Greg Palast: The battle between Big Oil and the Neocons

[Ian_rd]

The greatest investigative journalist of our time delivers yet again. Check out his discussion on the battle between Big Oil and the Neocons over Iraq that left the Neocons utterly defeated:

Was the Invasion of Iraq A Jewish Conspiracy?

...

After two mad years of hunting, I discovered the real plan for Iraq’s oil, the one that keeps our troops in Fallujah. Some 323 pages long and deeply confidential, it was drafted at the James A. Baker III Institute in Houston, Texas, under the strict guidance of Big Oil’s minions. It was the culmination of a series of planning groups that began in December 2000 with key players from the Baker Institute and Council on Foreign Relations (including one Ken Lay of Enron). This was followed by a State Department invasion-planning session in Walnut Creek, California, in February 2001, only weeks after Bush and Cheney took office. Its concepts received official blessing after a March 2001 gathering of oil chiefs (and Lay) with Dick Cheney where the group reviewed with the Vice-President the map of Iraq’s oil fields.

...

Full article: http://www.gregpalast.com/was-the-invasion-of-iraq-a-jewish-conspiracy

[Junkdrawer]

1. The Heart of Darkness & Useful Idiots...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=1406682

[never cry wolf]

2. K&R........

Very interesting suppositions...... Thanks for posting.

[Junkdrawer]

3. Funny how few on DU want to talk about Big Oil...

:(

[Raster]

9. Big Oil = Texas White-boy Petroleum Mafia

Think: Exxon, James Baker, the BFEE, Darth Cheney, Halliburton

[Junkdrawer]

12. ..and a lot of old money. Think Rockefeller. n/t

[Raster]

14. Big oil started with ol' rocky and Standard Oil. There was a damned good

reason Congress took action to break up his oil monopolies. Big oil then gave us ronnie raygun, who began dismantling anti-trust regulations aimed at big oil and also, coincidentally, started dismantling the communications fairness doctrine, allowing companies like clear channel unprecedented power. Hmmm, go figure.

On edit: And when you consider that most of the heavy hitters in this misadministration were part of the Nixon cabal, whose greatest regret was they couldn't control the media... I'm seeing a pattern.

[Junkdrawer]

15. Post #11 below has a link to a GREAT little history piece. n/t

[Joe Chi Minh]

21. I suspect it's because of a lot of us weren't sure of what was

going on and who was responsible for what and for what reasons.

On the basis of what I'd presumably misread, misconstrued, I'd assumed Big Oil and the neocons were hand-in-glove, and their common goal was to keep the price of oil high. Maybe there were others, as you imply, who did understand and had other reasons for keeping quiet on the subject.

[Junkdrawer]

23. Big Oil works in the shadows...

Has ever since the breakup of Standard Oil.

There's good reason to believe that World Wars I & II were fought largely for oil, but you'd never know it from reading or viewing popular histories. Always Good vs Evil.

Here's a clip from the post I linked in Post#1:

I recently viewed a BBC special called The Power of Nightmares. You can view it here:

http://www.novakeo.com/?p=133

While excellent, there was one thing that stuck in my craw: they portray the NeoCons as idealists bent on bringing Democracy to the world, rather than the vicious Imperialists that I remember from the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. The strange thing is that I've encountered this NeoCon-As-Idealist line before and coming from sources that I've otherwise trusted. Sy Hersh has said it repeatedly as has PBS's Frontline.


They knew damn well that "WMDs in Iraq" was a lie. So they had a more carefully crafted backup rationale. PNAC - Let's bring Democracy to the World while we're still the World's Superpower. All bullshit, of course, but I guess it passes for analysis at those infamous Washington cocktail parties.

[Joe Chi Minh]

25. Thanks for the URL. It's difficult to know which is the most surreal

bullshit. One is backed up by a mountain of hard evidence.... of a lack of any plausible evidence; the other is risibly absurd in very principle. US foreign policy smitten by a lust for democracy!!!! Love it!

What's more, "abroad", it seems, is now the mass of Americans, too. An extension of Wedgewood Benn's insight: the British working class is the last of the colonies.

[Recursion]

28. They're called "neocon" because they used to be liberals

...who got fed up with LBJ's incompetence on the one hand and Tricky Dick's accomodation of communism on the other (Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, btw, are not "neocons", though they run with them).

So they cooked up this dream of spreading freedom and democracy throughout the world, vive la Revolution!.

But like all such revolutions it just ended up killing a lot of people and accomplishing almost nothing.

[Junkdrawer]

30. Like I said: Useful Idiots...

Like the Spanish Missionaries were for the Conquistadors.

[Techno Dog]

41. Spot the former Liberal

Feith
Perle
Wolfowitz
Bolton
Cheney
Frum
Kristol
etc etc


I have read the whole trotsky theories, but personally I think it's just pr to try and diminish left wing criticism of an ideology based on power and greed.

[Bucky]

47. I think some people believe if they smoked grass in college, they're exLib

Cheney and his crew don't run around waving bibles in other peoples' faces. I don't like people to do that to me, but that's not going to cause wars. It's the fatcats who don't realize--or rather don't care to think about the fact--that "takeover the oil fields" necessarily means people dying. None of which is ever even close to being "liberal."

[RufusEarl]

4. This is a very good read,

The bottom line is big oil is making money hand over fist, and the Neo-cons are sweeping out a warehouse in east LA. Who's your daddy, com'on who's your daddy??

[Peace Patriot]

5. Oh, God, I love Greg Palast! If you read no one else ever again, read

Greg Palast! (... well...AND Stephen Freeman!).

He nails it again! He nailed Schwarzenegger! (--meeting with Ken Lay in May 2001, to plan the Calif coup to keep Calif from getting its $9 billion back from Enron). He nailed the 2004 stolen election (starting conditions: an estimated one million black voters purged from the voting rolls, nationwide) (--Diebold didn't have to tweak it much.) Now he's nailed the corporate oil wars (James Baker again--of the late Baker-Carter election commission (solution to election problems: purge more black voters with voter ID)). Corporate oil wars: Neo-Cons out on their ears (and with them, any interest Israel might have had in a more secure Middle East, misguided though it all was); Texas oil sharks and global corporate predators in.

Kudos to Greg Palast once again!

:applause: :bounce: :applause:

[Junkdrawer]

6. Is PNAC just more (intellectual) window dressing for Big Oil....

"Let's make the naked grab for oil into an ideological "spread of democracy" debate. Yeah, that's the ticket."

[Bushwick Bill]

7. I love Palast, BUT...

his recent bizarre critique/self-rebuttal of Hubbert/peak oil really didn't get the point. Peakers don't discuss running out completely, they talk about permanent, irreversible decline in production.
Palast:
http://www.gnn.tv/articles/2295/No_Peaking_The_Hubbert_Humbug
http://www.gnn.tv/articles/2297/Why_Palast_Is_Wrong
Here is a solid response.
http://www.energybulletin.net/16284.html

Anyway, what I definitely appreciate about this recent article of Palast's is that while several people (including me) thought that the Iraq invasion was all about strangling OPEC, it could have just been a big oil get-rich-quick ploy.

[Peace Patriot]

17. Yup, and it's hard to argue with the evidence that Palast marshalls...

...he saves it for the end: Douglas Feith out (resigned from the Defense Dept). Larry Franklin busted (for passing docs to Israeli lobbyists). Bolton out (kicked over to the UN-a powerless position). Wolfowitz out (kicked out of the Pentagon war room, to the World Bank, "the lending office for Bangladeshi chicken farmers").

While I don't exactly agree that Bolton and Wolfowitz are now in no position to do harm, they are certainly not running the war any more, no question about it. And it's not because the war "failed." The Bush junta doesn't punish failure. They LIKE failure, if it's in their interest. It was a purge of the Neo-Cons because they wanted LOWER oil prices (to destroy Saudi Arabia and OPEC with, in Israel's interest). (If Iraq's oil fields had been privatized, instead of ending up state-run, the competition among private oil companies would have driven production up, and prices down--but the opposite has occurred; the state-run company, under the Bush Cartel's thumb, and, of course, the civil war that the Bushites fomented, have keep production down and prices UP).

Palast's argument is very strong. I've always said that Israel, and it's more warlike, Likud-type supporters, were making a HUGE, HUGE mistake allying with the Bush Cartel and righwing 'christian' extremists. For one thing, the kind of deeply ugly emotional forces that the 'christian' rightwing stirs up--scapegoatism, racial, religious and sexist hatred (inquisitions, witchburnings, pogroms)--are easily turned on ANY group, at ANY time, for ANY purpose. Look at the dime these fascists turned on, from hating gays to hating brown immigrants! (Now their after "flag-burners"! I mean, you gotta laugh. Complete, total, unmitigated, 100% lying, deceitful, worthless HYPOCRITES--but this doesn't mean they're not dangerous.)

And for another, the Bush junta doesn't now--and never did--give one crap for the safety of Israel. If they did, they NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER would have invaded Iraq. It has turned the Middle East into a tinder box, in which no amount of armaments and "walls" can bring you safety. And if they cared one crap about the safety of Israel, they would have urged Israel onto a new path of peace and justice for the Palestinians, instead of abetting the Likud government in further injustice, and in becoming a medieval walled fortress bristling with arms--an untenable situation!

Now the Neo-Cons are out, oil prices have skyrocketed (as planned by James Baker and the Saudis), and we're never going to see the end of this war for OIL PROFITS and for HALLIBURTON war profiteers--until we get smart and throw their goddamned Diebold/ES&S election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor'!

Who headed Diebold? A Bush-Cheney campaign chair and major fundraiser--Wally O'Dell, a "Bush Pioneer," right up there with Ken Lay! Who funded ES&S (a spinoff of Diebold)? Rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon Foundation, which touts the death penalty for homosexuals (among other things). Who "counted" 80% of the nation's votes in 2004? Diebold and ES&S. HOW did they "count" them? With TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, and virtually no audit/recount controls. How did THAT happen? It was Tom Delay's and Bob Ney's pet bill--the "Help America Vote For Bush Act"--a $4 billion electronic voting boondoggle for their buds at Diebold and ES&S, engineered by the two biggest crooks in the Anthrax Congress. The money was used to bribe, bully, entice and corrupt election officials from one end of this country to the other, into hasty purchase of these egregiously NON-TRANSPARENT, crapass, unreliable, insecure, and extremely insider-hackable voting systems. In two years time--2002-2004--they destroyed all transparency and integrity in our election system, and paved the way for TRADE SECRET, private, corporate, Bushite-controlled "selection" of George Bush in 2004.

Non-transparent elections = tyranny and unjust war. That's what we have.

And thus it will remain, until ordinary Americans get wise, and head with their pitchforks and shovels (symbolic, of course) down to their local boards of election and county registrars and DEMAND VOTING COUNTING that everybody can SEE and that everybody can UNDERSTAND! No more gobble-de-gook, secretly programmed vote counting that only James Baker and the tech whizzes at Diebold and ES&S understand!

[mhatrw]

44. Nice summary.

[robertpaulsen]

20. Agreed completely. Thanks for the links, Bushwick Bill!

I bought Palast's new book Armed Madhouse and was perplexed by what is either obtuseness or disingenuousness in regard to Peak Oil. To quote from your energybulletin link:

1. In his dramatic opening, Palast misunderstands Hubbert's phrase "culmination of world production" to mean that the world would run out of oil and natural gas in about 2006. As we know, "culmination of world production" = peak production = peak oil. NOT "running out of oil."

What I don't understand is that in the book, Palast reprints a graph from Hubbert's 1956 presentation to buttress his point. But if you've read the book, the graph clearly shows that by the year 2050, the world will still be producing 5 billion barrels of oil per year. How is that possible if Hubbert meant, as Palast claims, that the world will run out of oil in 2006? Somehow Palast overlooked this.

I wish I could find the graph from the book, which I believe is on page 110. If anyone else can find it and reprint it here, it would more clearly illustrate what I'm referring to and show how strange it is that Palast missed it.

[rman]

46. I can't get over it how stupid Palast is in writing that article

He's a reputable investigative journalists for crying out loud.
What the heck was he on when he was investigating Peak Oil?

Did he ever see a peak oil graph? Do those look like the peak is followed by an abrupt and complete end to production? I don't think so.

http://www.hubbertpeak.com/summary.htm

There are about a million of those graphs depicting the "Hubbert curve" when you google for "peak oil graph".

I'm upset about it because Palast was one of few that i trusted. It seems that i just can't be paranoid enough.

[lectrobyte]

48. We will reduce oil dependency only when

we have a government less dependent on oil money. Truer words never spoke. Well worth reading.

[SeattleRob]

8. Palast Nails it!

As usual, it all boils down to the old axiom: Follow the money!

[Junkdrawer]

11. Yep. Here's a great read from UC Davis:

http://www.geology.ucdavis.edu/~cowen/~GEL115/115CH13oil.html

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=1468638&mesg_id=1517636

[The Stranger]

10. Palast sets up the Mother of All Strawmen, then SLAYS IT!

Thank you, Greg Palast! Whew, looked like a Protocols-esque conspiracy! :sarcasm:

Yeah, right. You sure slew that strawman. If Paul Wolfowitz and his PNAC minions "had their asses kicked utterly, finally, and convincingly," then George W. Bush must be the President of Mensa.

You really, really (REALLY) have to be kidding me.

[Pierre.Suave]

13. Where are

the supporting documents?

[Junkdrawer]

16. .

[Junkdrawer]

37. .

[Junkdrawer]

43. .

[rman]

18. "Bush and Cheney" - and the neocons, taken on board by Cheney,

who himself is a member of PNAC. Also Cheney and Rumsfeld are long-time buddies (see PBS "The Dark Side"). Yet Cheney the oil man beat the neocons?

[applegrove]

19. Please don't generalize. Please don't. More than one religion represented

in PNAC. And please.. Abramoff is not representative of his religion. He is just a goon. Why would any of ther others be representative?


Sure it is a cluster **** .. but that is my point. One and all..they players who wanted a long war..and went in with too few troops and undid any possibility of early success = peace for civilians in Iraq..they are all SNAKES.

Be it ties to the GOP, big Oil, PNAC & other creeps....they are all snakes. And most have more than one affiliation. Most are affiliated with all three.

[Ian_rd]

22. Palast's title is meant to poke fun at some conspiracy theorists (nt)

[applegrove]

24. Great! I'm glad. But my heart dropped to my knees anyways. Sometimes

sarcasm smilie is needed in the OP?

:yoiks:

[Joe Chi Minh]

26. It seems the neocons' fantasy was framed by what I believe

sociologists call, the principle of "deferred pleasure". They were prepared to wait for their big chance to gouge their end customers, until they'd destroyed OPEC. Presumably, more greedy, ultimately than even Big Oil.

[applegrove]

33. I could not read that far in the article. Some days.. I just cannot read

about the people currently in power.

[Joe Chi Minh]

35. It's worse trying to look at them though...

[Ian_rd]

27. Tried to edit .. but too late. You're right though, I should have ...

... pointed that out in the OP so no misconceptions were made.

[Recursion]

32. It's something to be careful about

I've seen more than a few freepers say that "neocon" is what liberals call "a jewish conservative". They are pointing to anti-hebraism from some of the more tinfoil-hat-ish sides of the left and to be honest they may be on to something, somewhat.

[applegrove]

34. Yes.. I agree. We must be carefull with titles. Especially second hand.

Everyone makes the mistake at some point (which really isn't a mistake.. it is just being cautious).

[Roland99]

29. Isn't that about the timeframe that Ahnuld was meeting witih top GOP pigs?

[katty]

31. Palast has pkged well what other altmedia writers have

said or written about this over the years. The BIG Oil puppetmasters have been systematically decapitating bush & the neocons-Cheney being the ubergreedy darth. When once silent admin people start saying things (as the 'C-span camera rolls') like:
"three words...the vice president." and "don't accept all the crap.." (paraphrase), it's over for the bush gang. The sound bites get juicier everyday.

[Joe Chi Minh]

36. An interesting and heartening insight!

[leveymg]

38. Palast got it 2/3 right. He forgot the Third Force behind all this:

the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the career CIA, and the permanent foreign policy Establishment who actually, really, run the U.S. Government.

It wasn't Jim Baker who gave the OSP-OVP cabal -- Wolfie, Feith, Libby -- the boot.

It was George Tenet acting through the CIA Inspector General who sought prosecution for the outing of Mrs. Wilson at the end of March 2003, just days after Tenet fell on his sword for the "sixteen deadly words" about Iraqi WMD that justified the invasion. That was followed by the DoD IG request that the FBI finally bust the OSP-AIPAC spy ring that was swapping classified documents with the Israeli Embassy. That was the one-two punch that sent the Iraq-Syria-Iran war party sprawling on its ass.

The four-stars and Agency chiefs knew exactly what they were doing. Grand Juries and leaks eventually paralyzed the Administration. Here it is. Bush-Cheney is the deadest of lame ducks. Time for the carcass to be removed, and a caretaker government to take over. The permanent government survived - the Witch is Dead.

As for $3 gas prices, we'll just have to learn to adjust. Cheap energy was an illusion, for which we were paying, one way or another -- it was past time to pop that illusion.

[Burried News]

40. Interesting analysis. Explains alot. The adults are back in charge.

[Peace Patriot]

42. "Cheap oil was an illusion" and the Oil Cartel's boffo profits ARE...?

Real, would you say?

Hugo Chavez showed that cheap oil is not an illusion--if oil is owned and used for the common good.

Also, I don't think I agree with you on the extent of George Tenet's power. He seemed like a man who had been out-maneuvered, when he resigned. He couldn't even protect his own agents in the field--and the Bush junta didn't just out Plame, they outed the entire CIA WMD counter-proliferation network around the world, putting all of its covert agents/contacts in danger of getting killed, and disabling all projects--the work of 20 years (the Brewster-Jennings network). Tenet's request for the Plame investigation seemed more like a parting shot--likely with his own reputation on the line with the spook community. My sense of things is that Rumsfeld is the mastermind behind this conspiracy against REAL counter-proliferation work (trying to prevent war, not manufacture it), and he is still very much in place--with his beady little eyes still fixed on Iran. I think they had to postpone bombing or invading Iran because of China--which would not have taken kindly to it--since they buy Iranian oil--and which holds a good portion of the Bush national debt paper. A precipitous fall in the dollar, or the stock market, would mess up Rove's narrative for their phony miraculous "comeback" victory in the fall. Even though they now have their buds at Diebold/ES&S counting all the votes with secret programming, they still like to write plausible narratives--I don't know why. Maybe it's that a widened war, and China's reaction, would make the whole thing (secret vote tabulation by Bushite electronics corporations) seem too silly for words. I don't think the plan is dead, though--just postponed.

I do think Palast has a good point about the impact of the Iraq war as to LOWERING or RAISING oil prices--and that this is where the Oil Cartel and the Neo-Cons parted company. And the Oil Cartel won. I also agree with whoever upthread suggested that Palast was mocking conspiracy theories, sort of--by positing a Jewish/Israeli conspiracy behind the Iraq war, that he had heard from a raving audience member, then opting for the raised price of oil as a better theory, with the Texans/Saudis as the conspirators. But you never know with Greg Palast. Things are so bad on the face of it--in the "Armed Madhouse" that the U.S. has become--that you don't really need to be a tinfoil hatter to see conspiracies. The conspiracies are real enough. The conspiracy to force us into unjust war, with lies and deceit. The conspiracy of oil price gouging. Whatever conspiracies were cooked up in Cheney's secret energy meetings. The conspiracy to torture prisoners. The conspiracy to spy on all Americans. The conspiracy to out Plame and Brewster-Jennings. The conspiracy to "re-elect" Bush. All involving several or many people. All cloaked in secrecy, lies and deceit. The very definition of conspiracy: to lie and deceive, as a group, for the purpose of murder, theft, power and/or coverup. Our country might as well be run by a gang of mobsters. I think Palast is saying: keep some perspective, when it comes to blaming Israel and Jewish Neo-Cons for the war in Iraq. They were certainly players, but so were a who-o-o-o-ole lot of other people--and the chief ones among them with a lot WORSE motives than the safety of Israel (however misguided) or the Neo-Cons' nutso dreams of imposing democracy by force. I think that's Palast's point: Look to the Bush Cartel/Saudis as the CHIEF CULPRITS of this Mideast disaster and of all our ills. If we're going to pinpoint and analyze the conspiracy to destroy our country with unjust war and humongous debt, we had better be accurate, and we had better see the whole picture.

[leveymg]

45. Oil profits are a windfall at public expense. The consumer pays twice.

American consumers get to foot the bill for the hundreds of billions blown on invading and occupying oil-rich countries, and then the consumer is shafted again when world oil prices go through the roof amidst the frenzied speculation of oil traders whenever there's another war. That's what I mean by the illusion of cheap energy.

Is that a conspiracy? Maybe. I'd call it kleptocapitalism, and that's Job One for Bush-Cheney.

Is there a rational alternative? Yes, but it would require windfall profits taxes and federal investment in public transportation, conservation and alternative fuels programs. The very things the multinational oil companies fear most.

[Maat]

39. My hubby called this before the Iraq Invasion ..

of course, he'd worked in the oil industry for over 20 years (mostly on the software/computer-modeling end). Luckily, he saw the Light, and has been a progressive since the early 90's - writes great software for the education industry now.