This was not a hate mail to start off with.I was genuinely following your blog in between and simply asking if you had posted anything else on “weapons of mass destruction”.I was wondering if the fact that the reasons for going to war were all wrong (this is my opinion and I’m stating it) would make a difference to your beliefs .Nowhere in the mail had I attacked you personally. (I understand that would qualify as hate mail).You could have answered me politely or simply ignored me.You are definitely free to write what you want, but if you cant differentiate between hate mail and a simple question , then you have work to do.

dilute, here is the deal - if you were really looking for my opinion, you could simply ask for it. I would have gladly replied. Instead, you had already made up your mind about something and you were already coming in convinced I am wrong. At that point, there is no debate - you were simply trying to score points off of me. That is not a simple question, but a hate mail disguised as one.

I wonder how you would feel if Iraq voted democratically for a radical Islamic government that advocated that womn wear Burkhas at all time and adulteres be stoned in the street. I think the Bush administration has the same dilema in Paletsine - they advocated democracy, freedom and liberty - well the people appreciated it and voted in aradical government - so what can tehy do about it now - it was democratic, the election were fair and the people’s madate was clear.

You are not paying $2.20 in the pump because of Iraqi oil, you are paying that amount because of limited refinery capacity and alo because the oil companies know they can squeeze you some more. Don’t you find it ironic that Exoon Mobil today posted the highest profit ever for any company in the US and you are paying $2.20 at the pump..hmm..I wonder if there is a relationship there?

Ck, I personally feel like if Iraqis want a fundamentalist government and they vote into power then it is their problem. They need to experiment with democracy and they need to figure that part out. They no longer have (major) obstacles in that process and I am happy about that. I guess it is about equality of opportunity (something that gets said a lot in discussions of affirmative action) - not equality of outcome.

As for the pump, I was being simplistic when I talked about the high prices. It is a sellers’ market and every oil company is going to stretch the consumer as far as they can - just like any other seller in any business. I just don’t agree that it is somehow obvious that since there are no WMDs, the Iraqi war was all about the Oil. It takes quite a bit of a leap of logic to think that.

Well Bush and Co. don’t agree with your personal point of view. They not only want a democratic system but they also want the people to elect a government which they ‘like’ - this whole thing is going to backfire on them big time. In the past at least they could say that Iraq was ruled by a brutal dictator - what are they going to say now - they can harld go around institutuing regime change if the govt. was democratically elected though they have done that in the past.

As regards Oil, I never heard Bush or anybody else for that matter say that they were going into Iraq for any other reason other than WMDs. There was no case made for removing a dictator (it would be a tough sell given all the dictators they have happily tolerated and even supported in the past). If you look at the troop movements in Iraq - they all headed straight to the oil wells. After the bombings there was no immediate attempt to restore electricity, water or sewage but Oil was flowing only weeks after the invasion. It is enough to make any rational person wonder if perhaps this was in fact all about the Oil.

If it is about the Oil then don’t hide behind it but say we need to Oil to keep the US functioning. Oil is the life blood of the US economy and impacts every single aspect of life so I don’t know why they are shying away from clearly saying - “look we can’t survive without Oil - we need to secure a constatn source of oil to secure our future.” In which case I would have said fine I understand - but instead they tried to cover it up with this false veil of freedom and democracy and liberation whcih I just don’t buy and looks like neither do the Iraqi people.

The US has in the past shown absolutely no signs that they are troubled doing business with brutal dictatorships - just look at the cosy realtionship they have with the House of Saud - so I’m sorry that I just don’t buy the fact that one day they woke up and said “oh it looks like the Iraqi people are opressed - lets free them” when they themselves sold Saddam most of his tools for opression in the past.

Well, Ck - frankly, I don’t give a damn what “Bush & Co.” think. My opinions about the war have always been my opinions and not based on what “Bush & Co” thought. Even with them, if you look at the resolution drawn out by the Congress when they authorized force in Iraq and Bush’s SOTU leading up to the war, there were many reasons cited along with the WMDs. If the media chose to focus on the WMDs, I am not going to blame anyone else for that. I actually recall doomsday scenarios all over Rediff (that “Bush & Co. mouthpiece) that predicted Saddam unleashing his WMD and killing thousands of people.

As for protecting the oil sites, you do remember what Saddam did in Kuwait in the last Gulf war, right? Anyone who has seen that would assume that Saddam’s retaliation would be to first set fire to the wells, which would be an extremely awful environment disaster. Until you can show me positive proof about how Bush is using Iraqi oil for anything other rebuilding Iraq, you are not going to sell me that. Sorry!

Could you please not over react ? Just because I’ve made up my mind(or so you think), and am asking you if you had anything different to say, doesnt mean I’m sending you a hate mail or a disguised hate mail. Your responses have been hostile enough , though.As for “scoring points”-I can only gape with disbelief ! For the last and FINAL time, the mail was NOT a hate mail.

Dilute, you are an anonymous emailer emailing me suggesting that I somehow stopped writing about something as soon as it was “obvious” (in your opinion) that I was wrong, thereby impugning on my integrity. You are saying I am the hostile one? I am over reacting?

Now you are saying that the Oil wells were protected because the US cares so much about the environment in the middle-east.

Iraqi Oil for rebuilding Iraq - fascinating. Let me explain the strategy to you. First you bomb all the facilities (except the oil pipelines - those are too valuable). Then you invade and take over the country. Then you sole source the contracts (no open bidding in the market to get the lowest price - no that’s something only reserved for projects in the US) to all your favorite contractors who happily rebuild all the facilities and make enormous profits (check the balance sheets of those contractors). The contractors are of course rebuilding Iraq so naturally they are paid with the profits from Oil sales which conveniently are to the US. Its a beautiful scheme where everybody except the Iraqi people benefit while the politicians and the contractors laugh all the way to the bank. And of course they have poor gullible people like you believing that this is done to safe guard the environment.
C’mon you are less gullible than that - learn to think for yourself.

Ck, you would make a lot more sense if US didn’t sink $80 billion of their own tax-payer dollars into rebuilding Iraq. Here is an interesting link - key graf being - “Though the country has the world’s third-largest proven oil reserves, it suffers from frequent gas shortages and often must import fuel because its refining capacity is so low.”

Wow! That must be a lot of oil sales and tons of profit if a country cannot even provide enough oil to run itself!

Last thing - just because I don’t necessarily have a jaundiced view of everything doesn’t mean I am gullible.

That’s why the scheme is so brilliant. $80 billion of tax payer money is used to rebuild Iraq. The contracts for the rebuilding are given exclusively to US contractors (who by the way charge exorbitant sums of money because there is no competition and contracts are resigned no matter what they do). The contracting companies then make huge profits back in the US. So if you look at it, its a brilliant scheme to channel your hard earned tax dollars into the hands of contractors.

I didn’t get what you meant by your last line starting with “wow….” What has Iraq’s low refining capacity got to do with oil profits. Did you stop and consider how it is that when Iraqi oil is flowing unfettered into the oil tankers to be shipped to the US for refining, you continue to pay $2.20 at the pump the very same year that the oil companies post the largest profits ever in the history of their operation. Stop and consider where your money is going - its not going to the Iraqis who own the oil because they’re selling oil at low low prices - selling being use in the widest possible sense, the oil is just basically being shipped out in unprecedented quantities and I’m not sure the current Iraqi govt. is keeping track

This is not a jaundiced view - look at the facts at hand
- Sole source US only contracts
- No competitive bidding
- Huge gains in the stock prices for these contractors
- Oil drilling rights given exclusively to US owned companies
- Huge profits for the oil companies
- Continued high gas prices

I’m not taking a jaundiced view - just looking at the facts at hand - when you add them all up they point in only one direction and it definitely is not your hypothesis that it was done to ‘protect’ the environment and ‘liberate’ the Iraqi people.

Ck, US taxpayer money is not Iraqi oil money - they are two separate things, so I don’t see how even if you assume the “no-bid” contractors are ripping off US tax-payer money how that translates into war for oil. As for no-bid contracts, they have been going on to KBR (Halliburton) for a while now, Clinton’s Yugoslavia war and the recent Katrina disaster rebuilding being some examples - were these two for oil too?

Iraqi oil is not flowing unfettered when the country cannot keep itself supplied - when the oil pipelines are being hit again and again by insurgents - read the article linked. Can you show me a single link about how much Iraqi oil is being refined in the US? Till you give me any factual evidence of the companies actually making money off of Iraqi oil, how should I simply take a bunch of circumstantial evidence and come up with a conspiracy theory?

Remember, just because some things are happening together, it doesn’t mean they are all related. Show me the proof I have been asking for and I will agree - just saying that oil companies are posting profits and people are paying extra money at the pump (there is your reason for profit without involving Iraqi oil) doesn’t mean there was a war for oil.

Shanti here are some things you should understand about the oil markets.
1. Crude oil in itself is not very useful - it is an interim product which only has value because it can be refined into petrol, diesel or other products.

2. Oil work like money on the global market by that I mean is if I wire you $100 today, it does not mean that my bank physically takes a crisp $100 bill from my vault and mailt it to you. It just means that my bank makes an adjustment on paper with your bank and your account is credited. The Oil market works in the same way. Oil is bought from a large pool contributed to by OPEC countires - so whne you buy oil, you are actually buying from that pool - so physically oil from a particular country may never reach your refineries but an increase or decrease in their product will affect your bottom line. The US refines about 655,000 barrels/day of oil from Iraq. Please see this link http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/rankings/crudebycountry.htm

You will notice that Iran is not amongst the countries from whom the US imports oil - yet they are deathly afraid that Iran will scale back supply. THat is because this will affect the Oil pool which will cause countries like India and China to start buying oil fro US suppliers.

Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world. The Oil companies are in fact making huge sums of money off Iraqi oil and the part that you do not understand is that Iraqi oil does not even need to come to the US for them to do that - it just has to go on sale in the Oil Pool - prices will instantly drop. However of late these price decreases have not been passed on to you the consumer.

So there are low prices of oil, and you are still paying $2.20 at the pump and the Oil industry is making record profits - do you still not get the link between these events? If you still don’t get it then I am sorry but perhaps you should have an energy consultant explain how the oil market works.

Things are not are simple as you seem to make out and you really need to dig deeper and first understand the mechanisms at work. This not behind the scenese conspiracy theory stuff. Do a little research. Here’s a project for you
You are paying $2.20 at the pump. Can you break down where your $2.20 is actually going. What is paid for the crude, what is transport, what % in refining and the gas stations profit margin and finally how much of your $2.20 goes to the oil company as profit. If you break down the number as in this article
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-exxon31jan31,0,5345162.story?coll=la-home-business
Exxon Mobil made a profit of $36.1 billion dollars in 2005 or as the article says about $116 million a day!

Ck, thanks for the exposition - you do realize that there was more Iraqi oil in the “pool” during Saddam’s regime than now, don’t you? By your logic, if it was for oil, the US was better off without the war…hmmm…

As for Exxon’s profits, refining costs, etc. all you are telling me is that the oil companies are fleecing the US consumers. You are still not making a case for me why the President is fighting a highly unpopular and putting all on line for something that could have been achieved without it. Why?

Whoopsa-Daisy - look who is back pedaling furiously now- guess he got a harsh talking to from Big Oil and by the looks of it the House of Saud. I guess he wanted to make sure that people like you ‘understand’


… (Bush) pledged to “move beyond a petroleum-based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.” Not exactly, though, it turns out.

“This was purely an example,” Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said. He said the broad goal was to displace foreign oil imports, from anywhere, with domestic alternatives. He acknowledged that oil is a freely traded commodity bought and sold globally by private firms. Consequently, it would be very difficult to reduce imports from any single region, especially the most oil-rich region on Earth.

Asked why the president used the words “the Middle East” when he didn’t really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that “every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands.”

Fine - but totally unrelated to the topic at hand, wasn’t it! Personally, I would prefer the entire world out of the death grip of the OPEC countries and the ME. Hopefully, the country will wake up someday and realize they need to be energy-independent.

Shanti,

I trade Crude for a living and there is one thing you have to also realise. Iraq has the potential along with Iran to have the largest untapped reserves of Crude in the world. We currently have enough crude around to keep us all happy, thats not why Oil is where it is. Its where it is because there are not enough refineries to crack the crude as explained before. Iraq and Iran are natural targets for the US and co to keep a hold of the cleaner crude when we really start running out. The war on Iraq was entirely motivated by Oil. Why does no one target China? Its undemocratic to the core. Why, because they would whoop some serious ass.
Its really not that hard to think about this. I am not saying Sadam was a better option but the motives were less than pure and now the US is, well in real sheet.

you want a hate mail???

u seem to be so americanized..trying to read evrything as a hate mail..and then declarin a war..

if u support iraq ppl voting a fundamentalist govt and say that they r free to do what they want, then maybe iraq wanted a saddam after all..who says ppl do not want a dictator (if they can vote for a stupid govt, they cannot not want a dictator)?..why does Uncle Sam have to interfere evrywhere?

ironic tht ur name/whatever is shanti..plz remove it..it is disgusting that u use it

[translation: I am a typical Desi idiot who cannot see beyond my own prejudices and consider Americanized a bad thing since I am such a pure-hearted patriot! I consider it my mission on earth to tell people what to do and what not and go around hating (yeah, really!) people I randomly find on the internet. I really need to get out more and get laid.]

Please do get laid…or fall on your knees and beg for a long overdue nocturnal emission. I do not really know if it will do you any good but it may save you from being shushed by Shanti in here.

I don’t understand.
How is what he wrote to you a hate mail?

He was simply stating what has happened since 2003 and asking for your thoughts.

I don’t know any of you..but I just didn’t get the whole hate mail thing.

I really do think you should all give “shanti” a break, this person (sorry to be vague, im not sure of your sex, im not a regular reader) Is just stating their OWN personal opinion,
You Know, FREEDOM OF SPEECH.. Which is what originated in this conversation (The point: Shanti thinks it’s fantastic about the War because the Iraq people who may i add haven’t done anything wrong they are just citizens will have freedom of speech, freedom to complain… TO FEEL.) So if you don’t like the views shanti have expressed, leave SHANTI’S site, and go and express what you want on some crappy site with all redneck americans saying Hail Bush! If you do however have something worthwhile (and i dont mean that in a nasty way, just, more “persuasive” speaking, rather than “protest” speaking, please say what you feel, and let shanti reply without, getting all fired up and saying something really…. STUPID. People just want to bully on the internet… I doubt any of you would have the courage to say all of this to someones face.

Just Chill! Let people have their own idea.. Dont force yours on them

Good one…….. Ck….. and thanks Shanti…….. but for your replies (more of sound, less of substance) Ck would not have spoken so much….

Arvind, could you elaborate on your points a little bit? Or are you just in love with your own words?

1) That wasn’t a hate mail and hence any reply assuming it to be a hate mail, is plain noise.

2)If you think that the war was to spread democracy, there cannot be a bigger canard than that. Atleast there is a circumstantial evidence for the war-for-oil theory. Not for the democracy one. Else why isn’t it attacking North Korea and a host of CIS and African nations and why is Pakistan major non-Nato ally. When you say it was about freedom it just sounds like Bush’s speech….. All sound, no facts.

3) If you are waiting for proofs and not circumstantial evidences, then forget it. You are never going to get it from a govt that lies and forges documents. Even if the documents are declassified after many decades. And if you can’t expect media to provide you, a media which has invented innovative concepts like embedded journalism.

4) And lastly, please don’t decide with what form govts should iraqis or for that matter anyone, should experiment. You can suggest, but not force. And if all that you want is “the entire world out of the death grip of the OPEC countries and the ME”, then find alternative sources of energy, cut down extravagant use of oil. But don’t bomb and rob.

Funny - if my post was noise, what is a reply to noise? Even more noise?

Canards, whatever! There is atleast solid proof that Iraq is turning democratic - see all the elections they have been able to hold - can you show me something similar to prove the oil theory? Who has got facts and who is making empty noise here?

The issue is not whether Iraq is turning democratic or not, but unjustified and illegal use of force.

And as for the oil theory is concerned, it has already been well discussed here and no point in pressing the discussion further when you choose to look the other way. If the way the contracts are given are not a proof enough, then nothing else would be. What proofs do you expect? That the President admit in his next SOTU that he invaded Iraq for oil?

Gosh, I don’t know about you but I do get tired of people repeating themselves louder and louder and hope that it will make up for the lack of facts.

If you haven’t read my reasons for supporting the war - which had nothing to do with what the US wanted btw - then it is your problem. I am satisfied with how everything fits because of my reasons, so I will not repreat myself.

As for the “way contracts were given out”, please explain again what about it - I don’t want vague accusations and “circumstantial evidence”.

Such anger in response to a simple mail? Disguised as what? Chill dear. You are stressing yourself out too much :beam: