Now here is GOP presidential candidate John McCain "clarifying" his remarks about saying that the U.S. war in Iraq was not really about oil. From CNN.Com:
PHOENIX, Arizona (AP) -- Republican Sen. John McCain has been forced to clarify his comments suggesting the Iraq war involved U.S. reliance on foreign oil. He said he was talking about the first Gulf War and not the current conflict.
At issue was a comment he made at a town hall-style meeting Friday morning in Denver, Colorado.
"My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East," McCain said.
The presumptive GOP nominee sought to clarify his remarks later Friday after his campaign plane landed in Phoenix. He said he didn't mean the U.S. went to war in Iraq five years ago over oil.
"No, no, I was talking about that we had fought the Gulf War for several reasons," McCain told reporters.
One reason was Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, he said. "But also we didn't want him to have control over the oil, and that part of the world is critical to us because of our dependency on foreign oil, and it's more important than any other part of the world," he said.
"If the word `again' was misconstrued, I want us to remove our dependency on foreign oil for national security reasons, and that's all I mean," McCain said.
"The Congressional Record is very clear: I said we went to war in Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction."
Excuse me Johnny Boy--which gulf war did the U.S. go to war in Iraq for oil? Are you saying that the U.S. went to war with Iraq in the First Gulf War because of oil? I thought that the U.S. went to war with Iraq in the First Gulf War to remove the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. Now you are saying that the First Gulf War is really about oil, speaking before a Denver town hall audience while we are currently engaged in the second Iraq War--but you are not talking about the secondIraq War that we are currently engaged in, but rather the First Gulf War in which we removed Iraq from Kuwait. And both gulf wars were apparently not about oil, and yet you are saying that the First Gulf War was really about oil--even though that war ended 17 years ago.
What a frickin' liar you are.
The real irony here is that John McCain was telling the truth in that Denver town hall meeting--both U.S. wars with Iraq are really about the control of oil. In the First Gulf War, the U.S. evicted Iraq from Kuwait in order to keep the Kuwaiti oil fields out of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's control. With this current Iraq War, the unspoken reason for the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been for the U.S. to maintain control of the Iraqi oil fields under the puppet Iraqi government. There is no other reason for the U.S. to maintain a military presence in Iraq except for the oil fields there.
Unfortunately, this truthful reason conflicts with the McCain campaign's political spin. The last thing the McCain campaign wants is to admit that the U.S. went to war in Iraq for oil--especially considering how the price of oil has exploded since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. You don't want to admit to the American voters, who are suffering under $4.00 a gallon gas prices, that the U.S. went to war for the benefit of Big Oils' excessive profits. So the McCain campaign has to lie to the American voters, continuing the Bush administration's ridiculous spin that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was to remove Saddam's non-existent WMD program, or to remove al Qaeda from Iraq. What is even more amazing is that John McCain lies about Iraq with such impunity, knowing that the corporate media will not call him out on this issue. What I have to wonder is will the American public continue to buy into these McCain lies about continuing the U.S. war in Iraq for another 100 years, or will they demand a U.S. pullout of Iraq by removing the Republican Party from the White House?
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