Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

November 19, 2007

The roots of our long and deepening involvement in Iraq go back more than three decades.

In 1975, a highly placed Pentagon policy-maker published an anonymous essay in Harper's magazine entitled ?Seizing Arab Oil.? That essay called for direct military control over Middle Eastern oil supplies. This concept was endorsed openly by then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and then-Defense Secretary James Schlesinger.

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced creation of a ?Rapid Deployment Force? designed to intervene in the Middle East. In 1983, that force, now focused entirely on the Persian Gulf, was re-named U.S. Central Command, or CentCom.

David Henderson of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, California, estimates that maintaining CentCom costs roughly one percent of our annual gross domestic product. That percentage will grow as our involvement in the Persian Gulf deepens ? not in defense of our nation, but in pursuit of political control over oil by Washington.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.