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The Iraq War, Peak-Oil, and how I came to love Dick Cheney (again)!

by The Conservative Commentator

As I got off my Humvee, I happened to catch my reflection on the car window. "Damn!" I thought to myself. "What a stud!" That pinstriped suit looked awesome on me. So, it was with a smile that I made my way up Anapamu St in Santa Barbara to get some lunch. As I neared State St, I saw a whole horde of marchers. I peered at their signs. And what do I see? Anti-Bush signs, anti-war, that kind of nonsense. It was the march before the Republican convention. Good Lord! Don't these people have anything better to do with their time! I mean, they may as well be farting in the wind, what with California being so overwhelmingly Democratic. What were they thinking? That they would turn a few swing votes in this state Kerry's way? Didn't they learn anything from 2000? Bush was going to win the electoral college votes, pure and simple. He didn't care a hoot about the popular vote.

Oh well! Fools will be fools I thought. Out of spite, I yelled out to them, "Four more years! Yeay!" Hah! What a rise that got out of them. Marching for peace, they couldn't really cuss me out. All they could do was continue whining about Bush. Now don't get me wrong. I am no Bush-lover. I know the man has the IQ of an insect. But that wasn't the point. It was the party I was voting for. I didn't give a rat's ass which puppet's strings got pulled. If anyone had any power I knew it was Big Dick, the Veep. I had always been a fan of the guy.

I guess you could call me an independent conservative. I called a spade a spade, no matter how many people thought I was wrong. Bush was a clown, and Kerry a man afraid of his own shadow. Sure, Kerry had the balls when he was younger. Going into Vietnam was a dumb-ass thing to do, and he had the guts to say so then. But now, look at him, looking like a lost puppy dog while a bunch of lying Vietnam-glorifiers take pot shots at him.

Not that I would have voted for Kerry anyway. Again, it is the party that matters, and the Democrats were shmucks. America was based on greed and competitiveness, not on socialism. Sure, a lot of people work as hard as I do, but they're not smart enough or tough enough to make the money I do. Hell, why should I share my money with the grunt who cleans up after me! I don't begrudge him coming from Mexico illegally to earn a few bucks. No sir, I believe it is actually good for America. It undercuts the slackers used to their minimum wage salary. Immigration was good, illegal or otherwise, so long as you cut out all that socialist workers' rights crap. Hey, someone is going to get abused. That's life. If I don't do it, you will. And the same goes for the environment. If I can breathe it and not keel over, that's good enough for me. The last thing I needed was some enviro-nut doing a guilt trip on me like in a Catholic confessional.

Coming back to Dick Cheney, he always seemed my kind of man. Willing to do what it took to get things done. If lies needed to be told, he told them. If he needed to keep his energy task force secret, he did so, and had enough strings to pull to get the Supreme Court to take his side. A doer. Like me. Squashing all obstacles in his way. Always adapting to change. 9/11 happened, but he didn't get all flustered. Used it to his advantage. Got the Patriot act signed, crushed the Taliban and then took out Saddam.

But Iraq had always puzzled me. Why on earth did we go into that god-forsaken country? It so reminded me of Vietnam. I mean, there were no WMDs, no connection with 9/11, and I knew Dick knew it. (And I never bought that hooey of liberating the Iraqis. Hell, we don't care if blacks and browns kill each other in our own cities, you think we give a shit if Arabs kill each other in theirs!) But Dick wanted it so bad, I just couldn't understand it. I knew he was too smart for Chalabi or the likes to have pulled a fast one on him. No sir, Dick wanted it, and I couldn't figure it out. I almost lost faith in him. My one rock almost got turned to mush.

And then, a few weeks back, I saw a documentary titled "The End of Suburbia". A friend of mine said I had to see it. He told me mysteriously that it had some answers. It started out like some leftist eco-scam, started painting a doomsday world where we suddenly run out of oil. "Phish! Baloney! @#$%&", I thought to myself. I was about to turn it off when I saw a guy they introduced as Cheney's advisor, a man named Matt Simmons who said that we were very close to an oil-production peak. I was intrigued. This was no granola-cruching, tree-hugging hippie cat, this man had founded an investment bank for the energy industry and had been part of Cheney's energy task force. What he had to say was very compelling. There was a limited amount of oil on this earth, and we have almost complete knowledge of its locations. We had depleted close to half of it, and the rest was going to be harder to get, less pure and hence more expensive. And in the face of increasing demand, it was just going to get worse.

The more I read and thought about it, the more certain I became that this change was coming. Our only hope was that we transition to some other source of energy before it was too late. To make that transition, we needed time and during that time, an uninterrupted supply of oil. And that got me thinking about Iraq. If at all anything bad happened in the Middle East (like Saudi Arabia's monarchy got unhinged) and the oil supply were held hostage, the world's economies could get devastated. What would we need to forestall something like that? Why, a military presence in the region, of course: Uncle Sam watching closely to make sure there were no fundamantalist goons about to grab power. Now, it started to make sense. Forget about discovering WMDs, the looming peak of oil supply could be used as WMDs against our economy. That is what needed protecting. This is why the Iraqi invasion was followed by utter disregard for protecting any of their nuclear facilities, it was the oil that needed protection.

As I made my way past the protesters, I smiled benignly at them. If only they could appreciate Dick like I could. Engineering an invasion to save the very trust funds these marchers drew their courage from, using fear and the specter of a nuclear 9/11 to brazenly convince a sheeplike public, brushing aside every naysayer in the administration, dragging Britain, Spain and Italy along inspite of popular opposition, thumbing his nose at Old Europe, Russia and China (whose only peeve was that they didn't have the balls to do what the U.S. did), Dick Cheney was a man I could love again. Thanks to him, I could continue to ride my Humvee the 30 miles from my home in Santa Ynez, to Santa Barbara just to have a bite at my favorite Italian place. And after that, not think twice about going another 30 miles to Ventura to get some flan. Hey, that's freedom, it is the American way!