The Lessons of Vietnam:

Dick Cheney learned from his Vietnam experience—he never went, managing to dodge the draft repeatedly—that the best way to fight wars was to privatize the military. Having an all volunteer military, rather than a draft, goes a long way, but using private contractors, driven by profit and responsible only to themselves, is really the best way to be able to do whatever you want.

Republicans have long argued that privatizing government agencies is the way to achieve efficiency, but they never bother to explain to the taxpayer just how they define efficiency. We can now clearly see from the experience in Iraq that they are defining efficiency as being the most efficient way to extract billions of dollars from the taxpayer without being required to justify themselves. (See James Risen's New York Times' story in today's paper.)

The Republican argument about privatizing government services has never been about making those services work more efficiently for the citizen, it has always been about efficiently milking profits for the few out of the taxpayers.

So why do Bush, Cheney and McCain want to drill off shore and in Alaska? It ain't for your sake, you can be absolutely sure of that. They represent the few and the wealthy.