What really scares me about USUK aggression

[Tiberius]

From you second link:

The total reserves for Alberta, including oil not recoverable using current technology, are estimated at 1,700- 2,500Gb

...

Our consumption continues to increase, as well as our dependence on oil imports. Today, about 59% of the oil consumed in the United States are imported. The deposits of oil sands (oil shale) in the United States are massive. The processing of oil shale has gone through cycles of development and commercialization, all without achieving a competitive cost of production.

It is convenient to take out only those parts of the context that are favourable to you, isn't it?

[notyoueither]

300 billion barrels of oil, extractable right now, Tiberius. read it and weap. that us more than Saudia Arabia.

I'm not sure why we are fighting about this, other than maybe you want to perpetuate the myth that oil is only found in the ME and anything the US does there is because of oil for them.

Trust me, we have more than enough oil in North America to take care of ourselves. Why would oil be so important then, eh?

btw, I said more reliable. reliab;le is not a source that has billions of dollars dropped into a resourse with no proven worth. Alberta just 'jumping' from 480 million to several billion barrels of proven reserves is just that, bull****. It cost several billion dollars to get that oil 'proven'. Do you think they just spent it in the last year? In fact, it has been being spent for the last thirty years.

And btw, yes, it is convenient for me to point out that all the oil the ME is not equal to the oil sitting below North America.

You seem to have a problem with that concept though. Why is that?

[Tiberius]

So Canada is the reachest contry in oil reserves? Great, I'm really glad to hear this, because that means we won't be dependent in the long term on the ME oil, and the unstable governments in the area.

But ...

300 billion barrels of oil, extractable right now, at what cost? Is it as cheap as the ME oil?

IMO you underestimate greed. The oil industry is interested in cheap oil, and currently the oil in the ME is the cheapest.

Even if all the 300 billion barrels are economically efficient to extract, the ME oil still accounts for 50% of the world currently recovarable oil reserves. The Canadian oil reserve is secure, but the next 3 or 4 big produces/reserves are still in the ME, and you are telling me that controll over them is not important for the US and its short and long term interests?

Trust me, we have more than enough oil in North America to take care of ourselves. Why would oil be so important then, eh?

If it isn't important, what are the US soldiers doing in SA, Kuwait and Iraq?

Ask yourself a simple question: if there was no oil, at all, in the ME, would the US have such a massive military presense in the area? I don't think so.

[Drake Tungsten]

Where's all the oil in East Asia that the U.S. troops there must be protecting?

[Tiberius]

Very smart question DT. You had thought a lot until you asked it, hadn't you?

[Drake Tungsten]

Not really. I tend to put as much thought into my rebuttals as my opponents put into their posts, so I didn't have to do much in this case.

[Zevico]

Problem Child, I would like to point out that the US has pointedly promised that a future Iraqi government will be democratic, so puppet state=impossible if the US keeps to this promise, and pro-US state=doubtful, leaning very much to no-although possible, if they have a good education system without too much propaganda.
Also, you outright dismiss any chance of their being any WMD in Iraq. Being such an expert on the issue, could you please tell us: 1) whether there is any chance Saddam destroyed some of the less well hidden WMD during or before the war, or 2) How long it takes to actually find things such as WMD in a large country made of up tracts of desert.
AS for imperialism-what do you mean by it? Certainly the US isn't "colonising" Iraq, and Bush has said that all revenue from Iraqi oil wells will go to help rebuild Iraq.

[Tiberius]

Well, to answer your genious question: they are protecting the US' interests. The US's interests in the ME is called OIL.

I'll let you think how the US's interest is called in eastern Asia. As difficult as it is, even you might figure it out.

[Drake Tungsten]

I'll let you think how the US's interest is called in eastern Asia.

Why? Is it because there's no easy, BS answer like "they want oil!" to apply to U.S. interests in East Asia?

[Tiberius]

Maybe I was wrong, and you can't figure it out after all.
Have a nice day.

[Drake Tungsten]

Damn, the fish didn't take the bait.

[GhengisFarbâ„¢]

Originally posted by notyoueither
As for why the armed might of the US might be interested in the ME right now, maybe you tuned out the fact that there is one hell of a hole in the ground right where the centre pieces of New York used to be, and the people who created the holes came from the ME. I don't know. I could be wrong here, but I think that is what has the Yanks up in arms.

You are absolutely right. This is the PRIMARY motivation for the US right now.

We bombed the crap out of Afghanastan but have been unable to get the ringleader Osama because he is holed up in an area being fought over by China, Pakistan, and India.

Yeah, America could send troops in there but all three of those other countries have nuclear weapons. Iraq didn't have usable ones so the US could beat up on them (a source for financial support for other terrorist groups which then forces those terrorist groups to compete for the sources Al Queda is using).

If Osama would just die or get captured I think a lot of the US agression would peter out.

TERRORISM has completed disrupted the US way of life and Americans are not happy about it.

1) We actually have people with weapons in our airports now.

2) We now have to wait more than 10 minutes to get our ticket and board a bloody plane.

3) Our military bases are not longer open to general public access.

4) We had to add a whole new department on terroism and have to pay more taxes to fund it.

It seems to me it would be whole lot cheaper to just nuke the Middle East and get it over with.

[problem_child]

Originally posted by Zevico
Problem Child, I would like to point out that the US has pointedly promised that a future Iraqi government will be democratic, so puppet state=impossible if the US keeps to this promise, and pro-US state=doubtful, leaning very much to no-although possible, if they have a good education system without too much propaganda.
Also, you outright dismiss any chance of their being any WMD in Iraq. Being such an expert on the issue, could you please tell us: 1) whether there is any chance Saddam destroyed some of the less well hidden WMD during or before the war, or 2) How long it takes to actually find things such as WMD in a large country made of up tracts of desert.
AS for imperialism-what do you mean by it? Certainly the US isn't "colonising" Iraq, and Bush has said that all revenue from Iraqi oil wells will go to help rebuild Iraq.

So Saddam destroyed his weapons of mass destruction just before the war huh? Then what was the bloody point of em? Saddam did destroy the WMDs, or rather UN inspectors did after the last Gulf War (UN inspectors like the late Dr David Kelly, another victim of our lying manipulative USUK leaderships).

By the way after GW1 the sanctions were imposed, and at no time were WoMaDs mentioned back then, the sanctions were originaly (alegedly) imposed to force the Iraqi's to depose Saddam Hussein (even though they did try to liberate themselves but were allowed to be slaughtered in their efforts by Saddam Hussein, with the complicity of USUK leadership because USUK leadership disliked the idea that a bunch of Arabs sitting on such a strategicly interesting peice of real estate might make their own national choices for once).

The real reasons the sanctions were imposed was to punish the Iraqi people, to hold them up as an example to others... what happens to those who get too uppety, and to degrade their previously well-developed society... don't want Iraq to get independant or anything, keep it 3rd world.

Iraq used to have a better then average standard of living for the area, America and Britain bombed the crap out of that and then made sure all facilities (from water treatment plants to medical materiels to pencil-graphite and lightbulbs) were cut off from the place so the nation could never recover, let alone rebuild WoMaDs (which Iraq had required heavy support in terms of money/material and expertise from the West to develop in the first place, back when they were fighting post-Shah Iran). The result of the sanctions was the deaths and high mortality rate of hundreds of thousand sof children (of course the most vulnerable in the society). The US and UK had bombed water-processors (of vital importance in an essentially desert nation) and destroyed the electrical infrastructure... then imposed sanctions, they knew who would be hurt. All those plants of various kinds that would never be repaired, all those hospitals that would never get enough medicines or equipment, especially nasty in a nation so saturated with Delpleted Uranium dust and Cancers...

However the genocidal santions regime had to be justified by USUK, (genocidal as defined by the Geneva convention) and that's when they first came up with the whole WMD thing as an excuse for their continued diplomatic/economic aggressions against Iraq.

It is well documented by the UN inspectors how Iraq had destroyed it's WoMaDs, the reason the US and UK were able to say they weren't complying is because the US had managed to construct a mandate that said every last bolt and every last bunsen-burner had to be accounted for, but the Iraqis had already destroyed a bunch of stuff- rendering every last item not necessarily accountable. Basically Iraqs arsenal and ability to produce more WoMaDs was effectively destroyed between the UN inspectors and the Iraqis themselves, this was known, but USUK wanted to be anal about it so that they could continue the sanctions, and continue their preludes to war. It's also well known that the inspection teams themselves were heavily infiltrated by CIA and Isreali spies, and that some of the demands they made effectively encouraged scientists to defect (the UN is not supposed to be a Defection Agency) or to interveiw college/university students... the kind of things no nation could possibly comply with. This apparently amounted to 'refusal to cooperate' by the war architects back in the Pentagon.

Don't beleive me? Read up on your Hans Blix, read up on your Kofi Annan, read up on your post GW1 period articles. Then come back an despute it.


Saddam bombed Iraqs Kurds with WoMaDs, where was the Wests self-rightiuos outrage then? The same place it was when Indonesia invaded East Timor, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians... it was in a boardroom discusing lucrative contracts with the military-men in their pea-green clothes and dark-glasses, everybody sitting in comfy leather chairs and sipping mineral water, that's where.

I'd also like to mention the no-fly zones, alegedly enforced to 'protect the Kurds', and yet in the Northern no fly zone, USUK pilots regularly ceased patrols to allow the Turkish military to come in to brutalise and kill the Kurds. When the USUK airforces were't turning a blind eye to Turkish operations against the Kurds there, they spent their time randomly bombing herdsman and villages (sometimes again and again), and denying Iraq the right to maintain an air-defence system (hmm, I wonder why...) There was never any legitemacy to the so called no-fly zones, they were a blatant abuse of a nations sovreignty, and a blatant abuse of the legitemacy of the UN.

It might also be useful to look at the UNs resolutions on WMDs in the ME area as a whole, Iraq was to destroy it's WoMaDs, and Isreal was to reduce it's WoMaDs, and Arabia was to reduce its arsenals. Obviously the US and Isreal had no intention of Isreal de-arming itself of nukes and poxes, and obviously the UK had no interest in Customer Number One buying less of it's deadly wares... so instead you only ever seemed to hear about Iraq having to disarm and disarm again.

When I say that GW2 was about oil, I don't just mean a few billion barrels, I mean the long term strategic value of oil, of strategic military power in that oil-rich region of the worlds cheapest oil, I'm not just talking about the value in terms of the price of a barrel times the number of confirmed barrels available, I'm talking about the value of controlling the largest reserves of the cheapest oil in the world for decades to come. The US used to be an external power trying to project influence into the Middle East, now the US is a regional power. It borders Arabia, Iran, Jordan, Syria...

And the idea that Iraq will ever be democratic or be invested in reminds me of a cleche, the wife of a wife-beater beleives her husband the next morning after a 'rough and drunken night' when he tells her:

'I'll never hit you again darling, from now on things are gonna change, I promise...'

Pur-leez. The Bush administration envisages the future of Iraq as being somewhere between the Shah's Iran and modern Turkey. That reads as a Kurd-oppressing kleptocracy familiar with torture, disapearance and repression as tools of public relations. You can also look at El Salvadore to see the kind of 'democracy' the US is in the habit of creating. For a start the US is not even deBa'arthing the Iraqi state below the highest levels of government (where it has instead directly installed for the time being Americans). The Iraqi security state, the police force etc... it's like de-Nazifying Germany by re-employing the Gestapo. (As an aside the US did actually recruit many Nazi's for it's clandestine death-squady type operations in South America, in underming the democraticaly elected government of Guatamala and killing hundreds of thousands of native Indians for example.... America has killed hundreds of thousands of Indians before... guess it was familiar territory really.)

Anyway, the US empire is modelling itself on the British empire, it's influence is to be informal when possible (proxies, clients, surrogates and well-placed compradors) and formal when necessary (direct military might, super-carriers, air-bases, battalions, invasion to 'free' people and all that kind of bollocks).

By the way, where is the oil in East Asia? is it anywhere near Vietnam at all?

One more thing, I make no apologies for being passionate in my opposition to the injustices and lies of powerful well-armed imperiums. Call me childish but I will always be proud to froth at the mouth when I see a bunch of imperialists walking on people and editing history so that self-rightous propaganda-dwelling rednecks can shout out

'Yee-haa! God what a Great Freedom Luvin Country We Are!'

But it's also good to see a bunch of people also saying 'Yeah well I'm American too, but this invasion thing is bull****... I'm not dumb enough to just beleive what I'm fed by the corrupt oil-men that run the joint right now, here's what I think their real motives are....'

[Drake Tungsten]

'Yee-haa! God what a Great Freedom Luvin Country We Are!'

[problem_child]

Drake, women are found in every nation on earth, so borrowing natures beautiful forms and trying to associate them with a country is like borrowing natures beautiful forms to try and associate them with some car so that people will buy it.

Might work with less intelligent people... but my gf is as good looking as that and she's European... so no points for the USA. Women were not invented by America. Nice try though.