Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Iran, Libya.....
What do they have in common?
Strong men in power.
Corrupt strong men in power.
And except for Iran and Libya, strong ties to the US, particularly the military. Bahrain is the Fifth Fleet's base in the area. The Egyptian military is strongly tied to the US.
We don't know much about Saudi Arabia and the status of any difficulties there, but we do know that SA's population in the oil producing section is about 10% Shia, so some disturbances can be expected or are ongoing. It is a secretive place, so there may be more going on than is let on.
These military ties of course protect our energy supplies.
The internet and instant worldwide communications have enabled and informed a population which was up to now quite uninformed.
It is a very young and restless population, one that in the main does not have a lot of economic opportunity available to it.
And now inflation in food prices is making life even more difficult for them.
I tell you, I think we have a powder keg on our hands, one that could threaten our energy supplies.
I read somewhere that the events in the ME mimic what happened in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The dominos simply fell one after the other in that region, ultimately causing the demise of the Soviet Union.
I'm not saying that the historical analogy is fool-proof. Although we have our problems, we are much, much stronger than the Soviets were in the 1980s though, like the Soviets, we're mired in a costly and stupid war in Afghanistan.
But we will be challenged, in oil and in our relationship with Israel, for it seems inevitable that once this surge of rebellion gets going at a higher level, the targets will be the US via oil and Israel via military action and terrorism.
We are entering a new era in the ME, and it scares me. Our preparations for this kind of thing seem non-existent.
If it is inevitable that we will have deficit spending, we need to target energy with those dollars. We need - desperately - to stop relying on oil. I don't know how many times since Jimmy Carter that has been the clarion call of our policymakers, but the net result has been zero progress. We still send billions upon billions of USD to the petrocrats and we get nothing but trouble and dependency in return.
The time has come to stop screwing around with energy, and take logical steps to replace our oil dependency with something more viable. |
