With the anti-war camp resolute in their conviction that the war was fought for oil, I decided to investigate the issue in depth for an issue of Newtopia devoted to the topic of “Empires.” It was a huge topic, and I needed help. I asked a Newtopia writer named Guy Herron to co-author the lead feature on the history and relationship between US foreign policy and oil. Guy Herron came recommend to me by a mutual friend, an eccentric expat writer living in Japan named Tom Bradley.
“If you want to write about oil and war,” Tom said, “Guy is about as knowledgeable as you can get when it comes to the Yoo-nited States of ‘Murrica, Charlie.”
snip
In February of 2003, during the run up to the invasion, we published an op/ed Guy wrote called, “The Bush Blunders.” His central assertion was that, “America has always been a plutocracy but the mailed fist has been concealed in a velvet glove. We think we are free -- we are not, we are just on a long leash.”
snip
Moreover, he continued, the US has a long history of installing brutal dictatorships around the world who are friendly to American business interests, and decidedly unfriendly to their own populations. He called the Iraq War the “beginning of the Fourth World War, a war which would be fought for strategic control over the world’s dwindling resources, chiefly oil.”
He claimed that when the National Security Act was passed in 1947, the United States turned over control to a “Shadow Government” that consists mainly of the CIA, NSA and the Pentagon. This “drugs and arms running network,” as he called it, was in charge of American foreign policy. He claimed that anywhere in the world you find the American military you also find oil (or other precious natural resources) and drugs. <1>
I had never heard it put quite like that. I was of course aware of the allegations of CIA drug trafficking, but I hadn’t really followed up with the research I started a few years earlier when writing for Reality Checks, so Guy’s assertion at the time just seemed like more hyperbole. The words “Shadow Government” made me cringe, it sounded so tin-foil hatty. My response was just short of deriding it as the rantings of a crank, but I restrained myself. In truth, my internal reaction was closer to denial.
snip
Operating from this logical yet limited thesis, I cut out all of Guy’s language about the murderous intent of the US, all mention of the “Shadow Government,” the CIA, and the “drugs and arms running network.” I believed at the time that only “conspiracy theorists” talked about those things. Even if it were true, I still feared their inclusion.
Guy was crestfallen. “Ah, Charlie, you gutted it,” he wrote back to me once he read my draft. “You’re missing the entire point.”
I argued back and forth with him that he was “going overboard” with his theory. He said it wasn’t a theory, it was fact, and well-documented at that. I told him I couldn’t publish any of those assertions without proof, and he laughed at me.
“The proof is right there if you want it,” he said. “But it means nothing without the courage to believe it.”
http://www.realitysandwich.com/exile_nation_ch4_pt9
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