We need to stay in the Middle East for oil. Oil and gas. That’s it. That’s the only reason we need to stay in the Middle East with airbases, and naval ports, and aircraft carriers, and huge arms depots, and the rest. The Washington Establishment is desperate to convince you we have other reasons.
Those Republicans [up for reelection in ’08], plus a few in slightly safer seats and a smattering of others, will hold the key to either partisan unity or bipartisan compromise on Iraq War policy.
“My answer is, let’s have a change in mission as rapidly as we can,” said Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who next year will defend a seat rated by CQ as “Republican favored.”
Alexander and Ken Salazar, D-Colo., have jointly proposed changing the mission of troops from combat to support, to reduce the presence long-term and to increase political and diplomatic efforts.
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., embraced Alexander’s proposal Monday as a model for bipartisan compromise because it calls for a long-term military presence in the Middle East.
“I think it’s pretty clear we need some kind of long-term deployment in the Middle East for two reasons: al Qaeda and Iran,” McConnell said. “I hope we’ll be able to get a broad bipartisan support for that kind of endgame strategy at some point here, if not next week, some time in the near future.”
Al Qaeda and Iran. Why are they a problem? For one simple reason. They oppose and resist our presence and influence in the Middle East. To argue that we have to stay in the Middle East because those two entities oppose our presence in the Middle East is nonsensical. But that is the argument the Establishment makes over and over again. They simply refuse to acknowledge (Ron Paul excepted) that we have a terrorism threat because of our presence in the Middle East, and not because radicals oppose our eroding freedoms.
America needs to transition from the sole superpower, responsible for the stability of the world energy supply and for all major humanitarian and peace keeping efforts, to some sort of power sharing arrangement. The people never signed on for an empire. They might like being the biggest boy on the block, but they must be constantly deceived and terrified in order for them to maintain support for our imperial policies.
This is a Republic…a fine and outstanding Republic. And we are rapidly losing our Republic in favor of some kind of Pax Americana that has no pax in sight.
Someone should look around and realize that we’ve got a Caligula running things, not a Senate. We need to fundamentally reassess our foreign policy. We do not need to stay in the Middle East to fight al-Qaeda and Iran. We’re fighting al-Qaeda and Iran because we are in the Middle East. At least, let’s understand cause and effect here.
A forward looking foreign policy should aim to make this country less dependent on Middle Eastern oil and gas, while also making sure that other democratic nations develop the air and naval assets they need to help us move away from our role as the ‘indispensable nation’ for all humanitarian and peacekeeping missions. We can’t afford it. Our rights are more important than our hegemony.
to my interview with David Korten, author of The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. I crossposted it on Booman some weeks ago. Here is the the link
And here I was thinking that we were there to benefit mankind. (cough, cough)
Who is “we”? The Clergy? The Military? The Latterati? Or…? Chronic servants of humanity all of the above… on the other hand none of the above withstand empirical observation very well, do they…
Yes there is a giant rift, though in my humble opinion not the clean chimerical one Korten conjures up. It is a rift between the empire mindset and the evolving One World System called globalism. This WTO system is not clean, it is greedy, is at this point all sorts of things it better wouldn’t be — but it undeniably is (a) adaptable and (b) based on cooperation and not on war. In fact it needs peace to function. The rift stems from the fact that the giant protection racket called the military-industrial complex needs unending threats to resolve, or else it will go hungry. Yet it has just proven itself incapable of resolving threats and of establishing hegemony. Hegemony as enforced by the military is as chimerical as Korten’s earth community. Messy, greedy cooperation under the WTO and NAFTA on the other hand has lifted hundreds of millions of earthlings out of poverty. Well-fed white children of privilege feel uneasy about it, but then old-style aristos felt the same degout when nation capitalism triumphed in the 19th century.
This is an excellent post. I agree entirely.
Glad to see you’re thinking’s evolved, Booman. That’s one reason I like your site so much.
Here’s a post of yours from May:
One is inclined to wonder just how many years of ‘oil’ the prosecution of this war has burned into vapors, and for what? Just because we could?
Do you remember “Three Days of the Condor?” Eerily prescient.
At the end there’s a conversation between Redford’s character and Cliff Robertson’s character about what we would now call “Peak Oil” and “American hegemony”. The upshot was that once the lights started to go out or they couldn’t afford to put gas their unaffordable SUVs to commute from the McMansions they can’t afford to the jobs that are less and less rewarding, Americans wouldn’t ask why, how, who or any of the other questions. They’d just demand the fix.
I’m afraid consumerism has addled the American brain to such an extent that the premise is probably correct.
That’s what the national security types have been saying for decades. And it’s been their meal ticket too. But someone please answer this: Does the US pay less for its oil than (say) Japan or (say) South Africa, because US troops have been stationed in the Middle East since the 1970s? The answer is no: we pay the same rate as everybody else, yet pay untold billions for troops on top of that. Add this money to the US Mid-East oil bill and you are sure to get a very interesting price per barrel. Hey it might even make corn-derived Ethanol look economical. The whole Stratego business, board-game and real, is completely nuts: The Chinese don’t “have” Africa either of course. Mental masturbation.
Sorry, I don’t buy it. The problem is not “them” (the oil firms, the government, the military, the transnationals, …), it is us.
The US public is not willing to moderate its current lifestyle. We like our SUV’s and McMansions. I just got back from a visit to a mall (something I do about once a year). The place is chock full of stores selling overpriced, non-essentials. There was an $82K Jaguar sitting in the middle to entice buyers.
Politicians promise a painless transition (to what they don’t say), but it involves the contradictory goals of conservation and growth. Either you use more or you use less, you can’t do both at the same time.
Any politician who said he was going to solve the oil situation by eliminating SUV’s and requiring auto companies to build cars getting 60 MPG in, say, five years, would be luck to get two votes (his and his wife’s).
As Pogo said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
We want our stuff, we just don’t like paying for it in lost lives, however this is how we have done it since the days of gunboat diplomacy and United Fruit. When we “win” nobody complains, it’s only when we are losing that the moral arguments get trotted out.
Interestingly we haven’t won a major war since the end of WWII, but we keep trying the same old game. I don’t know how many more time this will have to play out before people realize that we can blow things up, but we can’t control foreign populations.
How far would the estimated $2 trillion spent on the current wars have gone toward just paying for the oil?
While I’m not arguing your premise or your sources, I frankly think it’s more complicated than that. In the giant game of “Stratego” in the world, it’s the United States and China putting pegs on a map, establishing areas of influence for the second half of the Century. China has pegged out Africa, and we hope to keep the Middle East in our sphere of influence. To do that, we have to keep the Saudi royals in power…and to do that, we have to defend “their” Sunnis in Iraq, so that they don’t have to send their kids to do so. If they get involved in a war, their political stability may be gone.
That’s the thinking of the people behind our government–and theirs.But in their game strategy, our hidden government is really stupid. First, they have forgotten about Europe. And second, in their chutzpah they have made the effort to keep their hold on the MIddle East by spending trillions on their Chinese Credit card. So heads they win, tails we lose.
Imagine what would have happened if we would have spent a fifth of the money we spent in Iraq on grants for alternative energy.
Alternative energy sources aren’t going to solve our problem. There is no combination of presently or even near-term alternative energy sources that can hope to support the American lifestyle which we have been informed is not open to negotiation. Perhaps we can send Cheney off into the wilderness to discuss that with Mother Nature.
maybe these guys could help him see the error of his ways, eh:
just sayin’
lTMF’sA
Conserve now or suffer later. There is no combination of wars and blackmail that can make our current oil supply last more than 20 years–representing the approximate portion of our income that it currently represents. (How much oil is left? Depends on what fraction of your paycheck you want to spend, and what fraction of the population you want to have it.)
So it’s really not up for negotiation–we either develop the technology or we live without oil.
“So it’s really not up for negotiation–we either develop the technology or we live without oil.”
As a practical matter you may be right. If we lived in the real world, however–as opposed to the (words fail) world we think we live in–we could re-engineer the society to take reality into account. I realize this would mean living within our means, but sooner or later you’d think this would sink in.
Let’s see – postpone present pleasure or pay the consequences later. Considering America’s massive credit card debt I think we know what the answer to that one will be…
It’s not just power. It’s drugs, plastics, lubricants and cosmetics. It’s going to be a war–a class war.
The point is, do we fuel our technology development resources now, or buy from Europe and India later.
Via Crooks & Lawyers:
Rep. Chris Shays: We’re there for the oil