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World Focus: The Oil Coup: US-Saudi Subterfuge Send Stocks and Credit Reeling
Thursday, December 18 @ 08:16:49 UTC |  By Mike Whitney
December 18, 2014 - counterpunch.org
“John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, allegedly struck a deal with King Abdullah in September under which the Saudis would sell crude at below the prevailing market price. That would help explain why the price has been falling at a time when, given the turmoil in Iraq and Syria caused by Islamic State, it would normally have been rising.” (Stakes are high as US plays the oil card against Iran and Russia, Larry Eliot, Guardian)
U.S. powerbrokers have put the country at risk of another financial crisis to intensify their economic war on Moscow and to move ahead with their plan to “pivot to Asia”.
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World Focus: Why Oil Prices Are So High
Thursday, June 12 @ 23:27:20 UTC | A Weak Dollar, Bad Fed Policies and Hedge Fund Speculators
by Paul Craig Roberts
June 12, 2008
Counterpunch.org
How to explain the oil price? Why is it so high? Are we running out? Are supplies disrupted, or is the high price a reflection of oil company greed or OPEC greed. Are Chavez and the Saudis conspiring against us?
In my opinion, the two biggest factors in oil's high price are the weakness in the US dollar's exchange value and the liquidity that the Federal Reserve is pumping out.
The dollar is weak because of large trade and budget deficits, the closing of which is beyond American political will. As abuse wears out the US dollar's reserve currency role, sellers demand more dollars as a hedge against its declining exchange value and ultimate loss of reserve currency status.
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War and Terror: God for oil: The mother of all backroom deals
Friday, February 11 @ 21:11:45 UTC | By Chris Floyd, The Moscow Times
The hoary adage that "there are none so blind as those who will not see" should be carved in stone at the National Press Club in Washington. Surely there can be no better motto for the cozy clubhouse of America's media mavens, who seem preternaturally incapable of recognizing the truth -- even when it stands before them, monstrous and unavoidable, like a giant Cyclops smeared with blood.
For just as they botched the most important story of our time -- the Bush Administration's transparently deceptive campaign to launch a war of aggression against Iraq -- the clubby mavens are now missing the crowning achievement of this vast crime: the mother of all backroom deals, a cynical pact sealed by murder, unfolding before our eyes.
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War and Terror: On to Iran: Won't Get Fooled Again?
Monday, November 22 @ 14:01:09 UTC | By Paul Craig Roberts, counterpunch.org
It is not yet Bush's second term. All available US troops are tied down in Iraq by a few thousand lightly armed insurgents. Go-it-alone Bush has isolated America from her allies. And the neocons want to spread their war to Iran.
The Bush administration is recycling the lies that it used to invade Iraq: Iran is acquiring nuclear weapons that will be given to terrorists. In a display of loyalty to a ruthless neocon administration calculated to win him appointments to corporate boards, outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters that Iran was working on nuclear missiles.
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War and Terror: Bush and Putin
Wednesday, September 08 @ 00:06:28 UTC | By RON JACOBS
"We ... displayed weakness. And the weak are always beaten."
Vladimir Putin.
"We cannot show weakness in this world today, because the enemy will exploit that weakness. It will embolden them and make the world a more dangerous place."
George Bush.
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War and Terror: A Tangled Web of Neocon Lies: The Frauds of War
Wednesday, June 04 @ 16:16:21 UTC | By Gary Leupp, counterpunch.org
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
when first we practice to deceive.
You make use of the post 9-11 fear and anger to implement plans for change in Southwest Asia and the Arab world that you, and your colleagues in the American Enterprise Institute and Project for a New American Century, have advocated for a decade. (You recognize the potential utility of anti-Arab racism and the tendency of your countrymen to conflate all Muslims.)
You say al-Qaeda is linked to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. (No serious Middle Eastern scholar believes this, but you know that under the circumstances, with Homeland Security and flags flown cavalry-like from SUVs and Arab-Americans getting beat up and rounded up---the lie will fly.)
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War and Terror: Kick Their Ass and Take Their Gas: Democracy Comes to Iraq
Wednesday, May 14 @ 11:47:47 UTC | by Jacob Levich, commondreams.org
One month after the fall of Baghdad, the US has successfully liberated the people of Iraq from meaningful involvement in decisions about their own future.
A designer regime, concocted behind closed doors by Pentagon and State Department planners, is now being imposed on Iraq with great speed and without any kind of popular consent. Iraq's nascent "democratic transition government" is window-dressing for a military dictatorship charged with insuring that US policy goals -- especially the disposition of Iraq's vast petroleum reserves -- are protected from any troublesome outbreaks of democracy.
As journalist Naomi Klein recognized weeks ago, the Iraqi people will not be granted authority until fundamental and probably irrevocable features of the New Iraq are locked in place.
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War and Terror: When Lying Pays Off: The Fabrications of the Neo-Cons
Saturday, May 10 @ 05:30:19 UTC | by Wayne Madsen, counterpunch.org
America's manipulative neo-conservatives, who support unending aggression against any country that does not succumb to United States political, economic, and military control and who, themselves, seized power in Washington through electoral malfeasance, are taking a page from Nazi Germany's leaders in their quest for world domination. It is no coincidence that the neo-cons are worried about comparisons between their policies and those of Hitler. Ed Gernon, the Canadian executive producer of the upcoming CBS miniseries, "Hitler: The Rise of Evil," was fired when he suggested similarities between the methods used by both Hitler and Bush to wipe away civil liberties by playing on popular fear. The Nazi-like campaign against Gernon was launched by the New York Post and TV Guide, both owned by proto-fascist Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
After being caught lying about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to prove their flimsy case that Iraq was a world class threat, the neo-cons now are planting fabricated documents in the rubble of Iraqi intelligence and secret police facilities. Through a media laundering process, "discovered" documents are handed over to right-wing outlets owned by such slash and burn media moguls as Murdoch, Conrad Black, and Sun Myung Moon.
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War and Terror: Destruction for reconstruction
Thursday, April 03 @ 11:46:14 UTC | Dr M S Jillani
The US ground and air invasion of Iraq is now entering its third week. This period has seen many a myth explode and quite a few mysteries unravel. World was shocked to see the real face of United States' rhetoric about democracy and human tights in other countries. There is no doubt that these will be the common people of America who, someday, will have to pay for the follies of their present rulers, yet it is regrettable that the lives lost in the ongoing misadventure will never come back -- as will not the precious resources destroyed in the fire started by the United States.
A war is in progress, and there is little that can be accomplished through the analysis of its origins. The only useful impact that writings can make is in the way of stopping the war forthwith through the UN or some other international arrangement; sparing lives of civilians during the war; and preserving resources and environment for the generations to come. Events of the last two weeks do not suggest any hope for heeding to these or any other humanitarian considerations.
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War and Terror: Gauging promise of Iraqi oil: U.S. and British firms stand to reap a windfall
Wednesday, March 12 @ 23:07:31 UTC | Ousting Hussein could open the door for U.S. and British firms. Chinese, French and Russian rivals would lose their edge.
By Warren Vieth and Elizabeth Douglass, Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON -- Maybe it's a coincidence, but American and British oil companies would be long-term beneficiaries of a successful military offensive led by the United States and Britain to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Industry officials say Hussein's ouster would help level the playing field for U.S. and British firms that have been shut out of Iraq as Baghdad has negotiated with rivals from other countries - notably France, Russia and China, three leading opponents of war.
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War and Terror: War driven by the self-interest of America
Saturday, February 15 @ 20:13:28 UTC | By Robert Fisk, The Independent
In the end, I think we are just tired of being lied to. Tired of being talked down to, of being bombarded with Second World War jingoism and scare stories and false information and student essays dressed up as "intelligence". We are sick of being insulted by little men, by Tony Blair and Jack Straw and the likes of George Bush and his cabal of neo-conservative henchmen who have plotted for years to change the map of the Middle East to their advantage.
No wonder, then, that Hans Blix's blunt refutation of America's "intelligence" at the UN yesterday warmed so many hearts. Suddenly, the Hans Blixes of this world could show up the Americans for the untrustworthy "allies" they have become.
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War and Terror: How oil plays a role in an invasion of Iraq
Wednesday, January 22 @ 21:09:53 UTC | By Ash Pulcifer, yellowtimes.org
Most people are aware that oil will play a role in the Bush administration's possible invasion of Iraq, but many do not quite understand how. The common assumption is that the U.S. military will somehow "steal" Iraq's oil. This is simply not the case.
The reason that oil plays a part in any future conflict with Iraq has to do with the amount of oil available on the free market. On the free market, whenever there is an increase in supply of a product, the price of that product generally decreases. Such is the hope of the Bush administration with regard to the price of oil should they remove Saddam Hussein from power.
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War and Terror: Russian and US Economies want opposite outcome in Iraq
Saturday, November 02 @ 09:57:12 UTC | by Erich Marquardt and Matthew Riemer
yellowtimes.org
With his fate presumably in the hands of the Bush administration, Saddam Hussein is doing what he does best: surviving.
The Iraqi leader, realizing that American intervention could bring his rule to an end, has been winning friends in Western Europe and Russia by offering large, generous oil deals to powerful countries who are in a position to make a U.S. invasion more difficult.
Iraq has 110 billion barrels of oil reserves, second largest only to Saudi Arabia. Iraq's granting of large oil deals to politically important countries is cutting American companies out.
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Audio & Video: The Hidden Wars of Desert Storm
Wednesday, October 23 @ 14:48:49 UTC | democracynow.org 
THE HIDDEN WARS OF DESERT STORM
"Hidden Wars of Desert Storm" Directors: Gerard Ungerman and Audrey Brohy Narrated by John Hurt
The illegal arming of Saddam Hussein, The Pentagon's use of depleted uranium, and the US Government's lies about the 'massive Iraqi military build-up' on the Saudi Arabian border.
As the US continues to press its case to the United Nations for an invasion of Iraq, many have been questioning the Bush administration's motives for war.
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World Focus: Blood and oil
Thursday, October 17 @ 14:54:30 UTC | Guardian UK
Europe and America are taking increasingly divergent approaches to the unreliability of the Middle Eastern petroleum supply - one green, the other unrepentantly black, writes Randeep Ramesh
The question of whether oil is worth spilling blood over has been quietly raised by the foreign office minister, Peter Hain. In a speech today to the Royal United Services Institute in London, Mr Hain notes that the cost of protecting the Middle East's oil reserves, paid for mostly by the US and without which the west would grind to a halt, is as high as $25 (£16) a barrel - about the same as it costs to buy. Mr Hain, seen as an outrider for Blairite thinking, goes on to warn that no amount of money will guarantee petrol supplies to the west and consumers should be weaning themselves off the black stuff.
At present the world remains so dependent on oil for transport, it cannot stand any disruption in supplies. Remember the chaos and gridlock that the fuel protests brought to Britain? Tony Blair does and now recognises the explosive nature of rising petrol prices.
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