I’m working my way through a great book right now. It’s called “The Assault on Reason”, written by Al Gore. Al does a wonderful job following on his “An Inconvenient Truth”, where in common language he helps us to understand the critical and devastating impact that we are having on our planet due to global warming.
This latest treatise, published in 2007, I purchased during a recent trip for Dubai – capitalist center of the Middle East. I was hooked when I read a small section:
We know that Cheney himself [Vice President under Bush], while heading Halliburton, did a considerable amount of business with Iraq – even though it was under UN sanctions at the time. And we know that Cheney stated in a public speech to the Institute of Petroleum in London in 1999, more than a year before becoming vice president, that over the coming decade the world would need, in his opinion, fifty million additional barrels of oil each day.
Where is it going to come from? Cheney asked, and then, answering his own questions, he said: “The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies”.
Then, in the spring of 2001, when vice President Cheney issued the administration’s national energy plan, the one that had been devised in secret by corporations and lobbyists that he still refuses to name, the report included this declaration: “The Persian Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy.”
So with that I have been reading – and learning – about a whole series of interrelated events that do a very good job in explaining exactly what is happening in the region right now. It really is amazing stuff.
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