World War IV: Peak Oil Wars

War of Terror "will not end in our lifetimes"

"I don't know what weapons World War Three will be fought with, but World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones."
-- Albert Einstein

"the Third World War has already started--a silent war, not for that reason any the less sinister. This war is tearing down Brazil, Latin America and practically all the Third World. Instead of soldiers dying there are children, instead of millions of wounded there are millions of unemployed; instead of destruction of bridges there is the tearing down of factories, schools, hospitals and entire economies .... It is a war by the United States against the Latin American continent and the Third World. It is a war over the foreign debt, one which has as its main weapon interest, a weapon more deadly than the atom bomb, more shattering than a laser beam."
-- Brazilian President Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva (Lula), comment from 1989 when he was a labor leader and leading dissident in Brazil

 

 

World War II was also an oil war

World War II was in many ways an oil war - the US was able to wage the war because the American oil industry had recently reached the peak of domestic oil discoveries and had enough oil to wage global war.

In contrast, Germany, Italy and Japan do not have oil, and eventually ran out of fuel to power their war machines - a primary reason they lost.

Japan seized oil fields in Indonesia, but when they were driven out they lost much of their oil supply for their military imperialist expansion, and the US naval blockade of Japan ensured their defeat.

Germany tried to capture the rich oil fields of the Caucausus, but after the Stalingrad battle (on the way to the Caucaucus region), it was clear that the Nazi mechanized military would lose the war.

"Hitler and Goering had counted on the new jet fighters driving the Allied air forces from the skies, and well they might have -- for the Germans succeeded in producing more than a thousand of them -- had the Anglo-American flyers, who lacked this plane, not taken successful counteraction. The conventional Allied fighter was no match for the German jet in the air, but few ever got off the ground. The refineries producing the special fuel for them were bombed and destroyed and the extended runways which had to be constructed for them were easily detected by Allied pilots, who destroyed the jets on the ground."
-- William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, (1962), pp. 1426-7

Next on the hit list: Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Korea?

www.gulf-news.com/Articles/opinion.asp?ArticleID=102893
Patrick Seale: Who will be the next victim of US democracy?
Special to Gulf News | 14-11-2003

A good simulation of the likely outcome of the US attack on Iraq - chaos in the Middle East, and more
www.idleworm.com/nws/2002/11/iraq2.shtml (requires "flash" plug in for your browser)

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,928010,00.html
Straw: UK will not attack Syria or Iran
Wednesday April 2, 2003
Britain would have "nothing whatever" to do with military action against Syria or Iran, the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, signalled today.

Practice to Deceive
Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks' nightmare scenario--it's their plan.
www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0304.marshall.html
In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East.

Donald Rumsfeld's nuclear deals with North Korea - How Rumsfeld Filled His Pockets with Pyongyang's Nuclear Loot
www.counterpunch.org/floyd03042003.html

 

"Syria, Teheran on US radar?" The Hindu April 1, 2003
www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/stories/2003040102551400.htm
General Powell threatens Iran and Syria with attacks

www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0304/S00044.htm
Is The Iraq War The Beginning Of World War IV?
SCOOP EDITOR'S NOTE: The following report from CNN is chilling in its audacity. Ex-CIA Director James Woolsey is a Bush insider who is tipped to become the overseer of Iraq once this war is over. Here Woolsey openly talks of a much bigger war, what he calls World War IV.
While there is nothing particularly new about Woolsey's statement, a large number of Neoconservative nutter friends of the Bush Administration have been saying similar things for at least a decade (and Scoop has been reporting this for several months), what is truly shocking is the openness of the declaration contained in this story. Here we see the gloves of the American Imperialist agenda well and truly taken off.

 

www.cnn.com/2003/US/04/03/sprj.irq.woolsey.world.war/index.html

Ex-CIA director: U.S. faces 'World War IV'
From Charles Feldman and Stan Wilson
CNN
Thursday, April 3, 2003 Posted: 5:02 PM EST (2202 GMT)

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Former CIA Director James Woolsey said Wednesday the United States is engaged in World War IV, and that it could continue for years.
In the address to a group of college students, Woolsey described the Cold War as the third world war and said "This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us. Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the Cold War."
Woolsey has been named in news reports as a possible candidate for a key position in the reconstruction of a postwar Iraq.
He said the new war is actually against three enemies: the religious rulers of Iran, the "fascists" of Iraq and Syria, and Islamic extremists like al Qaeda. ....

"As we move toward a new Middle East," Woolsey said, "over the years and, I think, over the decades to come ... we will make a lot of people very nervous."
It will be America's backing of democratic movements throughout the Middle East that will bring about this sense of unease, he said.
"Our response should be, 'good!'" Woolsey said.
Singling out Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the leaders of Saudi Arabia, he said, "We want you nervous. We want you to realize now, for the fourth time in a hundred years, this country and its allies are on the march and that we are on the side of those whom you -- the Mubaraks, the Saudi Royal family -- most fear: We're on the side of your own people."


The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
-- George Orwell, 1984

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.
-- Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

"What's happening with Iraq is not isolated, it's part of a global phenomenon. When we see the installation of U.S. military bases throughout Latin America, when we look at [American interference] in countries such as Venezuela and Colombia and Panama, we have to ask ourselves what's going on.
"Lots of people think it and won't say it, but I will say it: The United States is seeking to control the world. That's why we are seeing the reaction in so many countries."
-- Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1980) Adolfo Perez Esquivel 
www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0314-01.htm

 

www.commondreams.org/views03/0906-05.htm

Published on Saturday, September 6, 2003 by the Globe & Mail/Canada
The Fourth World War
For two years, the U.S. has pursued the culprits behind the 9/11 atrocities with a vengeance that has shocked and awed ally and enemy alike. But even the devastating attacks on the Afghan and Iraqi regimes don't illustrate the true scope of the campaign, DOUG SAUNDERS reports. While everyone was preoccupied with the fireworks, Washington has quietly deployed thousands of agents in a secretive struggle that may last a lifetime
by Doug Saunders

The guys in the sunglasses have a name for this not-so-secret campaign. They call it World War Four, an unofficial title that is now used routinely by top officials and ground-level operatives in the U.S. military and the CIA. It is a global war, one of the most expensive and complex in world history.

 

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/08/which-world-war-is-it-anyway.html

Monday, August 30, 2004

Which World War is it, Anyway?

"And do not forget the petty scoundrels in this regime; note their names, so that none will go free! They should not find it possible, having had their part in these abominable crimes, at the last minute to rally to another flag and then act as if nothing had happened!"
- from the fourth leaflet of the anti-Nazi resistance, The White Rose, 1942.

Among those wise enough to know America is in one and has been for some time, there's disagreement over which World War George Bush is actually waging. Should we call it number III? Or was that the Cold War, and now we're at number IV and counting? ("This is World War IV" is the favoured construct of the neoconservatives. See, for instance, such bloody-minded idealogues as John Woolsey and Norman Podhoretz. I imagine at some point they determined that decades of association with nuclear apocalypse had voided the potential positive spin for "World War III.")
So which World War is it? It's neither the Third nor the Fourth; it's still the Second. Even though the apologists of the Pirate Class in their red, white and blue shirts will never own the name "fascist." As Orwell wrote in Politics and the English Language, "the word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable.'" But that's no reason for us to shy from using it. Just because goosestepping has gone out of style doesn't mean they've kicked off their jackboots.
When we talk about Nazis in America, we're talking about more than the more than passing resemblance to the Bush Cartel. That Prescott's family business profited handsomely by the Nazis is well known, at least by those who think it important to note such things. But the story is larger and uglier than more dirty dealings by a Bonesman.
It also goes deeper than the Republican Party's active recruitment of fascists and racists since the mid-50s through the aegis of its Heritage Groups Council, but since that's seldom recalled, let's pause for a moment to recollect.
When a number of senior members of George HW Bush's 1988 campaign team were revealed to be old school Nazi sympathizers it generated something of a media flap - Pete Hamill titled a New York Post column "George Bush and his fascist fan club" - but the scandal is little remembered today.

Some of Bush's team:

Radi Slavoff, GOP Heritage Council's executive director, and head of "Bulgarians for Bush." Slavoff was a member of a Bulgarian fascist group, and he put together an event in Washington honoring Holocaust denier, Austin App.
Florian Galdau, director of GOP outreach efforts among Romanians, and head of "Romanians for Bush." Galdau was once an Iron Guard recruiter, and he defended convicted Nazi war criminal Valerian Trifa.
Nicholas Nazarenko, leader of a Cossack GOP ethnic unit. Nazarenko was an ex-Waffen SS officer.
Method Balco, GOP activist. Balco organized yearly memorials for a Nazi puppet regime.
Walter Melianovich, head of the GOP's Byelorussian unit. Melianovich worked closely with many Nazi groups.
Bohdan Fedorak, leader of "Ukrainians for Bush." Fedorak headed a Nazi group involved in anti-Jewish wartime pogroms.
Nazis staffing the VP's campaign? Oops! Tut tut tut. We need to run better background checks, wink wink.

The Nazi infection goes back much further. All the way back to the 1930s, when industrialists with fascist sympathies and names like DuPont and Morgan sponsored a coup against Roosevelt to dismantle the New Deal. And then the '40s, when men with names like Bush, Dulles, Favish and Rockefeller traded strategic goods with the enemy, prolonging the war and costing Allied lives.
Worst of all, Project Paperclip saw Nazis virtually co-found the "National Security State," bringing their advanced technology and criminal medical research to America. And something else as well, as Nick Cook is told by the pseudonymous "Dr Dan Markus" in The Hunt for Zero Point:

When the Americans tripped over this mutant strain of nonlinear physics and took it back home with them, they were astute enough to realize that their home-grown scientific talent couldn't handle it. That it was beyond their cultural term of reference. That's why they recruited so many Germans. The Nazis developed a unique approach to science and engineering quite separate from the rest of the world, because their ideology, unrestrained as it was, supported a wholly different way of doing things. Von Braun's V-2s are a case in point, but so was their understanding of physics. The trouble was, when the Americans took it all home with them they found out, too late, that it came infected with a virus. You take the science on, you take on aspects of the ideology, as well.

The Nazi virus entered America's system long ago. It's been Americanized. But what else would one expect, given the CIA was essentially a co-creation of Nazis like General Reinhard Gehlen and his Abwehr anti-Soviet intelligence apparatus and Nazi money launderers like Allen Dulles and the corporatist/intelligence old boy network of Sullivan and Cromwell. No. Such men got exactly what they expected.
"Once the neo-fascists became bold enough to slay the President on the street, they showed their hand," Mort Sahl said early in 1968. So early Dr King and Robert Kennedy were yet to join the body count. "They showed how arrogant they had become. Now it's a question of symptom. That crime was a national symptom. If we can turn our back on that, we will pay a terrible price. That will be the end of this democracy."
They showed their hand, and they've had forty years of getting away with it. And not for lack of evidence. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't read Fonzi's The Last Investigation, Russell's The Man Who Knew Too Much or Newman's Oswald and the CIA, to cite just three works. Rather, they got away with it because the truth is too terrible, and many who did not conspire in the killing conspired in the cover-up because they were led to believe that a finding of official complicity in Kennedy's death would shatter the system, when in fact it might have killed the virus.
And undoubtedly the same justification has been used over and over again, to shield Americans from the awful truth of state-sanctioned assassinations, the October Surprise, medical experiments worthy of Mengele, the introduction of crack to the LA underclass, BCCI, 9/11 and on and on. High treason, many times over. But so what? You know what they say about none daring to call it such should it prosper. And brother, has it prospered.
Here's the thing: we're not talking about discrete, singular, sui generis conspiracies here. Indeed, these are not even conspiracies, in the sense of representing aberrant breaks with the system. These are, rather, examples that the system works. It's just not the system Americans were taught in civics class. The examples evidence the criminalization of the state by the deep political nexus of underworld, intelligence, industrial and military interests. "America," to these players, serves as the legit front for their lawless enterprise. The Nazi virus has consumed the host. If it were eradicated and the host miraculously recovered, the poor thing would swear up and down it was still late Autumn, 1963.


www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/02/10_War.html
On The Verge of Armageddon: World War III May Just be Around the Corner
BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
by Stephen V. Kane

Few have said it yet. Somebody needs to. We are on the verge of WWIII.
The signs are here. Armies massing in a tinderbox around the oil fields of the Mideast. Armies massing on the India-Pakistan border, another flash point in the world. Amidst a war of words that has ended in war before, the two sides are sending each other's diplomats home. North Korea is busily turning its nuclear facilities to the sincere task of creating enriched uranium for nuclear missiles. America the just has seen the rise to power of a dangerously misdirected mind, amidst an election sham, while US Senate power balance changes due to airplanes falling out of the sky, electronic ballot machines whose code is posted on unsecured servers, and vituperative character attacks against decent men and women seeking office for the good of the majority. That government has now turned bellicose, a dangerous development considering the awesome military hardware it commands.
Secret plans have been unearthed in the past forty-eight hours to further attenuate the rights of US citizens, including secret arrests and seizure of property; detention without counsel and without notification (disappearances); even plans to expunge the citizenship of anyone caught in a "terrorist" organization, where the government defines what a terrorist organization is. All with no recourse to the courts.
And war. Every tyrannical and totalitarian regime needs war. They will say they don't want world war, but world war consolidates and perpetuates their grip on power.
World war breaks out easily from a major confrontation as that in Iraq. As the major war transfixes the world, myriad minor ones break out, as nations use the cover of the big events in Iraq and India and Korea to settle scores elsewhere. China will wait until the USA is war-weary, and will then strike Taiwan/Formosa to "reunite" them to mainland China.
Nukes will be used in WWIII. There are too many of these terrible weapons stockpiled around the world to be secure. Some fool will unleash them, and once he does, all bets are off. Retaliations and counter-retaliations will wreck large sections of the biosphere.
Isn't it terribly ironic that the world survived the prospect of nuclear annihilation in the cold war, only to see it ignite in the remote and historically less significant places of the world? For forty years US and USSR nuclear arsenals aimed at every major population center on two continents stood ready to launch. And for forty years diplomacy and spying kept the giants respectful of each other. Now the fear is that a desperate rogue state backed into a corner will set one or two off. And what is US diplomacy doing? Backing these states into a corner.
Under the cloak of world war our enemies will find a way to deliver, and ignite, a nuclear warhead on our soil. These enemies will not rest until they have delivered this nuclear reaction to what they see as US imperialism.
Only by extraordinary, police-state laws and enforcement can the wartime government "protect" the people. They will eliminate, in fact already have eliminated, many freedoms. If you disagree with them on any level they will monitor your phone calls and emails. If you persist in your dissent they will arrest, detain and deport you. Ultimately, they will execute their political enemies under the same confusion, blood, and death of the wars they so desperately need to cover their failed attempts to govern a peaceful nation peacefully.
The intentions of the US government are not, in fact peaceful. Bush is an oil man placed into power by oil interests. The strategic prize is the Iraqi oilfields. Yet as a domestic political matter, only by war and the accompanying smoke, fog, and confusion of war can the Bush men consolidate their extremely tenuous grip on control over their "homeland." War provides them the necessary cover. The fear that war brings overwhelms the resistance by a people who feel powerless in the face of rapidly changing, overwhelming history.
But when the smoke clears -- and it will clear -- the United State will be dishonored. The dishonor will not arise from the policies of this misguided administration, but will be pointed at us, the American people. All of us. Just like Nazi Germany, where the signs of a rise to power of a depraved and dangerous element were unmistakable, the signs are here as well, to anyone careful enough to read them. The Germans resist this war because they know all too well the dire consequences that are in store.
There is no beer-hall putsch as in Munich. But there is a national election that saw tens, if not hundreds of thousands of voters disenfranchised in one state. Electronic voting machines were almost certainly tampered with in certain elections. A virtual news blackout exists in the mainstream media of any developments critical of the ruling elite. A President is put into office through campaign promises and slogans that are outright lies. His government may have impeded an investigation that would have forewarned the nation of 9/11. The appointed government, with a shaky electoral mandate, has embarked on a war that is unsupported at home, and vigorously rejected abroad: They assemble a massive army *before* trying diplomacy, to start the war anyway. Polite congressmen try to pressure the government subtly to stand down, expecting they will as reason says they must.
And yet like Germany in 1932 the intelligentsia, the press, and the rest of government grossly miscalculates the depravity of the situation. They will realize, only too late, they are dealing with a far greater, far more dangerous situation than they ever dreamed. They are dealing with a ruling faction that intends to rewrite the rules to an extent that nobody ever dared think possible in the USA.
Part of that new set of rules involves war. It doesn't matter that the world condemns it. It won't matter if a million people march in New York City on February 15. Once the fog of war settles in, none of that will matter. Once the guns begin to roar, the Bush Cartel, as it's been called, will write the dark history.