Mission accomplished, for real this time

The New York Times ran a story on June 19 about the expected awarding of no-bid contracts by Iraqi officials to western oil companies. While this should come as no surprise to the war's many critics, it is nice to see a report on the spoils of war and how this will shape up.

The article reports that the contracts would "lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies [Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, BP, and Chevron] in Iraq since the American invasion," which is good since apparently oil has become so scarce that the price of gasoline has steadily increased almost without fail each week for more than a year.

The article addresses what many have long suspected, that securing the oil concession was the reason for the war in the first place. "There was suspicion ... among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract,"the article reports.

While it feels good to hear all this, it is not so wise to think that this is some great revelation or that there will be an act of contrition on the part of the Bush administration.

Bush and his clique would never see this war as a blood-for-oil campaign, which is exactly how many on the left (myself included) have reasoned out this brutal nonsense. For all the spin rhetoric that we have become accustomed to in the past seven or so years, there has never been a flat denial that U.S. oil companies would eventually profit from this war. Any denial we did hear centered on refuting the claim that the war's purpose was strictly blood for oil.

Try to view this war through the eyes of a warmonger. A warmonger views a conflict in terms of its specific goal and the inevitable spoils of that goal. To Bush, his mission was righteous: the elimination of an enemy nation within the borders of a tyrannical state. Fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here; in Bush's mind, this made (and makes) perfect sense. Indeed, the article asserts the "administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism," and obviously the administration is not going to change its story.

Opponents of this war never understood Bush's logic nor his stated reasons for going to war. The whole conflict has reeked of deception, refocused objectives and flimsy reasoning from the beginning. But this was a war with a stated, undoubtedly flawed, purpose and the reward for supposedly accomplishing this goal would be the vast oil fields of Iraq. This war was always going to have spoils, and it was easy for the administration to deny the blood-for-oil allegations since questions suggesting such were flawed in their query. I don't recall a specific question directed toward the president that asked him what the real expected monetary returns of this war were going to be.

Much like the globalizing mission of Christianity more than 100 years ago, the reasons for embarking on the campaign are mired in a savior-based mentality. There is no way to shake the indelible markings in the mind of Bush and his people that what they were doing was right, that it was our job as a country to fight this war in Iraq, and to draw the lines of what is right and wrong for the world.

It is this poor mindset, rooted far in the past, that makes this war so frustrating. Clearly, the conservative ethos are living up to their expectations and in the end, occupying a foreign country while forcing an ideology on its people will work out as well as it did for all the European powers who did the same. Many of us know how this will turn out and that's what is so maddening.

So mission accomplished once again, Mr. President. Like so many things tied to this administration, your globalizing mission against terrorism has lead us back to the trail head, and we have a long hike ahead of us. There is little argument that we will be paying for your spoiled war for the rest of our lives.