The Lubricious Embrace of Iraqi Oil Fields

Well, the Bushites have succeeded for the time being of rewarding those for whom Bush went to war in Iraq: The giant oil companies.

Our State Department, acting as broker for Exxon, Mobil, Shell, BP, Total and Chevron, has strong-armed the ministers of our Iraqi client government into giving these suffering corporations no-bid contracts to exploit Iraq’s oil fields, supposed to hold the second-biggest pool of oil in the world after Saudi Arabia’s.

That means a couple of things for those who appreciate history. It means the U.S., the UK and France now have giant economic interests in Iraq. It means we all will poke around there for decades to protect the oil companies, once they spend a few bucks bribing Iraqi politicians and rearrange the Iraqi economy and government to suit themselves. Dick Cheney probably will head the oil consortium ruling Iraq. He'll go down in history as Big Dick.

The foreign policies of the U.S., the UK and France in the Middle East for nearly a century have been spelled OIL. True, we’ve garnished our selfishness in the Arab and Persian world with cant about bringing democracy to the downtrodden and so forth, but all that has no meaning than a sprig of parsley served beside a sizzling pork chop.

François Georges-Picot and Mark Sykes would snicker at the hypocrisy being offered for the Bush II war in Iraq. They were the young French and British diplomats who in 1916 at the behest of their governments took a ruler and compass to the map and penciled in most the lines still defining what a nation is in Greater Arabia and Old Persia. They left us out of fussing up the new governments, but when we sniffed oil we hustled in so that by the 1940s we had a few puppets of our own sitting on thrones while we mewed about self-governance for the downtrodden.

Bush II had a couple of other motives for going to war. First, he need a good war, to make his scratch on history. He wasn’t going to have fame otherwise. Daddy had a war called Desert Storm. Son created Desert Farce.

Second, there was a matter of revenge. Saddam Hussein had tried to bump off Bush I. Bush family honor demanded satisfaction. It's the kind of thing you swear to in Skull & Bones.

Last, knocking off Saddam gave the Israelis pols orgasms. Now they'd like El Stupido to do them another favor before he stumbles out of office in six months: Invade Iran.

Lots of oil there too. Good war might elect McBush and save the Republican party from the oblivion it deserves.

Stay tuned. The oil boys are thinking, plotting, scheming, manipulating. They got themselves a president and they might as well squeeze all they can out of him before he joins U.S. Grant as an exemplar of ethical leadership.

Bring Back That Old-Time Religion

It warms the soul to read laments about the our nation’s wickedness for abandoning the “traditional Christian values, in which this country was founded upon,” to quote a recent letter to my local daily, which prints every signed missive that arrives and that a phone call might verify.

One traditional 18th Century Christian value was slavery. Through silence the Constitution ratified by the 13 states not only sanctioned slavery but also, for apportioning taxes and congressional representation, graciously counted each slave as three-fifths of a human. This was not just a sop for the South but also for parts of the North, where many such 60-percent persons toiled in bondage.

In the slave colonies fervent divines of most Christian stripes (but not Quaker) preached that God had willed some people to be slaves and others to be slave owners and both should be thankful for it.

The nation’s largest Protestant domination, the Southern Baptists, did not formally give up finding Biblical justification for slavery until 1995.

(They still find Biblical justification for subjugating wives to husbands. It’s no wonder they oppose homosexual marriages, for in those jointures which partner would subjugate the other?)

Indeed, another founding traditional Christian value denied women the right to vote or hold legislative or other high office and in many jurisdictions the right to own property in their own names. Today’s semi-emancipation of women has helped lead us to where we are, ethically speaking.

Yet another 18th Century value was forcing children, often as young as five, to labor in coal and other mines, in factories, on farms, and as indentured servants leased out to strangers, for five and ten-year terms.

When the nation formed, few religious took umbrage at hanging six and seven year olds for picking pockets or stealing bread or at giving them a good skin-stripping flogging before tossing them into prisons to amuse sexually deprived adult felons.

No doubt the reinstitution of all these spiritually salubrious practices would improve our country’s morals.

Certainly Republican candidates and office holders see that. They call frequently for larding the federal and state judiciaries with judges who will uphold the morals of the Founding Fathers (not of no-account Founding Mothers, of course): Slavery, child labor, female bondage and like virtues.

Eight will get you five, when the Republican convention opens, before 15 minutes is up, the keynote speaker will be pounding the podium about the values of the nation in 1787 and how we must go back them; and across the land the heads of the millions of constitutional experts who people this country (most have never read the Constitution and therefore keep a pure mind about it) will bob up and down in agreement before their TV sets.

Bring back the past. Make it our future.