Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

["Tommy Armstrong" <tfa AT brickengraver.com>]

"the real motive for the Irak invasion is a three-letter word: OIL."

In a way I believe you are correct. But it is not the oil, in and of itself,
but the power that that oil gives to the possessor. With it, one can
realistically acquire power that is a legitimate threat--so a tyrant who
controls a lot of it inherrently has real power. He can fund programs of WMD
development, he can in many ways alter international relations by playing
one country off another.  The real reason that the French, for example, were
so vehemently opposed to the Iraq war, was not some high minded principle,
it was the fact that they had huge investments in the Sadaam government.
They had invested in a corrupt tyrannical government and did not want to see
all their assets disappear. 

Great natural wealth such as yall have in Venezuala should and could be used
for the benefit of all--but from what I gather it has been in large part the
object of graft and greed--that is the wealth is not spread to the people. I
am not an expert of course on Venezuala but from what I understand with all
that wealth, there is still an incredible amount of incredible poverty. And
this is the source of much of the what shall I call it "unrest"? Almost all
Americans I know would think that to be wrong. If it is a national resource,
it should be used to increase the national well being. But in my opinion,
communism is not the way to fulfill that redistribution. America is slipping
into the rich get richer and the poor get poorer mode, but as I said in
another post, there is still real opportunity--or at least the freedom to
give it a try. I am not familiar with your government structure, but when
too much power is vested in a single entity, I know it will degenerate to
graft and greed.  

"We haven't seen the avenging zeal of the Bush administration in countless
other places where dictators of all sorts prevail."

It is not really America's posistion to police the world-really-to make
everything right--to undo every injustice. We really get a bum rap on
that--we have not really bullied anyone--except Iraq (twice) Cuba and
Vietnam by milatary force in the last 100 years. We only came into WW1 after
an incredible propoganda campaign by the British and WWII after being
directly attacks at Pearl Harbor. In the case of Cuba, there was an
undeniable threat to our existance. In Vietnam, although a vast majority
believe we lost that war--we really did not. We saw communism as a real and
viable threat--and it was. The Cold War was real--there really was a battle
of two different world views--ours and their's. The real reason we went into
Vietnam was because we believed in the Domino Theory that if Vietname fell
to the communists, then all of South East Asia would follow. Vietnam did
fall, but by the time the war was over, there was no real threat to the rest
of that region from the communists, so we essentially achieved our goals. If
we had not gone to war--no one can know what would have happened.  We are
not physically or mentally capable of policing the world, nor have the
desire to do so. But when we see an injustice that we think directly affects
our well being, then we will act. In the case of Iraq, we saw a threat--not
only an economic threat posed by the vast oil reserves he controlled, but a
threat to the entire stability of the region and therefore a threat to our
existance. The fact that he had used those resources for mainly milatary
projects--that he had demonstrated that he was willing to use WMD's in the
past, that he had the resources, yes from the OIL, to create them--we
perceived as a threat to us. So we acted. 

Tommy Armstrong
 
You can get all A's and still flunk life. 
Walker Percy 

 

Dear Tommy,