* O. I. L.: The Case for a War Against Iran
Iran is figuring prominently in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election. In December 2011, Jon Huntsman declared that, if elected president, he would send in ground troops to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Rick Santorum recently charged on CNN that bombing Iran would be preventing a true war from starting. Mitt Romney, Wall Street’s favorite for the Republican candidacy, announced that, “If we reelect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon… If you elect me as president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.”
Despite the contention of international intelligence agencies that Iran shows no evidence of developing nuclear weapons, proponents of an attack on Iran continue to argue that Iran is pursuing nuclear proliferation and that this act does indeed establish a pretext for war. The rhetoric is strikingly similar to arguments preceding the invasion of Iraq.
A retired CIA officer and daily briefer to President George H. W. Bush, Ray McGovern, has been protesting the misrepresentation and misapplication of intelligence information since the 2003 War on Iraq. During Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC show on May 4, 2006, McGovern articulated the basic rationale behind American foreign policy using a simple three letter word: O, for oil; I, for Israel; and L, for logistics. In the aftermath of the campaign in Iraq, it was apparent that these three considerations did indeed establish a false pretext for the invasion of Iraq. And now, when the U.S. is involved in a “debate” over Iran and the most effective ways to halt its “ambitions,” McGovern’s warnings regarding the tripartite interests of elite policymakers, at the expense of this nation and its people, ring true — yet again. It would be judicious of the American public to consider the facts and determine whether a war against Iran, allegedly in our names, is justified.
O.I.L. in Iraq
Several months before the war in Iraq, President George W. Bush held meetings with American petroleum corporations. Hundreds of documents released to the British newspaper the Independent reveal that Bush had secured the rights of various energy companies to have access to Iraqi oil. Furthermore, the documents reveal that on October 31, 2002, British Trade Minister Baroness Symons held a meeting with British energy companies BP, Shell and BG, agreeing to lobby the Bush administration on their behalves: the United Kingdom would cooperate with the United States in ousting Saddam, but British energy companies were not to be “locked out” of access to Iraq’s oil supply. This “oil conspiracy,” as Tony Blair called it, turned out to be grounded in reality, after all.
It was only then that the Bush administration began its campaign to persuade the American public that Saddam was developing nuclear weapons and that he represented a threat to the United States. Contrary to the assertions of the Bush administration, the overwhelming majority of the U.S. intelligence community maintained that Saddam showed no evidence of possessing WMDs. In March 2006, Paul Pillar, a retired CIA officer, wrote an article for Foreign Affairs, entitled, “Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq.” According to Pillar, “The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made.” In other words, the administration was guilty of “cherry-picking” information that would substantiate the threat posed by Saddam. They disregarded the recommendations of the intelligence community to avoid war.
In May 2006, Ray McGovern articulated two other factors that dictated American foreign policy: Israel and logistics. During the interview, McGovern stated that, “The people running our policy toward that part of the world have great difficulty distinguishing between what they perceive to be the strategic interests of Israel, on one hand, and the strategic interests of the United States on the other.” Leading up to the war, Israeli politicians encouraged the U.S. to go to war because of the threat Saddam posed to Israel. Saddam had fired Scud missiles into Iraq in 1991 and had been giving money to the families of suicide bombers. Current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several other Israeli politicians addressed the Senate and the American public, reinforcing the image of Iraq as the embodiment of all evil.
After the invasion, however, even Israeli military officers stated that the threat from Iraq had been exaggerated. Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli general, told the Associated Press that “Israeli intelligence was a full partner with the United States and Britain in developing a false picture of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction capability” and that they had “badly overestimated” the threat to Israel from Iraq. These “bad overestimations” have cost the United States $823 billion in the past nine years.
The * O. I. L.: The Case for a War Against Iran by Dinar Daddy's Tidbits, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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