Newsweek’s recent interview with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin — now John McCain’s running mate — suggests Gov. Palin believes the war in Iraq could have been avoided, if only America had allowed more oil drilling in Alaska. Here’s an excerpt from the interview with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo:
BARTIROMO: How important is drilling in Alaska to ease the burden of high oil prices on Americans?
PALIN: Not only to ease the high prices of oil in America but also for national security reasons. Drilling in Alaska is going to be a matter of life and death. Up here in Alaska, we’re bursting with billions of barrels of oil that are warehoused underground. We have to pump and feed our hungry markets instead of relying on the foreign sources of energy.
And, later in the same interview:
BARTIROMO: Some people might say: “Look, even though opening up ANWR has been a symbolic issue for Republicans, the oil there may only have a marginal effect on reducing overseas dependence. Why is ANWR so important and how do we know that there’s actually enough oil there to really make a difference?
PALIN: Because just that swath of land in that refuge alone is estimated to hold about 11 billion barrels of oil and 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. And those are just the areas that have been explored. That’s about a year and a half worth of U.S. oil consumption and many months of natural gas. It’s about a trillion dollars worth of energy. And that’s—again—just that sliver of ANWR. So when we hear, “Well, maybe there isn’t enough,” or “Well, it’s too late to drill now anyway, we should have done this five, 10 years ago,” hey, I can’t argue that. I say yeah, we should have done that years ago. But better to start that drilling today than wait and continue relying on foreign sources of energy. We are a nation at war and in many [ways] the reasons for war are fights over energy sources, which is nonsensical when you consider that domestically we have the supplies ready to go.
Palin believes the war in Iraq is a fight “over energy souces”. In other words, Palin doesn’t believe the lies her party’s leaders sold to the American people to justify that war – the lie, for example, that America overthrew Saddam Hussein to stop “the terrorists,” or to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
Palin also apparantly believes that America’s war in Iraq wouldn’t have been necessary — in other words, more than 4,000 American soldiers who volunteered to fight for their country would still be alive today, many thousands more wouldn’t be wounded, and hundreds of billions of dollars would be available for tax reductions, education, health care, etc – if only America had been willing to tap the awesome oil-keg of Alaska.
It’s absolutely mind-boggling that a person with such cynical beliefs about why her party took this country to war could proudly run as that party’s vice-presidential nominee. Make no mistake: Palin is basically admitting she knows the whole “central front in the war on terror” talk about Iraq is pure marketing, aimed solely at the gullible rank-and-file of the Republican Party who swallow any rationale that’s served up to them.
McCain said something similar once, perhaps in a rare moment of “straight talk:”
PHOENIX – Republican John McCain was forced to clarify his comments Friday 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.
“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 expected GOP nominee sought to clarify his comments later, 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,” he said.
McCain breifly admitted that America went to war in Iraq over oil, and then he had to retract his statement in a way that made him seem like either a liar or a confused old man. Can patriotic Americas force Palin to issue the same retraction?
More importantly, consider all the Americans who believed the lies about why the neoconservatives wanted this war. If they all voted Democrat this time around, Obama would win by a landslide.