true believer armageddonists

I've been meaning to post this great comment from Teemu from days (and days) ago in a post about the war in Iran, specifically riffing off this great post by Billmon

Now, if someone would tell me couple of things:

1) Effect of ME tension to oil prices are most often seen from consumers' point of view ("BAD thing!"), but if you're producer who's not affected by conflict, you get nice windfall profit.

Now, Iran conflict could/would be bad for producer who doesnt get his product to market (due to Hormuz blockade etc.)

Other producers benefit immensely; I wonder how much Russia, for example, would oppose conflict - as a major producer, it would be huge boost to government-owned oil companies. Who else would benefit? This has been written about, but not with as much attention as it would deserve.


2) Kheney admin has been accused of keeping ME tension -> oil prices up (by Palast, I think, and few others). What kind of ties they have to industry players, and are those players such that benefit (Windfall) or suffer (Hormuz) from conflict?


3) What motivation drives the different members of admin? I'd suggest this simple dual-axis model (to be enhanced):

moral
|
|
|
personal -------|------- nation
|
|
|
money


clockwise from upper right:
- democratizationist ("official story")
- PNAC imperialist
- revolving door halliburtonist
- true believer armageddonist

I guess I should add more axes, as the subjects here seem to be limber enough to be all over the model at once.

Now that we have a framework/model when can do ANYTHING!

(I don't think I can get the grid to publish properly - hopefully you can see what we are trying to convey - 2 axes, moral vs money on the vertical, personal vs nation on the horizontal)

As you know, I'd throw everyone into the bottom left category by default, and see if they deserve to be nudged in one direction or other. I have no idea where the stoopid preznit would end up. I'm starting to think maybe he really is an armageddonist (if only he was capable of comprehending anything about anything.)

I keep getting told that there are quite a few pnaccers - particularly the guys at the DoD (excl Rumsfeld, I presume) - and the folks in the OVP are supposed to be mostly corporatists, although I'm not sure about Libby & Edelman.

thnx teemu. great work.