Rhetoric and The Voice of Freedom

Bush's Fourth of July Speech was full of it. I mean the stuff that is expelled from a Bull's behind.

Analyzing the collection of inane phrases doesn't take long and the core of it is two lies and a veiled admission, found in the White House release of the July 4th speech:

Lie No. 1: "It's a tough fight, but I wouldn't have asked those troops to go into harm's way if the fight was not essential to the security of the United States of America."

Wrong. You asked those troops to fight because you and your little group of evil-doers had an agenda. That agenda was Iraq and Iraq's oil fields. It also settled an old score for you so you killed two birds with one stone. Iraq was a broken country, Saddam Hussein a paper tiger. You've squandered billions on a war you fought for comfort - so that people could continue driving enormous SUVs - not for their security.

If you wanted to do something for people's security, you would have pushed through a bill for stem cell research so that people like my acquaintance Bill, who has suffered from cancer for years and is now cancer free thanks to stem cell intervention.

With 500 billion dollars you could have beefed up port security so that more than the continuing 5% of containers could be checked. With 500 billion dollars you could have transformed the relationship between this country and Arab Muslims so that they didn't believe you were on a crusade to destroy them. maybe if you had spent that 500 billion wisely, they would believe you and not their Imams ranting about the evil West.

But you chose bombs and men at arms and in doing so have jeopardized the security of the United States, not defended it.

Lie No. 2: Many of the spectacular car bombings and killings you see are as a result of al Qaeda -- the very same folks that attacked us on September the 11th. A major enemy in Iraq is the same enemy that dared attack the United States on that fateful day.

Wrong. The people planting bombs in Iraq are anywhere between disenfranchised Sunnis whose country you took away from them, frustrated fanatical Shia who were not handed the entire country on a platter and a faction that likes to associate itself with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan but does so unilaterally. There is no evidence that anyone associated with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan is funding, helping or guiding the so-called "Iraqi Al Qaeda."

If Al Qaeda did attack America on 9/11 then they did so before you blundered into Iraq with your army. They did so before Al Qaeda had even considered setting up shop in Iraq. Now you have given them not only a pretext to do so but the tools to do it with. You have now given them a country in which they can, by your own words, operate pretty much without hindrance and you have given them, above all, thousands of new recruits.

So what did Bush say that was right, if anything? Well, he did mention the three letter word: 'oil.' From his speech:

If we were to allow them to gain control of Iraq, they would have control of a nation with massive oil reserves -- which they could use to fund new attacks and exhort economic blackmail on those who didn't kowtow to their wishes.

So here we have the kernel of the whole thing again. Basically, the United States invaded Iraq so that it could fund new attacks and exhort economic blackmail on those who didn't kowtow to its wishes. How else do I interpret that. Because before the invasion, there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq - there was just Saddam Hussein and the oil was his. There was no one who would be funded or who wanted anyone to kowtow to anything - just a dictator. But there are plenty of those - just not many with half a billion barrels of oil beneath them.

Oil is something that is sneaking up more and more often into speeches by Cheney and Bush with regards to Iraq. It is a very subtle and insidious process by which slowly, they introduce 'oil' as an invasion argument, their Casus belli and in Australia, the Defense Minister simply blurted it out as reported by the BBC:

Australian Defence Minister Brendan Nelson has admitted that securing oil supplies is a key factor behind the presence of Australian troops in Iraq. He said maintaining "resource security" in the Middle East was a priority.

The fundamental importance of that statement is simply this: time has now worked its magic. WMDs are a long forgotten thing in our attention deficient society and the truth that surfaces every now and then bubbles up like some demonic black mold that we all know is there but only a few are willing to face as fact and is briefly reported on before being pooh-poohed by someone else as not being the "only" reason for having invaded Iraq. So Bush was able to say "oil" and "Iraq" in the same breath in his July 4th speech and no one is really shocked.

The effect is a ripple by which this becomes the accepted rhetoric and soon, they'll be able to say "we always said it was about the oil." That, my dear friends, is the message when you peel away the semantics about the War of Independence and all that stuff about purple hearts and brave soldiers. Funny that Bush should wax so lyrical about purple hearts when he was at the centre of the purple heart band-aid scandal that was aimed at Kerry in 2004.

No, oil is a touchy subject and we are experiencing an insidiously planned campaign to feather out that fact that everyone knows but which the right wing has forcefully rejected: Iraq was invaded for oil and we have to win the war so that we get to keep the oil. That's what American and British soldiers have been dying for in that country far, far away.