No Blood for Oil!
Remember 15 February 2003 when 10 million people said, "No Blood for Oil!".
Well, five years later, we got plenty of blood and we are running out of oil!
Yves Smith asks "Did the Iraq War Cause High Oil Prices?"
An oil economics specialist, Mamdouh Salameh, who advises the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation, contends that oil prices would be at less than 1/3 of their current level had the US not invaded iraq.
Emphasis Mine
Prof Juan Cole lists the costs to Iraqis in The Real State of Iraq:
By now, summer of 2008, excess deaths from violence in Iraq since March of 2003 must be at least a million. This conclusion can be reached more than one way. There is not much controversy about it in the scientific community. Some 310,000 of those were probably killed by US troops or by the US Air Force, with the bulk dying in bombing raids by US fighter jets and helicopter gunships on densely populated city and town quarters.
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The wars of Iraq-- the Iran-Iraq War, the repressions of the Kurds and the Shiites, the Gulf War, and the American Calamity, may have left behind as many as 3 million widows. Having lost their family's breadwinner, many are destitute.
...
In these situations, typically 3 persons are wounded for every one killed. In Iraq, I suspect it is higher, because US bombings and guerrilla bombings are such a big part of the violence. But let us be conservative.
That would mean 3 million Iraqi wounded in the past five years.
...
As for the displaced (i.e. homeless), they amount to a startling 5 million persons. There were 1.8 million internally displaced in January of 2007, and by December it had risen to 2.4 million. There are 2.3 million externally displaced, 2 million of them in Jordan and Syria.
Cole translates these figures into equivalent numbers for the USA by using a factor of 11. For Australia, we should use a factor of 5/7 (according to CIA World Factbook) This would mean everyone in Sydney, Newcastle, and Woolongong would be either dead, wounded, or a refugee. There could be an overlap between wounded and refugee.
Cole concludes that:
I do know that the apocalypse that the United States has unleashed upon Iraq is among the greatest catastrophes to befall any country in the past 50 years. It is a much worse disaster over time than the Burmese cyclone or the Mississippi floods.
At least, the Australian Combat mission over as Iraq troops return except for those not classified as combat troops!
While Rudd vindicates anti-war movement — bring all the troops home
However, most Australian troops in Iraq will remain. While not classified as “combat” troops, the 800 remaining armed forces personnel are not deployed to help with reconstruction. They include soldiers guarding Australians in Baghdad’s fortified “Green Zone”, sailors guarding maritime oilfields, air force units, and advisors and trainers of death squad-linked, pro-occupation Iraqi forces.
We have the appearance of withdrawing without really withdrawing.
2 comments:
So you have to ask yourself: Is it possible that the enviros are the cause of the oil war?
No Blood For Oil or No Drilling For Oil?
Thank you for the link.
The answer to your question is both yes and no.
No because the environmental movement has only really locked a tiny fraction of potential oil reserves.
Yes because of the stupid idea that every American can live in the country while working in the city. In Australia, 44% of our oil consumption is devoted to people travelling between home and work. The US is much worse.
This flaky idea that children should be living in a quarter acre block of private countryside is just economic suicide.
So, in order to maintain our standard of living as country squires, Arabs have to die. The Arabs would only use the oil to build their economies not ours.
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