Secret Bechtel Documents Reveal:
Yes, It Is About Oil

Is the war against Iraq all about oil? Not to hear Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tell it. Back on Nov. 15, he called the notion that oil was the real reason behind the Bush administration's drive against Saddam Hussein "nonsense," saying, "It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil."

But a new study released by the Institute for Policy Studies, based upon secret diplomatic cables just declassified by the National Archives, and internal communications of the Bechtel Corporation, suggests just the opposite?that oil is the underlying cause of this war.
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The Reason Why
by George McGovern

The President and his team, building on the trauma of 9/11, have falsely linked Saddam Hussein's Iraq to that tragedy and then falsely built him up as a deadly threat to America and to world peace. These falsehoods are rejected by the UN and nearly all of the world's people. We will, of course, win the war with Iraq. But what of the question raised in the Bible that both George Bush and I read: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul," or the soul of his nation?

It has been argued that the Iraqi leader is hiding a few weapons of mass destruction, which we and eight other countries have long held. But can it be assumed that he would insure his incineration by attacking the United States? Can it be assumed that if we are to save ourselves we must strike Iraq before Iraq strikes us? This same reasoning was frequently employed during the half-century of cold war by hotheads recommending that we atomize the Soviet Union and China before they atomize us. Courtesy of The New Yorker, we are reminded of Tolstoy's observation: "What an immense mass of evil must result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen." Or again, consider the words of Lord Stanmore, who concluded after the suicidal charge of the Light Brigade that it was "undertaken to resist an attack that was never threatened and probably never contemplated." The symphony of falsehood orchestrated by the Bush team has been de-vised to defeat an Iraqi onslaught that "was never threatened and probably never comtemplated."
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