Guest Comment: It’s the oil!

Norman Gonder’s arguments “ Why we have to be in Iraq” (March 28, 2007) are the same weak, trite, lame reasons all the people who voted for George W. Bush in 2004 use to try to justify a bad decision.

His lead-ups to the 9-11-01 attacks in New York and Washingon are the same “scare logic” the Bush administration used to justify the invasion of Iraq. They are as weak today as they were in 2003.

The terrorists of 9-11 were spawned in Afghanistan, recruited in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and trained by the Bin Laden followers.

Attacking Afghanistan was the sensible and rightous thing to do. Detouring to Iraq was not only unnecessary but foolhearty.

As Mr. Gonder says, Al-Qaeda has a few hundred cells in 50 or 60 locations around the world. Now some of these cells are in Iraq because the US invasion of that nation gave people there a reason to welcome that terrorist cult.

Before the invasion, there was little or no Al-Qaeda in Iraq; Saddam was very anti-Al-Qaeda, as commission studies have divulged.

If people remember the famous Clinton campaign slogan “It’s the economy, stupid,” they also will realize the Iraq invasion happenend because “It’s the oil, stupid.”

Mr. Bush wanted to tap that huge cauldron of oil and thereby have a seat at the OPEC table. He could then continue the relationship the Bush family has had for three generations with the Saudis (read: The Carlyle Group, Prescott and George H.W. Bush).

And now we have those same Saudis with whom George Bush held hands during the visit to Crawford denouncing our presence in Iraq. And for good reason.

We have no business there and didn’t in 2003. It was only a few years ago we supported and assisted Saddam in his struggle with Iran. But the oil was the clincher. That’s why we’re in Iraq.

We destablized a nation ruled by a dictator, true, but in that part of the world only dictatorships seem to work.

But seeing that Mr.Gonder was an oil company executive makes it easy to see how he would justify the Iraq war.

The cultural and religious differences in the Mid-East are far stronger and more significant than any such philosophies we native-born Americans ever experienced. Yet we went there and created the groundwork for a civil war.

And we are in the middle of it, like it or not, admit it or not. And as history has shown, there are no “winners” in a civil war. There are victors but no winners.

Look at the US. We had a civil war and there are still racial injustices, bigotry, and discrimination despite the outcome in 1865 and the legislation of the 1960s. Southern feelings still run strong. Confederate flags still fly. Yet the North “won.”

And for Mr. Gonder to try to smear the Democrats for not having a plan on how to go after the terrorists and Bin Laden is totally wrong.

Rep. John Murrtha has said repeatedly we have to redeploy our troops to where the terrorists are- Afghanistan, not where we have no business— Iraq.

And for Mr. Gonder to equate the loss of 3,000- plus American lives with the deaths of persons in high-risk occupations (police, firefighters, construction workers) is ludicrous. If the soldiers were not in Iraq those 3,000-plus would not have been killed. Work-related deaths are accidents.

Putting soldiers in an unnecessary war is akin to murder.

And being against Mr. Bush’s war, Mr. Gonder, does not make any American a non-patriot. We all support the troops; not this unjust war.

D.J. Davin and his wife, Kay, have lived in Sahuarita since 2002. He retired in1998 from his own manufacturers’ representative agency, which was located in Portland, Ore. He is a Navy veteran and once worked as a reported for the Gannett organization. The views expressed above are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of this newspaper.