This shows where American interests in Iraq and Middle East really lie. Our President is not feeling all fuzzy and warm inside at the dream of providing women's liberation, Capitalist-style, or giving bread and circus in form of republirat system of Government to the poor oppressed Moslem friends. It's the OIL people and Haliburton has already been caught over-charging the troops and us, the taxpayers, for it. I'll put up a copy of the study of 2000 in which is discussed the need to build a pipeline through Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan to the Far East.
For all the perceived faults, Nixon was a strategic man, who viewed the world as a chess game between America and the Socialists. He held that certain value attached to each piece of realestate called Nation States. Amongst the most valuable were the Middle-East, where we'd set up a puppet-regime called Israel to do our security in the oil fields, and another was South Africa, which we know is about as rich as land gets, where a white minority kept the aboriginal people in poverty and oppression to protect the resources. Whether right or wrong, you had gas for around $1.50 a gallon for your ride this week didn't you?
We need to grow up and admit we're a empire and will follow Grugyn's axiom that: "Rule where one may shall be the whole of the law." So the Democrats who are deluding themselves that we're dying to liberate women, and Republicans - who, for the life of me I don't get it - think we're dying to give Iraq a 'Democracy', can go eeeeazy with it. We murdered Natives of this land not because they were satanic or evil, we just wanted their land and they wouldn't give it up. We are in Iraq because we want their oil and they won't give it up. All else is rationalization to ease our conscience as we stand at the pump and count change for gas. Blog on.
Britain Furious at Nixon
Over 1973 Alert, Records Show

By Beth Gardiner
Associated Press Writer
December 31, 2003

LONDON (AP) - Britain's prime minister was furious at President Nixon for not telling him that U.S. forces were going on worldwide alert during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, according to records released Thursday.

Prime Minister Edward Heath learned of the alert - considered a high point in Cold War tensions - from news reports, the papers said. They were released under rules requiring that some secret documents be made public after 30 years.

Britain's intelligence listening post, Government Communications Headquarters, had learned of the alert but did not tell Heath's office or the Foreign Office because officials assumed Heath and Douglas-Home already knew about it, the papers showed.

Nixon said he put U.S. troops on high alert for just under a week, starting on Oct. 25, 1973, to show the Soviet Union that America would not allow it to send military forces to aid Arab states fighting Israel. The alert covered U.S. forces stationed in Britain.

Heath wrote in a memo that he thought Nixon's move, which came in the midst of the Watergate scandal, was unnecessary and harmful. "Personally I fail to see how any initiative, threatened or real, by the Soviet leadership required such a world wide nuclear alert," the prime minister wrote. "We have to face the fact that the American action has done immense harm, I believe, both in this country and worldwide."

The spy chiefs said they did not know what intelligence the Americans possessed, but said "we are inclined to see the U.S. response as higher than necessary to achieve the desired effect."

A British intelligence memorandum released late Wednesday said [Nixon] gave serious consideration to sending airborne troops to seize oil fields in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi during the 1973 Arab oil embargo, The Washington Post reported.

The document reportedly said that if faced with deteriorating conditions such as a breakdown of the cease-fire between Arab and Israeli forces following the Yom Kippur War or an intensification of the embargo, "we believe the American preference would be for a rapid operation conducted by themselves" to seize the oil fields.

It cited a warning from Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger to the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Cromer, that the United States would not tolerate threats from "under-developed, under-populated" countries and that "it was no longer obvious to him that the United States could not use force," the newspaper said.