With our current oil war winding down — no guarantees of course, President Bush recently said we’d be there “decades more” — it’s time to take stock of lessons learned. Vietnam, for example, taught the military one, big thing — control information! A real attempt was made this time around. Reports from the battlefield came from “briefings”, complete with blackboards, pointers, and scripts — and from “embedded”, that is, controlled reporters — an approach entirely contrary to the American ideal of freedom of the press.

Vietnam scenes of battlefield slaughter and children napalmed were eliminated, as were pictures of hundreds upon hundreds of America’s young men coming home in coffins. All replaced with pep talks from a President swaggering before audiences on military bases.

But, as the saying has it, truth will out. The Arab networks — Al Jazeera, et al — now provide these pictures to the world community, although we Americans are not allowed to see them. We’re left with the administration’s variety show, a painfully familiar masquerade that marries the Bible’s “coat of many colours” with the children’s fairy tale of “the emperor’s new clothes”.

Three major, new lessons cry out for attention and investigation before our nation’s next oil war. First, the strategy of targeting indigenous cultures for destruction: Iraq — the conqueror Alexander the Great called it Mesopotamia long ago —  is one of the world’s oldest civilizations. Much of our own heritage can be traced back to it.

That includes writing — those folks were the first to invent it — and, of course, the Bible. Their epic, Gilgamesh, written thousands of years before Abraham, provided us with the stories of Noah’s Ark and Abraham and Isaac. But when we began our invasion to “bring democracy” — all reliable sources already having said there were no weapons of mass destruction there — our troops protected the Oil Ministry and allowed the looting of world-heritage museums. Unhappily, we were only following precedent here — our ancestors annihilated Native American cultures in both North and South America.

The second concern touches America’s soldiers, and points to glaring flaws in their training. Their image in the Moslem world — some 1.3 billion people —  has been shaped by the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the rape of adolescent girls and the murder of their parents at Falluja and Haditha. It would seem that training in cultural sensitivity would be as important as training in marksmanship for maintaining our worldwide empire.

Last of this war’s lessons presents the thorny problem of divided loyalties and parallel initiatives. “Pie in the Sky” notions of imposing democracy notwithstanding, control of oil resources has been central to the Bush administration’s aggression. Together with that, however, has been the advancing of Israel’s geopolitical agenda.

So-called “neocons” — Perle, Wolfowitz, Frum, and the Israel Lobby — have held extremely partisan views in planning and promoting this war. And those views have been shaped in large part by their close association with Israel and its belligerent right-wing parties and ideologues — Likud, Natan Sharansky, et al.

The outlines of this problem might change, but it won’t go away. For example, a large percentage of current combat troops (and casualties) are “green card soldiers”, immigrants with Hispanic backgrounds promised citizenship as the reward for service. Our next oil war may well be against Venezuela, a Spanish-speaking nation (and donor of free oil to Maine’s poor). That part of the world, of course, has experienced over a century of American invasions. They know what it’s all about, and probably wouldn’t remain passive –remember the Bay of Pigs?

“From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli” the song goes. We still have our hands full on those distant, eastern shores. If Montezuma’s halls are next on the oil oligarch’s agenda, those halls may prove to be more of a maze than Saddam’s “green zone” palaces where Iraqi bureaucrats and American brass operate in air-conditioned comfort while our troops walk about in 115 degree heat wearing 555lbs. of body armour, “winning hearts and minds”.