Talking Fairness

Certain aspects of off-shore drilling are debateable. Will it be 5, 7,10 years or 2030 before benefits are seen? How large would those benefits be?

But one benefit that seemingly has been overlooked is not the affect on the price of gasoline more supply will perhaps have, but instead the affect of more supply from American companies will have on Iranian oil.

Isolating Iran is the indisputed path taken by the western countries concerned about Iranian nuclear ambitions, however, China and Russia have resisted the isolating sanctions from the U.N. up to this point.

With more oil of its ‘own’ in its arsenal, the US has the option available to supply a certain amout of oil, or even refined gasoline to China or Russia in order to remove each nations’ opposition to west’s wishes regarding Iran.

If the Democrats are correct in their assesment of how offshore drilling will affect prices at the pump, perhaps this option would be extremely attractive for America and if it can be made attractive to China and or Russia, then it would seemingly be a tremendous step in the right direction for the west in ending Iran’s nuclear program without relying on military action.

One element that seems to be left out of the offshore drilling debate is the notion that not only is it important for America to drop its dependency on Middle Easten oil, but the entire world to do the same.

Study: Bush led U.S. to war on ‘false pretenses’

According to this, there was a study realeased Tuesday, January 21, that measured the amount of times President Bush and his administration, “stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.” Now, I do not know the quality of this, but the country has gone through the facts and it’s pretty well accepted by the people who cannot simply say what they wish to that the intelligence was faulty and not that the government lied. That is to say that from the quote I used, the bulk of what the administration said (529/532 times) was most likely inclusive of the “was trying to produce or obtain Weapons of mass destruction,” and they said that based on the intel they were receiving.

    I don’t remember exactly what Bush and his administration were saying in 2002, but I do remember very well discussing the issue with my father when they were all over the news talking about Iraq. And never did we discern from what we read and saw that Saddam had nuclear capabilities; it never came up. We knew he didn’t. I figured he probably had chemical weapons because of his history with those, so I didn’t need any convincing that he had them again.  Now toward a connection with al-qaida, I don’t know how much Bush actually used this, if they even did… Again the article on the study is ambiguious on whether the study says Bush said something was or if he said it possibly was. Nonetheless Saddam did have connections with them. It was very weak, and had nothing to do with September 11, but there is evidence of meetings, and Saddam said on public news that he would give money to the families of sucide bombers against Israel. So, he publicly established himself with terrorism and evidently was in some degree of communication with al-Qaida.

   My conclusion, unchanging from years ago, the Iraq War is undoubtedly the first preemptive war the US has ever fought, and in that context the actual danger we preemptived will never be known, however, to those who say the US was led on false pretenses are just ignorant of the history of the Saddam Hussein regime. Barely a year into power he, for example started an eight year war with his neighboring nation Iran, which hadn’t even been ended with a cease-fire when he invaded another of his neighbors, Kuwait. He wasn’t, no matter what anyone wants to believe, simply sitting idly by because he has lost his will to conquer. A man like he is always a threat when that much power and that much wealth is at his disposal.

So, although the overthrow of that regime was overdue, doing so in the midst of apex of terror was very poor timing. Because Iraq may have had terror connections, they were minute compared to the uncontroversial sponsorship given by Iran. The Iraq War was too political for me to “agree” with it, in two ways: First, clearly Bush didn’t send enough troops there to begin with, and I believe he didn’t due to the expense he knew it would be even with the amount he did in fact send, and he didn’t want the cost to be as bad as it should have been. But also, Rumsfield wanted to fight a certain type of war, which hadn’t been fought previously, which centered on tactics and intel, with smaller amount of troops. Secondly, if one only looks at the justification and leaves out the politics of how the invasion and thereafter would play out, we would have not hesitated to go to war with Iran, in place of Iraq, for reasons afore mentioned. As controversial as it may be to say, I would rather have a Saddam ruled Iraq and have the US fighting the regime in Iran and have 10,000 dead and trillions more spent, and not have to worry about a nuclear terrorist sponsoring nation existing.