A Few Greedy Men
Oligarchy, per the Columbia Encyclopedia, is government by a few, usually the rich, for their own advantage. Does the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Gingrich axis fit this mold? And what about Halliburton and The Carlyle Group ?
An August 13 Financial Times piece by Jeffrey Sachs (by subscription only) has oligarchy written all over it. Sachs asks that mega-trillion-dollar question: Why did we really launch a preemptive war against Iraq?
The plot thickened with the release last month of the US Congressional investigation into September 11. It seems increasingly likely that Iraq was attacked because Saudi Arabia was deeply implicated in the terrorist attacks.
Two truths have long governed US energy security. The first is that Saudi Arabia is the key to world oil stability, the accommodating supplier when the market gets too tight. It would be a potential threat to the world economy if Saudi oil flows were disrupted.. .The second truth is that Saudi Arabia has been a spigot of private wealth for key US figures, and for the Bush extended family in particular. . .Saudi business has helped to make multi-millionaires of Henry Kissinger, Frank Carlucci, James Baker, George H.W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
September 11 threatened these two truths. . . To say that Saudi complicity in September 11 led the White Hosue to war in Iraq is speculative, but several insiders have suggested that the conflict was. .perhaps hatched in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.
Wesley Clark, for instance, said on Meet the Press that he thought there was "a concerted effort starting immediately after 9/11 to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein. . . I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is state-sponsored terrorism and connected to Saddam Hussein.'” They never gave Clark any evidence--these people from Middle East think tanks, even though he asked them for it.
Sachs theorizes that First, September 11 was a dramatic confirmation that the stability of Saudi oil was in jeopardy. The regime was unstable and perhaps even a lethal threat to the US. The only quantitatively significant alternative to Saudi oil was Iraqi oil, but that option was barred as long as Saddam Hussein remained in power.. . .Second, a substitute had to be found for the military bases in Saudi Arabia. . . Third, the Bush White House needed to issue a poweful threat to the Saudi leadership: one more false step and you're finished. Attacking the next-door neighbor was no doubt judged to be quite persuasive. Finally, there was probably a strong hope that the public could be diverted from the true roots of September 11. The Bush administration needed to turn the public's eyes away from the intelligence failures and head off the danger, however slight, that Saudi associates of the Bush family and friends would be implicated in the attacks. . .The administration's seeming unwillingness to examine the Saudi connections and the enormous costs of Iraqi occupation are now causing concern even among the president's stalwarts in Congress.
The notion of oligarchy offends democrats (with a small d) on principle, but I think you can make a pragmatic argument against it too. When right-of-center Republicans dominate all three branches of government, when Cheney closes the energy hearings to California Senator Feinstein although Dubya financial supporter Ken Lay of Enron and other energy suppliers were gaming the market, when critics of the government are labelled traitors or idiots, you're getting what control theory mathematicians and engineers refer to as a closed system with stifled feedback loops.
Soviet Russia is a prime example. The place fell far behind economically and kept denying and lying about its mistakes rather than trying to fix them. Vladimir-Six-Pack had to pretend he believed the lies--even if he didn't. The Soviet Union was a closed system that spurned criticism. By stifling the feedback loops of public discussion and press freedom, the government perpetuated failed economic solutions and pretended they were working.
Free markets, entrepreneurial ventures and free societies thrive on openness--not secrecy. In a risk-taking environment of unconventional ideas and conflicting points of view, mistakes are made--but the odds of them being tweaked and corrected are way better than zero.
8:34:46 PM 
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