In the
end, Darth Vader did not eat Robin alive (no Batman to
the rescue). Much to the contrary. The cyclopic spinning
machine is ruling that the only vice-presidential debate
in the US election, between incumbent Dick Cheney and
challenger John Edwards in Cincinnati on Tuesday, was a
tie - but not if you consider the numerous Darth Vader
instances of, euphemistically, "stretching the truth".
Dick Cheney played a snarling, almost lethargic
Darth Vader, sliding toward the downright nasty - as
usual - against an initially stumbling, but then very
alert and sprightly, Robin/John Edwards. Not to mention
hawkish: many will be alarmed that the Kerry-Edwards
ticket is actually proposing four more US Army
divisions, lots more non-Arabic-speaking Special Forces,
more power to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and an
even harder line on Iran.
The Iraq war is Dick
Cheney's war, as much as Donald Rumsfeld's, Paul
Wolfowitz's, Douglas Feith's and other fellow neo-cons'.
All eyes were on Cheney. And he actually spoke as though
someone named George W Bush didn't even exist. For
untold millions in the United States and around the
world, this is the actual president-in-charge; the man
who had "other priorities" besides fighting in Vietnam;
the man who always maintained - and still maintains -
that Osama bin Laden was sleeping with Saddam Hussein,
that Saddam had or was on his way to obtaining weapons
of mass destruction, and that the US would be greeted as
"liberators" in Iraq; the man whose - ongoing - ties
with Halliburton have elevated crony capitalism to new
levels; and the man who now says a United States under
John Kerry and John Edwards - but not under George W
Bush and Dick Cheney - will certainly be attacked again
on its own soil.
It's an open question whether
US corporate media will decide to do some research and
decapitate Cheney's fallacies once again hammered out
during the debate. A brand-new US Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) report has found there's no conclusive
evidence that Saddam was protecting the new bin Laden,
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, before the invasion of Iraq (in
fact, if he was alive, he was in no-fly zone Iraqi
Kurdistan, closely monitored by F-16s). Cheney said
Zarqawi "was in Baghdad before the war" (false) and is
now in Baghdad beheading hostages (instead, there's
ample suspicion that "Zarqawi" may now be a cipher used
by a number of Iraqi guerrilla groups).
When
cornered by Edwards, Cheney denied he had made a link
between Saddam and the attacks of September 11, 2001.
False: he's always made the connection, in ways so
emphatic that in a recent Gallup poll 62% of Republicans
still believe that Saddam was personally involved on
September 11. Fellow neo-con Donald Rumsfeld himself
refuted his "unknown unknowns" to admit to a "known
known": this week he said there's no "strong, hard
evidence" of an al-Qaeda-Saddam link.
Cheney
insisted on an "Iraqi track record of terror". False:
for 12 years Saddam's regime was incapacitated under
harsh United Nations sanctions; terror attacks started
after the US invasion, against the occupation.
Cheney said the Bush administration "captured or
killed thousands of al-Qaeda". False: real, hardcore
al-Qaeda fighters captured or killed are a little more
than a hundred, and most were captured by Pakistan.
Cheney said 16,000 US troops will remain in Afghanistan
"as long as it's necessary" - which is a clever way of
camouflaging the fact that without them Hamid Karzai's
client regime cannot hold on to power. Cheney also
praised dancing bear Prime-Minister-without-a-parliament
Iyad Allawi in Iraq - without mentioning (nor did
Edwards) that Allawi's recent speech to Congress in
Washington was written by Bush administration officials.
What they didn't talk about Some of
Cheney's assertions were pure Theater of the Absurd,
such as suicide bombers in Palestine owing their
existence to Saddam Hussein, or scandal-plagued
Halliburton being mentioned only as a "smokescreen" to
"confuse the voters". Edwards may not have been enough
of a foreign-policy connoisseur to challenge Cheney, and
many questions may have been frankly inane. But it's
astonishing that in such a crucial debate there was no
mention whatsoever of the key intersection between
Cheney's oil connections and the "war on terror".
Bush created the National Energy Policy
Development Group (NEPDG) in January 2001, right after
his inauguration. The group was directed by Cheney. As
soon as it published the so-called Cheney Report, its
point was made: the priority for the Bush administration
was never the "war on terror", but America's dependence
on energy sources. The Cheney Report was not strategic
analysis. But it was published during the Enron scandal
- with Bush-supporting Enron executives working as NEPDG
members. Something really fishy was afoot. In July 2003
the Department of Commerce was forced by the US Supreme
Court to unveil the documents used by the Cheney Energy
Task Force. Among these documents were maps of oilfields
in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia as
well as charts detailing which foreign companies had
closed deals with Saddam for oil exploitation in Iraq.
These documents are definitive proof that long before
September 11, 2001, regime change in Iraq was the No 1
priority on the Bush administration agenda. Edwards
would have made a killing establishing this connection -
if only a relevant question had been on the table.
The eighth chapter of the Cheney Report, titled
"Strengthening Global Alliances", says it's imperative
for the US to get rid of strategic, political and
economic obstacles in its quest to ensure the extra 7.5
million barrels of oil a day it will need by 2020. This
is the equivalent of the current total consumption of
India and China put together. As most of the countries
that are part of these "obstacles" are politically and
socially unstable, this means that secure supplies to
the US imply the presence of US troops. Thus the Bush
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the bases in Central Asia,
the pressure on Iran.
The Cheney Report makes no
bones about stressing the crucial, and growing, US - as
well as Asian and Western European - dependence on
Middle East oil. As the solution for the energy problem,
it proposes a military option. This is the ultimate
meaning of retired General Tommy Franks saying on the
record that "we will be in Afghanistan for years", and
the meaning of the 14 US military bases to be built in
Iraq.
At the time, the Cheney Energy Task Force
also had to refer to the UN sanctions imposed on Iraq.
Lifting the sanctions on Iraq would mean the go-ahead
for contracts frozen by the sanctions - most with
Russian and European companies and not with US
companies, since Saddam was not in business with the US.
So war was the only option to get the big prize - the
second-largest oil reserves in the world, which come as
well with very low production costs (if the Iraqi
resistance allows it ...).
The "Bush-Cheney
junta", as Gore Vidal describes it, has always
maintained that "the terrorists" want to destroy the
American way of life. But the whole proposition may be
turned upside down. To preserve an American way of life
that guzzles - and wastes - tremendous amounts of
energy, Washington is forced to go military all the way,
under the pretext of the "war on terror". And the
process, on top of it, feeds on itself. Who is the
largest world consumer of energy? It's the US Army.
Dick Cheney, especially when distilling the most
incredible fallacy, loves to start by saying "the fact
of the matter is ..." It's highly unlikely the next two
final presidential debates will go after the utmost
"fact of the matter": the real reasons behind the "war
on terror".
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