THIS IS NOT A WAR ABOUT OIL

Ok, I just watched Shooter which was a half-way decent movie until the end when the Senator proclaims that this war is about oil not weapons of mass destruction. I am so tired of this argument. First of all, lets start with 9/11, a day that over 3000 of our countrymen and women were killed. Those of you who believe the government knew about it and didn't do anything to stop them need to show me some facts. President Bush had only been in office for 8 months and during that entire time, his cabinet appointments were held up over and over again by the Democrats in Congress who were bitter about his win over Al Gore. While there were generic memos about Al Qaeda's desires to fly planes into buildings, there was never any specific information that would allow them to stop the attacks. If there was any evidence whatsoever that President Bush knew about the attacks and failed to act, the Democrats would impeach him right now. Secondly, we do know that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, he used them on his own people and you can find pictures of the men, women and children he slaughtered on the internet. In 2002, France, Germany, England, and the United States all claimed to have intelligence of his persistence in seeking weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. Even the United Nations agreed. After 9/11 happened, had President Bush failed to act on that intelligence and Saddam Hussein was able to acquire a nuclear bomb and use it against Israel, or our base in Ramstein, Germany or against any of our allies, who would everyone point the finger at? President Bush. If I had been President of the United States and I was told that our enemy was actively seeking to acquire weapons to kill Americans and our allies, and this enemy had a proven track record of using the weapons he acquired, I would have made the same decision as President Bush did. His most important duty is to protect Americans. The only thing I would have done differently is I would have fought the war to win it as quickly as possible, if that meant using every weapon at my disposal and sending 10 times the number of troops, because I want our enemies to be afraid to make the United States mad.

Now to the oil. If we went to war about oil, why didn't we take Iraq's oil? We buy oil from them, but we didn't just take it from them. Why go to war so we can buy 11.3 million barrels of oil from Iraq when we have an estimated 4-11 billion barrels of oil sitting in Anwar that the environmentalists won't let us drill for?? We have other oil reserves in the Everglades, the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of California that we aren't allowed to use. We haven't built an oil refinery in this country since 1976 just 2 years after the end of the oil embargoes. Just to compare, we get 56.2 million barrels of oil from Saudi Arabia, 53.8 million from Mexico, 46.2 from Canada. We buy 223.5 million barrels of oil each year from other countries. Iraq's oil is just a blip on the screen of the oil that we use (about 5%). Hardly worth the cost of war.

It is fine to be suspicious of the government. I wish people were more suspicious when the politicians are promising national healthcare and universal pre-k. Everything the government does takes money, and that money comes from us, the more they spend, the more we get taxed, but I am getting really sick of hearing people act like our country is some war-mongering, world-domination seeking foe of freedom that seeks to steal oil, land, and anything else from other countries. In WWI and WWII the United States occupied but did not conquer other countries. We could have taken Japan, but we didn't. We could have conquered Afghanistan, but we didn't. We could have bombed Iraq into oblivion, killed most of the people and called Iraq a territory of the United States, but we didn't. I am damn glad that I live in this country. I am damn proud of this country and our soldiers and I just want people to start using their brains to analyze some of this B.S. that is out there. Hitler was able to dominate an entire country by feeding off people's fears of conspiracies. It led to the slaughter of millions of Jews and the extermination of gays, the mentally ill and the physically handicapped, the loss of religion, the loss of the right to defend yourself, the loss of the right to raise your own children. If people don't learn to use their brains and logically dissect an argument to see if it is valid, then it won't take much for someone to walk us right over a cliff just like a bunch of sheep. If there ever is an anti-Christ, he won't have much of a challenge.