(no subject)

[helen99]

When Farenheit 9/11 first came out on screen I was invited to go, but I declined. I couldn't look. I had to turn away, in the same way I'd normally turn away from a horrible accident (only none of this involved any accidents). I finally brought myself to watch it, on video, alone, without anyone else's commentary, and where I could stop if I needed to.

No surprises. It provides a pretty concise case for why we have invaded the absolutely WMD-less Iraq on absolutely false pretenses, and why the name of Bin Laden is no longer in the news.

But the juxtaposition of the rich Saudi princes and Haliburton profiteers with the undereducated, poverty-stricken young guys who are actually doing the fighting because they believe in this country was what really got to me. They're fighting against an enemy who is justified in absolutely hating our guts for the way in which we have "liberated" them, and both sides are being blown to pieces, and for what? My brother thinks Bush is an incompetent (alot of moderate Repubs believe this). I don't think so. He has very competently secured a lot of profits for a lot of his friends. But back to the soldiers. We *need* these young guys to defend us against real threats. Yet they are deployed, WASTED in a place that had nothing to do with 9/11 or Al Qaeda, and which had no weapons of mass destruction, and which posed no threat to us or anyone else (except maybe their own people).

One thing the movie left out: The strategy of securing the oil fields in Iraq and elsewhere and the securing of the location of the proposed pipeline in Afghanistan can be supported by the possibility that peak oil has been reached and the supplies are starting to run out (not by WMD, for chrissake). This amounts to pure survival, unless we *very quickly* develop alternative energy sources. Which I highly recommend, by the way. Fast. Because establishing an empire has always been the beginning of the end, historically, and I don't think we are somehow exempt from that.

But even the motive of peak oil becomes suspect in the face of the profits that are being raked in during all aspects of this war - weapons, clothes, reconstruction, communications, everything.

Comments

[vashti.livejournal.com]

I've not yet seen the film despite that the DivXen have been sitting on my hard drive for about six months - does he also mention the threat to the dollar from Saddam moving to the euro for oil sales?

[gleef.livejournal.com]

No, he didn't mention that in the film. In fact, your mention is the first I've heard of it. Not surprised, since France was one of the bigger conduits for the oil in the Oil for Food program.

[vashti.livejournal.com]

http://www.feasta.org/documents/papers/oil1.htm

is a good place to start for more information on this.

[helen99.livejournal.com]

I read this somewhere last year. I'll try to dig up the article (I should have a politics subsection of Memories...)

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Nope - he left that one out too.

[aekiy.livejournal.com]

Sad thing about the alternate-energy thing is that we already have the means. We just need to start mass-producing and implementing the technologies we have, which are mostly just sitting around and going to waste.

We can and have created cars that run off pure electricity--laptop batteries--and recharge as they go. And we have the technology for hydrogen fuel-cells as well, we can create vehicles that emit nothing but water as a bi-product. We're just.. not doing it. Doesn't seem to make much sense to me. "Let's all die rich, instead of live happy!" Mrr..

[vashti.livejournal.com]

It's a sad fact of life, I think, that as long as our elected leaders only need to worry about the next four to five years, and as long as most people continue to vote with their wallets, nothing concrete is going to get done about any of this. :(

Well, until the oil runs out at any rate ...

[kyrin7.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough I was telling a coworker that it appears that America is practicing imperialism, and that there is no historical record of an empire that hasn't fallen, and lost it's place as a serious world power.
The coworker agreed, as he's from cameroon, and his own country has been a colony of at least 3 european powers.