Thank You, Chris Floyd

A few days ago Salon.com ran an interview with the prominent British novelist Ian McEwan. Some of McEwan's claims about the invasion of Iraq deeply irritated me.

So I was gratified to see Chris Floyd was irritated too and has already written everything I might have said. This saves me lots of work:

[McEwan's] glib "analysis" betrays a painful ignorance of political reality. First of all, the "war for oil" argument has never been, "The U.S. only wants lots of oil." That's strawman-making with a vengeance. The charge—fully substantiated by the Bush gang's own copious writings about their geopolitical ambitions ("Project for the New American Century," et al)—is that a group of elite interests in the U.S. want to control access to world energy resources in order to maintain and expand their own power and privilege (which they equate with "American interests"), and to put the squeeze on any potential rivals for geopolitical predominance in the coming decades, such as China and India. Whoever has their hand on the oil spigot—or controls, by threats and bribes, those who do—can shape the future to their own ends. This power is what the Bushist elite wants, not just the actual black stuff under the ground.

If you like this kind of vicious writerly in-fighting, you also shouldn't miss another well-deserved smackdown Floyd gave Spy Magazine founder Kurt Andersen. I admire Kurt Andersen for all kinds of reasons, but in this particular instance he was cruising for a metaphorical bruising.