Robert Scheer: Ike Was Right

We've been saying this for months, if not years, by now. Yes, oil plays a role in why we are in Iraq, but this oil grab, if that's what it really is, is to control the flow of oil, so that oil comany CEOs continue to make more money in salaries and bonuses than the budgets of quite a few small nations.

War, this war, any war, is always about the same thing; money and power. The U.S., since WWII, has needed wars to fatten portfolios, which tend to sag when peace, unexpectedly, breaks out, as it did when the Soviet Union fell apart.

Remember the Peace Dividend? Poppy used it to blow hell out of Iraq in the early 90's; redirecting the peace windfall, right back into war and his pal's portfolios.

Ike did, in fact warn us, about this unholy alliance, he called the military/industrial complex. Today, it has morphed into the military/corporate/security complex, but it is the same insatiable beast it has always been. if not worse, with the current crop of CEOs in the White House.

Until we find ways of making money off peace, we will be having this never-ending struggle, between Hawks and Doves.

It will also be necessary to levy a greed tx.

Truthdig - Reports - Robert Scheer: Ike Was Right:

The public, seeing through the tissue of Bush administration lies told to justify an invasion that never had anything to do with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 or weapons of mass destruction, now has begun a national questioning: Why are we still in Iraq? The answers posted most widely on the Internet by critics of the war suggest its continuation as a naked imperial grab for the world’s second-largest petroleum source, but that is wrong.

It’s not primarily about the oil; it’s much more about the military-industrial complex, the label employed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower 45 years ago when he warned of the dangers of “a permanent arms industry of vast proportions.”

The Cold War had provided the rationale for the first peacetime creation of a militarized economy. While the former general, Eisenhower, was well aware of the military threat posed by the Soviet Union, he chose in his farewell presidential address to the nation to warn that the war profiteers had an agenda of their own, one that was inimical to the survival of American democracy: