War on Iraq is America's Jihad

As I've tried to emphasize, the proposed war on Iraq is not simply motivated by a desire to seize the oil reserves. There's more to it than that, as George Bisharat of the SF Chronicle explains. "Oil is a constant," he writes. "In a sense, everything in U.S. Middle East policy for the last 50 years or more has been about oil. For that very reason, however, oil cannot explain a shift in policy toward war. Some new variable has entered the equation."

"The real reason we are going to war," he continues, is to fulfill the "messianic vision of a small but influential group of strongly pro-Israeli hawks within the Bush administration. Their goal is unilateral global domination through absolute military superiority. U.S. global hegemony will 'promote democracy' and 'spread prosperity' through free enterprise and trade...

"Iraq is just a first step in redrawing the map of the entire Middle East. Iraq under a pro-Western leadership, with its enormous oil reserves, would diminish the strategic value of Saudi Arabia and negate Saudi leverage vis-a-vis the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. A new Iraq would be a beachhead for ridding the Middle East of autocracies -- the wellsprings of terrorism, in the hawks' view -- installing democratic governments, and making the region a haven for free enterprise and development."

For better or worse (likely the latter), this war is intended to define American foreign policy for the next 20+ years.