The latest in a long line of scare tactics

August 30, 2007

If we withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, the civil war will follow us home. Oh wait, that doesn’t make any sense. Alright, how about, if we withdraw from Iraq, al Qaeda will take over. No, that doesn’t make sense either.

OK, I’ve got it. If we withdraw from Iraq, the price of gas will triple. Yeah, that’s it; that’s the reason to endorse a failing war policy and keep troops in Iraq indefinitely. (via TPM)

Gasoline prices could rise to about $9 per gallon if the United States withdraws troops from Iraq prematurely, Rep. Jon Porter said he was told on a trip to Iraq that ended this week.

The Nevada Republican, who returned Tuesday from his fourth trip to Iraq, met with U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, Iraqi Deputy President Tariq al-Hashimi and Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh.

“To a person, they said there would be genocide, gas prices in the U.S. would rise to eight or nine dollars a gallon, al-Qaida would continue its expansion, and Iran would take over that portion of the world if we leave,” Porter said Wednesday in a phone interview from Las Vegas.

I’ve never fully bought into the notion that the war in Iraq was solely about oil, but if war supporters don’t want to help push that argument, they probably shouldn’t say things like, “We can’t withdraw! It’s about the oil!”

For that matter, haven’t gas prices gone up considerably since the war began? Is this one of those arguments in which gas prices go up if we stay and gas prices go up if we come home?

Will Bunch, meanwhile, ponders how this could make the talking-points list in the first place.

[T]here’s zero evidence that leaving Iraq would directly affect gas prices, certainly not more than triple them (it’s now $2.75 ’round my way) — and in fact none is presented in the above article…. In fact, the ongoing civil war has already diminished Iraq’s oil production and dampened some hopes that it could be expanded. Most experts will tell you that the one action in the region that would raise oil prices would be war with Iran, something the neocons left behind in the Bush White House still relish.

What would lower gas prices for Americans? How about taking some of the $3 trillion we’ve been burning though in the conflagration in Iraq, and spending a portion of that on developing new energy sources or fuel-efficient vehicles, so that we wouldn’t even need to ponder trading more American lives for cheap gas.

Nah…not scary enough.

At least we know what the next bogus talking point is. As it gets increasingly difficult for war supporters to insist that the president’s policy is working, expect these arguments to get even more desperate.

They hate our freedom to drive SUV’s.

$9 gasoline! Run for your lives!

Electric car! Run for your lives!

  • “The one action in the region that would raise oil prices would be war with Iran.”

    No truer words have ever been spoken.

    Rep. Porter is demagoguing the issue. High gas prices would lead to a worldwide-sponsored solution to Iraq, for as goes the US economy so goes the economy of much of the rest of the globe. Also a US pull-out and an Iraqi-centric oil policy would give the Iraqis cause to get the oil fields up an running and maintain security on the pipelines. The US-sponsored hydrocarbon law gives Iraqis no incentive to allow their oil to be pumped if they are getting screwed out of the profits by foreign companies.

    But lastly, does this administration want gas to remain cheap for US residents? Being so heavily steeped in oil, I don’t doubt that Bush – Cheney would profitably enjoy a rise in costs at the pump.

  • First, and I know this is easy for a comfortable midwesterner to say and I am not unsympathetic to who this would hurt, but $9/gal. gasoline would, in the long term, be one of the best things to happen to this country. We’d un-kill the electric car pronto, we’d actually learn to use mass transit instead of driving 1-to-a-vehicle, urban sprawl would stop overnight, and they could retire the system of air quality warnings. People might walk or ride bikes, something that could lead to better average health (and lower health care costs) and (gasp!) meeting neighbors.

    Second, um, we get almost zero oil from Iraq right now.

    Third, having seen what Doonesbury did all last week with the Terrorist Following Us Home, I can’t wait to see if he takes on this nonsense as well. . .

    The Rethugs are getting seriously desparate for talking points.

  • Obviously you don’t understand economics. See, if we leave then Shell and Exxon, and Conoco will be run out of Iraq and off their huge oil reserves. Since these companies basiccally stole the rights to these reserves (thanks Dick Cheney!) and wil now have to buy the oil on teh “free” market, their costs are going to go way way up! The only way for them to maintian their Billion dollar per quarter profits they will have to raise gas prices to $9.00 per gallon.

    Sheesh, it is not that hard people!

  • I’m really tired of people just assuming that if something is uttered from the mouths of Petraeus or Crocker or any of the others “in charge” it just has to be true.

    It’s clear that some people have learned nothing from the experience of being told things like… this would be a cakewalk, we would be greeted as liberators, the war would pay for itself, the insurgency was in its last throes, there were WMD, and on and on and on, that nothing these people say should ever be assumed to be even in the same neighborhood as the truth.

    They say whatever they think they have to in order to get what they want – how many more times do people have to be lied to before they figure it out?

  • Wait a minute:

    “al-Qaida would continue its expansion, and Iran would take over that portion of the world”

    Don’t those two statements contradict each other??? Or was the statement intended for a
    less-informed segment of the population? Not to name names, but – as someone once
    exclaimed with exasperation during a lecture about the Sunni/Shia blood feud – “I thought
    they’re all Muslims!”.

  • And one needs to go to Iraq to learn such things? Who, rhetorically speaking, foots the bill for such enlightening sojourns?

    Don’t kid one’s self. It’s always been about the oil – maybe not directly, but power and influence worldwide has to go through oil at some point and power, control and influence in an oil region is crucial to that end.

    Waving the $9 a gallon fear banner is just completing the circle and kind of bringing the chickens home to roost.

  • Zeitgeist

    I think $9/gallon gas will eventually come. If it comes over the next ten years, society will adjust, and perhaps even apply some of the conservation measures you mention. (Though the european experience suggests that petrol demand is fairly inelastic, and here in the U.S., a lot of it is driven by land use patterns, which take a LONG time to change, as doing so means both residential housing and businesses have to relocate into entirely different sorts of digs.)

    However, if the $9/gallon gas comes in ten weeks instead of ten years, you are talking about a really hideous transition, with massive unemployment and poverty. Careful what you wish for.

    For the record, these scare tactics aren’t all that credible coming from the same bunch who sold the Iraq war originally as a self-financing cakewalk that would rid the world of a significant cache of WMD’s. They haven’t been right about anything so far, so they are pretty likely wrong about this.

  • We have established 14 bases in Iraq. Does anybody really believe our so-called leaders intend to remove us from Iraq? With China and Russia re-arming (because of the Bush Adm Nazi behavior invading countries, torture, secret prisons…) the plan is to keep us there forever. The rest is BS.
    It is time to impeach Bush/Cheney and replace EVERY member of Congress with real people who don’t just serve the party line. Bush’s legacy is the fact he single-handedly started WW III. Millions of people have been displaced, killed, injured….horrible!

  • I think the idea is that if we leave then the war expands into Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Strait of Hormuz closes, and attacks on oil facilities become more commonplace and successful. We would of course leave some military forces in the Gulf (like those 2 carriers already there) and some troops in Kurdistan, Jordan, and UAE to prevent this from happening, but that would be as flashy.

    The statement that makes less sense to me is:
    al-Qaida would continue its expansion, and Iran would take over that portion of the world if we leave

    I’m not sure how both these happen. Clearly, Iran’s influence will expand (we’re doing that for them anyway by propping up the Shi’ite gov’t), but how does al Qaeda expand? I can only see two ways of this happening. One way is if the Sunnis who are fighting them now (aka “the surge is succeeding”) pull a 180 and team up with them to fight Iranian expansion. Or, Saudi Arabia will loosen up their border with Iraq to let some more al Qaeda in to fight Iran as a proxy force. Of course, this runs the risk that if they do succeed, they’ll turn right back around and try to overthrow the Sauds.

    The thing that always riles me up though is that Saudi Arabia can never be mentioned. They are the breeding ground for al Qaeda, we are acting (at least partially) on their behalf in Iraq, we saber rattle against Iran on their behalf, yet they are always treated with kid gloves (but we all know why this is).

  • $9 a gallon gas?!!

    Fire and brimstone raining from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! The dead rising from the grave. Cats sleeping with dogs — MASS HYSTERIA!

    I’m afraid these guys have already ‘crossed the streams’.

  • Agreed jimBOB, and because I don’t believe the underlying threat I had the luxury of exaggerating. But the underlying point is that, like many goods, the market price of gasoline does not include negative externalities (some of which would be nearly impossible to quantify economically, like the loss of life fighting wars in the Middle East or the loss of community caused by driving everywhere). The US is spoiled, even compared to Europe whose gas costs considerably more. More important, when the cost of a product is artificially low due to externalities not being embedded in the price, we consume more of it than a rational actor in the market normally would. If the cost of the externalities (like pollution) were in the price either (a) we would use less to reflect the normal operation of elasticity or (b) there would now be a larger revenue stream from which policymakers (in an idealized world) would pay for health costs, pollution remediation, etc. to offset the impacts of hydrocarbon use. I suspect $9 is much closer to the “true” cost of a gallon of gas than $2.75 is; there is no reason users of the good should not be paying its “true” cost.

  • “If Gore and Clinton had their way, Saddam would still be in still be in Kuwait and you’d be paying five dollars a gallon for gas!” George HW Bush 1992

    (Can’t find a citation for the quote. I just remember it.)

  • This is not even original. Shortly before the election last year, Porkbusters (which seems to be down as of this writing), posted an article saying literally the same thing — “I don’t want gas to be $9/gallon, therefore vote for the republicans, they’re the lesser of the two evils.”

  • Nobody’s saying WHY gas would increase to $9 as far as I can see.

    I think, too, that if the US is forced out of Iraq before Western oil companies have a chance to grab those contracts for Iraq’s undeveloped oil fields that the oil companies will do something desperate.

    It really is time to develop new energy sources and technologies.

  • Hmmmm….let’s see. David Petraeus, career military officer. Gasoline marketing experience, zip. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, career diplomat and politician. Gasoline marketing experience, zip. Iraqi Deputy President and Deputy Prime Minister, Iraqi politicians desperate to hold their crumbling government together, which completely depends on the presence of troops to guard them – either loyal, trusted Iraqis or Americans. Gasoline marketing experience, zip. All are talking out their A-Hole, also known as Representative Jon Porter, when it comes to gasoline pricing. Since none on the individuals named on the board of “experts” could have known that Representative Porter was coming to talk about GASOLINE PRICES, of all things, he must have brought his “facts” with him, or they must have asked “real experts” like Dick Cheney or the Board of Directors at Exxon-Mobil for their feeling on the subject.

    Seriously, anybody who falls for this deserves nothing but contempt. Anyone that stupid should not be allowed to vote. America’s biggest foreign oil supplier is Canada. Distribution at present is not threatened, new discoveries have increased our holdings greatly and, although you can certainly triple what you pay us for it if you feel you must, I’m afraid we’d have to lie if you asked for a good reason.

    Whenever world prices sink below $20.00 a barrel (oh, sweet pain of nostalgia), many wells in Canada would be capped, because it costs just about that much to get it out of the ground. By contrast, you can bring a barrel of Iraqi oil (very pure, close to the surface and easy to get at) to market for less than $5.00 per barrel, including production and refining costs and a kickback to the Iraqi government. Any difference between $5.00 (actually, it’s less than that, but $5.00 will do for a benchmark) and current world price is pure profit. It’s like a license to print money, not to mention giving the controlling authority the capability to regulate world prices and control the pace of tearaway developing nations like China and India.

    And that’s what we’re REALLY talking about here.

  • I can’t improve on anything said here so I’m going to maunder a bit:

    You know what’s amazing to me? I wasn’t alive during WWII but I’ve read about the gas rationing (among other things). Somehow BushCo wants us to think that we can continue to rumble around in Ford Juggernauts while there’s a war that will determine the fate of the entire world 4 EVA! (According to BushCo.)

    Considering how little the average American has been inconvenienced by Bush’s Legacy Quest (TM) and how much the soldiers have been fucked over I’d consider it my patriotic duty to get rid of the damn car if it meant they could come home. [/maunder]

  • WHY would anyone continue to accept what these people say as being based in truth or reality?

    They have been consistently wrong about everything, so why would we want to believe they stand even a snowball’s chance in hell of being right now???

  • I’m still waiting for that one brave soul who goes to the pony show in Iraq and comes back and says, “I just don’t believe them. It sounds like pure propaganda to me. They just tried too damn hard to sell it to me. I saw only what they wanted me to see and please, power point presentations? Give me a break. Felt like I was being sold a time-share property.”

    Truth has its own ring to it and it’s not the “gong show”. Petraeus has already lost his credibility when he became just another Bush cheerleader. He thinks he’ll run for president one day. Bush has become obsessed with Iraq and like everything else he is obsessed with he must be forced to let go of it. With Bush only money talks because as he said, “money trumps …er…a ..peace…sometimes”.

  • Zeitgeist, in a lot of ways it’s ridiculous to be taking our limited supply of oil and just burning it to move hunks of metal around. Non-transportation uses (materials production, fertilizers, etc.) often have no real substitute, whereas for transportation we can replace petrol with electricity/biofuels/different land use so we don’t have to drive so much. And you’re right that the externalities don’t get priced in when we buy our relatively cheap gasoline.

    I think that moving away from the current energy usage model will require more than just higher pump prices, though. It’ll take a sustained policy push to restructure our society to prepare for the coming era of much less cheap energy, and to reduce carbon emissions at the same time. We’ll need an anti-Bush in the White House, and to get rid of the reactionaries in congress that prevent taking the obvious measures we need to take.

  • I have always believed that one of the original reasons for the boys to invade Iraq was they were not smart enough to realize a trade embargo does not work against a country who’s main export was oil. Iraq just sold it’s oil on the Black Market asking something less than OPEC was asking and there would be takers. By invading we take away that low price and transfer revenue over to some folks that are buddies wirh GW and DC. Thereby Saddam was doing us a favor by holding gas prices down .We invade, the price goes up. We leave, oops the price goes up even more.

  • Since every sperm is sacred we should be saving all the dailey millions of gallons of spewed spooge and when the little guys die a natural death we should convert it into fuel. I’m not sure how to do it but even as we speak Creation Scientists are working on the problem.

  • If they’re worried about high gas prices, then they shouldn’t be pushing for a war with Iran:

    …Now let’s just summarize why an attack on Iran, as reportedly being urged by Vice President Dick Cheney, and threatened by President Bush, would be a disaster even worse than the 2003 invasion of Iraq. First of all, attacking Iran, a Shia Muslim nation, would inevitably lead Iran to order retaliation by its Shia allies in Iraq against already strapped US forces in Iraq. Shia militias such as the Badr Brigade, which to date have largely ignored US forces, would be likely to turn out in force against American forces. With American supply lines already vulnerable, US forces could quickly be cut off from all but aerial supply. They would also be heavily outnumbered. Iranian sappers and their Shia allies in Iraq and in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait could be expected to do major damage to Persian Gulf refineries, oil pipelines and loading terminals, effectively shutting down production in most of the region. Iran, once it was at war with the US would also surely make use of the hundreds of anti-ship missiles that it has reportedly set up along the eastern coast of the Persian Gulf, striking both US Navy vessels and vulnerable oil tankers. Oil shipments through the Gulf would cease, even if Iran failed to block the narrow Straits of Hormuz by sinking a couple of ships in the narrow channel, if only because of the soaring cost of insurance that would follow the start of hostilities. That in turn would lead, according to some analysts, to global oil prices of perhaps $200 per barrel-about three times the current price…

    http://baltimorechronicle.com/2007/082907Lindorff.shtml

    But if you read my earlier post, you’ll see my theory about how they think this new war and the resulting draft will actually serve their primary motive, which is power. Basically we’re screwed if the Democrats don’t get a clue, and fast.

    Since that’s not gonna happen, we’re pretty much screwed.

    http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/12716.html#comment-274276

  • “Second, um, we get almost zero oil from Iraq right now.”

    Zeitgeist,
    Oil is priced on a world market, so the price we pay for gas doesn’t depend on whether Iraq’s oil is sold to us or someone else. The current world oil market is incredibly tight; there has basically been no surplus capacity since global production peaked in May 2005. Iraq produces 2 million barrels per day of crude oil and lease condensate (2007 average through May, the latest date for which International Energy Agency numbers are available), out of a global production of 73.2 million. As others have said, it takes pretty steep price increases to reduce demand for oil. If most or all of Iraq’s oil production were taken off line due to an expanded war, it could have an immediate, significant effect on what the world, and the US, pays for oil.

    Oil is finite; the permanent decline in world oil production is inevitable. Will we see some slight rebound from the 2005 peak before the long descent? In either case, we’re not prepared. A 2005 study for the US Department of Energy concluded that to successfully prepare for peak oil, the US needed to begin 20 years before the peak and with an Apollo project level of effort. Yet peak oil seems to have already arrived.

    So we’re headed to $9/gallon gasoline, whether the US stays in Iraq or leaves. As jimBOB says, it makes a difference whether it happens over 10 years or 10 weeks.

    That said, I agree with everything that’s been said about the foolishness of believing the predictions of those who said the Iraq cakewalk would pay for itself with oil revenues. And that attacking Iran (oil production 3.9 million barrels per day) carries a greater risk of oil price spikes than leaving Iraq does.

  • Electric cars & Ethanol.
    Anyone with a third or more functioning brain will see through this lie.
    Tell Republicans to go Cheney themselves.

  • In my opinion, predictions of genocide and Iran filling a vacuum are not unreasonable. The al queda part is valid if the volatility of Iraq — with or without our occupation — expands and intensifies. Islamic fundamentalism has already expanded, and remains a threat to unstable countries in the region. That instability could lead to collapse, and collapse could wreck the U. S. economy. Not because there isn’t a sound way to react, but because (I fear) our reaction to chaos would be irrational instead of rational.

    Conditions predicted by the above group are little different than the same warnings delivered by opponents of the invasion. Stay or go, bad stuff is going to happen. Our best bet is leadership that can handle the blowback. And competent leadership is nowhere to be seen.

  • Its all about that OIL and who is to finally control it. Even at least one of Bush’s staunch supporters, Australia, now admits that it was about oil all along. See it at:

    http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/jul2007/oil-j06.shtml
    “Australia’s Minister for Defence Brendan Nelson yesterday acknowledged that maintaining control over Iraq’s vast oil reserves was a critical factor behind the ongoing US-led occupation. His comments came just before Prime Minister John Howard delivered a major foreign policy address, similarly stressing the need to ensure “energy security” amid growing “great power competition” in the Middle East.”

  • Oil will never go below $85 again. In 2010 oil will be over $250 a barrel and gas will be $10 a gallon. Even though reserves are rising which should make oil prices drop the fact they don’t drop in price is because the political tensions are rising. With that you will either buy a hybrid which will still be expensive to operate or ride your bike or take the public transit. There are ways to reduce your fuel cost.

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