Thursday, October 06, 2005
The debate is why was Iraq invaded and what is going to happen? Is Britain, for example, despite the government leak about Iran's role in supplying armour piercing bombs which have been responsible for the deaths of 8 British soldiers in the Barah area, and Blair's fresh comments that we are going to stay till the time is right to leave, going to jump ship when a full-scale revolution develops in the south?
And America? They are going to stay longer than many think in some form or another - probably mostly intelligence centres across Iraq plus airbases in Kurdistan.
America decided to invade Iraq to make the world a safer place. It might be an instructive exercise to examine other places around the world which America considers dangerous, apart from Iran and North Korea. With this in mind it seems Venezuela might be a good starting point:
Hugo Chavez - showing the US who's master
Hugh O'Shaughnessy, Monday 10th October 2005
This mentions the U.S. government still haven't reprimanded "Pat" Robinson over his remarks about rubbing out Chavez.
Reading this article with a liberal-democratic eye, one can see the problem from both the Venezuelan middle-class's point of view and of other S. American countries which are still pretty authoritarian: helping the poor is not the way they see things ought to be done because they want a pool of ignorant cheap labour as the bottom line, as does the U.S. of A. It takes one back to Maggie's era: her great success amounted to destroying big industry (in order to demolish the large union's power) and creating a low-wage economy which Blair has inherited. He has done virtually nothing to increase the minimum wage to a generally acceptable level of say £6 per hour, because having people in work and topping up with benefits paid out of taxes is preferable to higher wages and a labour market skewed towards to 'buyer' rather than the 'seller' of jobs.
The point of all this is that despite all the tripe-talk in international affairs about freedom and democracy, the bottom line is cheap labour, wherever it is. America will not be happy if labour costs around the world are raised by people such as Chavez. Venezuela = oil (10% of U.S. oilcomes from there). America would prefer to create mayhem in Northern South America than allow oil prices to rise for people like Chavez to run his social projects.
And in the same vein, though the stated reason for invading Iraq was Saddam and his threat to the region and his association with some terrorist groups, the actual reasons seems to be (1) protecting Israel (2) a long-term strategy to maintain supplies of oil.
It has recently been said - whether true or not that Saddam had converted from petro-dollar to euro-dollar in 2000 and that Iran plans to do so in 2006. This would be the bottomline for the U.S., not whether Iraq becomes or a democracy or how many Iraqis die while the occupation forces are in Iraq.
All this is analogous to a triple agent: they said it was WMD and terrorism but we know it was oil -- they promised freedon and democracy -- while allowing chaos, we forget all about oil.
¶ Thursday, October 06, 2005
