What the F***??!

I don't consider myself cynical about politics. Skeptical yes, but not cynical.

For instance, when all those "NO WAR FOR OIL" protesters started yelling last year, I empathized with their root cause (no war), but shuddered a little over the "for oil" part. After all, I thought, if anything the B*** administration was too idealistic, being led down a garden path by neo-conservatives who wanted to rewrite history in the Middle East and bring down-home American democracy to the region.

Not exactly realpolitik, but not as cynical a policy as some of the protesters would have me believe.

Well I finally got around to reading the latest New Yorker (I get it on the West Coast several days late). In it is an article about Cheney and Halliburton and...well, if you follow politics, you probably already know most of it. Here's the article if you want to read it. As I went through it, eating a Fatburger, I nearly choked to death and did a spit take at this section:

Additional evidence that Cheney played an early planning role [in the Iraq war] is contained in a previously undisclosed National Security Council document, dated February 3, 2001 [one month after B***'s inauguration! - ed.]. The top-secret document, written by a high-level N.S.C. official, concerned Cheney’s newly formed Energy Task Force. It directed the N.S.C. staff to coöperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the “melding” of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: “the review of operational policies towards rogue states,” such as Iraq, and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”

A source who worked at the N.S.C. at the time doubted that there were links between Cheney’s Energy Task Force and the overthrow of Saddam. But Mark Medish, who served as senior director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs at the N.S.C. during the Clinton Administration, told me that he regards the document as potentially “huge.” He said, “People think Cheney’s Energy Task Force has been secretive about domestic issues,” referring to the fact that the Vice-President has been unwilling to reveal information about private task-force meetings that took place in 2001, when information was being gathered to help develop President Bush’s energy policy. “But if this little group was discussing geostrategic plans for oil, it puts the issue of war in the context of the captains of the oil industry sitting down with Cheney and laying grand, global plans.”

I'm still speechless about this. Maybe we did have a war for oil after all. Sorry, cynics.