reply to post by LateApexer313
Latte sweetie, ya know I love ya right back My ATS chat sweetie.
Okay, you've made some very valid points, but you went under several misconceptions there with what I did and did not say, but that's okay. We both
chatted after this post, and I'm just now replying after having gotten some sleep.
First off, every single President has had their hands deep in the Saudi's giant oil/money interests that's it's not funny, I just happened to pick
on the current idiot in office, the man residing the "Square Peg Goes Into the Round Hole Office", it's just that he was more obvious about it than
most, because his daddy is a Texas Oil man, and we all know it.
For anyone who cares to know a bit more about the intense and complicated relationship our Government has with the Saudi Government and their oil, I
strongly recommend a movie based on real events, and as a matter of fact the first couple of minutes talks specifically about the oil that was found
when they were in fact drilling for water.
I am referencing the movie only for those who are too lazy to read about the complexities of the Saudi's relationship with America, or those who have
not followed the newspaper stories all of their lives like I have. I do understand in fact that the Saudi people, King, Princes, and people living
under them in fact hate us as
infidels, but then again so does the vast majority of the Middle East, the difference is here is that the
Saudi's would rather keep us tied up into their lives, through sheer conveiniance of our American oil companies being there, as well as needing
troops to protect them, it makes things more and more complex for us as a nation and ties up our financial resources.
Second, another misperception I think you may be operating under, is that the American Government actually gives a damn about us as citizens, in that
they could have seized the oil and lowered our gas prices down to the 1980's prices of around a $1 a gallon, but there's far too many ramifications
to them doing this action. First off, it would cause more grief and toil in the Middle East due to the current situations between all the nations that
hate us and hate us being there and hate us for
interferring in all of their affairs. That is their perspective of course, and I can understand
it due to our foreign policy has generally always been to be wherever the money is, either through oil, or build up of troops and base housing etc, as
occupying foreign land takes money and corporations like Halliburton (I'm picking on them, like I picked on Bush) sign lucrative deals, and
manufacturing weapons, tanks, and or shipping them to those locations is very big money.
In fact it has become so much a cash cow, that most people do not realize just how more war is about money and the making of it are then it is about
the actual conflict with the exception to it being a population control issue where our politicians know soldiers will die in the interest of
serving their country and
doing their duty all in the name of patriotism.
For some light reading

I recommend strongly this book :
Blank Check: The
Pentagon's Black Budget
Amazon book review :
This expanded follow-up to Weiner's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1988 Philadelphia Inquirer series exposing the Pentagon's secret treasury offers a
comprehensive look at the origin and growth of this budget and the weapons and wars it has financed. Among the programs examined are the Stealth
bomber (an "impossibly expensive mistake") and a satellite system called MILSTAR which is central to the plan to "win" a nuclear war that will
already have been lost in the event of its activation. Weiner brings to light black-budgeted activities of a cadre of colonels, retired generals and
CIA agents, a virtual hidden army within the U.S. Army that "came close to hijacking a fair amount of power" during the Reagan years. This
hard-hitting expose of power out of control, immune from accountability, is well documented. It reveals how the executive office, the Pentagon and the
CIA have squandered billions of dollars on useless weapons and renegade foreign policies. First serial to Rolling Stone; BOMC alternate.
In this book based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles for the Philadelphia Inquirer , journalist Weiner probes the way the Pentagon has
used secret budgets to fund huge military programs. This has grown to the point that there are now more than 100 multimillion- and multibillion-dollar
weapons systems, many of them nuclear weapons designed to fight and win World Wars III and IV, built without the awareness of the public or even the
Congress. Weiner takes a close look at programs such as the Stealth bomber and provides fascinating detail from Congressional testimony. The thesis of
the book--that secrecy in government military programs is antithetical to democracy--is well documented and hugely important. As the Cold War draws to
a close and military budgets come under attack, the public and Congress may tend to forget the defense establishment's inclination toward secrecy and
self-perpetuation. Weiner's book serves as a timely reminder that this would be unwise. Highly recommended. - Jennifer Scarlott, World Policy Inst.,
New York
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
That's just the book on the black slush funds and moving around of American taxpayers money, not to mention the Pentagon as a lucrative business for
those know how to milk the cash cow through various ways and means. For a comical look at the effort through a fictional movie at just how corrupt
and to what effort the Pentagon brass will go to in order to keep the money flowing at all costs, I strongly recommend the movie
The Pentagon Wars and
while it is a fictional movie, it is a pretty good and reasonable look into the way the Pentagon works.
For more in depth look into the Pentagon and its infrastructure I recommend the book
The Pentagon's
New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century that talks about how the Military Industrial Complex essentially sees the need of intergating
the rest of the world into the system that is America.
Amazon book review :
This bold and important book strives to be a practical "strategy for a Second American Century." In this brilliantly argued work, Thomas Barnett
calls globalization "this country’s gift to history" and explains why its wide dissemination is critical to the security of not only America but
the entire world. As a senior military analyst for the U.S. Naval War College, Barnett is intimately familiar with the culture of the Pentagon and the
State Department (both of which he believes are due for significant overhauls). He explains how the Pentagon, still in shock at the rapid dissolution
of the once evil empire, spent the 1990s grasping for a long-term strategy to replace containment. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,
Barnett argues, revealed the gap between an outdated Cold War-era military and a radically different one needed to deal with emerging threats. He
believes that America is the prime mover in developing a "future worth creating" not because of its unrivaled capacity to wage war, but due to its
ability to ensure security around the world. Further, he believes that the U.S. has a moral responsibility to create a better world and the way he
proposes to do that is by bringing all nations into the fold of globalization, or what he calls connectedness. Eradicating disconnectedness,
therefore, is "the defining security task of our age." His stunning predictions of a U.S. annexation of much of Latin America and Canada within 50
years as well as an end to war in the foreseeable future guarantee that the book will be controversial. And that's good. The Pentagon's New Map
deserves to be widely discussed. Ultimately, however, the most impressive aspects of the book is not its revolutionary ideas but its overwhelming
optimism. Barnett wants the U.S. to pursue the dream of global peace with the same zeal that was applied to preventing global nuclear war with the
former Soviet Union. High-level civilian policy makers and top military leaders are already familiar with his vision of the future—this book is a
briefing for the rest of us and it cannot be ignored. --Shawn Carkonen
Barnett, professor at the U.S. Naval War College, takes a global perspective that integrates political, economic and military elements in a model for
the postâ€"September 11 world. Barnett argues that terrorism and globalization have combined to end the great-power model of war that has
developed over 400 years, since the Thirty Years War. Instead, he divides the world along binary lines. An increasingly expanding "Functioning Core"
of economically developed, politically stable states integrated into global systems is juxtaposed to a "Non-Integrating Gap," the most likely source
of threats to U.S. and international security. The "gap" incorporates Andean South America, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East,
Central Asia and much of southwest Asia. According to Barnett, these regions are dangerous because they are not yet integrated into globalism's
"core." Until that process is complete, they will continue to lash out. Barnett calls for a division of the U.S. armed forces into two separate
parts. One will be a quick-strike military suppressing hostile governments and nongovernment entities.
[edit on 5-7-2008 by SpartanKingLeonidas]