Golf courses in the desert: An alternative view of the Iraq war

[Cyrus]

And now for something completely different. Don't faint.


[ QUOTE ]
For all the talk lately about the emergence of a post-industrial economy, the last few years have been an object lesson in just how vital to capitalist dreams of the future the control of a few strategic commodities still is.

[/ QUOTE ] [ QUOTE ]
Iraq is awash with low-cost oil. As yet only 15 of its 74 fields have been developed; known reserves are 112 billion barrels, but once new technologies for subsurface exploration can be employed, Iraqi holdings might turn out to exceed 300 billion barrels (perhaps a quarter of global reserves) over the coming decade. With recovery rates of 50 per cent (a conservative figure) and reserves of 250 billion barrels (an equally cautious reckoning), Iraqi oil would be worth more than $3 trillion. To this can be added the bonus of 110 trillion cubic feet of natural gas – sufficient to supply the US for ten years or more. The US Overseas Private Investment Corporation delicately called it the ‘next Klondike’

[/ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
A dominant capitalist core has begun to find it harder and harder to benefit from ‘consensual’ market expansion or corporate mergers and asset transfers, [so] the preference for the military option makes sense.

[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]
‘Getting Iraq ready for Wal-Mart’ as the former Bush-Cheney campaign manager put it; notably, all of Saddam’s laws concerning labour rights, or the lack of them, were left intact.

[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]
But the problem with the Blood for Oil hypothesis is not its choice of oil as a dominant force among a group of politico-economic forces, but that it has conspicuously failed to grasp that oil draws its power from a field of capitalist forces that must periodically reconstitute the conditions of its own profitability.

[/ QUOTE ]

Retort : Was oil the reason for the invasion of Iraq?
Retort, a ‘gathering of antagonists to capital and empire’, is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The essay was written by Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts.
Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, which deals with many aspects of post-September 11 global politics, is due from Verso this summer.

[dr_venkman]

I thought the code name Operation Iraqi Liberation was quite amusing until they changed it to Operation Iraqi Freedom right after the initial assault began.

I'm guessing The Chimp in Chief is still chuckling and smirking over getting that one by the Pentagon.