War As Corruption

No matter who ends up writing the history of the American invasion of Iraq, no matter whether it's five, ten, or one hundred years from now, it will necessarily include the lust for oil, the grab for Iraqi oil reserves, no matter how much "democracy" icing Bush and his cohorts wanted to put on the story back in 2003 or ever.

Here's a new fact to get angry over: According to Harper's Index for November 2008, the US government has paid Blackwater, the private security firm, $110,000,000 from federal small business contract funds!!!

According to its own website, Blackwater has operations domestically in: Moyock, North Carolina; Mt. Carroll, Illinois; San Diego, California; and Tampa, Florida. Internationally, Blackwater has offices in East Africa; Amman, Jordan; Baghdad, Iraq; Kabul, Afghanistan; and UAE. Blackwater claims to operate in nine countries.

Blackwater hardly qualifies as a small business, although it remains privately held and therefore not subject to many transparency requirements. But as we have seen time after time, this Bush administration doesn't understand the rule of law.

I'm currently reading Thomas Friedman's new book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded." If the Bush administration hadn't been in a delusional state about global warming and not quite so greedy to fill its own pockets with the proceeds of the sale of the last of the planet's oil reserves, we might not be in this global financial crisis. Instead the US could have shown real leadership, opening the doors to new sustainable technologies, recycling everything the consumer uses, finding alternative fuels, which translates into good jobs at home and abroad, trade with other nations, and a quieter planet. By sending all of our money to the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, we have succeeded in funding the very source of anti-modernist, misogynistic fundamentalism. We didn't need the Patriot Act to try to stop the flow of money to support terrorism, that's all we had to do was trade in our SUVs for hybrids.