The Obomber Club: Armageddon for Oil

Dear Mr. President,

Back from the G20 and nobody signed up. Even the Pope has come out against bombing Syria. Still just you and your French poodle, Hollande. I’m certainly no expert, but it seems to me that you just blew an opportunity to avoid more bloodshed and earn that ill-gotten Nobel Peace Prize. There you were in St. Petersburg with heads of state and all you lobbied for was to join the Obomber club. No attempt at diplomacy or peace. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), got it right the other day when he said, “We need some options out there that does something about the chemical weapons.” He proposed giving Assad 45 days to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention and start destroying his stockpiles. (NYT, September 6, “Pentagon Ordered to Expand Potential Target With a Focus on Forces” p. A7) Seems more rational than punishment-bombing which is clearly a lose-lose proposition all around. It won’t change Assad’s mind (or “punish” him), will only create more chaos and misery, possibly widen the Syrian civil war into a region-wide secular war and give the extremist militants an opportunity to gain more power. Contrary to Kerry’s assurances that only 15-20% of the rebels are “bad guys,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) said the briefings he attended estimated that half the rebel fighters were extremists. (NYT, September 5, “Rebel Brutality In Syria Posing Dilemma In West” p.A1) If you’re hell-bent on bombing something, why not bomb the factories in Czechoslovakia, Holland, Russia, China and the U.S. that made and sold the chemicals to Syria that allowed them to make sarin, VX and mustard gas? (today’s NYT, “With the World Watching, Syria Amassed Nerve Gas” p.A1) None of your arguments hold water and your obsessive jihad to “punish” Assad has puzzled me. There’s a lot of theories out there but the one that makes sense to me is one by Nafeez Ahmed in an obscure environmental blog on the Guardian web site posted on August 30 (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/aug/30/syria-chemical-attack-war-intervention-oil-gas-energy-pipelines). It’s complicated but he pulls together interviews by Gen. Wesley Clark and former French foreign minister Roland Dumas, a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh, a 2008 RAND report and leaked diplomatic cables (thank you Chelsea Manning) to very clearly and succinctly lay out the case that it all boils down to the control and sale of oil and natural gas in the Middle East. Doesn’t it always come back to this? Armageddon for oil?