Grandma Millie, Revisited

Yesterday, the blogger mcsnee noted that the Bush administration’s lack of diplomatic efforts to stop the current conflict between Israel and Palestine is influenced by the President’s adherence to an apocalyptic form of conservative Christianity. And this is no doubt a big part of what is going on. But we can’t discount the power of the almighty dollar.

Consider that President Cheney and his second in command have largely ignored this conflict for the six years they have been in office, recently coming out in support of Israel. This not only rolls back eight years of careful and quite successful diplomacy by the Clinton administration, it also adds fuel to the fire of political instability in the region. This is particularly rankling to Iran, which funds Hezbollah, the pro-Palestinian militia group based in Lebanon and which the Israeli army has recently invaded Lebanon to in order to combat. Cheney and Bush were also responsible for the war in Iraq, a conflict ginned up by Cheney when he was still at Halliburton and strongly pushed by him and a proxy intelligence group he had installed at the Pentagon when he got into office.

Then consider this: the always jittery commodities market, which is sustained and energized by speculation, has responded to these crises by raising the price of oil to record highs. It peaked last night at over $78 a barrel. Note that this price is not based on any real crimp in supply, aside from a pipeline bombing in Nigeria, part of a separate regional conflict. Therefore, all of that run up in the price of oil is pure profit to the oil companies, companies that have close ties to both Cheney and Bush. And while they both moved assets into “blind trusts” when they got back into office, the family fortunes of these men, and the fortunes of their friends, are still very much bound up with the price of oil. They have a vested interest in political instability in the Middle East. Their policies have amounted to doing on the world stage what Enron did in the U.S.: they create crises in order to make money off the misery of others and the twitchiness of market speculation.

To make matters worse, due to term limits, Cheney and his Puppet-In-Chief are essentially politically untouchable. They don’t need to get re-elected in 2008. They are basically accountable to no one. The American people could turn all the Republicans who are running in the fall out of office and it would not make a bit of difference to the White House. Cheney and Bush can hold the entire American economy hostage through Big Oil, and, short of impeachment, there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

And it really won’t matter to Cheney and Bush if the American economy tanks due to increased energy costs. By then they will be out of office, no doubt working as lobbyists for the oil companies, making lucrative deals with the governments of China and India.

I suppose the Cheney/Bush administration could resort to diplomacy to stop the crisis, but, perhaps for reasons detailed above, it has no desire to do so. And one wonders if it would be capable even if it wanted to. American foreign policy of the last half decade has consisted of the Secretary of State saying something “firm” about the nations involved followed by Dick Cheney threatening to bomb them the next Sunday on the morning talk shows. It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence as the world becomes more in need of international caution and tact, but it sure has made a few people very, very rich.