IT'S THE IMPERIALISM, STUPID!

Great article from Antiwar.com that says what I've been saying for a while now: Leave other countries alone and then they will leave us alone. It's very simple and here's a sample:

Iran was an incipient democracy in 1953, but Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh — chosen by an elected parliament and hugely popular among Iranians — angered the West by nationalizing his country's oil industry. President Eisenhower sent the CIA to depose him. The coup was successful, but it set the stage for future disaster.

The CIA placed Mohammed Reza Pahlavi back on the Peacock Throne. His repressive rule led, 25 years later, to the Islamic Revolution. That revolution brought to power a clique of bitterly anti-Western mullahs who have spent the decades since working intensely, and sometimes violently, to undermine U.S. interests around the world.

If the Eisenhower administration had refrained from direct intervention against Iran in 1953, this religious regime probably would never have come to power. There would be no nuclear crisis. Iran might instead have become a thriving democracy in the heart of the Muslim Middle East.

Let's face it, our empire is killing us. It's killing thousands of other people too, but the empire is sold to us as something that's good for us. I mean, we already know it's not good for "them"--our subjects, I mean to say. Of course, we pretend we're "stabilizing" regions and "protecting" freedom and bringing "democracy," when really no such thing is happening.

But how is our empire literally killing us, you ask? Well, it seems to me to be a rather circular argument--we have this economic empire in which the dollar is the world's reserve currency but we are always having to fight to protect our currency's status as the coin of the realm. I mean to say, it's circular in that, because we're an empire, the global hegemon, we have to fight to remain an empire.

If we weren't trying to be an empire, which is the antithesis of democracy and the incubator of war, we could be what we were always intended to be: a place where freedom is protected and encouraged, happiness is pursued, and the general welfare is promoted.

American Theocracy

Oh, whatever...here's a couple of relevant quotes from Kevin Phillips' "American Theocracy" that got me thinking about all this:

"...the Bush administration knew that the oil-peak crisis probably posed strategic dangers far beyond those publicly acknowledged. The dollar's role as the world's reserve currency was also tied to oil. Besides which, seizing Iraq as a military base-cum-oil reservoir would allow U.S. troops to be pulled out of vulnerable Saudi Arabia, where their presence was breeding discontent and terrorism [p. 69]."

And another, in the section "Defining American Petro-Imperialism":

"...petro-imperialism--the key aspect of which is the U.S. military's transformation into a global oil-protection force--puts up a democratic facade...and seeks to secure, protect, drill, and ship oil, not administer everyday affairs. Still, the way in which the United States has begun to organize its national security and military posture around oil is...unprecedented in scope [p. 78]."

Doesn't that make perfect sense? We will fight to the death and use nuclear weapons in order to maintain our access to a finite energy source, mainly because powerful people profit. And the rest of us do the fighting and the sacrificing of our civil liberties and our livelihoods. It's a wonderful plan for the few, and an atrocity for the many.

Good night.