what we were discussing and find some thread that connected all these various angles. I believe I've found it. Or rather, I finally snapped to what was possibly obvious to a lot of people, but I was too naive to think about: The dollar. I don't mean the pursuit of the dollar, though certainly G.E., Bechtel, Halliburton and others within the Corporatacracy stood to profit immensely from this armed endeavor. No, I mean the protection of the dollar.

In the early seventies, Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. This enabled corporations and the U.S. Govt to assume huge debts without the pesky necessity to repay them. In a pinch, they could merely print more money. With the U.S. in control of the World Bank, all was well until the world's oil supply began to dwindle. Now, oil is the new gold. If OPEC demanded payment for oil in Euro's, and, if China, Japan or a coalition of other creditors decided to call in their loans in Euro's, the corporatacracy would be in deep doo doo. In a nutshell, that's what Saddam threatened to do.

Most of us on this blog are old enough to remember the Panama invasion, and the reasons given for that little excursion. Wasn't it to arrest Noriega for drug smuggling? Or, more likely, was it the fact that Noriega had threatened to allow a Japanese company, rather than an American one, to build a new sea level canal, which, at the time, was the largest engineering job in modern history. Which brings me to the common thread...The World Bank. If you want a insider's look at the grim reality behind foreign aid, read "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man." After reading it, I really felt naive, and angry.