War, Oil, Iraq & Ted Koppel

On the Sunday, March 11th episode of Meet The Press, hosted by the lovely Tim Russert, one of the guests that day was retired Nightline host Ted Koppel.

Ted said to Russert, in part:

I made a little note here of something that (US Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay) Khalilzad said to you a moment ago. He said the region will not be stable until Iraq is stabilized. It's the one thing nobody talks about. Everyone is concerned about the United States being in the middle of a civil war inside Iraq, but they forget about the fact that, if US troops were to pull out of Iraq, that civil war could become a regional war between the Sunnis and Shia.

And the region, in case anyone has forgotten, is the Persian Gulf, where we get most of our oil and, you and I have talked about this before, natural gas. So the idea of pulling out of there and letting the region -- I mean, letting the national civil war expand into a regional civil war, is something the United States cannot allow to happen. . .

If you look back at the elements of the war against terrorism, that war was going on and has been going on for the past 24 years. We just didn't connect the dots.

Twenty-four years ago, the pre-cursors of Hezbollah blew up the US Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. That was 1983, 241 Americans killed. In the interim, between then and now, you had two attacks on the World Trade Center, you had the blowing up of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, you had the attempt to blow up the USS Cole, you had the bombing of the two US embassies in East Africa.

This war's already been going on for 24 years. We were just a little bit slow to recognize it."

Touche, Ted Koppel. Not quite so squirrely now, eh?

This is about the third time I've made reference to the film (see this post), but the words still ring true to me now. From the 1975 movie "Three Days of the Condor":

HIGGINS: It's simple economics, Turner. There's no argument. Oil now. Ten or fifteen years it'll be food or plutonium. Maybe sooner than that. What do you think the people will want us to do then?

TURNER: Ask them!

HIGGINS: Now? (shakes head) Huh-uh. Ask them when they're running out. When it's cold at home and the engines stop and people who aren't used to hunger -- go hungry. They won't want us to ask. They'll want us to get it for them.

We're in Iraq. Plain and simple. The time for arguing how we got there is over. We have to deal with what is and not what should have been.

When we leave at the behest of the Democrats (and I'm beginning to believe this may in fact occur), what happens to the region? And what happens when we do the Logical Extension? And what happens if the entire region is destabilized? You willing to change your lifestyle? Completely?

Nah, BZ, that can't possibly happen.

Oh. Really?

BZ