The Iraq War is a Huge Success
…The hidden agenda of the US government in Iraq has been three-fold. Firstly, to take control of the world’s second largest oil reserves, thereby seizing one of the key oil spigots of competitors like Japan, China and the EU. Secondly, to prevent the dollar-based world oil market from transacting in Euros, something Iran, Iraq and Venezuela were attempting since 2002, when the Euro was launched. Thirdly, the establishment of permanent US military bases in the strategic heart of the world. (The US has built the world’s largest embassy, employing 5000 people, in Baghdad).
In all three respects, the war has been a resounding success. US oil companies have taken charge of Iraqi oil. In the future it is through them that Japan, China, EU and any other competitors will have to buy oil from the region, something that gives the US formidable leverage. The oil market continues to transact in dollars, fragile as it is as a global reserve currency. Iranian experiments with the Euro Bourse have not taken off.
The war has also achieved some other remarkable, unmentionable goals for Washington. Firstly, it has managed to demonstrate the ‘credibility’ of its military intentions of gaining full — spectrum dominance in the post Cold War world. It has been, as one journalist puts it, a successful ‘global experiment in behaviour modification.’ Secondly, the war industry has made huge profits as military orders have grown, Bush repeatedly asking Congress for more, almost $ 0.3 trillion having already been spent on the war. Nobel-Laureate Joseph Stiglitz estimates the war to cost (and the weapons manufacturers to get) between $1 and 2 trillion over the next several years. Thirdly, firms from the reconstruction industry have been having a field day, the costs of reconstruction (which are effectively benefits for the US corporations, at the expense of the Iraqi public: ‘we destroy, we rebuild, you pay’) are estimated at somewhere between $10 and $60 billion over the next several years, most of it to be levied, with typically imperial justice, on the tax-paying public of Iraq, the punishment for enduring a CIA- installed dictator for decades.
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