7 Apr 2008

Complicity And Guilt

Christopher Kin says the USA can’t leave Iraq because it needs the oil. And he expects Teh People to be OK with that:
...the US will not only endeavour to remain in control of Iraqi oil, but will also attempt to seize Iran’s oilfields and that, moreover, the US people will support this in order to preserve their living standard...

We have tended to think that the American people have been deceived by the Bush administration’s lies. It appears that, although initially this was the case, America has realized the truth but cannot admit its complicity. It cares about its high living standards and American deaths, not Iraqi or Afghan poverty and deaths. The American people do not recognize themselves in the mirror. They evidently see only fantasy images, unrelated to reality, derived from films.
Of course it's not so much films as the news media. And the question is whether the US people, who are mostly decent, would still think like that if the media did not present facts in such a distorted manner.

We see the same thing happening in Australia, where many ordinary people would rather just not talk about the war, either because they have been fed a false story or because they recognise the potential implications for their wallet.

But the narrative in Kin's article ignores one important fact: the USA cannot win in Iraq and will never have full control of Iraq’s oil (let along Iran’s). The pipes will always be sabotaged while the occupiers remain. So all that’s really being achieved is a higher oil price (and higher oil company profits for Cheney's friends) in the interim.

NB: h/t wbb at JQ's blog.