Empire Building

As usual, the ever-cheery Amy Goodman has a great show today on "Democracy Now." The guy who wrote "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" is back on, for like the 3rd time. Her show is about the only place I ever hear about him - I have wanted to read it for a long time, but haven't gotten around to it. You've got to read the transcript, today he actually explained the reason for the invasion of Iraq. Here's a snippet:

JOHN PERKINS: When he [Saddam Hussein] didn't come around, the economic hit men tried to bring him around. We tried to assassinate him. But that was an interesting point, because he had pretty loyal security forces, and in addition he had a lot of look-alike doubles, and what you don't want to be is a bodyguard to a look-alike double and you think it's the president and you accept a lot of money to assassinate him and you assassinate the look-alike, because if you do that, afterwards your life and your family's isn't worth very much, so we were unable to get through to Saddam Hussein, and that’s why we sent the military in.

AMY GOODMAN: Although Saddam Hussein was in the pocket of the U.S. for many, many years.

JOHN PERKINS: He was and – but we wanted that final deal, similar to the one we’d struck with Saudi Arabia. We wanted to get Saddam Hussein to really tie in to our system, and he refused to do that. He accepted our fighter jets and our tanks and our chemical plants that he used to produce chemical weapons that we knew were being used against the Kurds and the Iranians. He accepted all that, but he wouldn’t quite tie into our system in such a big way that he would bring in the huge development organizations to rebuild his country, as the Saudis did, in a Western image. And that's what we were trying to convince him to do and also to guarantee that he would always trade oil for U.S. dollars, instead of Euros, and that he would keep the price of oil within limits acceptable to us. He would not go along with those things. If he had, he would still be president, Amy.

Read the entire transcript of this interview on the Democracy Now website: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/15/1436221

And if I suddenly disappear, please send John Perkins to find me.