Dear Editor:

This is in regard to your recent editorial on the war in Iraq.

What a lot of Americans seem so ready to ignore is that there are three basic premises for wars in the Middle East: (1) oil, (2) weapon sales and (3) Israel. The choice Americans had in the past election surely wasn’t about changing their jazzed American way of life, which rests for the most part on global and domestic repression of the economically and politically disenfranchised. Whether the U.S. pulls out of Iraq does not matter much to the region; the Middle East will always remain unstable enough to justify American interference. Instability in the Middle East is good for America.

Even after a possible high-profile, high-commotion and highly-mediated pullout, the U.S. and its allies will remain fiercely present in the region to secure their political interests and their natural resource supplies. The American and Western European war machinista has too much at stake, especially in times of economic uncertainty (see http://www.corpwatch.org).

What puzzles me is how those at the core of the daily spin in American media repress these realities. No matter if it’s O’Reilly, Olbermann, Letterman, Stewart, Colbert, Limbaugh, Brooks, Dowd, NPR, SNL or the DKS, there is a deep consensus among the tightly controlled mainstream outlets and their puppet anchors that the stinky underbelly of the political iceberg better be left untouched.

Never mind how many die “over there” (including American soldiers). As long as we, telly-trained and pop-psyched Americans, remain convinced that “those poor suckers” got burnt despite (and not because of) our self-consuming American lifestyle, we will be ready to support any murderous action that leaves the Middle East in the turmoil it so undoubtedly deserves.

– Frank Rosen,

graduate student in English