The structural and institutional reality that the two party system has spontaneously sprung from is now being used to their advantage.

Well that may be true — entrenched power interests do tend to find ways to use existing structures to their advantage, almost by definition.

But I don't think the two-party system as presently constituted is as tyrannical as it may seem. High rates of incumbency and a dearth of primary challenges certainly work to the advantage of the reactionary elements in our society. But to what extent are those things enforced by the two-party structure, and to what extent are they simply things that we enable by our apathy?

For example, "Mittens" Romney made it a point during his brief tenure as governor of Massachusetts to break open the stranglehold of the Massachusetts Democratic machine on state politics. His idea was that Republicans would have a chance to jump in and take advantage of the new power vacuum. But he and his GOP fantasists didn't really look very closely at the state of Massachusetts politics.

Romney was governor not because of some secret untapped longing for Republican power on Beacon Hill, but because of rank and file dissatisfaction with the status quo on the part of Democrats themselves. They wanted nothing more than to see the ancient, embittered patriarches of their party relieved of the strangehold they held. By allowing themselves, however unwittingly, to be the useful tool of Democratic unrest, Massachussets Republicans paved the way for a mini-renaissance in Democratic dissent, activism, and youth politics that led directly to Deval Patrick and the gathering popularity of the state's gay marriage experiment.

In other words, the two-party system was (in that case) a vehicle for major social and political change. It was the natural way that those forces manifested themselves. It would be hard to look at that process and see how the old guard of the party establishment unduly benefited.

Nobody undertakes the advocacy of minority separatist independence in 1991 on the promise that maybe in 10 years or so there will be kickback from oil money for him.

Why not? Our tax money has made oil a very low-risk investment in even volatile parts of the Mid east. Their costs are mitigated by our tax dollars and their own backroom deals, so there's not much to lose.

Not in the 1980s they weren't.

As late as the Gulf War the (now) Kurdish oil regions were still under the control of the central government. The question of Kurdish autonomy, and where exactly the lines were drawn, was still a very volatile one throughout the ensuing decade. A lot of people were running around on the loose in the Kurdish "no-fly" zone — Turkish Kurds hiding out from their government, Baathist soldiers trying to drive the peshmerga back — even al Qaeda, which found in the laissez-faire American "safe zone" the opportunity for a foothold that Saddam's paranoid but highly effective internal security apparatus had never allowed them in the Iraqi state.

The idea that it was clear at that time that Iraq would fall apart by 2003 and that the Kurds would have a chance at their own oil supply as an independent state, if only there were a public figure who could start raising consciousness of their plight under the Baathist regime, is just silly. That is a made up history.

Galbraith got involved in issues of Kurdish independence, and eventually cultivated a financial stake in the outcome of that debate. His eventual financial stake did not happen first, and then somehow get sent from the future to change the past.

Anyone that doesn't believe that the main motives for invading Iraq were oil and the petrodollar when the only things currently functioning well in Iraq are its oil fields and petrodollar sales, and its oil fields are being auctioned off to development at thievery rates, well.

Hey, do you know who else aside from the oil companies profits immeasurably from the situation in Iraq? The construction people. And the food service people. I think it was those guys who started the war. It was all a big conspiracy to build bunkers and sell MREs. It's the blood-soaked "MRE-dollar" that is responsible for all of the carnage!

Also, the people who make bullets. They are just using those up and buying more! That must mean that the Iraq war was started solely because the bullet factories wanted it.

When there is peace, the military industrial complex and the resource extractors have no trouble finding innumerable ways to profit and grow. Should we say that peace only exists because large corporations ordered it?

Stay or go in Iraq, you can bet that the same companies will find ways to profit enormously either way. Once we are out, they may become easier to ignore from a more comfortable and pleasant perspective, but they will still be there.