Oil or winning friends?

My good blogmate Hotpotatomash sends along a Youtube video in which Wolf Blitzer and Charles Rangel exchange some thought on Iraq and the recent announcment that the Bush administration wants to send $20 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia. The Anything They Say banner even gets a plug at the end, for an Anything They Say Youtube debut. Thanks, mash!



Rangel says,

Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and all of them had decided to knock off Saddam Hussein for the oil long before 9/11. And if there's one thing that Cheney, Bush and ... Saudia Arabia has [sic] in common, is three things: oil, oil, and more oil.

Obviously, I wouldn't argue with that. But then one is confronted with the sight of a grown man, silly looking to be sure, though reasonably intelligent one assumes, wondering if oil really has anything to do with it, as though the US invasion of Iraq would have been just as likely were Iraq sitting on top of the world's third largest reserves of light sweet pickles. Really, we just wanted to help the Iraqis, that's all. And make friends in the regions. Note the sly maneuver whereby he casually calls the "viewers" idiots.

Well, explain that to our viewers, who uh, who may still be confused. Why do you believe its all about oil as opposed to other strategic political gains in the region, stability, bringing democracy, winning friends, let's say, at the expense of Iran, why is it all about oil?

I'm guessing that if Wolf's Situation Room viewers' only source of news is Wolf, they may not be aware that Iraq even has oil.

While I would certainly agree that control of Iraq's crucial reserves and the presence of 160,000 US troops in Iraq is a definite "strategic political gain," Blitzer apparently imagines that such a gain would be made whether oil was there or not, ignoring the very reason for it being a strategic political gain in the first place. And are we really to believe that Dick Cheney is concerned about winning friends? But no, it is you, the viewer, who might be "confused" about all this. They really do think their viewers are idiots.