Joe W.
>From : Jon Johanning <jjohanning at igc.org>
Reply-To : lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Sent : Tuesday, October 19, 2004 11:14 AM
To : lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Subject : Re: [lbo-talk] Crossing the Rubicon
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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