What is the real reason the USA went to Iraq?

Oil and stability of the region to keep the flow of oil running smoothly were the reasons the US went into Iraq.

If our cars ran on spicy cabbage, we would have taken out North Korea years ago!

Originally posted by Aeon10101110
Embryo:

Mr. Gold may indeed be quite intelligent with a number of credentials, but that is hardly qualification to merely gesture away many decades of literally rock-solid petrology. Moreover, it is highly dubious that he ever studied core samples, wireline logs or any of the manifold accouterments of exploration petroleum geology. While he might be a hit at cocktail parties for graduate students, he would do better to consult with geophysicists and petroleum engineers. Especially so, prior to positing a panacea to petroleum problems vis-a-vis pencil and paper hypotheses. It looks like you never read the whole article. Also, as I mentioned, he has written a book on this subject, The Deep Hot Biosphere. He has done all the things that you mention, the man is not stupid and will not be taken for a fool. It doesn't take someone (especially someone like Thomas Gold) to long to learn a new subject in depth - just the effort, time, and energy. Read the article (and the book) before jumping to conclusions. All you read were the excerpts I posted, and it is most apparent.

Oil shales and sands, which I mentioned a few posts prior to yours, could be a boon. Unfortunately, as I pointed out, it takes more energy to extract the petroleum than the energy value contained within it. Get it? And even if an efficient method was found, such reserves would be very expensive to extract. Hence, high-priced petroleum, much more so than today. One can not "pump" oil shale, despite your assertion to the contrary. And, as I mentioned, Canada has found a way to do it efficiently and economically - all it takes is someone to spend the time, money, and energy to figure problems out. Apparently America and American oil companies would rather take the easy way out and go use up someone else's liquid oil assets first before investing money to do hard research into how to extract the oil we already have.

Mr. Gold's ruminations about bacteria in subsurface formations is hardly ground-breaking, so to speak. Geologists have known about chemo- petro- and olio- trophs for decades. The latter type, as the name implies, exist in oil reserves, "eating" the hydrocarbons rather than producing them. And even if the proposed oil-producing mechanism did exist, would it be sufficient to maintain the overwhelming extraction rate? Read the book, you can probably get a few pages of it off of Amazon.com. The magazine article doesn't go in depth on everything.

Salon.com Never read Gold there, I read about him in Wired and did some research on him to find out who he was - apparently, you didn't read the Wired Magazine article online. He's been in any "hard" science magazine you can think of - go research who he is. He was only in Wired to talk a little bit about his ideas, since Wired is a popular magazine, its an obvious choice to talk., where you read of Mr. Gold, is interesting, but is an unlikely source for reputable, hard science. Unfortunately, we all soon will feel the deep pinch of decreasing hydrocarbon reserves. Because we did not pursue alternative fuels after the stunning wake-up calls in the early 1970's, the party is almost over now. Mr. Gold will soon be nursing a nasty hang-over.

Embryo:

How can you possibly put all of your faith in the theories of any single individual? Certainly, as previously asserted, Mr. Gold may be a gifted individual. But can his mind completely envelope the findings of a century-and-a-half of geological exploration, enough to entirely contradict the work of many thousands? You are merely deifying him, why should I take part in your worhip? And if he is correct about hydrocarbon reserves being constantly replenished, why isn't that indicated in the data? Petroleum doesn't just show everywhere in strata; cap rock such as a salt dome must be present to prevent upward migration of the oil. Therefore, all this "replenishment" must show up in such traps, which is simply untrue! Besides, even if there were the cited mechanism, could it possibly match the extraction rates? Worldwide oil production peaked in 2000 and many individual nations' production reached maximum many years prior to that. I'm curious though, do you even know the composition of crude oil? It's consistency, of course, is predicated by the source material.

As to my initial misquote of your source e-zine, please note my "erratum" posted immediately afterwards, and of course, prior to your landbasting.

Originally posted by Aeon10101110
Embryo:

How can you possibly put all of your faith in the theories of any single individual? Certainly, as previously asserted, Mr. Gold may be a gifted individual. But can his mind completely envelope the findings of a century-and-a-half of geological exploration, enough to entirely contradict the work of many thousands? You are merely deifying him,

why should I take part in your worhip? And if he is correct about hydrocarbon reserves being constantly replenished, why isn't that indicated in the data? Read the book - I can't remember everything off the top of my head, but he does present all the data you request, get it at a library, or buy it, its not too expensive. Petroleum doesn't just show everywhere in strata; cap rock such as a salt dome must be present to prevent upward migration of the oil. Therefore, all this "replenishment" must show up in such traps, which is simply untrue! Besides, even if there were the cited mechanism, could it possibly match the extraction rates? Worldwide oil production peaked in 2000 and many individual nations' production reached maximum many years prior to that. I'm curious though, do you even know the composition of crude oil? It's consistency, of course, is predicated by the source material.

As to my initial misquote of your source e-zine, please note my "erratum" posted immediately afterwards, and of course, prior to your landbasting.

I don't deify him - I just enjoy his material and find it opens up new possibilities and as such, I support him. I think his theories could hold true. He isn't always right, but he has been right more times than he has been wrong - and thats a pretty good record when it comes to science. And as I said before, read the book - you might find it worth your while, or you might not. Don't put off someone elses work because of preconceived notions. This may be of some interest to you in how Canada is extracting oil from oil sand very efficiently - www.eia.doe.gov...

This line specifically is very interesting:
The only thing that prevents Canadian oil sands production from being considerably higher (both now and in the future) is the lack of transportation infrastructure (most likely pipeline capacity) for moving production to market.

Also, since it still seems apparent to me that you haven't read the article or the interview (which essentially is the whole article), I'll post a "few" parts from the latter half.


I suppose it's understandable that pure scientists might reject a theory just because they don't like it. But why did oil companies interested in the bottom line not pay attention?



Because individual petroleum geologists who work for big companies never wanted to admit that they could have done their planning and their prospecting on an entirely wrong basis.



Perhaps there was little interest in your idea in the 1980s and '90s because oil prices stayed low.



But that made it clear that the geologists' theory and its predictions were wrong.



Maybe they were off by only a little - after all, the price is now rising steeply.



But that's only because of the OPEC cartel, which is held together still by the information that the oil is going to run out.

If it's clear that the fields are refilling, then of course the cartel greatly weakens, and the individual nations will try to outsell the others. So it's very important economically who is in the right.



How much more oil is there in your view of the world than in the view of traditional petroleum geology?



Oh, a few hundred times more.



But not all of it is accessible at the moment?



It becomes accessible by recharging, and the recharging process I think I completely understand. There's a stepwise approximation of the pore pressure to the rock pressure - that will always be the case if the stuff is coming up from below. You will not just fill up one reservoir at the top in the shallow levels. It will always be underlaid by another reservoir, and that in turn by another, and so on for a long way down.



And by pumping out oil from the highest reservoir you release the pressure on the lower ones, allowing more oil to seep up.



Yes, the partial seal between the surface reservoir and the one below in some cases appears to break open violently.



What's the evidence for that?



Many fields have produced several times as much as the initial testing of their magnitude would have indicated. Some geologists frankly agree that fields are refilling themselves - Robert Mahfoud and James Beck, who say fields in the Middle East are refilling, and Jean Whelan, who has observed a site refilling in the Gulf of Mexico - though they won't concede my theory is correct.



Your onetime colleague Carl Sagan used to say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. What evidence did you have for geologists who found your claims about oil extraordinary?



In Sweden I produced oil by the ton from 6 kilometers down. Eighty barrels we pumped, perfectly ordinary crude oil, entirely in nonsedimentary rock, in granite. It looked like perfectly good stuff.

The Russians have drilled 300 holes in Tatarstan since the Swedish experiments. They give me the credit for making the final determination between the biogenic and abiogenic theory by finding petroleum in the bedrock of Sweden.



Presumably the geologists said the oil had come in along cracks in the granite.



They'd have a hard time persuading me.



Isn't there oil in the shales around the granite?



But the shales are nowhere deeper than 300 meters. I was down at 6.7 kilometers.



A number of physicists of your generation - your friend Hoyle, George Gamow, Luis Alvarez, Freeman Dyson, Francis Crick (a physicist by training) - have gravitated toward big questions about life, its origin, its workings.



I think that's what any competent scientist will do in the course of time.



But for you, the move from one topic to another seems to have been driven by spotting other people's errors.



Yes, that's true. I was quite good at spotting a serious error, such as when Harold Jeffreys [a geophysicist at Cambridge] gave a particular formula for the damping of the Earth's free nutation [a slight nodding of the axis of rotation]. I looked at this formula and then I rushed to my friend Bondi and said, "Look, Harold thinks that if I have an object the size of a pea in the middle of the Earth and it has a suitable viscosity, it will cause the observed damping." I realized immediately it was rubbish. Bondi and I wrote a correction paper, and it took us a year to get that correction paper printed. Because the great Harold Jeffreys was still standing on his hind legs and saying what he wrote was right.



In putting forward controversial ideas, does it help to have had the experience of seeing your cosmological theories discarded? Did that experience toughen you up?



I was always pretty tough. But the pulsar episode shaped my attitude more than anything else. My idea that rotating neutron stars were responsible for pulsars was totally ridiculed at an international conference. I was not allowed to speak from the podium for five minutes in a two-day conference because it was regarded as such a monstrous idea. That was in the spring, and I think by November or December of that year, observations of the pulsar in the Crab Nebula had confirmed every damn thing that I'd said - confirmed that the frequencies of a young pulsar would be higher, confirmed that good places to look would be supernova remnants, and a number of other things.

After that, I was never going to compromise with other people's opinions again: Just know the facts.



Don't people tend to overtrust what they are taught are facts?



Yes, absolutely. Not only overtrust, but they publish whenever they have a positive result for an accepted theory, and if they have a negative result they suppress it, or it gets suppressed by the referee.



So you have to know what to ignore: You have to have what I think Bondi once called a ruthless disregard for the observations.



I kick myself for not having been firm enough sometimes. Some of my colleagues have, on occasion, wanted me to step down from my high horse, saying maybe there is something to what the others say. I should have resisted that.



Searching out error means changing fields quite often, though. If you had been more ambitious about your career, would you have stuck to a single area of research?



Yes, but that did not attract me - I followed my own interests. And that has been a handicap. The petroleum geologists dislike me, but very few of them have any notion that I've worked in other fields - and been also disliked, but found out right, you see. It should give them some pause.



I'm going to make an assumption and assume you're a geologist, hence, thats why you're offended. The composition of crude oil varies greatly from one source to another- crude oil from the Middle East contains a greater proportion of straight chain hydrocarbons, while Nigerian crude oil is predominantly cyclic hydrocarbons and aromatics. Mexican crude can be up to 5% sulfur, while Pennsylvanian crude contains less than 0.1%. Thats what I can remember from chemistry. And of course you have the most widely used idea that it comes from the remains of dead creatures, mostly dinosaurs.

Anyways, I don't claim to know everything. For that matter, neither does Thomas Gold. All I know are the theories and the mostly used "facts" of where Oil comes from, how much we have left, what it's made of, etc... I tend to disagree with the facts when I look at his theories and the evidence he has built up over many years. Contradictions are made all the time to widely held beliefs - and the funny part is, SOME of those contradictions turn up to be true. The sad part is, most new ideas are looked down upon because they don't hold up to commonly held beliefs or "facts" - even when all the evidence is there to say otherwise.

Think of it this way, one mind can change the way we think about certain things forever. Evidence? There are many, but I will cite one certain person - Albert Einstein. His ideas were contradictory and most people had a hard time adjusting to these new ideas which became "fact."

Remember, a "fact" is only a "fact" when enough people agree that the same thing is true. Einstein may be one person, but he changed physics forever just by a few "simple" new theories - and all those people before him who did the same thing over and over again were laid to waste. And the only reason why someone's work could contradict thousands of other people's work is because they all were taught the same way and as such they perform the same task the same way - variations may occur, but the end product still comes out the same way.

Its hard to think up new ideas when everyone else is there to put you down and say they aren't any good because, "its just not possible." Yeah, tell that to Einstein and the many others whose teachers told them, "you'll never amount to anything in life." Open your mind man, and read a good book while you're at it - The Deep Hot Biosphere. I'm sorry if I offended you in any way - I'm a bastard.



[Edited on 3-16-2004 by EmbryonicEssence]

Also, this is what Wikipedia has on him, its not everything, but it gives you somewhat of an idea of who he is.


Thomas Gold
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.


Thomas Gold (born 1920 May 22) is an American astrophysicist and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.



Astrophysics
Gold has carried out research on cosmology and on magnetic fields, and coined the term "magnetosphere" for the Earth's magnetic fields. Soon after the discovery of pulsars in 1968, he correctly identified these objects as rapidly rotating neutron stars with strong magnetic fields.

For a number of years Gold promoted the idea that a thick layer of dust would cover many portions of the surface of the Moon. His opinion influenced the design of the American Surveyor lunar landing probes, but their precautions appeared excessive, as Gold had overestimated the extent to which cyclic thermal expansion and contraction would pulverise lunar surface rock.


Origins of petroleum
Gold achieved fame for his 1992 paper "The deep hot biosphere" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which presented a controversial theory of the origin of oil and gas deposits. The theory suggests that crude oil deposits have their origins in natural gas flows which feed bacteria living at extreme depths under the surface of the Earth. Gold also published a book of the same title in 1999, which expanded on the arguments in his 1992 paper and included speculations on the origin of life.

According to Gold and others, these bacteria account for the presence of biological debris in fossil fuels, obviating the need to resort to a biogenic theory for the origin of the latter. Bacterial action may also explain oddities in the concentration of other mineral deposits.

Most western geologists and petrologists consider petroleum abiogenic theories implausible and believe that the biogenic theory of fossil fuel formation adequately explains all observed fossil fuel deposits. Most geologists do recognize that the geologic carbon cycle includes subducted carbon which returns to the surface, with studies showing the carbon does rise in various ways. Gold and geology experts point out that the biogenic theories do not explain phenomena such as helium in oil fields and oil fields associated with deep geologic features.

However, recent discoveries have shown that bacteria live at depths far greater than previously believed. Whilst this does not prove Gold's theory, it certainly lends support to its arguments. A thermal depolymerization process which converts animal waste to carbon fuels does show some processes can be done without bacterial action, but does not explain details of natural oil deposits such as magnetite production.



Also, this part is good: Gold achieved fame for his 1992 paper "The deep hot biosphere" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which presented a controversial theory of the origin of oil and gas deposits.



FYI, He's the one who originally came up with the idea.

I think this might be an info page he made in 2000 on Cornell's website, giving some pretty good info for his theories and evidence.

people.cornell.edu...

It says this at the very bottom left hand corner,
Page updated regularly.
Send e-mail to: [email protected]


It hasn't been updated since October 2000! If that is his email, I wonder if he stilll uses that one? If so, you could send him an email if you so choose.

[Edited on 3-16-2004 by EmbryonicEssence]

If his theory turns up just to be full of gas, I'll be fine with that. I just think the theories are good and that is all. I never claimed them to be fact. His work is still theory and I treat it as such. I may go overboard sometimes, but its kind of fun to think that the biosphere beneath us could work that way.

I'm all for alternative energy sources but I don't see us using them on a massive scale anytime soon. Not as long as we have the oil cartels running everything and the US of A continues to put oil families into the White House.

Many Presidents have said how they were going to appropriate funds for research and production of alternative energy sources. Something always happened to the funds though, they seemed to disappear and get cancelled as soon as they appear - very smoothly. The public always forgets though, the media is perfect for that.

If I recall, it was Ronald Reagan who said we would be running cars on Hydrogen in ten years (that was in the 80s). It just goes to show that the people who run the government aren't too concerned about alternative energy sources, let alone keeping their promises.

I want a car that runs off of love!

[Edited on 3-16-2004 by EmbryonicEssence]

It was for OIL.

Look at the Bush Administration and their ties. Cheney with Halliburton, Bush with Arbusto, Rice with Chevron, the list goes on and on.

They put Hamid Karzai in power in Afghanistan, he used to work for Unocal. They had been looking for a way to get the oil in the Caspian Sea THROUGH the Middle East to the coast, and had even invited the Taliban to Texas to hob-knob with the oil bigwigs.

It's not just that Iraq has so much oil, it's that they provide a solid method of delivery. It's just as important to have a stable pipeline as it is to get the oil in the first place. If you OWN the country it makes it easier to guard the pipeline.

Read it for yourself and form your own opinion,

www.eia.doe.gov...

"On December 8, 1998, Unocal announced that it was withdrawing from the Centgas consortium, citing low oil prices and turmoil in Afghanistan as making the pipeline project uneconomical and too risky. Unocal's announcement followed an earlier statement -- in August 1998 -- that the company was suspending its role in the Afghanistan gas pipeline project in light of the recent U.S. government military action in Afghanistan, and also due to intensified fighting between the Taliban and opposition groups. Unocal had previously stressed that the Centgas pipeline project would not proceed until an internationally recognized government was in place in Afghanistan. "

Anybody who thinks it is a coincidence that the US installed leader of Afghanistan is a former Unocal employee of note is smoking crack.

Always look to see who benefits. The oil companies. The multi-trillion dollar oil companies. The oil companies that donate millions of dollars to BOTH political parties.


jak

Whatever the reasons, people that were living under one of the most oppressive regimes in the world, are now at least free to voice their opinions, to build a country of peace and democacy, and to hope for a better tommorow. Most of which think is possible now

news.bbc.co.uk...

I don't particularly care for the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq situation, but no matter how much I may distrust their motives or critisize their actions, the fact remain that these people are now free, and if some had their way, if we had not done anything; Saddam would still be in power raping his people, and crushing the light of Iraq with his brutal tyranny.

TheEXone: If they're so free why are they so desperate to kill themselves in order to take out US soldiers? Why are they protesting every second day in massive numbers?

Why are collaborators with the US being killed? Why are the unable to elect their own government, if what they want is a secular Islamic state?

They're not free.

j

Do you really think we could operate in Iraq if all 27 million people in the country, or even one million of them were blowing themselves up trying to kill us?

The idea that they all are trying to kill us is not true at all. Most of the attacks which statisticaly are rather insignificant to our total force in the area have been caried out by ex-Baath party memebers, Feeyaden fighters, or foriegn terrorists coming in to create instability.
Those groups taget "collaborators" as you call them because of the same reason Saddam used to murder anyone who stood up against him, they represent change and terrorists want to scare people into going back to tyranny.
How could the police operate if the people as you claim want them dead? Everyday they take more and more responsibility and the Iraqis are trusting them to keep the peace.

They are free in many ways, the fact that you pointed out about Iraqis protesting openly where once that would mean certain death proves it. They may not like us to be there (who would want another country occupying them), but that does not mean they would rather have Saddam back in power.

Do you know how long it took us to get our government together after the Declaration of Independence? over 20 years. How can people expect the Iraqis to go from 30 years of oppresion to a fully functional democracy in less than one year? Having that mentality only causes expectations of failure, because the truth is it may take years for the country to stabilize. They have already chosen a draft constitution, and it won't be long before a referendum is carried out to adopt it. Come back in 1 to 3 years and then tell me they are not free. Everything that is worthwile in this world takes blood, sweat, tears, and time before it is built.

Finaly, Did you even read the article I posted because many of the questions you posed are answerd by Iraqis themselves in the survey they did, or do you just dissmiss the opinions of Iraqis as propaganda?

[Edited on 16-3-2004 by TheEXone]

Perhaps if, in 1935, Britain and the USA had bombed the crap out of Hitler, in 1936 people might have asked why it had been done. In 1945 most people - including a lot of those living in Germany - were wondering why that hadn't been done!

Originally posted by FieryIce1
This is really very informative but what I don�t understand is the push for oil as a reason since it was stated by three others that the process that forms oil deposits has been discovered making oil renewable.

ET3
Seems some Russian scientist discovered what really causes the formation of oil in our earth. Also that far larger oil deposits have now been discovered in other parts of the world. When we do switch to a different source for energy from oil those "old families" won't be effected. Oil would seem to be the reason for being in Iraq but the common knowledge is that oil is so limited and that is not the true case.

and

DontTreadOnMe
I have heard that they have found a way to make oil renewable, maybe this is what the Russians have come up with.

and

EmbryonicEssence
The US has vast quantities of something called Oil Shale - a claylike rock soacked through with fossil fuel.
The Canadians stuck with it and have perfected the process of extracting oil from something similar to the shale called Oil Sand.

These reasons also moot the oil for war proposition.

Why keep looking at oil as the main reason?


[Edited on 21-3-2004 by FieryIce1]

Originally posted by Catfish

ITS OBVIOUS.

BECAUSE IRAQ WOULDNT GIVE BUSH HIS OIL, SPOILED LIL' GORGEY PORGIE THREW A FIT AND GOT HIS FREINDS TO GO BEAT EM UP FOR HIS OIL.

I geuss there WAS some good in ridding them of Saddam.

But , from what I understand, the US left iraq in ruins.

on the news, a whole lot of people were left with no electrcity and water, because It seems the US trashed the place.

CATFISH

Revenge plain and simple. Old Bush screwed up by wimping out on Saddam to begin with, so he told his son to go put things right.

Too bad it only really mattered to the Bush family. Too many decent folks (on both sides) lost their lives for pride. Hell, let's face it, Saddam was no threat to anyone but the people of Iraq. And if they really wanted him gone, they could have ousted him.
[Edited on 21-3-2004 by Mr No One]

[Edited on 21-3-2004 by Mr No One]