The Real Deal, Same as the Old Deal

When the Iraq war started, a friend* and I had a conversation about the reason for the war. I felt embarrassed by the world's perception that we were doing it for the oil. Even though Bush and Cheney are oilmen, and I normally would take any opportunity to besmirch them, I could not attribe their decision to go to war to the notion that we just went to go in and take their oil.

History has proven me right. If we had gone in and just taken their oil, then gas would be cheap right now. It is not. But despite the high price of oil, oil companies are making insane profits. This gives us a clue as to the real motivation for the war. Another clue comes from the whole Halliburton scandal.

No, we did not go in to take their oil. We went in to take their business. Or rather, to give our companies a leg up in the Middle East economy. Now, American Samizdat has uncovered more evidence:

Friday, October 29, 2004 Another Taste of Iraqi Freedom [...] new legislation in Iraq has been carefully put in place by the US that prevents farmers from saving their seeds and effectively hands over the seed market to transnational corporations. This is a disastrous turn of events for Iraqi farmers, biodiversity and the country's food security. While political sovereignty remains an illusion, food sovereignty for the Iraqi people has been made near impossible by these new regulations. Agribusiness has been doing this everywhere it can, of course, as part of the overall corporate goal of complete subjugation of all of us serfs. The invasion of Iraq has made it trivial to do there, but watch carefully: what they do to Iraq they want to do to you.

He's right, of course. What they do to Iraq, they want to do to you. They don't care if you are Republican or Democrat, they want you to work for peanuts while they get rich. That is the deal.

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*That's the same friend who got a death threat after he had a letter published in our local paper, The Ann Arbor News.