It's past time to be honest about why we're in Iraq

We've been offered (and theorized about) a laundry list of reasons why the U.S. invaded Iraq and it's past time we look at them honestly...

Oil
This is the reason everyone (except the administration) thinks we're in Iraq. Yep, they've reportedly got 112 billion barrels of oil reserves, the second largest known reserves in the world. The key there is "they've" got it. Unless the U.S. is intending on supplanting the government of Iraq and turning them into a U.S. colony, it's their oil. And while their new government may be friendly to us, they'll sell to who they want to sell to. The only real reason oil may have been part of the reason for invading Iraq was to depose Saddam, end the sanctions, and enable larger oil exports from Iraq thus putting more oil into the supply but I think this is at best a secondary reason. Of course I'm sure that returning the oil assets that Saddam nationalized to the big oil buddies of George W. and Chaney was a nice secondary bonus.

Oil, Part II
Then there's the famous oil pipeline issue. From the Globe and Mail,

In the late 1990s, an American-led oil consortium held talks with the Taliban about building a pipeline from Central Asia - where oil and gas reserves are gigantic - through Afghanistan to Pakistan, from where it could be shipped westward. The talks broke down in mid-2001. Washington was furious, leading to speculation it might take out the Taliban. After 9/11, the Taliban, with good reason, were removed - and pipeline planning continued with the Karzai government. U.S. forces installed bases near Kandahar, where the pipeline was to run. A key motivation for the pipeline was to block a competing bid involving Iran, a charter member of the "axis of evil."

Yeah, I'm sure this was another "nice secondary bonus" but again, this is icing on the cake, not the main reason. It looks good on paper but read on and you'll get to what I think is the main reason for the Iraq War.

Saddam
Yeah, yeah... Bush wanted to get some back for his daddy. Yeah, sure. While George W. may have felt this way, I don't think his handlers really cared and I doubt that George W. had any real input here.

Terrorism & Muslim Extremists
This one is pure bullshit. The Muslim extremists hated Saddam for having a secularly led Muslim nation. They wanted him dead just about as much as they wanted to hurt the U.S. Pre-war Iraq wasn't going to fund or aid the people who had "Depose Saddam and make Iraq into a Muslim stronghold" on their to-do list.

WMD's
Sure, we all heard about the supposed WMD's and we now know that it was a load of horseshit. Cherry-picked evidence, evidence tampering, and so on that made the original case for the war in Iraq. Even if the general public didn't know it was all made up, the administration sure did.

The REAL Reason
So why are we in Iraq? Why do George W. and McCain keep talking about long-term extended presence in Iraq? Why do they consistently oppose timetables? Remember McCain's comment about staying in Iraq for 100 years? I'll give you a hint, the same hint that George W. and McCain give us when they compare dealing with the Middle East to WWII... they want what happened after the war. Take a look at the list of U.S. military bases in Germany. We maintained prior to the Iraq War approximately 70,000 soldiers in various U.S. military bases in Germany. That's nearly half as many soldiers as we have in Iraq right now in an active phase and I'd bet that 70,000 figure is fairly close to the target George W., McCain, and their neo-con friends would like to see permanently stationed in new U.S. military bases in Iraq. And that "100 year" comment from McCain... well, go Googling for "military" and "99 year lease" and you'll see what I mean.

The republicans would love to claim that they've brought peace and stabilization to the Middle East... that elusive goal that has evaded everyone that's tried for the last several hundred years or more. Well, this is how they plan to do it. Make a friendly country, establish enough troops to intimidate or force neighboring countries into behaving, and voila... peace in the Middle East and oil for everyone. Isreal won't work for these purposes because they're too tainted by the Isreal/Palastine thing and nowhere near large enough to support the kind of presence we're after. And besides, if you're going to park a bunch of U.S. troops in the Middle East, you might as well park them on top of the 2nd largest oil reserves in the world.

Yes, it's just possible that a continued U.S. presence in Iraq could have a stabilizing effect on the rest of the Middle East. And it's true that there's no way that the President could have come out in 2001 and said we're invading Iraq so we can build military bases there... the American public wouldn't have gone for it and the world would have united against us for it. But that would mean that we went to war with a sovereign nation, deposed their leaders, and imposed a new government upon them for a lie. Maybe with the best of intentions but a lie nonetheless.

So what should we do about it?
We're there now and at the time I'm writing this over 4,000 American servicemen and women are dead and thousands if not tens of thousands more are wounded. Is the answer to pull them all out? Do we go ahead and keep thousands or tens of thousands there in new U.S. held military bases and follow the neo-con plan? I'll be honest and say I'm torn. Part of me says that we should pull our troops home and deny the neo-cons a victory achieved through lying and deceiving the American people, the troops, and the world. And the other part of me says that we should go ahead with the neo-cons this time rather than give up what our servicemen and women have paid for with blood. Just keep in mind that those troops may stabilize the region, or just serve as a magnet for continued attacks and an endless stream of American blood and money. I just don't know.

Who needs global warming?

The discussion these days about pollution seems to be wrapped up in one issue... Global Warming. The two sides trade facts, figures, research studies, and insults in a volume that threatens to topple porn as the greatest share of the content on the Internet. What happened to all of the other reasons to control pollution aside from (cue the ominous music here) Global Warming?

Water
How many people do you know that are willing to drink their municipal tap water any more? This is something pretty basic... is the water that comes out of your tap safe to drink? Why is that? Could it be because of pollution? Here's an interesting tidbit from Wikipedia:

In 2004, Andrea Petersen wrote in the Wall Street Journal that "... for the first time, Americans are expected to buy more bottled water than beer or coffee. Sales of bottled water reached $7.7 billion in 2002, up 12% from 2001, according to Beverage Marketing Corp., a New York-based consulting company.”

$7.7 billion because people don't think their tap water is safe to drink. Of course that same article also says that "About 25% of bottled water sold is simply re-processed/used municipal(city) water according to a 1999 study in the United States" so it's not like the bottled water is that much safer anyway.

Air
So what about the air? Screw "Greenhouse Gases", let's talk about all the other crap we put in the atmosphere... Here's another tidbit from Wikipedia:

The World Health Organization states that 2.4 million people die each year from causes directly attributable to air pollution; with 1.5 million of these deaths attributable to indoor air pollution. A study by the University of Birmingham has shown a strong correlation between pneumonia related deaths and air pollution from motor vehicles. Worldwide more deaths per year are linked to air pollution than to automobile accidents. Published in 2005 suggests that 310,000 Europeans die from air pollution annually. Direct causes of air pollution related deaths include aggravated asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, lung and heart diseases, and respiratory allergies. The US EPA estimates that a proposed set of changes in diesel engine technology (Tier 2) could result in 12,000 fewer premature mortalities, 15,000 fewer heart attacks, 6,000 fewer emergency room visits by children with asthma, and 8,900 fewer respiratory-related hospital admissions each year in the United States.

I really have to believe that the healthcare costs associated with all of that are likely to be a pretty significant number of their own and that's not even dealing with the human costs. What the heck has happened that we have to have air quality reports as part of the weather report? And what will we do if or when air quality deteriorates enough? Start buying bottled air too? As I'm writing this, 4 U.S. cities have air quality low enough that it's "unhealthy" to breathe and that's with air quality levels that are actually pretty good today compared to most summer days so maybe I should find a nice bottled air company to invest in.

Oil
And then there's oil. In 2001 the price of a barrel of oil was roughly $25. In the last few weeks it has been bouncing around $140 per barrel. And here's a nice little chart for those of you that like pictures. Similarly in 2001 the price of a gallon of gasoline was around $1.25 and seven years later we're paying over $4.00 a gallon and wondering if it will break $5.00 before the summer is done. Here's another pretty chart for the picturephiles out there. The Department of Energy says that we consumed 20.7 million barrels of oil on average per day during 2006. Now if we figure the cost in 2001 vs. the cost today for that 20.7 million barrels of oil per day, we see that it's costing us almost $2.4 billion a day in increased costs. That's right about $869 billion dollars a year or right around 10% of the entire national debt.

Isn't that right there enough reason to consider fuel efficiency standards? Forget Global Warming, look at what that's doing to the strength of the Dollar, the cost of every damn thing because of shipping costs, the balance of our trade, and the overall health of our economy with just short of an extra trillion dollars a year being spent.

Global Warming doesn't matter
At this point it should be pretty obvious that whichever side of the Global Warming debate you're on, there's some damn good reasons why we need to change. When people say it will cost too much to change, I just wonder how we can afford not to. At this rate, we'll have water we can't drink, air we can't breathe, and cars we can't afford to drive which will have it's own economic impact and it will be considerably larger than the adjustment to consume and pollute less than we are.