WAR ON TERROR? MAKE THAT THE 'WAR AGAINST EXTREMISTS'
It's taken more than four years for President Bush to come clean, but he has finally admitted that the Iraq War was fought for the control of the country's oil, and that the war needs to continue to keep the oil out of the hands of "terrorists".
Bush said the following in a radio interview yesterday :
If the United States withdraws its military forces from Iraq, or all of the Middle East, extremists and terrorists could then attempt to topple governments to "control oil resources."He's clearly talking about Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Kuwait here.
(Bush is worried) "rival forms of extremists will battle for power...they will topple modern governments....they will be in a position to use oil as a tool to blackmail the West."
If they control oil resources, then they pull oil off the market in order to run the price up, and they will do so unless we abandon Israel, for example, or unless we abandon allies.'"
"You couple that with a country that doesn't like us with a nuclear weapon, and people will look back at this moment and say, 'What happened to those people in 2006?' and those are the stakes in this war we face."Israel is the only country in the Middle East confirmed to have nuclear weapons.
Bush also appears more concerned, as usual, with how people in the future will regard the choices he makes today, rather than the chaos and destruction resulting from those choices.
He is absolutely obsessed with how historians will view his presidency and its impact on the world. Bush wants to go down in history as a great wartime president, and believes this is how he will be regarded in decades to come.
"Part of the strategy (of fighting the 'War On Terror') is to help young democracies like Lebanon and Iraq be able to survive against the terrorists and the extremists who are trying to crush their hopes, and part of the democracy is for a freedom movement, which will help create the conditions so that the extremists become marginalized and unable to recruit."In little over a week, President Bush has re-justified the need to fight the 'War On Iraq' to include stopping extremists and terrorists getting their hands on oil supplies; the need to stop extremists from becoming involved in democracy; the need to create a 'freedom movement' across the Middle East; the importance of containing Iran and stopping Shiites from totally controlling Iraq and finally to show the rest of the world that "we don't abandon young democracies".
If Bush wants to fight against "extremists" in the Middle East influencing elections, or running in elections and winning, then he might as just come out and say, "The United States Is Never Going To Leave The Middle East. Ever."
He also seems still unable to grasp the idea that terrorists and extremists use the violence metted out against Iraqis and Palestinians on a daily basis (by fellow Arabs, "international terrorists", covert state forces and private security guards and corporate militias) as one of their key recruiting tools. The 'War On Terror' supplies endless publicity and promotional material for extremists and terrorists to recruit the young and easily influenced.
Orphaned children and widowed husbands and those who have lost their entire families to the 'War On Iraq' are also prime candidates for recruitment by terrorist or extremist groups.
"Extremists" is now the key word.
Terrorists are rarely mentioned in Bush speeches and interviews these days.
It's all about "the extremists".
Which is genuinely bizarre.
Extremism is, for the most part, a personal opinion of the actions or views or beliefs of other people.
The vagarities of defining 'terrorism' at least had the concrete foundation of the use of violence as a political weapon by a non-state entity, usually targeting civilians.
But an "extremist" can be anyone whose political opinion, or platform, you personally regard as "extreme", or non-mainstream, presumably.
But turning the American battle for world energy resources, known as the 'War On Terror', into the 'War Against Extremists' has been part of the Bush Co game plan as outlined by NeoCon strategists in the late 1990s, in the Project For The New American Century papers.
Terrorism as a tactic of war and politics is unlikely to ever go away, but you still need acts of violence and bloodshed to, at least, partly justify military action against "the terrorists, and their supporters".
A 'War Against Extremists' could be fought anywhere in the world, including the homeland, the United States of America.
The 'War On Terror' may fade, but a 'War Against Extremists' could literally last generations.
And victory in a 'War Against Extremists' would be what exactly?
A world where non-mainstream or radical thought and opinion was banned?
Would holding political opinions regarded as "extremist" mean you were a 'non-combatant', the enemy, and therefore worthy of detention or imprisonment?
The irony in President Bush preparing the ground for a 'War Against Extremists' in the Middle East, particularly in Lebanon and Iraq, is that he himself is now regarded as an extremist by country and regional majorities across the planet.
In the United States today, even senators who've supported Bush ceaselessy for the last three and a half years of the Iraq War are now removing photos of themselves with the president from their own websites. He is political poison for most Republican senators in the mid-term elections this week.
Why?
President Bush is regarded as something of an extremist himself now by the majority of Americans, who not only think the President lied to them and decieved them to get his Iraq War, but also remain unsure whether or not their president was somehow involved in, or allowed, the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City and Washington DC.
President Bush will most likely be regarded by historians as one of the most "extremist" presidents in American history, if only for the way his religious beliefs impacted on the private lives of Americans. And these same historians will no doubt judge his extraordinarily deceptive sprint into the 'War On Iraq' as one of the most extreme acts of any American president.
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