One of my favorite columnists is Ed Wallace.  He writes for the local paper ostensibly about cars, but his columns are invariably about the state of the US economy and often he treads on subjects others are too afraid to talk about, like why we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Seven years ago, he was chastised by his readers for stating that the stated reasons for invading Iraq and the possible costs of that war were flat wrong.  “Yes, [seven years ago] I compared President Bush to a used car salesperson who was low-balling a buyer to sell them a piece of junk. But do you recall the president’s sales pitch? He said it would cost us only $50 billion — Iraq would pay the rest out of their oil revenues. I stated the war would not be over in a few months and would cost far, far in excess of the publicly stated costs. And if Iraqis wanted to be safe during the heaviest combat, they should hide under an oil pipeline, because that was the only place we wouldn’t bomb.  Now it’s seven years later, $1 trillion has been spent, and few people deny that the war simply opened up the world’s last great easy oilfields.”

 Likewise, he has now pointed out that the war in Afghanistan is not about terror, but perhaps about the vast store of minerals “recently” found in that country.  “We have two wars going, ostensibly against terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, and those fanatics ‘accidentally pulled’ us into the richest untapped oil fields in the world, followed quickly by the richest untapped mineral fields in the world. Isn’t that a coincidence?  The only problem with that report about the Afghan mineral wealth on June 14th? The primary information was posted on the Web site of the United States Geological Survey two years ago. It was not new “news” at all, except to the media….See, it wasn’t just soldiers we were sending into those danger zones, but also geologists and petroleum engineers. And when one journalist wrote excitedly that this discovery of major deposits of lithium in Afghanistan would be great for the coming electric car era — to be honest, I sat there numb, unable to frame coherently my contempt for what he had written.

I always knew Iraq was about oil. It was confirmed when a court case forced Dick Cheney to release the maps of the oil fields in Iraq that he had divided up between oil executives in 2001 — before 9/11. But I hoped against hope that Afghanistan was about the war on terror. Now we are being told to just chalk it up as a future American victory for the cellular phone, laptop computer and electric car industry.

And for that we’re spending trillions?”

Here is a link to the rest of Ed Wallace’s thought provoking, perhaps to some just provoking, article:  http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/06/25/2293860/the-ore-on-terror.html

Michael