Cole Oil

Alan Greenspan confirms that he urged the Bush administration to take out Saddam on grounds of petroleum security for the US, and says one official told him, 'unfortunately we can't talk about oil.' Long-time readers know that I think restructuring the architecture of US energy security was among the major motives for the Iraq War. This thesis does not contradict the Mearsheimer-Walt theory that the Israel lobby and Israeli security formed a major impetus to the war, since US and Israeli interests in energy security overlap. It is just circumstantial, but I see a nexus in the American Enterprise Institute of Exxon-Mobil money and former officials and Neoconservative intellectuals, both with the ear of Dick Cheney.

Well, not even at the Ann Arbour Faculty Club can any mere mortal manage to be always, infallibly, wrong, Mr. Bones! The Gulf of Petroleum "thesis" does indeed "not contradict" the Jewish Statism "theory," but bare non-contradiction does not advance us much forwarder. Recourse must be had to the admittedly "just circumstantial" before the unwitting fictionist reveals that AEI dunnit.

'Tis a hard fate to go about picking up after Don Juan's opinionated commentarial doo-doo, O Bones! His list of villains, in the holy Homeland at least, is close to indistinguishable from our own, but he is so much in a rush to indict somebody Republican and aggression-friendly that he glues (some of) the jigsaw pieces of Crawfordology together anywhich way and pronounces the puzzle definitively solved rather before "premature" first begins to become an applicable epithet.

Nothin' more detestable than AEI, sir. As Lord Acton once memorably didn't say, "Ideology corrupts. AEIdeology corrupts absolutely." No jackass better worthy of pinning the tail of lawless vigilante GOP invasionism on than AEI, yet all the same "corrupted" is a general expression, and general corruption is not quite the same thing as specific guilt. As a mere matter of fact, the AEI "nexus" dinna do it to the former Iraq, and neither did the greed of Greenspan nor the zeal for Zion.

When the court historians to Princess Posterity see the whole puzzle of the militant extremist GOP's Peaceful Freedumbia painstakingly reassembled in say, the year of religionism 2042/2603, no doubt even then some captious critics will claim that great swathes of the reconstructed original canvas are irrelevant to the alone true and originally intended Theme. If Prof. Dr. Tarn could play a Voltairean trick on the helpless dead for Alexander the Great of Macedon two dozen centuries afterwards, no doubt somebody Tarnlike six centuries hence will be able to do it for little tiny all-but-invisible Dubya of Kennebunkport-Crawford.

Everybody but thee and me, Mr. Bones, seems to be a Theme-monger of late, "Theme" comprising both Colean "thesis" and Colean "theory." A bloody bushogenic shambles like the former Iraq cannot have happened by mere incompetence and accident, can it? Surely there must be some Malignant Intelligent Designer behind it all, surely there must be a THEME to such a puddin'?

Oh, well, no use arguing with 'em, Mr. Bones, the gentry and neo-gentry and wannabe neo-gentry who reluct to accept the general messiness of human events.

Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison! And God knows best!!