Wilkerson

Gotta watch the Daily Show

The fake news teaches us more than the real news. Take Stewart's clips of former Secretary of State Colin Powell's former deputy, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, broadcast on the Wednesday 10/26 edition of the Daily Show. Where else could a big section of the general public become informed of Wilkerson's angry dissent from Bush administration policy given in a talk on October 19? (Video/audio links here, transcript here, additional links here, excerpts from follow-up oped piece here)

Many candid bombshells dropped in Wilkerson's speech, for example, former Pentagon Policy planner, neocon Doug Feith, was ``the dumbest man I ever knew...'' and Feith got to ``tell the State Department to screw itself in a closet....'' Go download and listen to the actual speech to get the full flavor.

I just wanted to point out some insights Wilkerson communicated, mainly in the q&a portion of the October 19 program. At one point during the speech, Wilkerson gave this provocative remark:

We can’t leave Iraq. We simply can’t. I can make that case. No one in this administration has made that case. They have simply pontificated. That’s all they’ve done. Now, I’m not evaluating the decision to go to war. That’s a different matter. But we’re there, we’ve done it, and we cannot leave. I would submit to you that if we leave precipitously or we leave in a way that doesn’t leave something there we can trust, if we do that, we will mobilize the nation, put 5 million men and women under arms and go back and take the Middle East within a decade. That’s what we’ll have to do.

Later in the q&a, Wilkerson explains one of the reasons this is true:

The other thing that no one ever likes to talk about is SUVs and oil and consumption and, as one little girl said yesterday at the Yoshiyama Awards, do you know that we consume 60 percent of the world’s resources? We do; we consume 60 percent of the world’s resources. Well, we have an economy and we have a society that is built on the consumption of those resources. We better get fast at work changing the foundation – and I don’t see us fast at work on that, by the way, another failure of this administration, in my mind – or we better be ready to take those assets. We had a discussion in policy planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields in the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N. trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly. That’s how serious we thought about it.

If you want those resources and you want governments that aren’t inimical to your interests with regard to those resources, then you better pay attention to the area and you better not leave it in a mess. Now, people will say, maybe you, well, it won’t be a mess that they won’t handle themselves in the area. I don’t trust that to be a good outcome.

Wow. That's the most candid policy statement you are likely to hear directly from a high-level planner. Despite Wilkerson's care in explaining oil field seizure would occur under international auspices, neocon policy planning would have envisioned no such thing. Furthermore, even if the UN was to be involved, the US would exert far greater control than anyone else. So original Deep Blade Analysis concerning the background motivations behind the Iraq war is confirmed by Wilkerson's remarks.