Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Colin Brace wrote:
>
> >Doug, you argued vehemently against this idea some weeks ago. Still
> >think it is unthinkable?
>
> I suppose anything's possible but it just doesn't make sense to me.
> How can you control a country in a civil war? How can you produce and
> export oil when all around things are blowing up? How can you gain
> propaganda victories when it looks like you've unleashed a shitstorm?
> It doesn't seem like a rational imperial policy - but it must be
> conceded that the imperium isn't being run by rational people right
> now.
My feeling, which I'll make a prediction, is that the people running the imperium right now are as rational as any set of imperium-masters can be, and that they wouldn't adopt this as a _strategy_ without some sense of consensus within the elite, ruling class, whatever.
A civil war would eventually become regularized (as do battles between crime families) and the oil would, more or less, flow, and through u.s. companies. And remember, the u.s. does not need the oil for domestic consumption, and the u.s. state has religiously guarded oil corporations' interests for well over a century -- there is no greater constant than that in u.s. foreign policy. Indonesian oil was probably the primary casus belli in 1941.
And control can be passive: i.e., it is sufficient to see that no other major power (let alone the imperial province at issue) can exercise unimpeded control.
Also: If the bases were for active control of Iraq, or merely an extension of tactics of keeping troops alive, wouldn't they be built where they would be of more use in exercising active control of a pacified Iraq?
We won't _know_ the answers to these questions for many years, but as a basis for strategic thinking within the anti-war movement (including building anti-imperialist sentiment within that movement) the "Brightman Hypothesis" seems the most promising.
Carrol