Wilkerson
Gotta watch the Daily Show
The fake news teaches us more than the real news. Take Stewart’s clips of former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s former deputy, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, broadcast on the Wednesday 10/26 edition of the Daily Show. Where else could a big section of the general public become informed of Wilkerson’s angry dissent from Bush administration policy given in a talk on October 19? (Video/audio links here, transcript here, additional links here, excerpts from follow-up oped piece here)
Many candid bombshells dropped in Wilkerson’s speech, for example, former Pentagon Policy planner, neocon Doug Feith, was “the dumbest man I ever knew…” and Feith got to “tell the State Department to screw itself in a closet….” Go download and listen to the actual speech to get the full flavor.
I just wanted to point out some insights Wilkerson communicated, mainly in the q&a portion of the October 19 program. At one point during the speech, Wilkerson gave this provocative remark:
We can’t leave Iraq. We simply can’t. I can make that case. No one in this administration has made that case. They have simply pontificated. That’s all they’ve done. Now, I’m not evaluating the decision to go to war. That’s a different matter. But we’re there, we’ve done it, and we cannot leave. I would submit to you that if we leave precipitously or we leave in a way that doesn’t leave something there we can trust, if we do that, we will mobilize the nation, put 5 million men and women under arms and go back and take the Middle East within a decade. That’s what we’ll have to do.
Later in the q&a, Wilkerson explains one of the reasons this is true:
The other thing that no one ever likes to talk about is SUVs and oil and consumption and, as one little girl said yesterday at the Yoshiyama Awards, do you know that we consume 60 percent of the world’s resources? We do; we consume 60 percent of the world’s resources. Well, we have an economy and we have a society that is built on the consumption of those resources. We better get fast at work changing the foundation – and I don’t see us fast at work on that, by the way, another failure of this administration, in my mind – or we better be ready to take those assets. We had a discussion in policy planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields in the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N. trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly. That’s how serious we thought about it.
If you want those resources and you want governments that aren’t inimical to your interests with regard to those resources, then you better pay attention to the area and you better not leave it in a mess. Now, people will say, maybe you, well, it won’t be a mess that they won’t handle themselves in the area. I don’t trust that to be a good outcome.
Wow. That’s the most candid policy statement you are likely to hear directly from a high-level planner. Despite Wilkerson’s care in explaining oil field seizure would occur under international auspices, neocon policy planning would have envisioned no such thing. Furthermore, even if the UN was to be involved, the US would exert far greater control than anyone else. So original Deep Blade Analysis concerning the background motivations behind the Iraq war is confirmed by Wilkerson’s remarks.
October 29th, 2005 at 03:00
I’m only an occasional reader here. I must ask: How do you keep warm in winter? I’ve been thinking: even if all vehicular internal combustion engines were to cease operation today, is there enough fossil fuel available to keep humanity from freezing in winter for another 100 years? Then I think of the fact that most ‘first world’ people eat oil in the form of machine-produced food. It clearly is not sustainable, and we are so near the brink…….that avian flu may offer an extension? I say this as one who primarily grows 90% of my own food, heats with wood, does not intend to avail myself of Tamiflu, and is as accustomed to the comforts of modern life as anyone reading this.
October 29th, 2005 at 05:52
Like about 80% of the people in Maine, we burn some oil in the winter. We also have a wood stove and use a small amount of wood for heat. If you want wood around here, you can buy it (not cheap). Further south, it’s much more difficult to get it the last couple of years on the open market. So if you want to heat with wood you really need your own woodlot.
October 29th, 2005 at 16:29
Here in environmentally-friendly Sweden we heat our house with pellets: small, 8cm compressed sawdust pellets which are very cheap, very friendly to the environment and by God do they heat our wee abode in the 25 minus winters we have here.
October 29th, 2005 at 16:42
Pellet stoves have become popular around here too. “Home and Hearth”, a local stove shop, does a brisk business. Problem is, the companies that make & sell the pellets have been swamped, I understand, so the prices have been reaching near what oil costs.
http://www.bangornews.com/news/templates/?a=120374&z=0
November 1st, 2005 at 23:08
That is a real shame. The whole purpose of encouraging alternative fuel here was to bring heating costs down for the average consumer. I guess Sweden and America are cultures apart when it comes to interpreting the needs of the consumer (or is it the needs of the distributor?). I mean it is silly, production of these pellets is minor and cost-effective. Mark-ups on pellets are probably quite generous anway without the need to make surplus values over and above that. I really am a Swede these days…
February 15th, 2007 at 01:54
[...] an epidemic. Even administration dissident Lawrence Wilkerson — who Deep Blade discussed here — re-laid out the winter 2003 case, as cited by Max Boot (in a piece also discussed by Deep [...]