[Peace-discuss] It's just too embarrassing…

[C. G. Estabrook]

Jenifer Cartwright wrote:
> ... but what is the corporate/corporate media's interest in continuing US
> aggression in Af-Pak? (Other than war-profiteering in general). --Jenifer

This seems to me precisely the right question -- the one that is avoided 
(innocently or culpably) by so many liberals who try to make sense of Obama's 
nefarious policies.

Forgive me for quoting myself, but I've written a good bit about this matter:

The real reason for the Long War that [the Neocons] – and now Obama – wished to 
promote, stretched back deep into the twentieth century.  During World War II 
the US State Department described the Mideast is the “most strategically 
important area of the world,” and the area's vast energy resources – oil and 
natural gas – as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the 
greatest material prizes in world history.”  In the years since then, oil 
companies and their associates have reaped colossal profits; but, even more 
importantly to the US, control over two-thirds of the world’s estimated 
hydrocarbon reserves – uniquely cheap and easy to exploit – provides what 
Obama's foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski called “critical leverage” 
over European and Asian rivals, what the State Department many years earlier had 
called “veto power” over them.

Noam Chomsky points out, "Note that the critical issue is control, not access. 
US policies towards the Middle East were the same when the US was a net exporter 
of oil, and remain the same today when US intelligence projects that the US 
itself will rely on more stable Atlantic Basin resources [i.e., those of the 
Western hemisphere plus west Africa].  Policies would be likely to be about the 
same if the US were to switch to renewable energy.  The need to control the 
'stupendous source of strategic power' and to gain 'profits beyond the dreams of 
avarice' would remain.  Jockeying over Central Asia and pipeline routes [notably 
in Afghanistan] reflects similar concerns."

With Israel as its "local cop on the beat," as the Nixon administration put it, 
the US has conducted a generations-long war for the control of energy resources 
in a 1500-mile radius around the Persian Gulf -- from the Mediterranean to the 
Indus valley, from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia – and not because the US 
is dependent on Mideast oil: less than 10% of the oil the US imports for 
domestic consumption comes for the Middle East.

And it should by now be clear that – whether we call them al-Qaeda, Taliban, 
insurgents, terrorists, or militants – the people whom we're trying to kill in 
the Middle East are those who want us out of their countries and off of their 
resources.  In order to convince Americans to kill and die and suffer in this 
cause, the Bush administration repeatedly lied about the situation, from 
trumpeting the non-existent weapons of mass destruction to outright forgery. 
But the Obama administration continues to utter the biggest lie, that the US is 
fighting a "war on terror," as they expand the war to Pakistan, which they see 
as the center of opposition to US control of the region...

--"Minion of the Long War," Counterpunch, May 1 - 3, 2009
<http://www.counterpunch.org/estabrook05012009.html>