Sludge Report #140 - Thou Shalt Not Steal

Tuesday, 10 September 2002, 12:36 am
Column: C.D. Sludge

In This Edition: Thou Shalt Not Steal - This Is Not About Persuasion, It Is About PR For A Decision Already Taken - The Countdown To War Has Begun - Poppy’s Friends Run Interference For Junior - The Prize – Cui Bono – Commanders In Thief - There Is Always An Alternative

NOTE: Authors of this report will be anonymous and wide ranging, and occasionally finely balanced. Indeed you are invited to contribute: The format is as a reporters notebook. It will be published as and when material is available. C.D. Sludge can be contacted at sludge@scoop.co.nz. The Sludge Report is available as a free email service..Click HERE - http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/myscoop/ to subscribe...

Sludge Report #140

Thou Shalt Not Steal

It is a sad indictment on the state of democracy at the beginning of the 21st century that UK PM Tony Blair and US President George Bush both claim to be Christians.

Seemingly in spite of everything that their professed faith stands for – i.e. peace and goodwill to all men - the two men appear hell-bent on starting a war in the Middle East, and they claim to be doing this to protect us.

Their conduct begs several questions.

Why, when seemingly the whole world is begging for caution and care, are the twin administrations of Blair and Bush ignoring all the advice of their allies?

Why too are these two allegedly populist politicians running so strongly against the public opinion of both of their countries?

And perhaps most strange of all, why, when even their own best estimates suggest that it will be several years before Iraq has a nuclear bomb, do they have to attack Iraq immediately?

There is a simple - albeit highly unsatisfactory - answer to all these questions, and you will have heard it before, oil.

The planned war against Iraq is not a war of defence, it is a war of theft. A war to seize something that belongs to someone else.

Think about it. A war to defend the world against terror would not have to be conducted immediately and unilaterally. A real war against terror would seek to make the world a less dangerous place, not a more dangerous place.

But a war to seize the world’s oil supplies has to be conducted immediately. Lest the American public wake up to what their commander in thief is up to and seek to stop him.

America, of all secular Western democracies, is unquestionably the most religious, and when God spoke to Moses on Mt Zion he did not exactly mince his words. “Thou shalt not steal,” he said.

So why is C.D. Sludge so convinced that this analysis for what is going on is correct?

Please read on to find out, I am sure you will find the evidence obvious and compelling.

And once you have finished you are called upon to act. Send this column on to your friends, post it on notice boards, talk about it at work, church, school and to your family.

The world today stands at a crucial fork in history. We have but one chance to stop a slide into global war, and it is now. Once the war begins the path to peace will be ever so much harder, and the casualties will be numbered in the millions.

This Is Not About Persuasion, It Is About PR For A Decision Already Taken
The Countdown To War Has Begun

Last week George Bush Junior finally broke his silence on whether there is to be a war with Iraq.

For weeks he had been letting Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condi Rice do the running. But now it was time to speak.

"There's no doubt in my mind that we should allow the worlds worst leaders to hold America hostage, to threaten our peace, to threaten our friends and allies with the world's worst weapons,” he told an audience at South Bend, Indiana on Sep. 5.

Okay so he broke it incoherently, but that hardly matters, as the White House press office is now routinely editing transcripts of everything George says and it is therefore unlikely to make it into a Reuters report.

Dubya went on to tell his audience how patient a man he is.

Immediately after he got back on a plane, rushed to another city and told two more audiences how patient he is, and how important it is that we deal with Saddam once and for all.

“You need to know there's a lot of good folks working hard to protect us. I mean, any time we're getting a hint that the enemy might be thinking about doing something to us, we're moving on it. We communicate better, we're aware of their hatred. Prior to September the 11th we would never assume that America would be a battlefield. It is now. It's a different era. I want you to know that you should take comfort in the fact that a lot of good people are doing everything they can to make sure that America is secure, not only at the federal level, but at the state level and here at the local level. A lot of really good people are getting better information and are acting on it as quickly as possible. “ – GWB Kentucky 5th September (please note: this quote has already been sanitised by Dubya’s press minders.)

You get the message. The point to take from all this is that the war must be now just weeks away at the most.

Why else would Cheney and Rumsfeld let George loose with his mouth? Too much of this garbage appearing on network television, and their decades of planning to steal all the world’s oil will be sunk.

What we are seeing here is a highly organised PR offensive. And we are seeing it approach its climax.

And it is not as if it hasn’t been done before.

In 1990 and 1991, before the first Gulf War, Scoop’s own Tom Flocco has revealed in “Funding War Public Relations With Foreign Cash” , that George Bush Senior sat back as Hill & Knowlton ran a NZD$40 million PR and lobbying campaign to sell the war to the US people.

So far however the latest campaign appears to be failing. Many of the old PR props, for example former UNSCOM chief Richard Butler rabbiting on about weapons of mass destruction, have lost their gloss. And poll support for war with Iraq has not been rising in recent months, it has been falling.

Meanwhile George is very clearly not patient, however often he tells us he is. Rather he has ants in his pants about the war he is about to declare.

And though he may tell us over and over again that no decisions have been taken to attack Iraq, he is lying. But such is the way of the thief.

In all probability George, Donald and Dick gave the initial orders to attack months ago.

CBS news has recently revealed that Rumsfeld actually issued orders to the Pentagon to map out a strike on Iraq on September 11th itself, in the complete absence of any evidence that Iraq was involved.

Rumsfeld’s notes to staff on the day – immediately after the attacks - indicate he didn’t care much about who was attacked in retaliation. “"Go massive,".he wrote, "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

LINK: http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0208/S00119.htm
Operation Seize All The Oil Revealed!

But it would be a mistake to conclude that the war on Iraq as some sort of off the cuff act of revenge. There is method to this madness.

As From The Wilderness’s Michael Ruppert so clearly outlined in “Saudi Arabia: The Sarajevo of the 21st Century?”, the plans to invade Iraq have been in motion for months if not years.

The troops (at least 150,000) are already in place, a new state of the art air base (Click for images) has been built in Qatar for the purpose.

In short the countdown to the war has begun. All that remains is for the politicians to give the green light, then operation Seize All The Oil can begin.

The best part of Mike Ruppert’s analysis however is not the troop counting, excellent though that is, but in the impeccable logic behind the central thesis of his argument.

Anyone seriously considering the prospect of war for oil theft against Iraq has always had one major obstacle to their logic.

The US is completely dependent on Saudi Arabian oil, and any attempt to seize Iraqi oil assets would run a serious risk of losing access to Saudi crude. Thus such an effort would be an exercise in throwing out the baby with the bath-water.

But, argues Ruppert very cogently, this would not be the case if the plan was to seize Saudi oil too.

That is, if an invasion of Iraq triggered a civil war in Saudi, then the US would have a great excuse to mobilise its troops there to defend those parts of the Saudi regime that are loyal to the Texan clique, and protect its access to the oil fields.

The oil in Saudi is nowhere near Mecca anyway, so Saudi could be partitioned, and US interests could therefore secure their supply with the backing of the largest military the world has ever seen.

Poppy’s Friends Run Interference For Junior

Another apparent inconsistency that deserves some explanation in this plot is the recent dovish outbursts from so many of George Bush senior’s former colleagues in arms.

In the lead up to the loosing of George’s vocal chords, several former George I cabinet members - Lawrence Eagleburger, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft - all came out with uncharacteristically cautious advice for their former boss’s son.

Taken on their face these comments were quickly interpreted in the mainstream media as evidence of a possible split between Poppy and Junior Bush over what should be done with Iraq.

However this scenario inherently lacks credibility.

In the Bush Family loyalty is valued over all else. Why else would Army Secretary - and disgraced former Enron executive - Thomas E. White still have his job.

And if this is so, then why would James Baker - who went to so much effort to undermine the vote counting process in Florida in order to get George Junior into office - now start white anting his protégé an former colleagues Cheney and Rumsfeld.

So what is going on?

The answer is simple. This is a double take, more smoke and mirrors.

And from a PR perspective this is arguably the administrations master-stroke.

By getting George’s Dad’s close advisors to come out and urge caution several key PR objectives are achieved simultaneously:

1. the slur that George Junior is finishing off his father’s business, at his behest, is neutralised;
2. the slur that George Junior cannot think for himself and is merely a puppet is neatly turned on its head. When the war finally begins George Junior will appear to have acted decisively and in the face of conflicting advice;
3. finally, by getting a group of senior republican hawk’s to dominate the media running in the sphere of dovishness regarding Iraq, anyone who genuinely opposes a war against Iraq is shut out of the debate. When war finally does break out, rather than seek out genuine critics, the TV networks will be running to George Bush senior’s former colleagues for their balancing soundbites of critical opinion.

Game, set and match. Ari’s finest moment.

The Prize – Cui Bono

The final piece to the puzzle of figuring out what is really going on with U.S. Administration policy in the Middle East is an examination of the motivation, the prize, and who benefits.

What exactly is it that George, Dick and Donald are hoping to win out of this war, apart from re-election in 2004 - and you can rest assured that the war will still be underway in some form or other by then.

For the answer to this question it is necessary to absorb a few basic – but often ignored - facts about the nature of the global oil business.

1. Oil is a non-renewable resource, i.e. once it is used up there is no more;
2. Oil is the source of well over half of all the world’s energy needs. Close to 50% of global electricity generation is oil based;
4. The US consumes 25% of global oil production;
5. Petrol in the US is cheaper than petrol in New Zealand;
6. The US presently imports 60% of its oil consumption needs;
7. Forecasts, even assuming the Arctic oil resources are opened up, show that by 2020 the US will be importing 80% of its oil consumption needs;
8. While the US has huge stockpiles in its strategic reserves, it only has enough for six months of consumption.

All the above are easily verifiable publicly available facts. And they show very clearly how vulnerable the U.S. is to an oil shock. And then we have this…

LINK: http://img.scoop.co.nz/stories/images/0208/9530149ef08d61421101.jpeg
Graphic: The World’s Oil Reserves

What does the above image show you? Who has all the oil?

Finally we have some slightly more scary recent observations about the oil market.

The reserves shown in the above graph are only enough oil for current consumption levels to be maintained for around 40 years.

Also, while massive investment has been made in exploration for new oil over the past decade, new oil has been discovered at less than a tenth of the rate that we are consuming it. I.E. for every barrel of oil we discover each year (that is locate, under the ground – not secure for use) we use ten.

Meanwhile OPEC’s latest set of statistics (see… http://www.opec.org/NewsInfo/mi/pdf/MI072002.pdf) on the oil market show quite clearly that global oil production has reached a plateau, and may even be falling.

This is significant as it fulfils a prediction about the oil market, the coming of the so-called Hubbert Peak. Hubbert was a scientist who anticipated a peak in oil production at around this time.

What is important about the Hubbert Peak is what happens after it is reached. From then on it is downhill.

While every year there are more and more people, more and more SUVs, more and more people wanting to fly, more and more people wanting to heat their houses, there is less and less oil.

Or put another way, every year each OECD country will attempt to grow faster than its “competitors”, but how will they be able to grow without increasing their energy use?

What will happen in such a world?

The Commander’s in Thief Bush and Blair, I expect, would agree that what happens in such a world is a global economic readjustment of a kind that has never been seen before in human history.

And that those who control the oil supplies will get to dictate the terms of that transformation.

Commanders In Thief

And so the stage is set for the beginning of the first great Oil War. And if you think about it, there will be more.

Why would China and Russia just let Britain and the US take more than 50% of the world’s oil reserves to do with as they see fit? Why would India?

On its face Tony Blair’s backing for the war, and today’s outburst from Jacque Chirac –seemingly suggesting a diplomatic spin through which the US Administration can achieve his aims via the U.N. – run clearly against the grain of their character.

Blair, as stated in the opening to this column, is a Christian. He shouldn’t believe in stealing. It is forbidden. And yet that is what he is backing, the greatest theft of national resources in human history.

Sludge can only presume Blair has made a Machiavellian compromise. Perhaps he has assumed, correctly, that the US is already set on its path, and that for the sake of Britain and its oil industry (the second largest in the world), a future in the arms of George Bush’s America is far more attractive than a future as a nation of principle.

For his part Chirac has till now been playing to his public. But today he has begun too to play to Washington’s tune. Perhaps George filled him in during his much publicised phone call.

George’s speech to the United Nations on Thursday will indeed be a crunch point in this debate.

But if anyone in the UN has any principles they ought to remember several unsavoury facts about the Bush Administration’s new found enthusiasm for backing UN Security Council resolutions on Iraq.

Firstly there are the numerous resolutions against Israel that Israel has routinely ignored for decades.

Secondly there are those pesky U.N. biological and chemical warfare treaties that the U.S. has been flagrantly violating for years.

And if that is not enough there is the fact that when the UNSCOM inspections regime was last in place, the magnificent men from Langley decided that it would be nice for them to use it as cover for an elaborate operation designed to obtaining intelligence to mount their last air war against Baghdad.

It will be interesting to see if in the wake of George’s speech any nation has the temerity to use the dreaded “H” word.

There Is Always An Alternative

In the interests of maintaining this column’s philosophy of irrational optimism, all that remains to do now is to postulate a solution to the above conundrum.

C.D. Sludge will forever take it as gospel that until the war actually starts, there will remain time to prevent it - there is always an alternative.

As for the considerable problems of dealing with a world moving into a phase of declining oil production, this too is a problem that human ingenuity and cooperation based on mutual respect must be able to solve. As a close friend often tells me, “if we can face it, God can fix it.”

But first we, or more accurately the people of the USA, their Congress, Senate and media, need to face it.

And the reality here is that this will probably take a miracle.

Furthermore, as the above revelations about the dynamics of the smoke and mirrors in play in this debate illustrate, these people are well organised, and plan each move very carefully.

Nevertheless a Public Relations counter offensive is demanded.

Internally everyone who knows the truth now has to tell everyone that is willing to listen the unpleasant truths about oil, and the grand theft that is about to be committed. Politicians and reporters whose instincts tell them to leave this problem to someone else to solve, need to think again.

Meanwhile one group outside the US has considerable ability to add clarity to the internal voices of critique within the U.S. - the world’s oil producers - George Bush’s would-be victims.

If the leader’s of Iran, Iraq, Saudi, Venezeula and Nigeria (not to mention Russia) think about it carefully, what do they have to lose?

George and his friends are planning to steal everything they have anyway.

They now have a choice, turn out their pockets, or fight back. Perhaps it is time to turn off the world’s oil spigot.

Anti©opyright Sludge 2002

© Scoop Media

Alastair Thompson

Scoop Publisher

Alastair Thompson is the co-founder of Scoop. He is of Scottish and Irish extraction and from Wellington, New Zealand. Alastair has 24 years experience in the media, at the Dominion, National Business Review, North & South magazine, Straight Furrow newspaper and online since 1997. He is the winner of several journalism awards for business and investigative work.

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