Re: Re: 'GERMANY REFUSES TO BACK A MILITARY STRIKE ON IRAN' - 'IRAN
- From: "nowletshavethetruth" <YooHooGirl@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 10:48:21 -0400
World War III ? starring Islamic fascists, Nazis, Rumsfeld
Brent Battle,
Opinion Columnist,
7 September, 2006.
Daily O'Collegian,
http://www.ocolly.com/read_story.php?a_id=30453
Batten down the hatches and call the troops to order! The U.S. military,
in all its holiness, is fighting Islamic fascists ? the modern equivalent
of 1930s Nazi Germany ? in an attempt to eradicate evil from the Earth.
Maybe ? just maybe ? we will win the War on Terror, usher in the
millennial reign of Jesus Christ and keep Jessica Simpson from getting
another zit. In a perfect world, just maybe we can.
The sad truth is the U.S. is no more or less the next Nazi regime than the
so-called ?Islamic fascists,? or Iran or Hezbollah or a cartoon caricature
of the prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban.
What we have is a failure to communicate. Mahmood Ahmadi-Nijad, Iran?s
outspoken president, makes attempts to restore a 26-year deficit in
communications between his country and the U.S. He wrote a letter
requesting a unilateral meeting and recently challenged President Bush to
a debate to be viewed by the world. Spokesmen for the White House have
declared both attempts at restoring communications as public relations
ploys to distract attention from Iran?s nuclear program.
Talks between the countries dwindled in the late ?70s after the anti-U.S.
Iranian regime declared the U.S. as ?The Great Satan? and swore vengeance
for a U.S.-backed coup in the ?50s, which dramatically destabilized the
region for years. ?Blowback,? the CIA term for an unintended consequence
of a covert action, became the best description of Iran between the ?50s
and ?90s.
It?s the reason we financed Saddam Hussein, gave him rifles, tanks and the
information to build chemical and biological weapons. Hussein was the go-to
guy for the U.S. in the ?80s to fight Iran. We have video of Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shaking the hand of Hussein after we turned him
into a pawn.
Rumsfeld, despite coming under harsh criticism from political pundits
across the board, said Tuesday the U.S. is at war with Islamic fascism.
Those opposed to the so-called War on Terror suffer from moral or
intellectual confusion about right and wrong, he said.
I believe God works in mysterious ways. The same day Rumsfeld blathered on
about morality and ethics, two non-profit organizations co-authored a study
that found the CEOs for U.S. oil companies have tripled their annual profit
margins on average since 2001. Defense contractors have doubled theirs as
well, according to the 60-page report by the Institute for Policy Studies
and United for a Fair Economy. On average, all other CEOs saw profit
increases of 6 percent.
President Bush could never defend questions about his administration?s
involvement in catapulting Al-Qaeda and Hussein in the ?80s. He can?t
defend the coincidence of the North American Aerospace Defense Command war
drills ?eerily like the Sept. 11 attacks? in the months leading up to 9/11,
which USA Today reported in 2001 and Pentagon documents later confirmed.
They can?t explain the fake terror alerts, the manipulation of pre-war
intelligence or how a war on terror is a false premise within itself.
It?s no wonder they refuse to debate. It?s no wonder they continue to
blame the media, the half of the country who sees through their lies, the
regimes they financed two decades ago, the dissenters, the real patriots
and the proselytizers of common sense, such as Ahmadi-Nijad.
The sad fact is the Bush administration will not debate Ahmadi-Nijad or
any one else who stands up to the warmongering policies of the U.S.
military meant for financial gain. All the ?defense? officials can do is
claim our faux enemy is the modern Nazi Germany.
The Nazis were notorious for staging and propagandizing a fake terror
attack on the homeland to launch an unprovoked invasion of foreign
nations. Only the U.S. and has mimicked this tactic recently. Look in the
mirror, Rumsfeld. It is there you will find your Nazi.
(I found this article at http://www.ocolly.com/read_story.php?a_id=30453)
And:-
Should Our Children "Die for Oil"?
Michael DiMercurio,
Military.com,
September 6, 2006.
I had a debate recently with a thinking woman whose views tend to be
somewhat to the left of my own. While she is a business maven, she is also
a mother, and when I mentioned that her son would be a great candidate for
a service academy -- to serve as an officer in the greatest armed force in
history -- she turned white as a ghost and said, ?My son or daughter will
never carry a gun in some stupid war! No way! I'll never let them be in
the military!?
Hysterics aside, the emotional response could be decoded to read that she
could not envision a situation in which her offspring should ever be
sacrificed at the alter of freedom.
?There's a war going on in Iraq right now, you warmonger,? she hissed.
?Would you ask your son to be over there, getting shot at? Or no reason
other than to guard the big oil interests' energy assets? You want your
son to die for nothing??
As a matter of fact, I said, he's trying to get into the Air Force Academy
or West Point. He wants to fly a jet, drive a tank, or swoop a helicopter,
but he also loves the idea of hoisting an M-16 as a grunt and becoming
history's ultimate weapon ? the armed infantryman. (As a digression, I
always wonder, if he becomes a West Point cadet, which side of the stadium
do I sit on during the Army-Navy game? A silly question ? Navy's side, of
course.)
After hearing all the objections a mother can raise to having a son in the
uniform of the U.S. Armed Services, she insisted that we're fighting for
oil because of a conspiracy. That Big Business -- Big Oil -- is keeping
down technologies that would make oil obsolete, and that we as a nation
continue to pollute and waste the precious resources of the earth,
squandering our children's future ? and their very lives ? in our
sinfulness. That we should go to work to implement oil-free technologies
NOW, and that our failure to do so is the result of a vast right wing
plot.
It is always difficult for me to paraphrase an opinion I consider ill
founded. I tend to make the other side's argument seem ridiculous.
Therefore, I decided to let Left Wing Mom speak for herself. The following
statements were only edited for grammar, as in the original they were
rushed to the page of a hastily written email:
Left Wing Mom:
?I read your editorial ?What's a Superpower to do?' Wow, I actually agree
with more of it than I thought. Of course you're veering way off with the
Iranian H-bomb, and the idea of using an American nuclear weapon to ?solve
the problem' and then blaming the mushroom cloud on an Iranian technical
problem is wild even for you. And saying Roosevelt allowed Pearl Harbor to
come under attack? I can't believe you said that out loud! And as far as
Iraq, rather than having our children guard the oil and get killed doing
it, the most important thing to be doing is developing, at the most rapid
pace, the technology that will radically reduce our dependence on oil --
not only ours, but the rest of the worlds' too. Then the lunatic radical
Muslims can incinerate each other all they want and we can ignore them.
And as to the Russians supplying Iraq with weapons, it's not time to pick
a fight with Russia -- that's history. Better to keep them in the inner
circle and use them for diplomacy with Iran when the time comes. But
you're not listing the biggest part of the argument, which is that we have
to get away from our addiction to oil. Because the most important thing is,
American children should NOT be SACRIFICED for oil -- not mine, not yours,
none! We need to bring on the technologies that have been suppressed for
decades -- technologies that will make oil use obsolete. Then our soldiers
can come home.?
The trouble with quoting her directly, of course, is that it makes her
argument seem a bit more lucid. But let's go to the issues. First, as to
Iran, my recommendations in the article ?Iran: What's a Superpower to do??
stand. So far, they are passing the test of time now that Iran has thumbed
their noses at the U.N. deadline.
But what of this business about our children dying for oil? Do we have the
technology to make oil use a thing of the past?
Actually, we do have the technology to make oil obsolete (several
technologies, actually). Here's a short list:
1. Nuclear fission: for use in large-scale power production. This method
produces zero carbon emissions (zero!); therefore it is a favorite of
environmentalists -- at least the real ones, though not the radical
pretenders.
2. Coal gasification and combined cycle power: America is the Saudi Arabia
of coal. We could use it cleanly. You simply bring coal into a chemical
plant that manufactures synthetic natural gas and synthetic liquid fuel
(methanol) while discarding the molecules that are bad for the
environment, like sulfur and mercury, and you pipe the syn gas or syn
liquid into a conventional natural gas burning or oil-fired power plant.
Advantage: doesn't use oil. Disadvantage: makes carbon dioxide, a
greenhouse gas that is accused of changing the atmosphere and the climate
of the planet, and not for the better. (But, if we happen to have another
ice age, won't greenhouse gases come in handy?)
3. Coal gasification at the mine mouth: chemical plant at source of coal.
Syn gas is put into the existing national pipeline infrastructure -- ditto
syn liquid fuel. Advantage: again, no reliance on oil. Disadvantage: that
pesky carbon emission problem.
4. Triple hybrid cars: add to present hybrid a hydrogen fuel cell. The car
would run on electric motors supplied by batteries. When the battery is
low, the fuel cell kicks in to recharge and provide supplemental power.
When the fuel cell is low, the gas engine comes online. The power unit is
recharged back at the house by using efficient, zero carbon power
technology (nuclear).
5. Microturbines for households: distributed power using syn gas and small
gas turbines, about the size of your car engine. Powers one house. While
this is less efficient than a larger fossil plant and creates more
pollution, it would eliminate costly and unsightly infrastructure (large
power transmission towers and power lines, which are susceptible to
terrorist attacks).
So you see, if these technologies were implemented, no American children
need die for oil.
That's where my email to Left Wing Mom ended. But it occurred to me that
we do seem to be ignoring the fact that America has an enormous amount of
its own oil. It's in Alaska. Place called the North Slope. Why aren't we
exploiting it? Perhaps that's part of the same conspiracy that is
suppressing the above oil-free technologies.
Left Wing Mom replied promptly:
?Of course we have technology, but are we developing it, ramping it up?
No. Fuel cells have been around for 15 years. It's bull! We consume 20
million barrels a day of oil, just U.S. consumption. Time is long past to
get delivery on alternatives. Reasonable, readily available and not
environmentally destructive (which nukes, coal and absurdly long pipelines
are).?
?Dear Left Wing Mom,? I replied, ?have you ever heard of economics?? You
don't go crazy making or ?ramping up? or implementing technology that will
make energy at the equivalent of $150/barrel. Oil was $30/barrel seven
years ago. Natural gas was so plentiful that they started cramming it into
pipelines and building quickie power plants with gas turbine engines (think
a jet engine the size of your house). Now that oil's north of $70/barrel,
and natural gas is six times the price it once was early in the decade,
economics dictates that we explore alternatives.
When oil is cheap, I continued, all you can (economically) do is test or
"pilot plant" the technology for eventual us. You don't actually build it.
Why? Who would drive up to your gas station if you were selling gasoline
for $16.87/gallon when the station across the street sells it for
$3.12/gallon? That's why we're not building the new technologies yet. You
have to consume the available oil first. Then you go to coal and nuclear
technologies. That resource will last 200 to 350 years. Then when the
uranium runs out and the coal runs out (and the oil has been long gone for
200 years), then you go to geothermal. You see, we're all sitting on an
ocean of lava, white-hot magma. It's 11 miles deep under your sneakers,
but consider it an inexhaustible amount of power. That and solar together
will be the power sources of the Year of Our Lord 2357. So there's no
conspiracy or black helicopters. It's just the money talking, so listen to
it.
But after I sent my reply, I kept thinking. As far as Iraq and Iran go,
the idea of developing new technologies that will eliminate the need to
safeguard America's energy interests with armed force is a few decades
away, even with a crash program. And crash programs are generally against
the laws of economics.
But isn't it worth the national expenditure if it saves lives? What's a
life worth? Priceless, right?
If you were to ask a personal injury trial attorney that question,
assuming he's had three or four pops of scotch to ensure his candor, he'd
tell you a human life is worth between $1 million to $3 million, depending
on fault and the level of insurance coverage. How does the Pentagon view
the cost of a soldier? Based on recruitment of scarce personnel resources
and the levels of investment per soldier for training, equipment, and
support, you would arrive at the same approximate figure, and whenever two
different means of finding a number converge on the same answer, it has to
be right, doesn't it? (Not really, but let's keep going for a while.) A
loss of 5,000 troops in Iraq would equate to roughly $10 billion. Then add
in the estimated cost of the war by adding up Congressional appropriations
bills. The total ?War on Terror? estimated cost through 2007 is $487
billion (Congressional Research Service). Interesting to note that the
loss of human life at $10 billion is a small fraction of the almost $500
billion we're spending on the war. For Iraq alone, the bill is only $315
billion, but add on that $10 billion in human life and you get a nice
round $325 billion.
Now let's compare the cost of that to the implementation of the new
oil-free technologies. They would cost, with an accelerated construction
program, about $2,000 per kilowatt capacity for replacing oil technology
with oil-free technology (cheap natural gas power plant project costs are
about $1000/kilowatt, synthetic combined cycle power would cost $1500 to
$2000/kilowatt depending on the technology eventually used and the
construction schedule). The number of megawatts used in America today is
605,000 (U.S. Energy Information Administration, ?Inventory of Electric
Utility Power Plants in the United States, 2000?). That means it would
cost about $1.2 trillion to implement a nationwide conversion to oil-free
technology. As we know, all back-of-the-envelope estimates can only come
up with, at best, half of the cost to do a project (and with some, perhaps
only a tenth, as the moon landing program cost reviews showed). So let's be
safe and multiply by three. That's $3.6 trillion.
So, new technology: $3,600 billion. War in Iraq: only $325 billion. That's
a bargain by the standards of any economist. It means we could be in Iraq
for THREE DECADES and still have a cheaper endeavor than turning away from
oil.
I continue to press the point that politics is an extension of economics.
Economics is as strong a force as physics. So long as oil is still
(relatively) cheap, we will continue to do what we must to keep our hands
on it.
But that still leaves one last nagging doubt in my mind. About my son,
strapping on Nomex gloves and firing up the jet of his Cobra helicopter?
I'd still feel better about him doing that if he were protecting the
existence of America from the threat of invasion rather than to protect
oil assets or economic scenarios. In the Cold War, it was worth risking my
own life to go toe-to-toe with the Russkies in order to defeat the sweeping
octopus of World Communism and make the world safe for democracy. But to
have my son risk his life to keep gasoline from reaching $5 a gallon?
Maybe Left Wing Mom had a point after all. But please, don't tell her I
said so.
Copyright 2006 Michael DiMercurio. All opinions expressed in this article
are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of Military.com.
(I found this at: http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,112589,00.html)
.
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