The Road To World War III: Bush’s Legacy, Part III

Posted on May 12, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Dandelion Salad

by Mickey Walker
www.thepoliticaljunkies.net
May 11, 2008

Epilogue

Perhaps there is no turning back at this point. New developing giants of world commerce such as China will demand an ungodly amount of new oil in the next few years to satiate their rabid need for a quick fix that only oil will satisfy. For the first time in history, more Audi automobiles are being sold and shipped to China than any other country in the world. Today, Audi, next month, Cadillac, perhaps? They have the money to buy them. We can only hope to make monthly payments here at home in an insolvent nation.

Russia, as it awakens from its long hibernation with the vastest resources on the planet, will surely begin to need more oil fast to quench its new found place in the world of commerce as (you guessed it) one of the most powerful capitalistic countries in the world. So much for the Evil Empire of Reaganomics where the United States bought $500.00 hammers from Halliburton while laying off thousands. Flipping hamburgers became a manufacturing job, according to the Gipper, remember? Russia and capitalism in the same paragraph seem paradoxical, but these days, lots of new wrinkles are showing in the world of trade and commerce, and mournfully, the United States is watching from the bleachers as our dollar disintegrates. Under the Russian soil is more oil than the Arabs. Russia has paid its national debt and is running surpluses into the black, thank you very much for bringing them to their knees, Ronald Reagan. The Chinese have more bodies to work at more factories to produce more goods for more humans on the planet than even Wal-Mart can handle.

Each country has hard assets. And they mean to evolve as world powers, and that means more oil. And if we Americans think that $3.65 per gallon is high today, just crystal ball it to May, 2009. Dare we even guess how high gasoline will go as we get raped at the pump by our impotent government which caters to Exxon, genuflects to Halliburton, and courts illegal mercenary armies like Blackwater? We elected Democrats in 2006 to help us, but they chickened. Will we ever get mad about this free for all pillage of the National Treasury for world occupation of foreign oil reserves? You can bet China will get mad if it runs short of oil (which is inevitable) in propelling its giant economy. If China cannot get enough oil, I would guess that they would go to war, much in the same way the United States did with Afghanistan and Iraq, and attack a nation with rich oil deposits. We showed them how. If Taiwan had rich oil pools, you can bet China would have attacked it years ago.

It’s hard to believe how close Bush has brought us to the brink of World War III. Like drunken gunslingers, we are threatening nations with nuclear weapons and delivery systems. With Elmer Gantry indignation Bush calls them the “Axis of Evil.” Now the oil shortages and the rampant, uncontrollable appetite for oil from light-speed developing super powers like China make for a scary world, indeed. Would China sit still for a pittance of oil in lieu of their rapid growth of oil-sapping factories and billions of Chinese now able to buy cars? Would China or even France sit still to let their military forces be shut down due to lack of oil? No way. There will be war before that happens.

So here we are with our thumb up our collective rectum, dicking around in Iraq, the second largest pool of oil in the world. China wants it, dude. China gonna take it if necessary, get it? Like vultures, Russia (who has no love lost for American imperialists) salivates and loves what is about to happen. The Ruskies know that we Yanks invade countries (the oil rich ones) for our own use while not giving a damn about whether China or France goes down the tubes for lack of oil. Heck for Russia, taking and occupying countries is old hat to them: they wrote the book. They know which walnut shell the pea is under. I’m afraid that’s the way they and the world see things, like it or not. Unlike us, they are not privy to BS spins in the US news media, starting with Fox News, fair and balanced with Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.

Oil. Secret meetings convene over it, minutes are sealed by Executive Privilege, and the world knows our intent even if we the people believe the spin that we are seeking to liberate the Iraqis to establish democracy in a nation that formerly was ruled and abused by a dictator. The world knows and probably cares more than the American people do that the Dick Cheney-Ken Lay Energy Department meeting minutes were sealed in darkest secrecy years ago. Bush wants them kept a deep, dark, secret. Why? The GAO and I would like to know. What is so secret in this open society we call America that the people cannot know? Haven’t we paid at the pump with blood to at least know what’s in those minutes that the Bush Administration does not want us to see? If we are going to send our brave men and women to die for their country in Iraq, shouldn’t we know how much a part of our being there is because of the oil and not to free Iraq from Saddam Hussein? If we were really in the dictator toppling business, wouldn’t we have started out with Kim Sun IL of North Korea? Or maybe we would have had a go at China for all its human rights violations. Could it be that oil sets the main priority for our lying about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq so that we could bring freedom to the Iraqis? Oil, just oil. And look at us. Are we nuts? Don’t we all really know why we are there in Iraq? And is it worth it to stay? Are we too cushy at our tubes and armchairs to care about what is going on in America? Is there any pulpit in America that can wash the blood from our complacent hands for looking the other way and flipping the channel?

In the 1950s we worried about nuclear war. Our fathers built fallout shelters, stocked them with food, and if lucky, a cheap Geiger Counter to help us over the radioactive decay from the nuclear fallout of a nuclear holocaust. Fission fragments rapidly decay to safer levels to where in days, a family and the dog could come out and try to make a life for our species once again. We cared back then. We had a healthy fear of things that meant the end for all of mankind. Many of my peers and I were scared to death during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We knew that the world could be destroyed if Russia did not back down from President Kennedy’s ultimatum that they get the hell out of Cuba and take their missiles and the horse they rode in on with them back to Russia.

These days, most of the newer generations find it a bit quaint that we built the fallout shelters and were afraid of the world ending as we knew it. We shuddered at the movie, “On the Beach” which described the melancholy of the survivors of World War III who were waiting their time for the radiation to reach them down under. Today, no one gives nuclear war a second thought. There could be many reasons for this brand of new apathy, but regardless, it seems real enough.

Could it be that we have spent our futures away by letting Congress and rogue presidents borrow and spend us into oblivion? Instead of being enraged because we lost our jobs or our houses or that gasoline prices should top $4.00 a gallon by June, are we novacained, or valliumed up, or hypnotized by spin doctors on TV and radio? Have we become zombies? Are we too numbed up to care that private military groups like Blackwater are not only on the U.S. payroll, but are at the ready to do the bidding of whoever says to do whatever to whomever, be they innocent American citizens or the enemy? Is what is going on too complex for us to grasp? Do we not care about the prospects of a real nuclear war because our sense of helplessness is at an all time high, and we just don’t care anymore? Maybe.

The first month I spent in Da Nang, Viet Nam, in the boats, in the river and bay, scared me to no end. I constantly looked over the shoreline, up the ridge of Monkey Mountain to the trees where snipers could have picked us off at any time. I cared and watched everything, and then something happened. I became too tired to care anymore about the possibility of my own destruction. I did my job much as a farmer in Rosebud, Texas or a refinery worker in Port Arthur might have. You just get tired of the bull—- of worrying about it. So you go on and cope as if there was no threat or danger. Is that what happened to us after the Bush thugs lied us into war and sends Reserves to do combat tours 3, 4, and 5 times with no remorse? Is that why we lie back and let Bush destroy habeas corpus while shredding the Constitution with his illegal signing statements that nullifies the very existence of Congress? Have we become too lethargic, too weary with it all to care that we are being wiretapped illegally in violation of the Constitution?

Since when would true Americans not censor and impeach a president offing a secret CIA agent in service of the welfare and national security of America (Valerie Plame, dude), for his own political purposes of illegally invading Iraq based upon lies just because Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson, exposed Bush as a liar and a charlatan? Were we not insulted when Bush pardoned Scooter Libby, the only White House conviction in the Valerie Plame affair that disgraced the very nation we used to call America?

Let’s cut to the chase, short and sweet. If America is to survive, we need to wake up, kick ourselves in the ass, and get out onto the streets and protest what we have let America become. F— the Patriot Act and those who would jail us for exercising freedom of speech, granted us under our beloved Constitution. We care. We want to live and prosper again as a good nation, one who will avert nuclear war any way we can. We must bow up and do it. Let’s get some fire in our ass and grit in our craw. Or we ain’t who we always thought we were.

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