Operation
Iraq Forever
By Manuel Valenzuela
22 May, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The
occupation of Iraq, still illegal and immoral by any sense of human
understanding, has now run into its fourth bloody and horrific year,
becoming a quagmire for America and a vast killing field for Iraqis.
Indeed, for Iraqis, America’s invasion and subsequent occupation
has been and will continue to be one massive war crime, an onslaught
of criminality against humanity not seen since World War Two. It is
they, the Iraqi people, who have undergone tremendous hardship, and
it is they who will continue to suffer in horrific ways, due to the
lunacy and delusions of America’s miscreant leaders. Indeed, hell
on Earth has been imported into Iraq without so much as a care, concern
or bother from the American people, without so much as a protest or
two by the world entire.
For America and her people,
on the other hand, to say that the Iraq debacle is the greatest strategic
disaster in American foreign policy history is an understatement, for
the implications of America’s defeat at the hands of Iraqis have
only now begun to be seen, with its reverberations to be felt for years
to come. What was once considered a cakewalk by an arrogant nation,
basking in the glory of exceptionalism and ignorance, blinded to reality
by addictions to materialism and televised charades, instead turned
into an inextricable sand trap that threatens to turn a New American
Century into the Last American Decade.
For unlike Vietnam, a backwater
nation at the outer periphery of world affairs, where America’s
defeat did not disturb the grand chess match of Cold War geostrategy
or cause worldwide geopolitical earthquakes, Iraq is at the epicenter
of the world, sitting atop vast oil fields, possessing two fresh water
rivers in a region where water is scarce, situated in the middle of
vitally strategic lands sought by rising powers and dwindling empires.
A defeat in Iraq, as is already apparent, and had long since been predicted
by many, would thus severely damage the interests of America, thereby
altering a global balance of power where one superpower dominates the
rest of the world. Inside her shores, a defeat would, similar to what
happened after Vietnam, alienate her people away from further wars of
conquest, thus making it harder to implement the plans for a New American
Century, thus destroying the once great controlling power engendered
by the New Pearl Harbor.
The occupation of Iraq has
and will continue to severely cripple America, both in treasure and
blood, bogging it down in a grueling guerilla war of attrition for years
to come. Already the war and occupation has lasted longer than America’s
involvement in World War II. Already it has cost, in only four years,
over one trillion dollars. Already, America’s military is overstretched,
overstressed, overburdened and overworked. So far, close to 3,500 troops
have died, with up to 30,000 maimed and injured; tens of thousands of
personnel have been forced to serve more than two tours of duty. The
psychological costs to thousands of soldiers will never be quantified,
as will the societal damage done by people returning home with different
minds, different lives and altered circumstances.
Yet in spite of the apparent
defeat, the apparent debacle taking place in Iraq, the American leviathan,
that corporatist element within the parameters of the state, that elitist
cabal embedded in predatory capitalist markets, will not allow itself
or the nation to be extricated from Iraq, for the price of such a calamity
would be disastrous. For the Iraq War was first and foremost a war for
control of oil, that most important of natural resources, that devil’s
excrement needed to run the engine called modern human civilization.
The subsequent occupation
of Iraq, beyond the obvious lies of WMD, bringing democracy and freedom,
ridding Iraqis of tyranny and Saddam, and fighting al-Qaeda in the “war
on terror,” was built on the necessity of pacifying and controlling
the Iraqi populace so that the rape and pillage of Iraq’s oil
could commence. For this war has always been and will always be about
black blood, that dark substance that condemns and curses all who live
above it, and empowers and enriches those who extract it. He who controls
the oil controls the world, after all, and he who controls the world
controls humankind’s destiny.
It is the devil’s excrement
that sustains modern civilization; its births Empire and makes overlords
of those that control it. It is also a truism that those who seek the
power of modern empire must make a deal with the devil to drink blood
from its veins. It is this deal with the devil that invariably resurrects
violence, destruction, suffering and the worst in human wickedness.
Empire’s Gas Station
As such, to purposefully give up such a prize as the oil fields of Iraq,
along with its perfect strategic location, would be tantamount to giving
up on a burgeoning empire, something the elite and the corporatists
of the nation are not yet ready to do. Controlling the oil markets of
the world, along with the spigots, pipelines and oil fields of Iraq,
dictating supply and demand to the globe, possessing the power to control
the amount of oil a rival or rising superpower is allowed to have, and
establishing a beachhead for further attempts at acquiring yet more
oil and gas, this time in Iran and Central Asia, is too tempting a proposition
for America’s elite to extricate their armies from Mesopotamia.
In truth, to leave Iraq would be to leave behind all delusions of a
New American Century. It would be akin to declaring defeat to Russia
and China, in essence granting these rising powers Iraq’s oil
fields on a silver platter and cementing the precipitous fall of the
American Empire itself.
Iraq is too valuable, in
the minds of America’s elite and her corporatists, to simply walk
away from. For all intents and purposes, therefore, Iraq has become
America’s 51st state, a colony that will act as America’s
gas station for decades to come. Iraq is destined to become the grease
that provides the lubrication needed to run the great American engine.
It will act as America’s aircraft carrier, the easier to patrol
the world’s most strategic region. In time, Iraq will be used
to invade, threaten, hold hostage and/or conquer the oil fields of Iran
and those of the central Asian basin. From Iraq America’s new
national security infrastructure, such as pipelines and refineries,
can best be defended from any barbarian horde. Iraq is today the gateway
towards attaining the Empire the elite and the delusional have always
envisioned. It is the gateway towards power, control and untold wealth.
Of course the sacrifice of
American treasure and blood is and will continue to be of no significance
to those possessing the delusional blueprints of a New American Century.
After all, it is not their children sent off to war, becoming cannon
fodder, returning in a body bag, with missing appendages, burned bodies
or psychologically maimed minds. It is not their wages being taxed in
order to pay for the ever-expanding corporatist army. It is not their
hard earned money being expropriated so that energy giants can further
enrich themselves to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in profits
every year.
To the elite way of thinking,
the sacrifice of 3,500 dead soldiers, most poor and working class, from
rural cesspools or urban jungles, is a minor and inconsequential inconvenience,
along with the injury of 30,000 more, in the pursuit of Empire. These
brave and oftentimes naïve and brainwashed soldiers are simply
the expendable tools of wealth accumulation and empire building, the
robots needed to pull the levers and push the buttons of the vast arsenal
of killing machines developed by the military industrial complex. They
are cannon fodder used not for defending freedom and democracy, but
for defending the corporate bottom line and its shareholder wealth.
In a nation of 300 million people, the death in Iraq of 3,500 soldiers,
or 30,000 for that matter, is of little importance to the elite who
see poor men and women as a means to an end. They are the collateral
damage sacrificed in the name of predatory and debauched capitalism.
They are the catalysts for corporatism to thrive.
Sadly, America will remain
in Iraq for decades to come, occupying sand and dune, living behind
massive concrete walls, inside enormous embassies and bases, all built
to protect the ultimate prize of the 21st century: oil. Iraq is now
a giant American forward operating base, a geostrategic prize from where
the delusional elite can amplify their presence both in the Middle East
and the Caspian basin. From Iraq the oil and natural gas fields of Iran
are but a stone’s throw away. From Iraq and Afghanistan Central
Asia becomes easier to threaten and control, easier for its energy resources
to be exploited and defended against potential adversaries. From Iraq
it is easier for the rising empire to contain, control and check the
advancements of Russia, China and India.
The future death of thousands
of American soldiers, and the maiming of tens of thousands more, is
a reality that will inevitably come in the years ahead, will be but
the price of doing business, of maximizing profit and power, of controlling
the black blood necessary for empire to rise and breathe. Thousands
dead and tens of thousands maimed is of little consequence or importance
to those whose vision of delusion includes an empire greeted by the
world as liberator, with flowers and candy thrown at its feet. Sacrifices
need to be made for the sake of consumerism and materialism, for gluttony
and greed, after all. Just not for the elite that steer the American
ship. The trillions of dollars that have already been spent, and those
trillions that will invariably be needed in the future will of course
be taken from the American people, their treasure pillaged, their wages
raped in the pursuit of empire. It will be us, the common peasant, that
will be forced to absorb the present and future costs of delusions of
grandeur and self-aggrandizing hubris. It will be our children who will
have to sacrifice freedom, rights and blood.
The added benefit to the
elite of this robbery of the American taxpayer is that for every dollar
that goes to the Iraq War, to the military-industrial complex, to the
bank accounts of the war profiteers and the energy corporatists, one
less dollar is allocated for social services, education, healthcare,
infrastructure and the general welfare of the American people. One more
dollar taken out through taxes equals one less dollar in the pocket
of the people, thereby eviscerating the middle class and shifting the
burden of war from the wealthy to the middle and working classes. By
gutting the middle class, by putting severe pressure on its ability
to subsist on already diminishing wages, the elite further separate
themselves from the rest of us, increasing the wealth gap, and by consequence,
increasing their power and control over us as well. When the rich get
richer and the poor poorer, only a nation of fools fails to see who
wins and who loses.
As such, the Iraq War is
also a war against the American people, for it is designed to make us
anemic creatures dependent on the decisions of the elite. It is engineered
in part to increase injustice, inequality, exploitation and dominion
over us, robbing us of our power to mobilize and seek change. By redistributing
America’s treasure away from the people and to the few elite and
the corporations, using war as pretext and fear as a conditioning element,
government is being rewired to stop acting in the interest of the masses.
Meanwhile, it is being made to serve the interests of the corporate
world, which have been getting enormously powerful through the looting
of our treasure, under the rubric of fighting the fictional war on terror
and under the illusion of destroying a nation only to later rebuild
it. The shifting of resources away from what helps the people to what
empowers the corporate world is but one more sign that the age of American
corporatism is upon us.
The belief that the Iraq
War will end once the Bush administration leaves office, and that American
soldiers will return home, is an illusion and a mirage, a concoction
of wishful thinking that has no basis in reality. America has cemented
its presence, firmly planting the foundations for a long and prolonged
occupation. Permanent military bases have been erected, as has the largest
embassy the world has ever seen. It has manipulated elections so that
its puppets are elevated to the highest echelons of Iraqi power. It
has written oil laws favorable to its interests that it then demands
be passed by so called sovereign Iraqi lawmakers, in essence writing
the same laws it needs to make legal the exploitation and robbery of
Iraq’s oil fields.
The Middle East is the most
vital region in the world in terms of energy allocation and its subsequent
strategic control, and is therefore of tremendous national importance
to a nation desiring to elevate itself to full-fledged empire status.
It has controlled the region for decades now, either by military force,
destruction of democracy and through its large cadre of puppets, and
by occupying Iraq with a large military force, it now possesses a stranglehold
on the world’s second largest energy reserves. And, by making
colonies of Afghanistan and Iraq, by supporting the tyrants of Central
Asia, it now surrounds the third largest oil reserves in the world,
namely those of Iran. Its rich oil and gas fields, now targeted for
conquest, are located just across the Iraq border, within invading distance
for American forces, far away from Tehran, close enough to smell the
fumes.
Iraq, therefore, is a prize
that will never be relinquished, and is the reason America will never
extricate herself from the debacle it has created. No amount of pre-invasion
ignorance, occupying incompetence and blinding arrogance will force
America to abandon her cherished possession. No continued bleeding through
a thousand cuts will force it to return home in defeat. To the architects
of empire, there is more than enough cannon fodder, more than enough
treasure from which to maintain control of Iraq’s oil fields.
There is too much invested already, too much left to gain, too many
fragile egos to appease, too many insecure men to protect, to simply
abandon a prize that has been cherished by the elite for decades.
We are in Iraq, and though
broken by our hands, though destroyed by our military, she is now ours,
for our greed and our love of comfort and consumerism demands that she
be pillaged of her oil and raped of her sovereignty. Our addiction to
her black blood demands that we care nothing for the plight of her people
or for the decimation of her society. It demands that we cast a blind
eye to the holocaust now taking place there and the ethnic cleansing
destroying families and neighborhoods.
It demands that we see Iraqis
as subhuman brown skinned aliens, their plight and suffering ignored,
their decimation at the hands of our military and our government lost
in hollow memory banks. It is because of oil, after all, that we can
share in the privileges of living in the wealthiest nation the world
has ever known. And so to continue living in comfort and consumerism,
the beast must be fed, it must gorge upon the dark liquid of the third
world, and the deal with the devil must, invariably, continue well into
the future.
As such, no matter which
member of the political duopoly is in the White House, no matter how
loudly the citizenry demands a pullout, the United States will not leave
Iraq in the foreseeable future. The two headed hydra is, after all,
attached to the same body, obeying the same master. No amount of lies
or spin or promises will alter this reality. We live in the New American
Century, after all, where reality is the domain of those in power. As
the will of the people no longer matters or counts, our voices will
be silenced, our growing anger suppressed. Sure the illusion of troops
returning home will be created, with scenes of families reuniting and
hero’s coming home gracing the airwaves, yet in the real world,
back in the land of permanent bases and rich oil fields, back where
enormous and modern embassies rise on the banks of ancient rivers, tens
of thousands of troops will remain, guarding America’s ultimate
prize, the blood that sustains Empire, comfort and the military-industrial-energy
complex.
The mirage of American troops
returning from Iraq with their heads held high, as always marching triumphantly,
as always having defeated evil, will captivate millions of ignorant
but otherwise well-intentioned Americans. To millions more, however,
this charade will be seen for the fiction that it is, for Iraq will
remain a very dangerous place, especially for energy exploiters and
oil conglomerates eager to further enrich themselves by pillaging a
nation blind. Tens of thousands of American soldiers will remain, we
will be told, to secure democracy and freedom for the Iraqi people,
to ensure security in the cities, to make sure the “democratically”
elected puppet is protected from al-Qaeda. We will be made to think
our soldiers need to remain to protect Iraqis from themselves.
In truth, tens of thousands
of soldiers will establish a permanent presence in Iraq because the
Anglo-American energy consortium will need protection while it pillages
and rapes Iraq of her natural resources. America’s military will
be needed to defend from the targeted sabotage and rebellion of freedom
fighters, from the expected assassinations and kidnappings of energy
workers. It will ask to protect pipelines, oil fields and their infrastructure;
it will be told to suppress strikes and the rage of Iraqi oil workers.
The safety and freedom of Iraqis will mean absolutely nothing in the
grand scheme of greed and gluttony and American empire. To the empire,
oil trumps blood just as much as profit trumps people.
Brand Marketing
Of course to hear the Iraq War apologists tell it, and there are many
of these individuals in government and the corporatist media, America
is in Iraq because we are fighting al-Qaeda, and nobody else. To the
dwindling delusionists and supporters of this illegal war who are somehow
inexplicably still given a voice in the media and in print, the illusion
must be made that America is at war, given this war on terror, with
the dreaded bogeymen from al-Qaeda, those same evildoers who attacked
us on 9/11. This is the only way to keep the charade going in the minds
of millions that America must remain in Iraq, staying the course, as
always knowing that the deeply embedded myth of America being the epitome
of good and always triumphing over evil, epitomized by whatever convenient
scapegoat is needed, will again capture the minds of the naïve
and gullible.
This fantasy, of course,
is the last refuge of scoundrels, for it has been proven over and over
again that only two to five percent of fighters in Iraq are foreign.
But this does not preclude scoundrels from preaching lies to the congregation
nonetheless. A convenient enemy is needed to validate the Iraq occupation,
however, one that has already been conditioned into the American mind
as being nefarious and monstrous.
Indeed, what America confronts
is guerilla warfare in an urban setting. Her soldiers, sent to protect
the interests of the elite and those of the military-industrial-energy
complex, are engaged in a battle against freedom fighters, the vast
majority from Iraq, most common peasants once living ordinary lives
who want nothing more than to rid their land of the occupying forces.
From the beginning of time resistance fighters have waged war against
the more powerful invading and occupying force, as always using their
skills and talents to bleed their rivals to death.
Like American Revolutionaries,
Iraq’s freedom fighters fight for independence and freedom, for
nationality and to expel foreign forces from their country. If America
or any other nation were invaded and occupied, resistance fighters would
immediately spring up as well, forming an army of brave patriots using
the tactics of the poor to try and contain the weapons of the much more
powerful and wealthier military. Unfortunately, it is the poor of both
countries waging war against each other, killing and maiming one another,
for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. Such is war that the poor
are always made to fight each other when it is the elite that is their
common enemy.
Yet the truth of who and
what America’s army is fighting can never be mentioned, for a
myth has been embedded into the average American mind that America is
in Iraq to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq, not to fight their freedom
fighters or rape their women. Since an occupying power cannot fully
dehumanize a legitimate resistance movement, given that its cause is
nobler than that of the occupying force itself, it must resort to the
realm of fiction and propaganda, concocting lies and distortions to
smear the resistance. Only by making freedom fighters seem subhuman
or evil in the eyes of its people can the occupying force thereby make
it acceptable to mass murder, dehumanize, torture and illegally detain
Iraqis.
Indeed, resistance movements
such as those fighting the American military in Iraq are allowed under
international law. When such an invasion and subsequent occupation has
been proven to be based on lies and deceit, becoming immoral and illegal,
a crime against humanity, any resistance movement would find broad support
among the peoples of the world. Indeed, these movements are romanticized
and applauded, for they become brave patriots and freedom fighters against
criminality, illegality and immorality. Such was the case with the French
resistance against the Nazis, the Jewish resistance in the ghettos,
the plight of blacks in apartheid South Africa and the struggle of Palestinians
against the oppressive and apartheid methods of the Israelis.
As such, in order to marginalize
and vilify the resistance, in order for the American populace to accept
wanton destruction and killing, in order to transform individuals fighting
for independence and for an end to occupation, the impression must be
made by the creators of reality that the Iraqi mujahedeen are really
al-Qaeda in Iraq, thereby becoming the central myth of why America is
in Iraq and why it must continue to remain there. This way, the dreaded
evildoer extraordinaire, that entity that continuously haunts the American
mind, that bogeyman that in the original conspiracy theory was said
to have brought down World Trade Center towers 1,2 and 7 through controlled
demolitions and at freefall speed, killing 3,000 innocent Americans
in the process, can continue to spread fear and insecurity in the belief
structure of millions of Americans who, like Pavlovian dogs, cower in
fear at the sound of the word al-Qaeda. It is al-Qaeda, after all, and
not Iraq freedom fighters, who attacked us on 9/11. It is al-Qaeda,
after all, that planned war games on the day of 9/11 and ordered fighter
planes to stand down, not Iraqi resistance fighters.
Thus, by using the concocted
scapegoat of al-Qaeda, having escaped the caves and mud huts of Afghanistan,
this time festering and planning to take over Iraq if we let them, and
hiding the reality of whom exactly the American military is fighting
in Iraq, millions of Americans readily accept the continued occupation
as being beneficial to their own safety and security. For, as the scoundrels
and the liars love to tell us, we are fighting them there so we do not
have to fight them here. If we leave, we are told, they, being al-Qaeda,
will follow us back, undoubtedly to wage holy jihad in the little towns
of Indiana and Nebraska. This way, the creators of the new reality hide
the true rival in Iraq while at the same time manipulating the American
public into allowing the continued debacle taking place.
As long as the term al-Qaeda
is used in symphony with Iraq, as long as Iraq and the so-called war
on terror are similarly correlated, millions of Americans will continue
to support an occupation that is illegal and immoral. As such, the Iraqi
resistance movement will continue to gain strength, it will continue
to engage the American military, and a war of attrition will continue
to kill and maim both Americans and Iraqis. This way, a vicious cycle
of violence will not cease, for Americans will continue to associate
the need to wage war in Iraq, believing, albeit mistakenly, that America
fights al-Qaeda in the fictional war on terror, not knowing or understanding
the true nature of the rival.
With violence begetting violence,
more resistance fighters will join the movement, as naturally occurs
in a guerilla war against an occupation. With manipulations and lies,
the American people will be made to believe that al-Qaeda in Iraq is
growing more dangerous, that it is expanding, that it will indeed follow
us home if we leave, that it presents a clear and present danger that
must be defeated. Thus, the ingredients for the endless war the elite
have dreamt about for decades, and the key to staying permanently in
Iraq, have managed to rise out of one nation’s desire to be free
of occupation and another’s systematically damaged and manipulated
psyche, born on 9/11, that freezes in horror and loses all ability to
reason and think logically at the mention of the words al-Qaeda and
war on terror. As long as the term al-Qaeda is used over the airwaves,
as long as it retains its corroding effect, the American people will
allow the fictional war on terror to continue. Such is the damage done
by the masters of reality.
Quite conveniently, then,
Iraq’s freedom fighters are morphed by the state and the corporatist
media into al-Qaeda, thereby validating America’s presence and
continued occupation of a nation, and a people, fighting for her freedom.
The liberty and ease by which the apologists of the war grant al-Qaeda
franchises throughout Iraq, indeed, wherever America seems to pick fights,
without even a hint at investigation by the corporatist media, underlies
the fallacy of this myth. Along with the purported death of probably
100 al-Qaeda’s number two’s, it also demonstrates the level
of propaganda and manipulation the Pentagon and its lackeys fill the
media, and thus our minds with. Truth is the first casualty of war,
after all. Therefore, under the auspices of fighting terrorism, America
can stay and focus on the real and most important task at hand, namely
the complete control, rape and pillage of Iraq’s oil fields and
pipelines.
The Curse of Black Gold
And so America will continue fighting in Iraq because the state says
we are fighting al-Qaeda, because it blames Iraq’s puppet government
for its own incompetence and ignorance, because it says through its
stenographers and talking heads that the war on terror must be fought,
even if it takes decades to win, and because America is good and exceptional
and she must defeat evil, just as she has always done. Along with our
permanent occupation, we will continue mass murdering, torturing, dehumanizing
and falsely imprisoning hundreds of thousands of Iraqis whose only crime,
whose only curse, is living atop the devil’s excrement, that dark
liquid waiting to be gorged on by a most greedy, ignorant and arrogant
drug addict.
For when it comes to dominating
that black gold called oil, easily available for conquest in various
third world nations, either through puppets, market colonialism or military
might, no dark skinned, non-European looking human is safe from the
tentacles of modern empire, for soon subhuman you will be called, seen
as primitive, as an animal, needing the “enlightened” hand
of Western intervention for salvation. When the aim of categorizing
you as alien, evil and below the parameters of being human is achieved
your family will be murdered, your people displaced, your life forever
altered, your plight ignored. Your death will never equal that of an
American or a British citizen, for you are a third worlder, a person
of the southern globe, bred to be exploited and oppressed, your lands
becoming the feudal estates of corporatism, your blood, sweat and tears
falling only after you have slaved yourself for the north’s comfort
and wealth.
The death of your son will
not be counted, the rape of your daughter will be dismissed as lies,
the dehumanization of your father and the torture of your brother will
never see light of day, for your country has been targeted as the next
petrol station that will invariably be forced to pay tribute to the
purple robe of empire. Whether you live in Nigeria, Venezuela, the Caspian
Sea basin or Iran, it does not matter, for you live where black gold
abounds, where the drug of oil can be found. As such your lands will
become toxic, your air and water filled with poison. All the while,
even as your natural resources are pillaged, your nation raped, your
nation collapsing, you will never see a dime from the corporations of
the empire. For poverty is your destiny, even as vast wealth lies below
your feet. Subsisting on garbage, living in shacks, your national wealth
stolen and embezzled, you thus realize that the black gold you were
told would transform your nation has been nothing but a terrible curse
you wish never existed.
Of course if you live where
the devil’s excrement is bountiful you cannot help but notice
the addiction of the empire, and how maddened it becomes if its fix
is not satiated. You realize that death, destruction and suffering are
the only realities and expectations for nations not willing to pay tribute
to the empire. Thus, if you are not careful, if you are not ready, the
next knock on your door might very well be that of a most immoral and
criminal addict, ready to kill you and destroy your nation for its next
much needed fix. And then you will automatically become the Empire’s
next enemy, its next terrorist scapegoat, becoming the evildoer chosen
to strike fear in the American populace. Inevitably, your face, your
people and your culture will become the poster children in the next
marketing campaign and psychological war against the American citizenry,
designed, as always, by fascism’s public relations experts, its
army of little Goebbels.
Deal With the Devil
America cannot exorcise itself from its addiction to oil that, like
a demon inside our body, possesses us day and night, demanding that
we satisfy our insatiable thirst for black blood. In this deal with
the devil that we long ago made, we became dependent on a natural resource
that, while not plentiful inside our own shores, is readily abundant
in the Middle East, Central Asia, West Africa and Venezuela. For this
reason the Middle East has become a militarized region, a vast feudal
estate owned by the masters and lords of energy, protected by the Empire
itself. For this reason it has become the world’s most volatile
and sought after region. Inside its borders puppets and despots and
proctors overlook America’s oil fields, proclaiming themselves
princes, kings and presidents, as always oppressing and exploiting their
people, as always overseeing the empire’s interests.
In our deal with the devil,
the more we taste the more we want; the more we continue to grow the
bigger we want to get. The more powerful we are the greedier and more
gluttonous we become, expanding the size of everything we own, including
our stomachs. Millions of us believe oil is abundant, as if it grows
yearly in some global breadbasket. Millions of us fail to understand
that hundreds of thousands of human beings are killed and maimed, and
tens of millions live in perpetual indigence and oftentimes are forced
to confront armed conflict because of our insatiable addiction to oil.
Millions of us fail to see that it is our standards of living, our greed
and gluttony, that contributes to so much misery and destruction worldwide.
Yet year after year our greed
compels us toward ever larger vehicles and homes, bigger toys and an
exponentially growing consumption habit. Through our actions it seems
that we care nothing for the planet or its inhabitants, instead filling
our minds with the arrogance and apathy of a spoiled child, transforming
ourselves into a most insecure schoolyard bully. We behave as if we
are entitled to what does not belong to us, in essence forcing the school’s
other kids to give us their lunch money, threatening with violence those
that decline or stand up for themselves.
Our greed and gluttony, our
indifference and arrogance, our insistence on maintaining and even expanding
our standards of living, all at the expense of the planet and its people,
is the reason we invade, occupy and exploit weaker nations. It is the
reason Iraq is in chaos, why Nigeria is on the verge of full rebellion,
why Central Asia is full of despotic leaders and why Venezuela is vilified.
It will be the reason why Russia and China will in the years ahead become
rivals and enemies, why more and more people around the globe hate America
and why we spend more on military equipment and weapons than the entire
world put together. It is when we look in the mirror that the devil’s
excrement can be seen, acting like an aura around our head, smearing
our face with the darkness of wickedness and the madness of addiction.
We can continue believing
the exceptionalism of America, the grandeur of her virtues, that of
her leaders and her people, yet reality and truth are altogether different,
presenting circumstances too uncomfortable for us to contemplate yet
important enough to try and understand. We can continue living the delusion
of myth and the charade of the American Dream. We can continue being
brainwashed and conditioned that our way of life is the only way of
life, that the world entire must conform to this way of life, and that
bogeymen hate us for said way of life. Yet to confront the evil’s
done in our name by the government we elect or fail to stop, we must
realize that in many ways, we are to be blamed, we are guilty in failing
to act, in putting a stop to an unsustainable standard of living.
Until we realize the damage
we do around the planet so that we may live in comfort, so that we may
enjoy the highest standards of living humans have ever had, so that
we may drive giant SUVs and live in expansive, heated and air-conditioned
homes, America will remain in Iraq indefinitely, her military garrisoned
inside bases clustered around oil fields, facilities and pipelines.
Until we confront the predatory capitalism that is turning America into
a corporatist state and the world into a giant sweatshop Iraq and others
like it will continue. Until we look ourselves in the mirror and realize
that it is our failure to act and alter a doomed course, that it is
our indifference to the damage our lifestyles cause Earth, we will finally
grasp that it is ourselves, more than anything else, that are the reason
we will remain in Iraq long into the future, for our way of life must
be maintained and fed through the world’s last remaining petroleum
reserves.
Until we realize our gluttony
and greed, until we decide to put a stop to our addiction and arrogance,
a new version of Iraq will metastasize every decade or so, popping up
somewhere around the globe where black gold exists, every time new oil
fields are needed to expand our economy or our comfort level, causing
untold suffering and destruction in the process, resulting in resistance,
conflict and a ever-growing hatred of America. To feed itself the empire
thus needs to increase its military, it thus needs to maintain over
750 bases worldwide. To feed its peoples’ ever-growing greed and
gluttony, its ever expanding waistline, Iraq must remain within the
empire’s violent and voracious claws, becoming a colony of imperialism,
to be exploited and raped.
No amount of propaganda or
brainwashing or delusion or denial can make extinct this truth. We are
thus stuck in Iraq for the long term, for her resources and land is
needed to sustain and maintain the America we live in. To believe the
empire will ever leave voluntarily is to live in delusion and fall prey
to the myths of our conditioning. We have made a deal with the devil,
and now we must pay its consequences.
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