Letters

OIL--A REFINED IRAQ SCHEME

Los Osos, Calif.

In his review of Christian Parenti's The Freedom and other books ["Because We Could," Nov. 8], Andrew Cockburn takes issue with Parenti's thesis that we went into Iraq to make "US military might...the sole security arbiter upon which all advanced economies are dependent" and that "securing the Middle East and its oil reserves would give America important political leverage over the EU and East Asia." Cockburn's preferred explanation: Dick Cheney wanted to keep his Halliburton pension rolling in. In view of the fact that since 1992 the Project for the New American Century--Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, James Woolsey, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, John Bolton, "Scooter" Libby, Zalmay Khalilzad, et al.--has advocated a military posture capable of, in their words, "deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role" and military intervention in Iraq to assure "access to vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil" and that this doctrine, once its authors ascended to power, was codified into the National Security Strategy, yes, I think we can safely postulate at least this once, without Cockburn's fear of delving into "wonkery," that this nation acted "for reasons of foreign policy." He might best think of it as his own theory of all governments‚ international actions "motivated by exigencies of domestic politics and/or squalid personal greed" writ large.

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