The corporate and economic reasons for war

We seem to have wrangled and jousted over every nuance of the moral and strategic aspects of the latest war in Lebanon. Wars seem to come and go like dark clouds, their origins as hard to fathom as the weather. They seem to be woven from many fibres of historical injustice and disagreement. They seem to be an unstoppable aspect of human nature.

Yet plainly things are not what they seem to be. The story of our lives, the story of the serial wars since the end of the 19th century is but a narrative - a narrative that carefully avoids the underlying corporate and economic reasons for war. The details are hidden in plain sight, but are never presented as a continuum. If the media did their journalistic duty, we would see that all the wars are but pieces of one continuous whole.

The shocking thing is that none of this ever had to be; a fact that we know in our hearts to be true. No dispute ever had to spread beyond the bounds of its small geographical locality. No dispute ever had to fly the conference table and take to arms. War is the greatest card-trick in history.

Crucial to this trick are the race and religion cards. Once these jokers are played, it's all over for clear thinking, and we find ourselves "through the looking glass". In order to proceed, we must make a superhuman effort to ignore Jew v Arab, Muslim v infidel and deity v deity.

We must clear our heads of the noise which is daily foisted upon us, a noise so all pervasive that we are addicted to it. Like all addictions, it will be our downfall unless we kick the habit.

So what might war look like to the uncluttered mind?

War for profit - the grotesque face of globalism

• The impetus for war is wealth and power.
• The financiers with vast wealth and power have a thirst that can never be quenched - an appetite that can never be sated - because their rapaciousness only serves to make them the most insecure people on Earth.
• Their game-plan is a strategy which uses religion, race, culture and manufactured hatred for its own ends. Life is not sacred. This is the oh-so familiar amorality of the corporate mindset which demands "profit über alles".
• Iraq was but one dot-point in an unbroken stream of war-for-profit. Cui bono - who gains? Always follow the money.
• Money - the monetary economy - is made out of thin air. It is just an idea - a way to organise humanity. Our modern economy is enabled by the availability of a potent free energy source - irreplaceable compact fossil sunshine.
• Energy alone fulfils the dreams that money promises. In order to dream the American Dream, you must stay asleep. If the sleeper wakes, the money-dream will disappear.
• The looming shortage of easy, high quality oil is the trigger for the financiers' march to global fascism, because it has galvanised them into collective action.
• Although the financiers are spread across the globe, they concentrate their influence through control of the US Government, the defence industry and mainstream media. The US is their powerful spearhead and the US treasury is their well.
• Even the most moderate US general is compromised by the fact that the US Department of Defense is the largest single-entity user of high quality oil in the world. The US war machine would be useless without it. Catch-22.

The Middle East - ground zero

Obtain a map of the Middle East and Central Asia. Mark in the oilfields, wellheads, pipelines, US bases, social and religious demographics if you like. Now you have the grand chessboard of Brezinsky and Kissinger.

(Courtesy Asia Times)

See how the most sensible, pragmatic, economic and ergonomic gambit for the withdrawal of sweet Iraqi oil is to gather and pipe it straight to the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, from where it can be shipped westward. It's that simple. This has been the dream of western industrialists since the potential of the oilfields was realised so long ago. The port city of Haifa is the preferred embarkation point.

There was such a pipeline, the Mosul-Haifa pipe, built in the 1930s, but this was disabled during Israel's 1948 war. Even if the old small pipes could be resurrected, they would not have the capacity to quench our modern thirst for sweet oil.

Henry Kissinger fathered the proposal for a new 42" pipe in 1975. Pipeline constructors Bechtel asked Donald Rumsfeld to negotiate with Saddam Hussein about the project in 1983-84, but in the end Saddam wouldn't play ball. We all knew what a shifty character Hussein was. We knew that because we had been repeatedly told what to think about him.