@RusA #9858981 Peoples here mostly think that after 9/11 it's American propagandda about the "Oil" in middle east, since most middle eastern countries are muslim, and Bush just want to got the support to attack Iraq for the "oil" there.
The invasion of Iraq was never about oil as far as our government was concerned, but about getting rid of the leaders in that region who were unfriendly to us, and replacing them with leaders who would do as they were told.
It's complicated, but... [deep breath] There was a think-tank called People for a New American Century, or PNAC, who were right-wing "neo-conservative" hawks who wrote throughout the late 80s and 90s that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. was the only military superpower, and ought to take over the world through force of arms, and get rid of anyone who stood in our way. Well, they didn't put it exactly that way. They talked about "global hegemony" and "establishing a military footprint" to effect "regime change" where necessary. They said that we should start with Iraq, which had long been a troublemaker whom we had fought and beaten once before. Then after throwing Saddam out of power, we should then go after Iran and Syria, even Russia and China if they weren't frightened enough by then to support our interests. These guys were around since the first Bush administration, but he called them "the Crazies" and ignored them. But many of them worked their way into George W. Bush's administration, and persuaded Bush used 9/11 as an excuse to pursue their ideals, starting with Iraq. Contrary to their expectations, that first step took us right off a cliff, and into a tar pit that we've never quite gotten out of. Hard to believe, but those people are still around, and insisting that the Iranian people would welcome us as liberators if we invaded their country , just as they said in 2001 that the Iraqi people would do. Thank goodness nobody takes them seriously any more.
Oil, however, was why the American people were generally so enthusiastic about Bush's invasion plans. They thought that once we got control of Iraq's oil fields, we'd ship all their oil over here, and then we'd have cheap gasoline from then on. This was never part of the government's plan, because it doesn't work that way: the price of oil is based on the market price set by OPEC, and even if we took control of Iraq's oil reserves, it would still be sold on the global market, and we'd buy it as we always have. (From our government's point of view, it was a side benefit to control so much oil by way of a puppet Iraqi government, but not the main goal). It was something of a shock to Americans, then, when the price of gasoline actually started going up, from US$1.46 per gallon in 2001 to a high of $3.28 in 2008. A 2004 Boondocks cartoon, when the price had already gone up about 34%, expresses that feeling better than anything I can thing of:
And the pic on the internet with Pres. reagan with Osama bin Laden, we also assume that USA was also behind all that 9/11 attact too
Funny you should mention that! A position paper put out by the PNAC in 2000 laid out their plans for global military domination, but lamented that it was unlikely to happen without "a new Pearl Harbor". Almost exactly a year later, the 9/11 attacks happened. We first sent troops into Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaida's base of operation, but then the PNAC people in Bush's administration (including the Vice President and Secretary of Defense) convinced him to pin the tail on Saddam and use that, as well as unconfirmed intelligence that he was amassing WMDs, as an excuse to invade Iraq. Because of the timing between the PNAC's document, and Bush supporting the invasion with their rhetoric like "a new Pearl Harbor" and "global hegemony" and "military footprint", the rumors immediately started that Bush and the neo-conservatives had somehow been behind the attack. (When I first heard the news on TV, I got on my then-new internet connection, and the first search result was a page from some nutjob website where the headline was "BUSH DID IT!" It was an early lesson about not believing everything you read on the internet. ) It's highly unlikely that Bush was part of a plot to attack his own country, but the administration does bear some blame, because the intelligence reports were all there, the experts just didn't put them together soon enough. This lack of coordination is the reason Bush later established the Department of Homeland Security to oversee all the agencies that address security threats.
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@RusA #9858981
Peoples here mostly think that after 9/11 it's American propagandda about the "Oil" in middle east, since most middle eastern countries are muslim, and Bush just want to got the support to attack Iraq for the "oil" there.
The invasion of Iraq was never about oil as far as our government was concerned, but about getting rid of the leaders in that region who were unfriendly to us, and replacing them with leaders who would do as they were told.
It's complicated, but... [deep breath] There was a think-tank called People for a New American Century, or PNAC, who were right-wing "neo-conservative" hawks who wrote throughout the late 80s and 90s that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. was the only military superpower, and ought to take over the world through force of arms, and get rid of anyone who stood in our way. Well, they didn't put it exactly that way.
Oil, however, was why the American people were generally so enthusiastic about Bush's invasion plans. They thought that once we got control of Iraq's oil fields, we'd ship all their oil over here, and then we'd have cheap gasoline from then on. This was never part of the government's plan, because it doesn't work that way: the price of oil is based on the market price set by OPEC, and even if we took control of Iraq's oil reserves, it would still be sold on the global market, and we'd buy it as we always have. (From our government's point of view, it was a side benefit to control so much oil by way of a puppet Iraqi government, but not the main goal). It was something of a shock to Americans, then, when the price of gasoline actually started going up, from US$1.46 per gallon in 2001 to a high of $3.28 in 2008. A 2004 Boondocks cartoon, when the price had already gone up about 34%, expresses that feeling better than anything I can thing of:
And the pic on the internet with Pres. reagan with Osama bin Laden, we also assume that USA was also behind all that 9/11 attact too
Funny you should mention that!