OIL Seems like there is some truth in here at least to me:
When oil is gone, civilization will be stupendously different. The onset of rapid depletion will trigger convulsions on a global scale, including, likely, global pandemics and die-offs of significant portions of the world’s human population. The “have” countries will face the necessity kicking the “have-nots” out of the global lifeboat in order to assure their own survival. Even before such conditions are reached, inelastic supply interacting with inelastic demand will drive the price of oil and oil-derived commodities through the stratosphere, effecting by market forces alone massive shifts in the current distribution of global wealth.
If the US economy is not to grind to a halt under these circumstances it must choose one of three alternate strategies: dramatically lower its living standards (something it is not willing to do); substantially increase the energy efficiency of its economy; or make up the shortfall by securing supplies from other countries. President Bush’s National Energy Policy published in March 2001 explicitly commits the US to the third choice: Grab the Oil. It is this choice that is now driving US military and national security policy. And, in fact, the past 60 years of US policy in the Middle East can only be understood as the effort to control access to the world’s largest supply of oil.
Witness, for example, the deep US embrace of Saudi Arabia since World War II. One quarter of all US weapons sales between 1950 and 2000 went to Saudi Arabia despite its horrifically repressive, literally medieval tribal nature. The CIA’s overthrow of Mohamed Mosadegh in Iran in 1953 after he nationalized his country’s oil is another example. So, too, was the US strategic embrace of Israel during the 1967 Six Day War. The US was deeply mired in Vietnam but needed a “cop on the beat” to challenge Arab states—Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Yemen—that were “going Soviet.” It has stuck with that relationship ever since.
More recent examples of national strategy in bondage to the compulsion for oil include US support for Saddam Hussein in the Iran/Iraq War; its support for Osama bin Laden in the Afghanistan War against the Soviet Union; and, of course, the most recent invasion of Iraq to seize its oilfields and forward position US forces for an invasion of neighboring Saudi Arabia when it is inevitably destroyed by internal civil war. And under a Grab the Oil strategy, militarization of US society will only deepen.
The reason is that a very major portion of the world’s oil is, by accident of geology, in the hands of states hostile to the US. Fully 60% percent of the world’s proven reserves of oil are in the Persian Gulf. They lie beneath Muslim countries undergoing a religious revolution that wants to return the industrial world to a pre-modern order governed by a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy. Saudi Arabia alone controls 25% of all the world’s oil, more than that of North America, South America, Europe and Africa combined. Kuwait, Iran and Iraq, each control approximately 10% of the world’s oil.
Another 15% of the world’s oil lies in the Caspian Sea region, also a dominantly Muslim region. It includes a group of post-Soviet, satellite and buffer states that lack any semblance of legal or market systems. They are extraordinarily corrupt, really just Gangster Thugocracies masquerading as countries. Think Afghanistan. Both Russia and China consider this region part of their “sphere of strategic influence” portending significant clashes for the US over coming decades.
As long as the US chooses the Grab the Oil alternative, the implications for national policy are inescapable. The combination of all these facts—fixed supply, rapid depletion, lack of alternatives, severity of consequences, and hostility of current stockholding countries—drive the US to HAVE to adopt an aggressive (pre-emptive) military posture and to carry out a nakedly colonial expropriation of resources from weaker countries around the world.
This is why the US operates some 700 military bases around the world and spends over half a trillion dollars per year on military affairs, more than all the rest of the world—its “allies” included—combined. This is why the Defense Department’s latest Quadrennial Review stated, “The US must retain the capability to send well-armed and logistically supported forces to critical points around the globe, even in the face of enemy opposition.” This is why Pentagon brass say internally that current force levels are inadequate to the strategic challenges they face and that they will have to re-instate the draft after the 2004 elections.
But the provocation occasioned by grabbing the oil, especially from nations ideologically hostile to the US, means that military attacks on the US and the recourse to military responses will only intensify until the US is embroiled in unending global conflict. This is the perverse genius of the Grab the Oil strategy: it comes with its own built-in escalation, its own justification for ever more militarization—without limit. It will blithely consume the entire US economy, the entire society, without being sated. It is, in homage to Orwell, Perpetual War for Perpetual Grease.
In his first released tape after 9/11, Osama bin Laden stated that he carried out the attacks for three reasons: 1) to drive US military forces from Saudi Arabia, the most sacred place of Islam; 2) to avenge the deaths of over half a million Iraqi children killed, according to UNICEF, as a result of the US-sponsored embargo of the 1990s; and, 3) to punish US sponsorship of Israeli oppression against the Palestinian people. Oil and the need to control it are critically implicated in all three reasons.
But now comes the sobering part. In response to the 9/11 attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated that the US was engaged in “…a thirty to forty year war (!) against fundamentalist Islam.” It is the fever of War, of course, that becomes the all-purpose justification for the rollback of civil liberties. Lincoln used the Civil War to justify the suspension of habeas corpus. Roosevelt used the cover of World War II to inter hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans. And now Bush is using the self-ratcheting “War on Terror” to effect even more sweeping, perhaps permanent rescissions of civil liberties.
Under the Patriot Act, a person can be arrested without probable cause, held indefinitely without being charged, tried without a lawyer or a jury, sentenced without the opportunity to appeal, and put to death—all without notification of…anybody. This is simply a Soviet Gulag and it has been rationalized by the hysterical over-hyping of the War on Terror. The fact that it is not yet widespread does not diminish the more important fact that it has been put in place precisely in anticipation of such procedures needing to be being carried out on a mass scale in the future.
321energy.com |
