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241 comments on The Connection Between Financial Markets and Energy - Open Thread

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lengould on September 15, 2008 - 3:13pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

A confused and very weak argument, bob. You claim to show that "Iraq was not about the oil" by stating that it was "shmoozed ... Neocons {who were} persuaded ... Iraq was the ideal target for the PNAC project of domino democracy." but offer no proof that any significant neo-con decisionmaker cares one iota for democracy. The schmoozed neocons caused the disastrously comically under-manned under-planned post-war occupation, but not the incentive for the occupation in the first place, which I'm on record for having called as "the oil" a month before the start of the stupid event. It was clearly obvious then, and still is.

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ceiii2000 on September 16, 2008 - 9:11am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

You may want to read up some more on PNAC, it wasn't 'Democracy' that they wanted to give the world. It was the US as the supreme military superpower and a stable middle east. According to them this could be accomplished by establishing permanent 'military presence' (100 year bases) in the middle east and the removal of the Iraq leadership, whether or not Saddam was the target.

I'm not saying it wasn't about oil, as a matter of fact I believe MOSTLY it was. But stability in the middle east could have been wanted for a lot of reasons. Ollie North warned us about Bin Laden long before 9/11/2001.

I used to assign things to 'conspiracy' a lot. I believe now that our leadership honestly believes that since they were elected/chosen/whatever to do the job and they are richer/smarter/more godlike than the peasant masses, that they will make decisions and no matter what follow them through because of course they are the right decisions. Iraq fits this description perfectly.

As for Opium in Afghanistan, when the Taliban was in charge the opium trade was all but destroyed there. Now the US is using local 'leaders' to help them fight the war on terror, much their money comes from the opium trade. Of course so does the Taliban's. I've been wondering if the troop increases there are due to actually trying to get the drug problem under control more than a need for more firepower.

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WisdomfromPakistan on September 17, 2008 - 7:19am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

As its obvious I am from Pakistan, close to afghanistan and there was taliban's newspaper published here and many people went to afghanistan from here to see how they govern between 1996 and 2001. All of those people reported that taliban had destroyed all the opium farms. Its an indisputed, well known fact that taliban destroyed all the opium farms, nobody ever doubted about it before you. Though taliban needed a lot of money to build war-torn economy of afghanistan and to buy weapons to secure borders they not used any money from opium.

If talibans were using opium money then they would have tons of money but they lived very poor lives (for eg ministers went to work on bicycles etc). Also if talibans were already using opium then how can its production be increased, it would only be sustained in that case. Remember that taliban had captured 95% of afghanistan by 1996 and for the next 5 years ruled a quiet peaceful country and all the war with northern alliance was at the northern border in only 5% of land occupied by northern alliance. Given that peace and 5 years of rule they would have cultivating and trading lot more opium than americans are able to do now in a war zone. So, the very fact that after american invasion opium production increased many folds proves that taliban were not using opium.

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241 comments on The Connection Between Financial Markets and Energy - Open Thread

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