Great news! As of this past week or so, for the first time oil production in Iraq has exceeded what it was under Saddam Hussein before the US invaded, a whopping 2.3 million
barrels per day!! For a country with the world's second largest oil reserves, this is a great achievement!!! Clearly, our goal there has been achieved, so now our troops can come home!!!
It's at times like these that I turn to the words of the famous Gertrude Himmelfarb:
ReplyDelete"Liberty too can corrupt, and absolute liberty can corrupt absolutely."
Pity her son (William Kristol) didn't listen to her. (Such is the fate of mothers. Sigh.)
brenda,
ReplyDeleteDear old Gertrude. Hard to beat her for irony. She deserves her son.
Regarding the great achievement of Iraq, I note that while it is second in oil reserves it is currently about 12th in production in the world, with those ahead of it being the following in rough order (and with Nigeria just behind it):
Russia
Saudi Arabia
USA
Iran
China
Norway
Mexico
Canada
UAE
Kuwait
Venezuela.
So, more glory to the great achievement of current Iraqi oil production!!!!!
Barkley
You know Gertrude Himmelfarb, Barkley?
ReplyDeleteTo those who suffered my outbreak of quotations yesterday. I was reading Dr Laurence J Peter's 1976 book entitled 'The Peter Plan'. This publication has two quotations per page, usually spoken or written by American cultural leaders of the 1970s. I spent the afternoon attempting to find out who these people were.
I have a reasonably large collection of 1970s books warning of the calamities the world was expected to face in the early 21st Century if immediate change was not implemented. Peak oil, climate change, oil wars, food and water scarcity and so on.
Dr Peters has an Author's Note at the bottom of the first page of Chapter 1 (in the book referred to above) in which he says:
..I have continued to investigate incompetence during my residence in several American cities. If you were to ask me why I have persisted in my pursuit of incompetence, I could only give you Sir George Mallory's instinctive reply, "Because it is there." I presently live in Los Angeles, California, so that (Peter's imaginary) Excelsior City now encompasses much more than my birthplace.
"His great ambition was to escape civilization, and as soon as he had money he went to Southern California." Alva Johnston
Given the importance of Barkley's alarm about the current Iraq war quagmire, perhaps I should have first quoted President George Bush Sr from the early 1990s. He spoke these words in the middle of the previous Iraq war:
The American way of life is not negotiable.
The film about peak oil last night gave witness to Bush Sr saying this in his address to the American nation. Shortly after it showed him enjoying a typical western leisure pursuit - ripping around in his speedboat.
brenda,
ReplyDeleteWhile it is true that I have known Paul Wolfowitz, I have never met any of the Kristols. Only know their work by reading it or of it.
William Kristol's parents are arguably as much the founders of the US neocon movement as anybody, Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb. They met at a Trotskyist rally in 1942, but by the 1960s had rather different views, with Irving founding the neocon mouthpiece, The Public Interest (now defunct), while having edited Commentary earlier. He continues to hold a position at the American Enterprise Institute. William is very much the son of both of his parents.
Barkley