Chris Abraham

Says a journalist in an actual missive, “I was talking with a retired US general the other day…”

What follows is an actual conversation from an undisclosed location between an unnamed journalist and an unnamed retired general:

“What the fuck! This war in Iraq is a special forces war,” says a retired general, “we can prosecute this whole war with a small force of special forces operatives. A big occupying army does absolutely nothing to help us move ahead. It just presents a huge fucking target, militarily and politically, and pisses off the locals. Within the context of winning the war in Iraq, there is no reason to have any non-special forces troops there.”

So the journalist asks, “Uh, why are they there then?”

“Well,” replies the retired general, “because it scares the Iranians, and because we can just storm across the border, ready to go, all pumped and primed from the experience in Iraq.”

And the journalist asks, “why do we want to invade Iran?”

“Well,” says the retired general, “partly because we, like everyone else in the world, don’t want Iran to have The Bomb. But more because we don’t want China having a nice secure oil source for their 9% growth rate. We want them to know we can choke them if they get unruly - it’s not the execution of a threat that is powerful, it’s your adversary’s knowledge that you could that is powerful.”

“And even moreso,” adds the retired general, “we want Iran to just stop even think about opening a Euro-based oil bourse. If oil started being traded in Euros, demand for the Dollar would plummet and along with that, its value, and the US would be fucked since it depends on borrowing to survive. That is the attack that would kill us - no dirty nuke or anthrax would do more than inconvenience us a bit. A Euro oil bourse would sink the US like a tourniquet to the neck.”

“Frankly,” concludes the retired general, “those two reasons - Chinese wrapping up oil contracts, and the threat of a Euro-based oil bourse were the real reasons we were in such a rush to invade Iraq. With the war, all the Chinese contracts disappeared, and the potential for a Euro oil bourse evaporated.”