In about 14 hours I'll be on a plane back home.

I've kept up with a lot of war news from CNN thats on a lot of TVs at the guest houses here. I've thought a bit about oil and how criminal it is, from a certain point of view. Its a terrible misinterpretation of land ownership rights. something monitarily valuable is just sitting in the ground and if you 'own' the land above the well of oil, you just pump it out and sell it to other people. i feel they have no right to do that. ARCO with deep-sea oil rigs, just sitting out there in international waters, taking as much oil as they please and getting as rich as they like. gas works really well for doing mechanical work if you have to be portable like a car or lawn mower, so the market is just huge. i wonder if the market is still growing. anyways Bush Sr. struck oil in texas while he was still a young man and the family fortune is based on that. Dig a hole and sell the earth to its own inhabitants. i suppose the miners are doing the same thing, but i doubt the profit margin is nearly as high. i need to buy a deep-sea oil well.

what if the primary reason for the iraq war is so that US oil companies can get dynasty-sized oil deals with the 'new government'. The new iraqi government is setup with iraqis but oh yeah those oil wells, well to cover our costs you're gonna have to honor this contract where exxon gets the first 10 million barrels a day at $5/barrel for the next 50 years. We can cover up the real reason with human rights atrocities and weapons of mass destruction, of which there are shreds of real value. the people in power can rationalize whats happening because some of the attrocities are real. but real soldiers are dieing. sons and daughters. a full scale invasion of an entire country seems like the act of trying to own that country. how does bombed cities make our temporary iraqi government more powerful or more legitimate? democracy has to come from the inside. so maybe it makes sense to 'arm the rebels' and give them the resources they need to have a civil war. i seem to remember that not going well in central america.

I dont think this war is worth a single coalition soldier's life. protecting your own country from invasion, that could be worth lives as some iraqis would agree. being a world cop and stopping an invasion from say north korea into japan or germany into france, that might be worth lives. the human rights violations and U.N. violations by the iraqi government are not worth a single coalition soldier's life who is told he is going in there to free the iraqi people and protect other countries from invasion.