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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (204696)	9/30/2006 11:55:47 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi CobaltBlue; Re: "Blockade. In a word, blockade. Military force. We've got aircraft carriers and submarines, Iraq doesn't." As we've learned so well in Iraq, is not so good at obtaining oil. Our carriers burn oil, they cannot force people to sell it to us. Re: "Nope, I remember the 1973 embargo, and that's exactly what happened. OPEC tried to turn off the spigot, but in the Middle East, everything has a price. The people the Saudis sold to, in turn sold to paper third parties, and so on down the line of plausible denial. ("I swear upon a thousand camels!")" The hell you say. The price of oil went from about $3 to $12 per barrel in a couple months. "U.S. imports of oil from the Arab countries dropped from 1.2 million barrels (190,000 m³) a day to a mere 19,000 barrels (3,000 m³). Daily consumption dropped by 6.1% from September to February, 7% by the summer of 1974. During that period, the United States suffered its first fuel shortage since World War II." "In the U.S., drivers of vehicles with license plates having an odd number as the last digit were allowed to purchase gasoline for their cars only on odd-numbered days of the month, while drivers of vehicles with even-numbered license plates were allowed to purchase fuel only on even-numbered days. The rule did not apply on the 31st day of those months containing 31 days, or on February 29 in leap years — the latter never came into play, as the restrictions had been abolished by 1976." en.wikipedia.org Re: "Money talks, bullshit (ideology) walks. ..." The basic problem with the neocons is that they believe their own bullshit (ideology). The Iraq war is a great example of bullshit (ideology) marching, when the country would have been better served if it had just walked away. Being sure of yourself can be very dangerous thing. Getting into Iraq was caused by the same overconfidence in American power that you're exhibiting here. Talk about it all you like, sometimes making threats is good foreign policy. But if we get diplomatically cut off from oil from the Middle East, getting it running again by some sort of military action is just not feasible. Carrier groups kill people and break things. They do not drill for oil. They use oil, they do not create it. They can prevent oil from being shipped, but they cannot ship it. The problem here is understanding the nature of power. The US is more powerful than any other nation, but "power" is not a simple thing. The real world is not a game of "Risk" where the guy with the largest stack of pieces usually wins. The real world is vastly more complicated than that, and it is only when you know enough about many different things that you can have a good idea what the limitations and abilities of the power possessed by various nations actually is. The real world is not a video game. Having a gun doesn't make it easier to do 99.999% of the things you might want to do. Guns are fairly useless. -- Carl