I have a good, but misguided, friend who recently laid the all about oil canard on me when discussing the fact that George W. Bush will invade Iran if re-elected, and it’s all for their oil.
Yeah, that’s a fantastic idea, Chester. Iraq and Iran, all about the oil there. Bush is diabolical enough to fight unpopular-enough wars costing billions of dollars halfway around the world to get whatever oil the freed societies will sell us, which might not be much (for example, Iraq’s oil production ain’t that much these days).
Come on, you naive people. If Bush were that evil, and if he were so Machiavellian to do anything to get his hands on the precioussss, he would:
- Drill in ANWAR, like it or not.
The nation’s parks and preserves have oil. Bush would just have to jail, shoot, or “disappear” hippies and environmentalist types to get to it. That’s damn cheap. - Depose Chavez and install a protectorate in Venezuela.
Venezuela’s right on the other side of the Caribbean. Nice and close, with a convenient dictator-like president-sort-of to depose. Transporting the oil back to the states would be damn easy, and not subject to expensive cross-Atlantic or whatnot travel. But you know how we could make transportation cheaper? A pipeline! - Secure the southern border, by making it narrower–and with Guatamala and Belize.
Our friends down south have recently discovered new off-shore oil fields which gives Mexico roughly 102 billion barrels, about as much as Iraq or Iran–and they’re much closer. We could put a couple battle groups off of either coast and push right down from Texas or do some amphibious landings in Acapulco and Cozumel.So we seal up the border and take care of cheap foreign labor in our auto plants by making them pay American minimum wage, and Bush gets his precioussss, not to mention retribution for the foosball drubbing Vincente Fox laid on him in early 2001. But why stop there?
- Invade Canada.
Those “friends” to the north are sitting on the 22nd largest oil reserve in the world and they want to put all their rocks in the sling in get-tough trade negotiations with the American Goliath. You want to talk tough? We’ve got your tough right here.In addition to the oil and the easy pipelines, it’s politically expedient. Big Pharma will like the end of the drug reimportation threat, Canadian hockey teams will be saved because they’ll get to charge ticket prices in US dollars, and most of Canada will enjoy our one-language policy that we’ll enforce in Quebec.
- Nuke China.
To preempt that threat, Bush could reduce China to rubble, thus easing other oil supplies from the burden of the Chinese industrialization and stockpiling.
So quit being lazy, Chesters, and start using your imaginations for your simpleton conspiracy theories, for crying out loud. Any one or several of the above options will provide us all the petroleum we need to ensure that no hotel room will go un-Vasolined into perpetuity.
Iraq, Iran, and our various Middle Eastern expeditions have more at stake than some precioussss oil, and I’m not going to say it again.
