quarta-feira, agosto 09, 2006

Nunca brinques com a "mão invisível"

«"Control is what it's all about," one oilman told me. "It's not about getting the oil, it's about controlling oil's price."
So, within days of Bush's election in November 2000, the James Baker Institute issued this warning:
In a market with so little cushion to cover unexpected events, oil prices become extremely sensitive to perceived supply risks. Such a market increases the potential leverage of an otherwise lesser producer such as Iraq...
I met with Falah Aljibury, an advisor to Goldman Sachs, the Baker/CFR group and, I discovered, host to the State Department's invasion planning meetings in February 2001. The Iraqi-born industry man put it this way: "Iraq is not stable, a wild card." Saddam cuts production, or suddenly boosts it, playing games with the U.N. over the Oil-for-Food Program. The tinpot despot was, almost alone, setting the weekly world price of oil and Big Oil did not care for that. In the CFR's sober language:
Saddam is a "destabilizing influence... to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East."
With Saddam out of control, jerking markets up and down, the price of controlling the price was getting just too high. Saddam drove the oil boys bonkers. For example, Saddam's games pushed the State Department, disastrously, to launch, in April 2002, a coup d'etat in Venezuela.
This could not stand. Saddam delighted in playing cat-and-mouse with the USA and our oil majors. Unfortunately for him, he wasn't playing with mice, but a much bigger and unforgiving breed of rodents.
Saddam was asking for it. It was time for a "military assessment." The CFR concluded:
Saddam Hussein has demonstrated a willingness tothreaten to use the oil weapon to manipulate oil markets... United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq, including military, energy, economic, and political/diplomatic assessments.
The true motive to invade Iraq, Saddam's "manipulation of oil markets," was there, but not yet, in April 2001, the official excuse.
Not surprisingly, the desires of the "Project for a New American Century," the neo-con field of dreams, of remaking Arabia, was not in the Baker Institute-CFR plan. However, the conclusion, Saddam must go, matched the neo-con's policy demand, if for highly different reasons. The Baker-CFR panel had a limited concern: Get rid of the jerk, the guy yanking the market.»
- Greg Palast, "Armed Madhouse"


Portanto, segundo esta perspectiva, o tirano louco meteu-se com a "mão invisível". Ideia infeliz. A "mão invisível", que não é para brincadeiras, aplicou-lhe de pronto o cacete super-evidente.

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