Quoted from a BBC article: North Korea’s threat to “weaponise” its plutonium stocks is “provocative” and “deeply regrettable”, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says. She said the move had been denounced around the world and would isolate North Korea’s government further. The North said it would start enriching uranium and use the plutonium for nuclear weapons hours after a UN vote for tough new sanctions against it. The US would vigorously enforce the new sanctions, Mrs Clinton said. Speaking during a visit to Canada, she said that the latest UN moves provided the tools needed for “to take appropriate action” against North Korea. The North says it will view any US-led attempts to “blockade” it as an “act of war”.

Apparently North Korea has, at the moment, 8,000 spent fuel rods and one-third of those have been processed and all the plutonium would be used to make atomic bombs. If all the rods are reprocessed, North Korea could harvest13-18 pounds (6-8 kilograms) of plutonium – enough to make at least one nuclear bomb. In addition, North Korea is believed to have enough plutonium for at least half a dozen atomic bombs.

Click here to view the embedded video.

My personal commentary is that this small man, Kim Jong-il, is throwing a temper tantrum. He has a Napoleon complex and unfortunately is in the position to make good on his threats. Pathetic as he may be, he is going to kick and scream like a small child until he is dealt with. The worlds problem is that he wants to be important and he thinks building bombs makes him important. Personally I think someone should just kill the stupid little fucker and get it over with. China is against North Korea’s defiant steps but they reserve their greatest words against them. They are another concern here but it seems, on this issue at least, they’re more closely aligned with the general global community’s stance against North Korea than they are with Kim Jong-il.

Actually, come to think of it, it doesn’t sound all that different now does it? No I’m not comparing George W. Bush to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at least not the way you’re thinking. But the irony of the similarities of the situation is not lost on me. The obvious difference here is that Barack Obama, who was running on the “CHANGE” message like Mir-Hossein Mousavi, wasn’t running against an incumbent president. Oh and our CHANGE candidate won and won by a large margin. Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s being declared the loser and by a large margin.

To be honest my first reaction is that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cheated and manipulated/stole the election. I don’t pretend to know anymore about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the popular challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi than what I see on the news but truth be told I think there was some hanky panky going on. Right or wrong I have a bad feeling about this guy and don’t put it passed him to rig an election. Hell, if it can be done here it most certainly can be done elsewhere. Is this fair? Frankly I don’t care if it is or not, it’s simply my opinion. But I’d be willing to bet most people feel the same way.

You wanna hear something REALLY intriguing? The right wing neo-cons here in the US were rooting for Ahmadinejad to win! Yes, it’s true. Why you ask? Well let me tell you why. It feeds their M.O. They sell their point of view based on fear. They scare and worry the public to get their agenda across. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the bad guy of the middle east right now. We killed the other one (cough, cough) a few years ago. Oh you thought it would be Osama bin Laden? Oh you poor misguided soul. No it’s Ahmadinejad and the Neo-Cons want him in office so they can keep point at him as the devil incarnate, and not let Obama think his idea of diplomacy is working. It’s not just me saying this. Take a look at this article from The Huffington Post. A short excerpt from that article:

Other neocons, worried a shift in power will signal a fresh start relations with Iran, are already deflating a Mousavi win. The same pundits who constantly point out Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, and nuclear ambitions as reasons to confront Iran now argue that the president doesn’t matter. Martin Peretz wrote at the New Republic, “We’ve known for a long time that elected leaders do not carry the weight of those who have been anointed.” Ilan Berman seconded at the American Spectator, “Whoever ends up becoming president will have little real power — and even less influence over Iran’s geostrategic direction.”

In fact, Mousavi does disagree with Ahmadinejad on a key policy point. Unlike the current president, he would back nuclear talks with Iran and United Nations Security Council members.

Hey guys, you can’t have it both ways! Do you want to represent the United States or control it? Geez you guys are friggin nuts. No wonder the world sees us the way they do. NeoCons=Bullys and for my $ they stand for the exact opposite of what the US stands for.

Anyway, this election controversy is going to be interesting to say the least. With Iran’s election going haywire and now North Korea saying the want to weaponize their plutonium, Obama has his hands full for sure.

Having said that. I have to ask… Where was the secret service? They were pretty slow at making their move. I mean this guy gets off two “shots” at the president before someone tackles him. Looks like it was another reporter too. Shouldn’t they have been all over him? Shouldn’t one of the secret service jumped in front of the president to catch or block anything else coming? Shouldn’t he have been surrounded and scurried off to a safe location? Fine, it was just a couple of shoes, but you don’t know if there’s anything else. Maybe they were too busy laughing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

By David S. Hilzenrath
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 1, 2008; D01

At the Beverly Hills office of criminal defense lawyer Edward M. Robbins Jr., anxious new clients are showing up with an unexpected problem.

The clients put money in Swiss bank accounts, where it was supposed to stay secret. But now those depositors fear the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department will gain access to their bank records, Robbins said.

“They’re coming in from the cold. They’re nervous,” Robbins said.

And with good reason, the former federal prosecutor said. A lawyer who specializes in tax cases, Robbins thinks the government is gearing up to prosecute large numbers of Americans for failing to disclose foreign accounts on their tax returns and evading taxes on income generated by the accounts.

“If I were one of these guys with 10 to 50 million in my account, I’d be having an aneurysm,” Robbins said. “It’s an extremely dangerous situation for these guys.”

The legendary secrecy of Swiss banks has come under fresh assault lately from U.S. and European authorities who say their citizens have used the privacy to hide assets and dodge taxes.

The U.S. effort to capture back taxes targets Americans who hold undeclared accounts at UBS, one of Switzerland’s largest banks. The developments could put UBS in legal jeopardy and undo the reputation for confidentiality that has helped make a small nation in the Alps a magnet for international deposits.

UBS, which also has extensive operations in the United States, has been under investigation by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“UBS takes this matter very seriously and is working diligently with both Swiss and U.S. government authorities, consistent with Swiss law and the legal frameworks for intergovernmental cooperation and assistance,” UBS spokesman Mark Arena said by e-mail.

Over the summer, the IRS won permission from a federal court to demand that UBS turn over the identities of an estimated 19,000 American clients who have failed to disclose their Swiss-based accounts on U.S. tax returns. It remains unclear what has or will come of that effort. Swiss law restricts the bank’s ability to breach client confidentiality. Swiss law also gives clients the opportunity to oppose the release of their names through a judicial process that could slow any disclosures.

“All of these names have to be checked, and each case has to be looked at,” Swiss embassy spokeswoman Emilija Georgieva said, declining to say whether the Swiss have turned over any identities to the U.S. government, yet.

Washington lawyer Martin Lobel, chairman of the Tax Analysts information service, said the Swiss government appears to be “using the legal process to delay until people forget about it,” and he predicted that “nothing much is going to happen.” Even if the IRS got the names of 19,000 UBS depositors, the agency couldn’t handle the volume, Lobel said.

However, Robbins said it appears that criminal prosecutors at the Justice Department, as distinct from the civil lawyers handling the IRS demand, are gaining access to such details through a parallel investigation. The Beverly Hills lawyer said he recently contacted the Justice Department on behalf of a new client and was told a prosecutor already had the client’s name.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment for this story. The IRS did not respond to repeated inquiries.

The curtains began to part on UBS late last year when a depositor named Igor M. Olenicoff, a California real estate billionaire, pleaded guilty to one count of filing a false tax return. Then, in June, a former UBS employee pleaded guilty to helping Olenicoff conceal $200 million and evade taxes of $7.2 million. The former banker, Bradley Birkenfeld, gave investigators details of how UBS allegedly catered to wealthy Americans, potentially violating U.S. banking and securities laws, according to a Senate report.

As described in Senate and court records, UBS bankers allegedly helped clients set up sham companies in offshore havens such as the Bahamas to conceal the identity of account holders. To solicit new clients, bankers not licensed to do business here traveled to art shows, yachting competitions and other upscale events in the United States, falsely declaring at times that they were entering the country for pleasure.

They were trained to avoid and detect surveillance by U.S. law enforcement; one internal training document prepared them for the possibility that they could be “intercepted by an FBI agent.”

They allegedly kept American clients informed about their investments by carrying account information to the United States in encrypted form. They allegedly advised clients to misrepresent withdrawals from their Swiss accounts as loans and to tap their Swiss funds by purchasing jewels and art while traveling abroad.

In one instance, Birkenfeld used an American client’s funds to buy diamonds. Then, the banker snuck the stones into the United States in a tube of toothpaste, according to a statement of undisputed facts filed in connection with his June guilty plea.

When Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, convened a hearing on the subject in July, he estimated that the abuse of offshore havens worldwide costs the United States about $100 billion annually. The U.S. government isn’t the only one concerned. Last month, when representatives of 17 nations met in Paris to discuss international financial transparency, German and French ministers said Switzerland should be added to a blacklist of tax havens, the Swissinfo news service reported.

About 20,000 U.S. clients have about $18 billion on deposit with UBS in Switzerland, and about 19,000 of the clients have not disclosed their accounts to the IRS, the Swiss bank has told Senate investigators, according to a July report by the subcommittee staff. By Birkenfeld’s reckoning, such accounts generated about $200 million of annual revenues for UBS, according to court records.

Called to testify before the subcommittee in July, a top UBS official invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. But another UBS executive expressed contrition and promised the bank would cooperate with U.S. authorities.

“UBS genuinely regrets any compliance failures that may have occurred. We will take responsibility for them. We will not seek to minimize them. On behalf of UBS, I am apologizing. I am committing to you that we will take the actions necessary to see that this does not happen again,” said Mark Branson, UBS’s chief financial officer of global wealth management.

Some Americans familiar with the situation say UBS could strike a cooperative posture secure in the knowledge that the Swiss government could protect its clients. Still, UBS could be forced to choose between violating Swiss law and its stringent privacy protections or defying U.S. law and putting its U.S. business at risk. In his Senate testimony, UBS’s Branson noted that almost 32,000 of the company’s 80,000 employees were based in the United States.

James Nason, a spokesman for the Swiss Bankers Association, said, “UBS itself cannot decide to hand over client data because then it would be violating Swiss law.” Any Swiss bank “waits for instructions from the Swiss authorities,” Nason said, adding, “Switzerland doesn’t allow fishing expeditions.”

Nason put blame elsewhere, saying, “Attacks on Switzerland usually come from countries that have a relatively low level of taxpayer honesty.”

Beverly Hills lawyer Robbins represented Olenicoff, which might help explain why, as he related, about 20 other UBS clients have turned to his law firm. In New York, attorney Bryan C. Skarlatos, who specializes in criminal tax law, said his firm has been approached by dozens of people who hold offshore accounts at UBS and other banks. They wanted to come clean with the IRS before getting caught up in a crackdown, he said.

Whether or not the Swiss officially give up clients’ secrets, the U.S. government could have other ways of getting information. For example, bank employees have an incentive to expose tax evaders to the IRS, Skarlatos said, because whistle-blowers could receive 30 percent of the money they help the government collect.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this story.

I don’t know how many times I need to say how totally screwed up the whole government is. How many times do I have to tell people they lied to us about a great many things INCLUDING 9/11. It was all part of a much larger plan. They know they can’t ask us or convince us to believe what they want us to believe. So they MANIPULATE the people with the most affective form of coercion… FEAR.   If the population feel the only way to progress is to allow the government to take control and do everything for us, then they get what they want. ABSOLUTE POWER! Those weak minded individuals who are too afraid to think for themselves, ask questions, demand answers and remind the government officials that they work for US are the very people they are targeting. Unfortunately these lemmings are a majority of society. These are very scary times we’re living in people. Believe it when I say if something isn’t done and done SOON, we’re headed to a place that we don’t want to be. The scariest part is that most people can’t see it. If their daily lives are made easier, they make more money, can buy better housing, buy better cars etc., they don’t care what else happens. STOP… look at the big picture people. We’re headed to a time that we’ve only read about in books or seen in movies. Maybe these creative people weren’t so far off as they were thought to be. The real question is… What are you prepared to do about it?

Tell everyone you know to read this blog and see this video. It’s THAT important!

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is an article taken from the Al Jazeera website. I know this is a heavily debated issue with lots of passionate verbiage from all sides of the argument. Well, that’s the very point of The Red Pill Society. Open conversation and debates over issues that affect our world. Don’t be so sure that your opinions are the only right answer. Different points of view can give a completely different description of events. At least be open to the fact that there may be another “truth” beyond what you think. I for one have always believed that the US presence in Iraq was driven by the desire to control oil. Are there other reasons? Of course. I’m not sitting at the table with George W. Bush to hear the real story. Do you seriously think they would tell us the REAL truth?

By Michael Schwartz

• Putting a country in your tank

Lately, even Democratic candidates for president have been weighing in on why the U.S. must maintain a long-term, powerful military presence in Iraq.

Hillary Clinton, for example, used phrases like protecting our “vital national security interests” and preventing Iraq from becoming a “petri dish for insurgents,” in a major policy statement. Barack Obama, in his most important speech on the subject, talked of “maintaining our influence” and allowing “our troops to strike directly at al Qaeda.” These arguments, like the constantly migrating justifications for invading Iraq, serially articulated by the Bush administration, manage to be vaguely plausible (with an emphasis on the “vaguely”) and also strangely inconsistent (with an emphasis on the “inconsistent”).

That these justifications for invading, or remaining, are unsatisfying is hardly surprising, given the reluctance of American politicians to mention the approximately $10-$30 trillion of oil lurking just beneath the surface of the Iraq “debate” — and not much further beneath the surface of Iraqi soil. Obama, for example, did not mention oil at all in his speech, while Clinton mentioned it twice in passing. President Bush and his top officials and spokespeople have been just as reticent on the subject.

Why then did the U.S. invade Iraq? Why is occupying Iraq so “vital” to those “national security interests” of ours? None of this makes sense if you don’t have the patience to drill a little beneath the surface – and into the past; if you don’t take into account that, as former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz once put it, Iraq “floats on a sea of oil”; and if you don’t consider the decades-long U.S. campaign to control, in some fashion, Middle East energy reservoirs. If not, then you can’t understand the incredible tenaciousness with which George W. Bush and his top officials have pursued their Iraqi dreams or why — now that those dreams are clearly so many nightmares — even the Democrats can’t give up the ghost.

• The rise of OPEC

The United States viewed Middle Eastern oil as a precious prize long before the Iraq war. During World War II, that interest had already sprung to life: When British officials declared Middle Eastern oil “a vital prize for any power interested in world influence or domination,” American officials agreed, calling it “a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”

This led to a scramble for access during which the United States established itself as the preeminent power of the future. Crucially, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt successfully negotiated an “oil for protection” agreement with King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. That was 1945. From then on, the U.S. found itself actively (if often secretly) engaged in the region. American agents were deeply involved in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 (to reverse the nationalization of Iran’s oil fields), as well as in the fateful establishment of a Baathist Party dictatorship in Iraq in the early 1960s (to prevent the ascendancy of leftists who, it was feared, would align the country with the Soviet Union, putting the country’s oil in hock to the Soviet bloc).

The U.S. influence in the Middle East began to wane in the 1970s, when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was first formed to coordinate the production and pricing of oil on a worldwide basis. OPEC’s power was consolidated as various countries created their own oil companies, nationalized their oil holdings, and wrested decision-making away from the “Seven Sisters,” the Western oil giants — among them Shell, Texaco, and Standard Oil of New Jersey — that had previously dominated exploration, extraction, and sales of black gold.

With all the key oil exporters on board, OPEC began deciding just how much oil would be extracted and sold onto international markets. Once the group established that all members would follow collective decisions — because even a single major dissenter might fatally undermine the ability to turn the energy “spigot” on or off — it could use the threat of production restrictions, or the promise of expansion, to bargain with its most powerful trading partners. In effect, a new power bloc had emerged on the international scene that could — in some circumstances — exact tangible concessions even from the United States and the Soviet Union, the two superpowers of the time.

Though the United States was largely self-sufficient in oil when OPEC was first formed, the American economy was still dependent on trading partners, particularly Japan and Europe, which themselves were dependent on Middle Eastern oil. The oil crises of the early 1970s, including the sometimes endless gas lines in the U.S., demonstrated OPEC’s potential.

It was in this context that the American alliance with the Saudi royal family first became so crucial. With the largest petroleum reserves on the planet and the largest production capacity among OPEC members, Saudi Arabia was usually able to shape the cartel’s policies to conform to its wishes. In response to this simple but essential fact, successive American presidents strengthened the Rooseveltian alliance, deepening economic and military relationships between the two countries. The Saudis, in turn, could normally be depended upon to use their leverage within OPEC to fit the group’s actions into the broader aims of U.S. policy. In other words, Washington gained favorable OPEC policies mainly by arming, and propping up a Saudi regime that was chronically fragile.

Backed by a tiny elite that used immense oil revenues to service its own narrow interests, the Saudi royals subjected their impoverished population to an oppressively authoritarian regime. Not surprisingly, then, the “alliance” required increasing infusions of American military aid as well political support in situations that were often uncomfortable, sometimes untenable, for Washington. On its part, in an era of growing nationalism, the Saudis found overt pro-American policies difficult to sustain, given the pressures and proclivities of its OPEC partners and its own population.

• The neocons seize the unipolar moment

The key year in the Middle East would be 1979, when Iranians, who had lost their government to an American and British inspired coup in 1953, poured into the streets. The American-backed Shah’s brutal regime fell to a popular revolution; American diplomats were taken hostage by Iranian student demonstrators; and Ayatollah Khomeini took power. The Iranian revolution added a combustible new element to an already complex and unstable equation. It was, in a sense, the match lit near the pipeline. A regime hostile to Washington, and not particularly amenable to Saudi pressure, had now become an active member of OPEC, aspiring to use the organization to challenge American economic hegemony.

It was at this moment, not surprisingly, that the militarization of American Middle Eastern policy came out of the shadows. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter — before his Habitat for Humanity days — enunciated what would become known as the “Carter Doctrine”: that Persian Gulf oil was “vital” to American national interests and that the U.S. would use “any means necessary, including military force” to sustain access to it. To assure that “access,” he announced the creation of a Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, a new military command structure that would be able to deliver personnel from all the armed services, together with state-of-the-art military equipment, to any location in the Middle East at top speed.

Nurtured and expanded by succeeding presidents, this evolved into the United States Central Command (Centcom), which ended up in charge of all U.S. military activity in the Middle East and surrounding regions. It would prove the military foundation for the Gulf War of 1990, which rolled back Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait, and therefore prevented him from gaining control of that country’s oil reserves.

Though it was not emphasized at the time, that first Gulf War was a crystalline application of the Carter Doctrine — that “any means necessary, including military force,” should be used to guarantee American access to Middle Eastern oil. That war, in turn, convinced a shaky Saudi royal family — that saw Iraqi troops reach its border – to accept an ongoing American military presence within the country, a development meant to facilitate future applications of the Carter Doctrine, but which would have devastating unintended consequences.

The peaceful disintegration of the Soviet Union at almost the same moment seemed to signal that Washington now had uncontested global military supremacy, triggering a debate within American policy circles about how to utilize and preserve what Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer first called the “unipolar moment.”

Future members of the administration of Bush the younger were especially fierce advocates for making aggressive use of this military superiority to enhance U.S. power everywhere, but especially in the Middle East. They eventually formed a policy advocacy group, The Project for a New American Century, to develop, and lobby for, their views. The group, whose membership included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and dozens of other key individuals who would hold important positions in the executive branch after George W. Bush took office, wrote an open letter to President Clinton in 1998 urging him to turn his “administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power.” They cited both the Iraqi dictator’s military belligerence and his control over “a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil.”

Two years later, the group issued a ringing policy statement that would be the guiding text for the new administration. Entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, it advocated what would become known as a Rumsfeldian-style transformation of the Pentagon. The U.S. military preeminence was to be utilized to “secure and expand” American influence globally and possibly, in the cases of North Korea and Iraq, used “to remove these regimes from power and conduct post-combat stability operations.” (The document even commented on the problem of defusing American domestic resistance to such an aggressive stance, noting ominously that public approval could not be obtained without “some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”)

• Saddam’s Iraq and oil on the brain

The second Bush administration ascended to the presidency just as American influence in the Middle East looked to be on the decline. Despite victory in the first Gulf War and the fall of the Soviet Union, American influence over OPEC and oil policies seemed under threat. That sucking sound everyone suddenly heard was a tremendous increase in the global demand for oil. With fears rising that, in the very near future, such demand could put a strain on OPEC’s resources, member states began negotiating ever more vigorously for a range of concessions and expanded political power in exchange for expanded energy production. By this time, of course, the United States had joined the ranks of the energy deficient and dependent, as imported oil surged past the 50% mark.

In the meantime, key ally Saudi Arabia was further weakened by the rise of al-Qaeda, which took as its main goal the overthrow of the royal family, and its key target — think of those unintended consequences — the American troops triumphantly stationed at permanent bases in the country after Gulf War I. They seemed to confirm the accusations of Osama bin Laden and other Saudi dissidents that the royal family had indeed become little but a tool of American imperialism. This, in turn, made the Saudi royals increasingly reluctant hosts for those troops and ever more hesitant supporters of pro-American policies within OPEC.

The situation was complicated further by what was obvious to any observer: The potential future leverage that both Iraq and Iran might wield in OPEC. With the second and third largest oil reserves on the planet — Iran also had the second largest reserves of natural gas — their influence seemed bound to rise. Iraq, in particular, would be amplified substantially as soon as Saddam Hussein’s regime was freed from severe limitations imposed by post-war UN sanctions, which prevented it from either developing new oil fields or upgrading its deteriorating energy infrastructure. Though the leaders of the two countries were enemies, having fought a bitter war in the 1980s, they could agree, at least, on energy policies aimed at thwarting American desires or demands — a position only strengthened in 1998 when the citizens of Venezuela, the most important OPEC member outside the Middle East, elected the decidedly anti-American Hugo Chavez as president.

In other words, in January 2001, the new administration in Washington could look forward to negotiating oil policy not only with a reluctant Saudi royal family, but also a coterie of hostile powers in a strengthened OPEC.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the new administration, bent on unipolarity anyway and dreaming of a global Pax Americana, wasted no time implementing the aggressive policies advocated in the PNAC manifesto. According to then Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill in his memoir The Price of Loyalty, Iraq was much on the mind of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the first meeting of the National Security Council on January 30, 2001, seven months before the 9/11 attacks. At that meeting, Rumsfeld argued that the Clinton administration’s Middle Eastern focus on Israel-Palestine should be unceremoniously dumped. “[W]hat we really want to think about,” he reportedly said, “is going after Saddam.” Regime change in Iraq, he argued, would allow the U.S. to enhance the situation of the pro-American Kurds, redirect Iraq toward a market economy, and guarantee a favorable oil policy.

The adjudication of Rumsfeld’s recommendation was shuffled off to the mysterious National Energy Policy Development Group that Vice President Cheney convened as soon as Bush took occupancy of the Oval Office. This task force quickly decided that enhanced American influence over the production and sale of Middle East oil should be “a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy,” relegating both the development of alternative energy sources and domestic energy conservation measures to secondary, or even tertiary, status.

A central goal of the administration’s Middle East focus would be to convince, or coerce, states in that region “to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment”; that is, to replace government control of the oil spigot — the linchpin of OPEC power — with decision-making by multinational oil companies headquartered in the West and responsive to U.S. policy needs. If such a program could be extended even to a substantial minority of Middle Eastern oil fields, it would prevent coordinated decision-making and constrain, if not break, the power of OPEC. This was a theoretically enticing way to staunch the loss of American power in the region and truly turn the Bush years into a new unipolar moment in the Middle East.

Having determined its goals, the Task Force began laying out a more detailed strategy. According to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, the most significant innovation was to be a close collaboration between Cheney’s energy crew and the National Security Council (NSC). The NSC evidently agreed “to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the ‘melding’ of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: ‘the review of operational policies towards rogue states,’ such as Iraq, and ‘actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.’”

Though all these deliberations were secret, enough of what was going on has emerged in these last years to demonstrate that the “melding” process was successful. By March of 2001, according to O’Neill, who was a member of both the NSC and the task force: “Actual plans…. were already being discussed to take over Iraq and occupy it — complete with disposition of oil fields, peacekeeping forces, and war crimes tribunals — carrying forward an unspoken doctrine of preemptive war.”

O’Neill also reported that, by the time of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the plan for conquering Iraq had been developed and that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld indeed urged just such an attack at the first National Security Council meeting convened to discuss how the U.S. should react to the disaster. After several days of discussion, an attack on Iraq was postponed until after al-Qaeda had been wiped out and the Taliban driven from power in Afghanistan. It took only until January 2002 — three months of largely successful fighting in Afghanistan — before the “administration focus was returning to Iraq.” It wasn’t until November 2002, though, that O’Neill heard the President himself endorse the invasion plans, which took place the following March 20th.

• The logic of regime change

With this background, it’s easier to understand the recent brief, but highly significant, flurry of controversy over a single sentence in The Age of Turbulence, the bestselling, over-500-page memoir by longtime Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. He wrote simply, as if this were utterly self-evident: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” (See video: Alan Greenspan: “The Iraq war is largely about oil”) As the first major government official to make such a statement, he was asked repeatedly to explain his thinking, particularly since his comment was immediately repudiated by various government officials, including White House spokesman Tony Fratto, who labeled it “Georgetown cocktail party analysis.”

His subsequent comments elaborated on a brief explanation in the memoir: “It should be obvious that as long as the United States is beholden to potentially unfriendly sources of oil and gas, we are vulnerable to economic crises over which we have little control.” Since former ally Saddam Hussein was, by then, unremittingly unfriendly, Greenspan felt that (as he told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward) “taking Saddam out was essential” in order to make “certain that the existing system [of oil markets] continues to work.”

In an interview at Democracy Now! he elaborated on this point, explaining that his support for ousting Hussein had “nothing to do with the weapons of mass destruction,” but rather with the economic “threat he could create to the rest of the world” through his control over key oil reserves in the Persian Gulf region.

Greenspan’s argument echoes the logic expressed by the Project for a New American Century and other advocates of aggressive military solutions to the threat of OPEC power. He was concerned that Saddam Hussein, once an ally, but by then a sworn enemy of U.S. interests in the Middle East, would control key oil flows. That, in turn, might allow him to exercise economic, and so political, leverage over the United States and its allies.

The former Fed chief then elaborated further, arguing that the threat of Saddam could be eliminated “by one means or another” — either by “getting him out of office or getting him out of the control position he was in.” Replacing Saddam with a friendly, pro-American government seemed, of course, like such a no-brainer. Why have a guy like that in a “control position” over oil, after all? (And think of the possibility of taking those embarrassing troops out of Saudi Arabia and stationing them at large permanent bases in nearby, well-situated, oil-rich Iraq.)

Better by far, as the Cheney Energy Task put it, “to open up areas of [Iraq's] energy sectors to foreign investment.” Like the Task Force members, Greenspan believed that removing oil — not just from Saddam’s control, but from the control of any Iraqi government — would permanently remove the threat that it or a broken OPEC could continue to wield economic leverage over the United States.

Revealingly enough, Greenspan saw the invasion of Iraq as a generically conservative action — a return, if anything, to the status quo ante that would preserve unencumbered American access to sufficient Middle Eastern oil. With whole new energy-devouring economies coming on line in Asia, continued American access seemed to require stripping key Middle Eastern nations of the economic and political power that scarcity had already begun to confer.

In other words, Greenspan’s conservative urge implied exactly the revolutionary changes in the political and economic equation that the Bush administration would begin to test out so disastrously in Iraq in March 2003. It’s also worth remembering that Iraq was only considered a first pit stop, an easy mark for invasion and occupation. PNAC-nurtured eyes were already turning to Iran by then as indicated by the classic prewar neocon quip, “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”

And beyond this set of radical changes in the Middle East lay another set for the rest of the world. In the twenty-first century, expanding energy demand will, sooner or later (probably sooner), outdistance production. The goal of unfettered American access to sufficient Middle Eastern oil would, if achieved and sustained, deprive other countries of sufficient oil, or require them to satisfy U.S. demands in order to access it. In other words, Greenspan’s conservative effort to preserve American access implied a dramatic increase in American leverage over all countries that depended on oil for their economic welfare; that is, a radical transformation of the global balance of power.

Notice that these ambitions, and the actions taken to implement them, rested on a vision of an imperial America that should, could, and would play a uniquely dominant, problem-solving role in world affairs. All other countries would, of course, continue to be “vulnerable to economic crises” over which they would have “little control.” Only the United States had the essential right to threaten, or simply apply, overwhelming military power to the “problem” of energy; only it had the right to subdue any country that attempted to create — or exploit — an energy crisis, or that simply had the potential and animus to do so.

None of this was lost on the unipolar-minded officials who made the decision to invade Iraq — and were more ready than any previous administration to spell out, shock-and-awe style, a new stronger version of the Carter Doctrine for the planet. According to Treasury Secretary O’Neill, Rumsfeld offered a vision of the grandiosity of these goals at the first Bush administration National Security Council meeting:

“Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that’s aligned with U.S. interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond.”

An even more grandiose vision was offered to the New York Times by presidential speech writer David Frum a few days later: “An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States, would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans.”

As worldwide demand for hydrocarbons soared, the United States was left with three policy choices: It could try to combine alternative energy sources with rigorous conservation to reduce or eliminate a significant portion of energy imports; it could accept the leverage conferred on OPEC by the energy crunch and attempt to negotiate for an adequate share of what might soon enough become an inadequate supply; or it could use its military power in an effort to coerce Middle East suppliers into satisfying American requirements at the expense of everyone else. Beginning with Jimmy Carter, five U.S. presidents chose the coercive strategy, with George W. Bush finally deciding that violent, preemptive regime change was needed to make it work. The other options remain unexplored.

[Note: This commentary -- and most of the useful work on the role of oil in Middle East and world politics -- rests on the remarkable evidential and analytic foundation provided by Michael Klare's indispensable book, Blood and Oil,The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum. Readers who seek a full understanding of these issues should start with that text.]

– Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His books include Radical Protest and Social Structure and Social Policy and The Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His work on Iraq has appeared on numerous Internet sites, including Tomdispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, and ZNET; and in print in Cities, Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His email address is Ms42@optonline.net.

Copyright 2007 Michael Schwartz

By Janet Fyfe-Yeomans and Amanda Grant

SYDNEY, Australia — He is an unlikely revolutionary, but this Christmas, Santa is a rebel with a claus.

He is having the last laugh on political correctness — and it’s a great big fat belly laugh.

Santas across Sydney, Australia, are rebelling against attempts to ban their traditional greeting of “ho, ho, ho” in favor of “ha, ha, ha.”

Recruitment firm Westaff — which supplies hundreds of Santas across the country — has told its trainees that the “ho ho ho” phrase could frighten children and could even be derogatory to women.

Two Santa hopefuls reportedly quit the course because of the hullabaloo of the ho, ho, ho.

One would-be Santa has told The Daily Telegraph he was taught not to use “ho, ho, ho” because it was too close to the American slang for prostitute. He also quit.

“Gimme a break,” said Julie Gale, who runs a campaign against sexualizing children called Kids Free 2B Kids. “We are talking about little kids who do not understand that ‘ho, ho, ho’ has any other connotation, and nor should they.”

“Leave Santa alone,” she added.

Australian Childhood Foundation chief executive officer Dr. Joe Tucci said it was the latest example of political correctness gone mad.

“There is no stronger tradition for children than Santa’s ho, ho, ho,” Tucci said.

On Wednesday, Australian department-store chains David Jones and Myer as well as the Westfield shopping center chain moved to reassure children, and their parents, that Santa and his customary greeting was part of Christmas’s present as well as Christmas’s past.

A David Jones spokeswoman said they had discussed the situation with Westaff and that their Santas would not be silenced.

“Senior management have assured us that Santas provided to David Jones have not been censored in any way,” the spokeswoman said.

At Myer, where Westaff also train the fat men in red suits, Santa could not stop laughing about the suggestion.

“Myer has not directed our Santas to refrain from using ‘ho, ho, ho’ and believe the expression is an important Christmas tradition,” a spokesman for Myer said.

Westfield’s Santas are recruited and trained by RegProm Marketing and they will be “ho, ho, ho-ing,” a Westfield spokeswoman said.

“Westfield Santas are known for their friendly and welcoming nature and know how to deliver a real festive ‘ho, ho, ho.’”

Sydney mother Maybel Lopez said she wanted her daughter Andria, 5, to grow up hearing Santa’s “ho, ho, ho” just as she had, and she did not realize the phrase had other connotations.

“It’s what Santa has been saying his whole life — my whole life. It is just a normal thing, really, for him to say ‘ho, ho, ho,’” said Lopez.

Westaff’s national Santa co-ordinator Sari Hegarty wrote to stores explaining the company’s position.

“Westaff has been a provider of quality caring Santas for over 40 years,” Hegarty wrote in an e-mail.

“Part of our advice to our Santas is that they should be mindful of children having their first Santa experience,” she added. “We ask our Santas to try techniques such as lowering their tone of voice and using ‘ha, ha, ha’ to encourage the children to come forward and meet Santa. We wish you and your family a very merry Christmas.”

Westaff national operations manager Greg Jansz said it was “misleading” to say the company had banned Santa’s traditional greeting and it was being left up to the discretion of Santa himself.