AMERICA, ISRAEL, AFGHANISTAN, OIL

Sent to the Star, March 25, 2009.

A fundamental goal of American foreign policy, and one that has been formally enunciated in State Department documents, is to obtain oil cheaply, if necessary by force. That is one of the reasons why America spends half the planet's expenditure on weapons of mass destruction. The American government openly defines access to cheap oil as essential to its 'security'. The use of force in Iran in 1953 for oil, when the CIA acted to remove a democratically-elected leader who threatened to nationalize an oil-company which was taking Iranian oil out at bargain price, is well understood, though not acknowledged. The 'oil' motives in the invasions of Iraq of 1991 and 2003 are also understood, if not acknowledged.

But the 'oil' motive in America's arming of Israel, which has 200 nuclear bombs and every type of state-of-the-art chemical and biological weapon, as well as the best air-force of any non-US NATO country, is less understood. Israel's value to America is that it is the 'gun' pointed at Arab and Iranian heads in the Middle East, the world's most fertile oil region, so that oil continues to flow cheaply to America. Israel is America's gun by proxy, since a gun wielded openly (though it is to Iran and Iraq) is difficult to justify to world opinion.

But delivering the Jews their 'promised land' is a cover story that is very easy to sell, not only to Christian fundamentalists and Bible-thumpers in America, but to most Western governments, because of guilt over the Holocaust. People seem to forget that 200 years ago, when America was being 'settled' by the genocidal unsettling of its original inhabitants, the Puritans invoked the same Old Testament ideas of a 'chosen people' favored by God, who could presumably steal from, murder and exploit 'lesser' peoples. Then it was America that was the 'Promised Land'; now it has shifted to Palestine.

(As 'Zbig' Brzezinski, former US National Security Advisor wrote: "The unwillingess to recognize a historical connection between the rise of anti-American terrorism and America's involvement in the Middle East makes the formulation of an effective strategic response to terrorism that much more difficult".) In simple terms, unless the legitimate and long-standing grievances that have been cynically ignored for decades by a self-serving America are addressed, the terrorism - itself a response to the much greater TERRORISM from America, Britain and Israel - will not die.

It is troubling that PM Harper slavishly follows the rapine policies of former President Bush Jr.. He has apparently not learned from his error in opposition when he would have taken Canada into the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Nor does he seem to appreciate that the real reason for American presence in Afghanistan is not the Taliban, which America never cared about, but that Afghanistan is a gateway to another rich oil region – Central Asia. Canadian soldiers are dying in Afghanistan for all the wrong reasons, and but for former PM Chretien's magnificence, might have been dying in Iraq as well, also for the wrong reasons.

If Afghanistan and Pakistan are today one of the world's most dangerous hot-spots, it is the direct consequence of the short-sighted neglect of the American leaders, who invested billions in giving arms and missiles to local warlords to terrorize the Soviets, but who would not spend a fraction of that to rebuild the shattered country when the Soviets had been pushed out. And of the criminal arrogance and duplicity of the Bush administration which within months of 911 began a shift of resources away from Afghanistan to its real target - the theft of an utterly defenseless but oil-rich Iraq, which 911 gave it the perfect pretext for.