Recently Obama was asked by CNN's Candy Crowley if "there's anything that's happened in the past 7 1/2 years that the U.S. needs to apologize for in terms of foreign policy?" Obama responded by saying, "No, I don't believe in the U.S. apologizing. As I said I think the war in Iraq was a mistake. We didn't keep our eye on the ball in Afghanistan. But, you know, hindsight is 20/20, and I'm much more interested in looking forward rather than looking backwards." The United States, Obama told Crowley, "remains overwhelmingly a force of good in the world" [1].

obama's insults:
(...) During his Brown Chapel address, Obama praised the “Moses [King and Selma] Generation” of Civil Rights leaders for bringing black America “90 percent” of the way to social equality in America. It’s up to Obama and his fellow “Joshua Generation” blacks to get past “that [final] 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side,” Obama said. This formulation was consistent with his 2006 campaign book The Audacity of Hope’s claim that most black Americans have been “pulled into the economic mainstream.”
Never mind that blacks are afflicted with a shocking racial wealth gap that keeps their average net worth at one eleventh that of whites and an income structure starkly and persistently tilted towards poverty (Loewen 2005, p. 130; Shapiro 2005). Or that whites in the United States, considered separately, enjoy the highest quality of life in the world while black Americans, viewed separately, live at the level of a “Third World” nation (Elaine Brown, The Condemnation of Little B [Boston, MA: Beacon, 2002], pp. 78-79).
(...) Too bad Obama’s relatively privileged background has little to do with American Horatio Alger (rags to riches) mythology. And too bad that Obama’s paean to the American Dream was plagued by a different sort of empirical challenge: the relatively stationary and harshly unbalanced structure of American inequality.
(...) Not only does the social class into which you are born matter a very great deal when it comes to where you stand on the American socioeconomic ladder. It matters more in the U.S. than it does in most if not all the rest of the industrialized world. As reporter David Wessel noted on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in the spring of 2005, the best scholarship on the subject simply does not support "the notion that the US is a meritocracy where smarts and ambition matter more than parenthood and class." In reality, the odds that a child born into poverty will climb into the middle or upper class are slighter in the U.S. than they are in "class bound Europe." The U.S. and its junior partner England are "the least mobile societies" among the world's "rich countries." France and Germany "are somewhat more mobile than the U.S.; Canada and the Nordic countries are much more so."
(...) As Obama waxed eloquent about “generous America’s” status as the global beacon of ascendant opportunity, the best current research determined at least 45 to 60 percent of "parents' [class] advantage" is "passed on to their children." Using the 60 percent estimate, Wessel reported that rich Americans’ inherited edge and poor Americans’ inherited disadvantage goes five generations deep in the U.S., extending back to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. According to Chicago Federal Reserve economist Bhashkar Mazumdor, who matched government survey data with the Social Security records of thousands of men burn during the 1960s, just 14% of American men born to fathers in the bottom tenth of the wage structure have risen to the top 30%. Conversely, just 17% of men born to fathers in the top tenth have fallen into the bottom 30th.
(...) It gets worse, Wessel noted, when you factor in race: fully 42% of blacks born into the bottom tenth of families for income fail to escape the lowest ten percent. By contrast, just 17% of whites born into the bottom tenth stay there as adults.
(...) “The people in this stadium need to know who we're going to fight for,” Obama told labor union members in Chicago’s Soldier Field last August. “The reason that I'm running for president is because of you, not because of folks who are writing big checks, and that's a clear message that has to be sent, I think, by every candidate.” At the same time, “Obama, Inc.” proceeds to set campaign fundraising records with considerable help from gigantic corporations and investment capital behemoths like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase and Co., and Exelon. These and other stupendous concentrations of wealth exercise quiet but powerful control over Obama’s campaign rhetoric and policy proposals. Especially insulting to our intelligence and sensibilities is Obama’s determination to retain close and lucrative funding relationships with leading Washington-based lobbyists and lobbying firms he claims to repudiate. Obama talks a big game of not taking lobbyist money but he works regularly with influential lobbyist players who (as Los Angeles Times reporter Dan Moran noted last August) “skirt disclosure requirements by merely advising clients and associates who do actual lobbying, and avoiding regular contact with policymakers.”
(...) In an interview last year with Time’s Joe Klein, Obama expressed interesting misgivings even about Massachusetts’ (non-single payer)plan for universal health insurance. He insulted American intelligence and moral sensibilities when he told Klein that “voluntary” solutions are “more consonant” with “the American character” than “government mandates.” Never mind that, as Noam Chomsky noted in 2006 (Chomsky Failed States [2006], p. 225): “A large majority of the [U.S.] population supports extensive government intervention [in the health care market], it appears. An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that ‘over 2/3 of all Americans thought the government should guarantee “everyone the best and most advanced health care that technology can supply;”’ a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 80 percent regard universal health care as ‘more important than holding down taxes’; polls reported in Business Week found that 67% of Americans think it is a good idea to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens, as Canada and Britain do, with just 27 5 dissenting; the Pew Research Center found that 64 percent of Americans favor the ‘U.S. government guaranteeing health insurance for all citizens, even if it means raising taxes’ (30 percent opposed). By the late 1980s, more than 70 percent of Americans ‘thought health care should be a constitutional guarantee,’ while 40 percent ‘thought it already was.’” Obama, it is worth noting, received $708,000 from medical and insurance interests between 2001 and 2006. His wife Michelle, a fellow Harvard Law graduate, was a Vice President for Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, a position that paid her $273, 618 in 2006.
(...) These were maddeningly meager reflections on the wonders of American democracy. Obama’s ode to the absence of fascist dictatorship in the U.S. deleted the absence or weakness of substantive positive popular governance there. It evaded the unpleasant fact that much of ordinary U.S. citizens’ freedom to “say,” “write,” and “think” whatever they wish generally amounts to the liberty to whisper to one's immediate neighbor in the front row of a crowded movie theater with a blaring sound track since it is generally drowned out by giant, concentrated corporate media and the special megaphones possessed by private and state power. In a similar vein, Joe Six Pack et al.’s votes - when actually counted - are mere political half-pennies compared to the structurally empowered super-citizenship bestowed upon the great monied interests and corporations that exercise such well known disproportionate influence on American “market democracy.”
(...) It gets worse and more insulting and authoritarian with Obama. After referring to Americans as "one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes,” Obama’s Keynote Address praised "a young man" named Seamus who "told me he'd joined the Marines and was heading to Iraq the following week." Seamus' most endearing quality, Obama told the 2004 Convention, was "absolute faith in our country and its leaders, his devotion to duty and service." Reflecting on Seamus’ supposed blind and unquestioning devotion to the American fatherland, Obama "thought this young man was all that any of us might hope for in a child." So much for the venerable democratic tradition of encouraging critical thinking and questioning authority!
(...) "We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photographs," Hedges and Al-Arian report, "that some soldiers had so lost their moral compasses that they mocked or desecrated Iraqi civilian corpses." Twenty four veterans "said they had witnessed or heard stories from those in their unit of unarmed civilians being shot or run over by convoys. These incidents were so numerous that many were never reported." The killing of "unarmed Iraqis" is "so common many of the troops said it became an accepted part of the daily landscape." Several interviewees told Hedges and Al-Arian of cases where U.S. soldiers would "plant AK-47s" next to the bodies of unarmed Iraqis they had butchered "to make it seems as if the civilian dead were combatants" (Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian, "The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness," The Nation, July 30, 2007).

mainstream media, NYT:
It’s in the leftmost sections of the nation’s conservative, dominant (so-called mainstream) and corporate media that you best discern where concentrated economic and political power set the outer parameters of permissible discourse.
(...) Is this all perhaps part of the answer to the great supposed mystery of “Why They Hate Us?” Dominant U.S. media’s powerful, opinion-shaping unwillingness and/or inability to acknowledge the victimization of people on the wrong side of our imperial guns is part of a broader devaluation of non-North American and non-white lives in U.S. culture. We are obsessed with the tragic murder of 32 innocent students at Virginia Tech but cannot bring ourselves to focus on routinely larger and daily civilian body counts in occupation-mangled Iraq.
(...) We offer hundreds of thousands of dollars for information about three U.S. soldiers ambushed south of Baghdad last May. We value the life of innocent civilians murdered by al-Qaeda terrorists on September 11, 2001 at $1.8 million. Meanwhile we give the comparatively tiny sums amounts of $500-$2500 to the surviving family members of innocent civilians we butcher in the name of freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan (Mitchell 2007; Engelhardt 2007).
(...) “Our” media has spent more energy mourning the death of a fallen U.S. horse (Barbaro) than it has on the death of untold thousands of children in U.S.-occupied Iraq.
(...) We killed 3 million Indochinese people during the 1960s and 1970s and spent the next three decades agonizing over what the Vietnam War did to us – the real victims.
(...) And who can forget the famous nationally televised comment of the “liberal” Bill Clinton administration’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright regarding the murder of half a million Iraqi children by U.S.-led economic sanctions. It’s a hard choice, she said, but added “we think he price is worth it” (Stahl 1996). The Madame Secretary did not comment on whether the parents of the deceased juveniles agreed with her curious imperial cost accounting.
(...) The U.S. GI deaths in Mesopotamia are terrible of course, but they reflect legitimate resistance efforts by an illegally occupied people who have suffered from the U.S. invasion on a scale that makes American “sacrifice” look minor indeed.

paul street on the mainstream media:The coverage and commentary is full of detailed descriptions and discussion of various aspects of different legislative proposals and how politicians, policymakers and advocacy groups line up regarding each clause and proposal. But the relevant overall context for understanding the issue is largely missing. That context is the spatially and socially unequal structure and operation and class basis of the world capitalist system, which creates both the “push” and the “pull” behind mass “illegal” (and legal) immigration to the U.S. and the fear so many working Americans feel about the presence of immigrants in the U.S. There’s no serious discussion of the critical roles that U.S. global trade, investment and foreign policy play in generating and sustaining poverty and repression in the “developing” nations that export so much cheap labor to the U.S. Also beyond the range of serious focus: the U.S. business community’s desire to exploit stateless – politically and institutionally disenfranchised – labor and the pivotal, profit-enhancing contradiction between (a) global capital’s freedom to roam the planet with “race-to-the-bottom” impunity and (b) global labor’s comparatively constricted movement across national borders..
(...) Growing economic inequality in the U.S. is another example. This topic is receiving welcome and increasing media attention after thirty five years in which the share of U.S. “earnings” appropriated by the richest 1 percent of American has tripled while incomes have stagnated and fallen for the nation’s working class majority. The most unequal and wealth-top-heavy nation in the industrialized world by far, the U.S. is now at pre-New Deal levels of economic disparity. The top 1 percent owns more than a third of the nation’s wealth.
(...) Sadly, however, the relevant coverage and commentary generally comes with a key part of the story – the basic nature of the nation’s business-ruled (state-capitalist) political-economy – all but left out. You hear and read about various policy debates relating to whether growing inequality is about “technology” and/or globalization and/or deindustrialization and/or education and skills and/or about the erosion of union power and/or “free trade” and/or immigration and/or tax policy and/or culture and behavior (always meaning the culture and behavior of the poor, not the rich) and so on. Some of this discussion is useful and intelligent but there’s a giant taboo against honest discussion of the fact that the business-ruled state-capitalist system of socioeconomic management tends by its very nature to generate massive inequality combining opulence for the privileged few and relative poverty for the many. As the liberal economist Lester Thurow (no stark raving “Marxist” like yours truly) noted in the mid 1990s, “democracy and capitalism have very different beliefs about the proper distribution of power. One believes in a completely equal distribution of political power, ‘one man [sic] one vote,’ while the other believes that it is the duty of the economically fit to drive the unfit out of business and into extinction. ‘Survival of the fittest’ and inequalities in purchasing power are what capitalist efficiency is all about. Individual profit comes first and firms become efficient to be rich. To put it in its starkest form, capitalism is perfectly compatible with slavery. Democracy is not.”
(...) Never mind that the preponderant majority of Iraqis have wanted U.S. troops to leave their nation from the start. Never mind that just 1 percent of Iraqis think the U.S. invaded to export democracy or that the great majority of Iraqis think Uncle Sam came to (imagine) grab their oil. Or that a recent poll conducted by “our own” State Department reports that almost three-fourths of Baghdad’s residents would “feel safer” if U.S. forces left their country. Or that one of the first actions of the U.S. occupation authorities was to open up much of Iraq ’s economy to multinational corporate ownership – an action that would never have been supported by the Iraqi majority and which violated core principles of national independence.
(...) As James M. Lindsay, a vice president at the Council on Foreign Relations proclaimed last year, “it was always hard to sustain the argument that if the United States withdrew from Vietnam there would be immense geopolitical consequences. As we look at Iraq , it's a very different issue. It's a country in one of the most volatile parts of the world, which has a very precious resource that modern economies rely on, namely oil."
(...) Even if the U.S. overcame its gasoline addiction and became fully energy- self-reliant (it currently receives just 20 percent of its oil from the Middle East), something else would still make U.S. officials positively obsessed with Middle Eastern petroleum: the ongoing and ever-worsening loss of America's onetime supremacy in basic global-capitalist realms of production, trade, international finance, and currency and the related emergence of the rapidly expanding giant China as a new strategic military (as well as economic) competitor. As the noted Left geographer and world-systems analyst David Harvey argues, the United States' long decline, reflecting predictable (and predicted) shifts in the spatial patterns of capitalist investment and social infrastructure gives special urgency for the U.S to deepen its control of Middle Eastern oil and use it as a bargaining chip with even more oil-dependent regions like Western Europe and East Asia, homes to the leading challengers to U.S. economic power. That core objective would hardly be attained helping Iraq act in accord with the principles of democracy and national independence.
(...) Dominant (“mainstream”) U.S. media coverage and commentary on Iraq continues to be hopelessly crippled by doctrinal observance of taboos against discussing five basic and intimately interrelated aspects of so-called “Operation Iraqi Freedom”:
1. The monumentally criminal nature of the invasion, which involved (in the words of the 2005 Istanbul Declaration) “planning, preparing, and waging the supreme crime of a war of aggression in contravention of the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg Principles.”
2. The brazenly imperialist and colonial nature of the occupation, which is richly continuous with earlier U.S. behavior within the beyond the Middle East and provides critical context for understanding why U.S. soldiers die on a regular basis in Iraq (where Americans are understandably seen as unlawful invaders).
3. The racist nature of the occupation, expressed in the false conflation between al Qaeda and a small group of predominantly Saudi hijackers on one hand and the broad Arab and Muslim worlds on the other hand. This racism has found expression also in U.S. ground forces’ recurrent description of Iraqi civilians and resistance fighters as “hajis” and “towel heads”(among other terrible designations) and in many Americans’ insistence on describing the entire Middle East as a den of primitive, barbarian and enemies of modern “civilization.”
4. The full and overwhelming extent of Iraqi civilian casualties, including more than 700,000 dead by now. The Iraqi body count dwarfs the U.S. death toll in Iraq , but dominant U.S. media remains primarily and narcissistically obsessed with U.S. fatalities in Mesopotamia . The mostly civilian Arab victims of U.S. imperial violence (a lovely expression of America ’s noble commitment to “civilization”) are unworthy victims of the Iraq War as far as dominant U.S. media is concerned.
5. The critical role of the American Empire Project’s longstanding core concern with the control of Middle Eastern oil in shaping the decision to invade Iraq and in ensuring that the U.S. will not completely or truly withdraw from that illegally occupied nation or indeed the region anytime soon, whichever corporate-imperial party happens to hold power in Washington.
(...) At the “left” margin of dominant U.S. media’s narrow parameters of acceptable discourse (defined by the likes of the New York Times and militant centrists Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama), the war is at worst a terrible “mistake” – a “strategic blunder” driven by a sincere but naïve drive to advance noble and democratic ideals and institutions.
(...) The assumption of benevolent intention, the denial of criminal and imperial intent, the inability to grasp the role of petroleum, and the denial of racist and mass-murderous realities makes taking in “mainstream” war/occupation coverage and commentary like hearing a baseball game being called by a blind man.
(...) According to a Washington Post “news” story (not an editorial) in January 2005, “spreading democracy around the world” was “one of [the Bush administration’s] top foreign policy goals for the new term."

After returning to Cambridge not too long ago, just as all underclassfolk were leaving, many friends have asked me what I learned/did/enjoyed in the three months in Nicaragua I substituted for my Harvard spring. I've found it nigh on impossible to 'summarize', let alone describe, my time abroad - not because the depth or awesomeness of the experience makes conveying it impossible (doubtless that's how some very nice people have interpreted my inability to list 'lessons learned'), but really only because a few sentences, well thought-out or not, can never do justice to a whole semester (whether in Managua or in Harvard Yard). For those reasons I think it may not be best to post here about what happened there - at the very least, I'd be 'forcing it', a habit which my campers last summer made me promise to kick. Furthermore, all that's relevant about my trip, in the cambridgecommon sense, will probably make itself explicit in the course of posting soon enough.

For example: my final paper for the program I was enrolled in tried to discuss the 'gutting' of politics that follows from today's forced coupling of 'democracy' and capitalism. I looked at the Free Trade Zone in Nicaragua with this theme in mind - in my opinion, the premises of these types of mega-Projects - the idea, however expressed, that development can be planned by an educated, 'expert' elite - make clear the emptiness of what passes for democracy today.[1] I recently came across this news story looking at past speeches given by America's commander-in-chief (excerpt below), notable not merely because his words are shown to be flatly absurd, but also because his posturing demonstrates excellently the weakness of this country's democratic fabric.

In a "Rose Garden news conference", Bush is quoted as saying (on Iraq):

"I recognize there are a handful there, or some, who just say, `Get out, you know, it's just not worth it. Let's just leave.' I strongly disagree with that attitude. Most Americans do as well."

Not only, as the article notes, does Bush totally misinterpret public polls, his analysis is pathetic. Those who say - "get out" - are not necessarily also arguing "it's just not worth it". His need to characterize those who advocate for immediate withdrawal as pessimistic nationalists, only lacking faith, willpower, and the manly courage of their fearless leader, reflects how American politics is framed to exclude viewpoints that are fundamentally distasteful. This is so obviously inimical to democracy, precisely because it prohibits productive, deliberative, and inclusive discourse. It can never be asked, within the limits of the paradigm that Bush defines here, whether people oppose the war for reasons more principled than blind nationalism. Perhaps because the war was completely illegal and illegitimate under international law? Perhaps because its architects manufactured, cooked, and fabricated the intelligence? Perhaps because of imperial designs?

Some might suggest that I've picked an easy target - that Bushisms are hardly indicative of a political climate in critical condition. However, I insist that the Democrats are minimally different, and excluding the fringe 'hopefuls without hope' (Gravel, Kucinich), politicking in the USA requires that certain assumptions central to the sanctity of the political arena remain unshaken, if ever even challenged. Most obviously these include the belief in the essential benevolence of US foreign policy (have Democrats read "Killing Hope", by William Blum?) [we could surely name others: that the American Dream is glorious and viable, that anti-capitalism is inadmissable, that we must not question our founding fathers, etc.] Paul Street, a radical historian and activist who writes regularly for ZNet, has made it his pre-election mission to discredit Obama (in particular) and the Democrats (more generally) on these points (see, for example this and this).

What we should be challenging, more broadly and more crucially, is the "rule of experts"-ideal ensconced in this political model. Its incompleteness facilitates the calcification of these aforementioned "Points of Unity". Politicians live a politician's life; they are funded by certain groups, educated in similar ways, and usually isolated from their constituents in very real ways (financially, spatially, racially, etc.). Yet they monopolize Power. This obviously defies democracy, since democracy most deeply demands the entering of everyone into politics; it is highly egalitarian, and ideally extremely hostile to this paternalism. No one should be empowered to decide for anybody else. Instead, we must all participate in the making of our world. In the case of the Free Trade Zone in Managua, for example, Nicaragua grants a group of dogmatically-educated technocrats (a man I interviewed had five textbooks on his desk, one of which was Mankiw's "Principles of Economics" in Spanish) the right to chart a course for the future of the hundreds of thousands of people directly or indirectly affected by their proposals. The structure of today's politics subscribes to this basic belief in the ability of a smart, well-educated class of people to direct a country. [2] Does the autocratic essence of this arrangement not trouble us? Surely we, even as Harvardians who (all other things being equal) benefit from this status quo, still understand the integrity of a radically democratic polity?

[1] In my opinion, development should never be understood as a technology of government, since that necessarily de-links it from politics. It is not simply the likely result of certain, correct set of policies, but most importantly a state of politics - a way of organizing government that empowers and liberates each citizen.
[2] Immanuel Wallerstein, pioneer of world-systems theory, traces the origins of this arrangement very persuasively: "Liberals put their faith in one key premise of Enlightenment thought: that rational thought and action were the path to salvation, that is, to progress. (...) It followed that ‘normal political change’ ought to follow the path indicated by those who were most rational—that is, most educated, most skilled, therefore most wise. These men could design the best paths of political change to pursue; that is, these men could indicate the necessary reforms to undertake and enact." (from this essay; PIN needed).

paul street on may day:
You know when somebody like...I don’t know, like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or even John Edwards tells you they’re against the Iraq War make sure you ask them why. Are they against it because it’s an immoral and monumentally illegal and brazenly imperialist oil occupation that has killed more than 700,000 Iraqis as well as 3300 Americans and is part of a larger U.S. project of global dominance? Or do they think that the only thing wrong with the war is that it isn’t working.
(...) I really liked those chalk body outlines that one of you did last night to bring home the needless death of 3300 U.S. troops. But let’s not forget the 700,000 or more Iraqis murdered by this criminal war.
(...) If you go back and look more closely at the struggle for shorter working hours you’ll find something interesting. You’ll find that workers wanted more time so that they could participate in the great “democracy” that the United States purported to be. They knew very well that time is a democracy issue. Democracy takes time. It takes time to study the issues and their historical context and meaning. It takes time to disentangle the endless lies of the power elite and its servants. It takes time to cut through all the propagandistic self-serving know-it-all bullshit of the bosses, teachers, newscasters, textbook writers, advertisers, candidates, political consultants, bureaucrats, professors and other professional liars and thought coordinators.
(...) This was complete bullshit. They acted in accord with FIXED intelligence – with COOKED intelligence designed in advance of the war to justify an invasion they had already decided to launch. We also got the big democracy promotion lie claiming that the real reason to invade Iraq was to spread freedom and democracy. That is a complete fairy tale. The last thing U.S. policymakers want to see in Iraq is real freedom and democracy and independence since the last thing they want to see is that country free to make whatever deals it likes with whoever it wishes in regard to the remarkable petroleum resources under their soil.

on the impending war on iran (street):
[note: this article outlines the build-up and cites its sources at the end, meaning it is a good resource for future work]
The assault envisioned, it should be noted, is a “Shock and Awe” air attack, not a ground invasion or prolonged occupation that will cause mass U.S. casualties. The problem of GI burnout and casualties will not deter Washington from undertaking a month-long high-tech air war launched mainly from sea-born vessels. The White House is contemplating the use of nuclear weaponry, something that would involve an especially high ratio of “enemy” devastation to U.S. troop loss.
(...) it is worth remembering, the White House claimed that neither they nor anyone else had good reasons to anticipate the chaos that lay ahead when they invaded that shattered nation. This was completely false. Beyond technically irrelevant predictions of turmoil from within the Middle East and from the U.S. and global Left, numerous key establishment figures advanced serious “elite” warnings about possibly disastrous consequences after a quick military victory over a weak regime. The agents of advance warning (to name just some of the more prominent voices) included George Bush Senior’s National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, retired Air Force Col. John Warden, Marine Corps consultant Frank Hoffman, National Defense University professor Daniel Kuehl, conservative Congressman Ike Skelton (the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee), and the Committee on International Security Studies at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences [footnote 19].
(...) The administration’s desperation could be furthered by its awareness of the remarkable strategic stakes at play in the Middle East. Cheney and Bush have sparked events that could end up significantly damaging the United States’ position in the world system. Their incompetent and delusional actions have enabled a potential decisive separation of largely Shiite-inhabited Middle East oil lands from U.S. control, something that would cost the United States critical leverage over world-capitalist rivals and significantly accelerate its demotion to the position of a “second-rate world power.” Seen from the perspective of the American Empire Project, of course, there is nothing irrational about U.S. policymakers’ longstanding obsession with the control of Middle Eastern oil [footnote 23].

blood for oil (paul street):
Just as both sides of the Cold War possessed their own very different interests in incorrectly calling the Soviet Union “socialist,” both sides in the current U.S. war-funding and timetable debate have an interest in falsely describing the Congressional votes as “antiwar.”
(...) For their part, the Democrats wish to exploit the moral prestige of antiwar sentiment. Sixty percent of U.S. citizens oppose the increase of U.S. troop levels in Iraq. The occupation is now opposed by two-thirds of Americans. Nearly three fourths (72 percent) of Americans polled last year said that all U.S. in Iraq should come home by the end of 2006. Democrats rode this antiwar sentiment into Congressional majority power last November.
(...) The Democratic Congress has not exercised its power to end the war. It has not passed an antiwar bill.
(...) In the March 23rd House vote, all but eight of the Democrats (Dennis Kucinich, John Lewis, Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, Diane Watson, Lynn Woolsey, Mike McNulty and Mike Michaud) basically gave Bush the money
he needs to continue and expand the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and possibly to initiate an assault on Iran. If the Congressional bill was enacted tomorrow, without a Bush veto, it would fund Bush’s audacious, democracy-defying Surge (escalation) to the supplemental tune of $124 billion – considerably more than the White House actually requested.
(...) The distant troop withdrawal proposed by the House bill is hitched to the same Iraqi government “benchmarks” that Bush announced in his nationally televised escalation speech of January 10, 2007. The benchmarks for “withdrawal” include the passage by the Iraqi parliament of an imperialist, neoliberal petroleum law. Hidden beneath largely diversionary language about “revenue-sharing” across Iraq’s regions, this law will try to help subject Iraq’s stupendous oil reserves to domination by Western capital and the American Empire. The “withdrawal” envisioned by Congress would only remove combat troops and only on the eve of the 2008 elections. In the names of “diplomatic protection,” “counter-terrorism,” and the “training and advising of Iraqi Security Forces” (translation: OIL protection), it would leave U.S bases and forces in Iraq for an indefinite period. However much they claim to oppose permanent military bases in Iraq, leading Democrats within and beyond Congress imagine an American military presence in Iraq for decades to come.
(...) Saddest of all, perhaps, 90 percent of the House’s 71 Progressive Caucus voted for the supplemental authorization bill. This was a truly depressing “progressive” performance, one that speaks volumes about the absence of anything that deserves to be considered a relevant “Left” inside the narrow-spectrum U.S. political system.
(...) Deeply committed to the doctrinal notion that the U.S is an inherently noble, benevolent and democratic force in the world, top Democrats insist on combining their calls for (partial and qualified) “withdrawal” with preposterous and offensive claims that the U.S. has done everything it can “for the Iraqis.” As leading “Blue Dog” (right-wing) Democratic Rep. John Tanner (D-TN) told the Public Broadcasting System a few weeks ago:

“We…need to send a message to the Iraqis. Look, this has been four-plus years now, four years and three days. We have lost over 3,000 people. We have lost over 25,000 wounded. The Iraqis have had Saddam Hussein taken out. They have had two elections. They have had a government now for over a year. And we see no progress on them….it's time for them to step up. I am past the point of asking young military families in this country to continue to die and the American taxpayers to spend $2.5 billion a week in Iraq to help people who are seemingly unwilling or unable to get along. And, while they're shooting at each other, both sides are shooting at us.”

“I don't -- I think it's time for us not to be the policemen on the beat in the city of Baghdad. We're not talking about leaving the area. We're not going to leave the area. But I think that a timeline and a message to the Iraqis: Look, it's time for you people to get along. We're not going to stay here open-endedly, shedding our blood and our taxpayer money forever.”

(...)This by now standard Democratic Party rhetoric advances an interesting take on the U.S. assault on Mesopotamia four years after world history’s most powerful military state invaded that country, sacked its civil society, and essentially disbanded its state. The U.S. has deliberately provoked and fueled the very internal Iraqi factional and religious strife that leading Democrats cite as an example of Iraqis’ hopeless division.
(...) Top Democrats are just as committed as the Republicans to preventing what would amount to a geopolitical, world-systemic catastrophe for the American Empire: the loss of U.S. control over Middle Eastern oil. The notion of the people and/or states of that region doing whatever they wish with the remarkable, economically and geopolitically super-strategic oil that sits under the nominally sovereign soils – possibly even forming production and sales agreements with the Asian Security Grid (thereby accelerating the United States’ devolution to the status of a second-rate world power) – is anathema to the good Men and Women of Empire atop both wings of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Party.
(...) [oil privatization details] Iraq’s oil wealth, by the way, is significantly greater than often assumed. Its proven reserves of 115 barrels make it the third largest oil state in the world (behind Saudi Arabia and Canada). But recent reports suggest that it may possess an additional 200 million barrels, making it home to one fourth of the world’s petroleum. Thanks to three decades of largely U.S-imposed chaos (war, sanctions, civic collapse, government dissolution and the like), moreover, Iraq’s spectacular oil reserves are remarkably “underdeveloped.” They are exceptionally “virginal” – close to the surface, and thus accessible for rapid and cheap extraction some day (A.K. Gupta, “Oil, Neoliberalism and Sectarianism in Iraq,” Z Magazine, April 2007)
(...) Next May, the Iraq National Assembly is likely to finalize petroleum legislation worked up by the Iraq cabinet in “consultation” with the White House, the world’s leading petroleum corporations (the “majors”) and the U.S.-based neoliberal consulting firm BearingPoint – the proud recipient of a $240 million federal grant to help create “a competitive private sector” in Iraq (Gupta, “Oil, Neoliberalism and Sectarianism in Iraq”)
(...) the final bill will certainly mandate “Production Sharing Agreements” (PSAs) that could (some day) confer astonishing profits on giant Western oil corporations at the expense of the Iraqi people and the Iraqi government. Currently used in relation to just 12 percent of the world’s oil reserves, PSAs leave ultimate oil ownership with the governments under whose soil petroleum sits. But they abolish the state’s monopoly over oil production, something that is more than sufficient to satisfy the profit lust of Western capital. Consistent with Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller’s famous managerial-capitalist maxim “own nothing, control everything,” PSAs reserve the oil industry’s leading profit centers – exploration and production – for private, generally multinational firms on terms that are highly favorable to those companies (see Antonia Juhasz, “Spoils of War: Oil, the U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area and the Bush Agenda,” In These Times, January 2007).
(...) the “majors” and a number of other giant global firms will be permitted to recoup 60 percent or more of their Iraqi oil revenues during the initial “cost recovery” phase of militarily imposed Mesopotamian oil privatization. Profit rates will then fall to 20 percent, still double the PSA norm, with a special provision permitting transnational firms to “transfer any net profits from petroleum operations to outside Iraq.” Another part of the draft legislation requires any dispute between external oil corporations and the Iraq government to be resolved through international arbitration – something that will certainly favor Western (chiefly Anglo and U.S.) capital over “sovereign” Iraq.
(...) The draft law provides no guarantees for Iraqi state participation, requiring the Iraqi state oil company to compete against global firms for the right to explore and produce new oil fields in occupied Iraq. Depending on how relevant authorities interpret the draft law’s call for “the speedy and efficient development of the fields discovered but partially or entirely not yet developed,” the proportion of the Iraqi oil prize that could be open to neoliberal “privatization lite” ranges from two-thirds to one hundred percent. Not surprisingly, the official U.S. position is that none of Iraq’s oil fields are fully developed, something that will permit the big transnationals to move into any and all of the nation’s oil fields.
As the New York–based Global Policy Forum noted last year:

“According to oil industry experts, new exploration will probably raise Iraq’s reserves to 200+ billion barrels of high-grade crude, extraordinarily cheap to produce. The four giant firms located in the US and the UK have been keen to get back into Iraq, from which they were excluded with the nationalization of 1972. During the final years of the Saddam era, they envied companies from France, Russia, China, and elsewhere, who had obtained major contracts. But UN sanctions (kept in place by the US and the UK) kept those contracts inoperable. Since the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, everything has changed. In the new setting, with Washington running the show, ‘friendly’ companies expect to gain most of the lucrative oil deals that will be worth hundreds of billions of dollars in profits in the coming decades. The new Iraqi constitution of 2005, greatly influenced by US advisors, contains language that guarantees a major role for foreign companies. Negotiators hope soon to complete deals on Production Sharing Agreements that will give the companies control over dozens of fields, including the fabled super-giant Majnoon. However, despite pressure from the US government and foreign oil companies, the current Iraqi government has not passed a national oil law” (Global Policy Forum, “Oil and Iraq,” http://www.global policy.org/security/oil/irqindx.Htm).

(...) [on democracy?] Washington’s close alliance with the arch-reactionary oil-rich state of Saudi Arabia and the administration’s sponsorship of an attempted coup against the popularly elected government of oil-rich Venezuela are two excellent examples – the Empire’s assertion that it is promoting democracy in Iraq is coldly contradicted by the curious fact that Iraq’s draft oil law has received input from the majors, the White House, the International Monetary Fund and BearingPoint, but NOT the Iraqi public.
(...) According to a 2006 poll, 76 percent of Iraqis think the real reason for the invasion was a U.S. desire “to control Iraqi oil.” Nobody who wishes to be a member in good standing of the U.S, political class can afford to “sound like” three fourths of the “liberated” nation’s people, less than 1 percent of who think the U.S. invaded to “export democracy.” As Chomsky likes to say, Orwell would be impressed.
(...) Meanwhile we continue to incredulously wonder “Why Do They Hate Us?” Yes, after we’ve “sacrificed” so much “blood and money,” as top Democrats like to say, so much “for them.”