[lbo-talk] Crossing the Rubicon

[Jon Johanning]

Well, I still think a 700-page book is too much for me to spend time 
plowing through, especially if the style of the chapter sample is 
typical of it. I would still like to see someone boil it down to an 
"executive summary" of a couple of pages. This guy Ruppert sounds to me 
like someone who is too much in love with the sound of his own voice, 
or the look of his words. He needs a really brutal editor.

I gather that his essential point is that most of the Bush 
administration, led by Cheney, deliberately set up a situation in which 
they allowed the 9/11 thing to go through in order to have a pretext 
for waging wars in the Middle East to grab all the oil and solve their 
"peak oil" problem. If that's his argument, I have a few questions 
about it.

In the first place, I don't think they needed something on the scale of 
9/11 to start a war. They could have eased into it with a few missile 
strikes, stepping up the flights over Iraq they were already carrying 
out, and then faking a Gulf of Tonkin sort of incident or two. In other 
words, the argument that the situation was so bad for the leaders of 
U.S. capitalism that they had to slaughter 3000 folks, or stand by and 
watch them being slaughtered doesn't convince me.

Also, the fact is that the major oil companies are already adapting to 
"peak oil" by investing pretty heavily in solar, wind, hydrogen, etc., 
technologies, so that they will be ready when the price of oil gets 
high enough to make them practical. My view of big corporations is that 
starting wars is not necessarily their preferable modus operandi -- 
shifting technologies is a lot more advantageous for them most of the 
time.

Thirdly, Ruppert apparently still hasn't figured out the details of his 
alleged grand plot, which makes his theory not particularly convincing. 
The Kennedy assassination buffs had the same problem, in my opinion. 
They spent decades poring over the frames of the Zapruder film, poking 
pin-holes in the Warren report, and muttering about the grassy knoll, 
but never really managed to display a complete picture of their 
supposed plot -- who did it, and what specifically they did. So maybe 
there was some devious conspiracy to kill Kennedy, but who knows?

Similarly, Ruppert says so much "evidence" about 9/11 was destroyed 
that we might never know what really happened. If so, all we can say is 
that he might have a hell of a good plot for a movie, but who knows if 
it's true?

Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org
__________________________________
A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You 
should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest 
and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax