Letter from Chip Northrup

We’ve See this Melodrama Before

I was having lunch at the Petroleum Club in Midland, Texas when a shout went up as the invasion of Iraq was announced. When the war was over, the concessions for the northern Iraqi oil fields went to Hunt Oil of Dallas, owned by Ray Hunt, George W. Bush’s largest campaign donor. The no-bid contract to rebuild Iraq went to Halliburton, Vice President Cheney’s former company.

The pretext of the invasion was Iraq’s mythological possession of “weapons of mass deception,” as evidenced by the vial of fake anthrax that a clueless Colin Powell dutifully waved around at the UN. The rationale for the invasion of Venezuela are the allegations that their president is involved in drug smuggling (like the former president of Honduras that Trump just pardoned), that he owned a machine gun, which is illegal to possess without a permit in the U.S, even though neither the alleged gun nor Maduro were in the U.S., and the allegation that Maduro had successfully overturned the results of the presidential election—which Trump tweeted about like a jealous adolescent. 

We’ve seen this political melodrama before. It’s not about gangs killing Christians in Nigeria, it’s about the oil. It’s not about a dictator owning a machine gun in his own country, it’s the oil. Everybody knows this. Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor winner Smedley Butler wrote a book about it, titled “War is a Racket,” stating the facts: “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.”

Meet the new war, same as the old war. Wherein the Marines hit the beaches to liberate the Venezuelan oil fields on behalf of Chevron and Goldman Sachs. 

Chip Northrup
Cooperstown