What Are They Really Up To?
Huck Gutman, DAWN, February 17. 2003

The government of the United States is, sad to say, in the hands of blinkered ideologues. And that is putting it kindly. A less generous interpretation is that a small group of people are determined to serve their own narrow interests, oblivious to the effect their actions may have on either their own nation, or the six billion people with whom they share the globe.

President George Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and presidential adviser Karl Rove have come up with a 'policy' toward Iraq based on a triumvirate of crass motives: oil, sleight-of-hand, re-election. [...]

Within the territorial borders of Iraq lies the second largest petroleum reserve in the world.

Saddam Hussein may have done many things wrong, but in the eyes of President Bush one of his very greatest errors was that he signed contracts with the Russians, the French and the Italians to allow them to extract that petroleum from beneath Iraqi soil.

The Americans and the British, should Saddam remain in power, will see huge profits made - but by other nations, and more particularly by corporations other than the ones headed by the men with whom the president plays golf when he is in Texas.

"Regime change," that neutered term which means deposing Saddam Hussein, also means contract abrogation and renegotiation. [...]
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 3:52 pm