It is easy to blame the government!
If you are a Republican, it’s the Democrats; if you are
a democrat, it’s the Republicans; and, if you are an independent
(like myself), it’s the government period.
Of course it is all the government’s
fault! After all, aren’t they elected to do a job and, if
they mess up, isn’t that their fault? “Aye, there’s
the rub” (Shakespeare). Who elected the government? Unfortunately
(or perhaps I should say fortunately) “We the People.”
So, if things go wrong, ultimately it is “We the People”
who are to “blame.”
And herein lies the faint glimmerings
of a solution. If anything is going to change, ever, it will be
at the grass-roots level. And that means you and me, and my friends
and your friends, and so on and on and on.
Impossible? Maybe, but, if so,
we might as well commit mass suicide, like lemmings, and jump
into the sea. Personally I’d rather hang on to my “faint
glimmerings.”
We have become addicted to oil!
Wow, that was an abrupt change
of subject, wasn’t it?
Not really. Oil and our government
are virtually one and the same. Scratch a politician and you will
find oil! Just about any politician (of either party).
Our prosperity depends on oil.
The prosperity of any “super-power” depends on oil.
And, almost by definition, a super-power is a power that controls
oil.
We tend to think that oil has always
been around. Well, I guess it has, under the ground. The first
oil wells, however, were drilled as late as the 1880s –
only a little over a hundred years ago. Since then we have seen
the development of the modern world as we know it. Ships, airplanes,
submarines, tankers, tanks, aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and,
of course, our cars. The wars of the twentieth century were won
or lost because of oil. Japan, for example, attacked Pearl Harbor
because their oil supply lines were threatened. Germany, after
the crushing defeat of the First World War, had its oil supplies
virtually cut off. So what did it do? Start the Second World war
to win “lebensraum” (living space) which, incidentally,
included countries that had access to and control of oil.
British foreign policy has been
dominated by oil since the First World War. And the same applies,
and still applies, to American foreign policy. Without control
of oil, we should have lost the Second World War and we should
not have been able to “defeat” Communism. These are
geopolitical facts of life.
Isn’t it reasonable, therefore,
to regard oil as number one on the list of our national “interests”?
If our survival as a super-power depends on our access to and
control of oil, then surely our politicians are right in saying
that we need to do whatever we need to do to ensure an uninterrupted
supply? And, if the politicians do not do their job of protecting
“our” oil, then isn’t it reasonable that they
get thrown out of office? – which is a political fact of
life.
As an aside, my main objections
to the war in Iraq were the reasons given for it. If the government
has simply said, “we need to fight Iraq because of their
oil,” I might have disagreed but, at least, there’s
a certain logic to the argument. To say that we had to fight Iraq
because they possessed WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) is simply
naïve considering how many other countries have WMDs. And
to say that we had to fight Iraq because they supported Al-qaida
and terrorist organizations is also naïve considering how
many other countries are doing the same, or worse. And to say
that we had to fight Iraq because of human rights abuses is simply
not true. Look at what is currently going on in Africa’s
Sudan with hundreds of thousands being “ethnically cleansed”
through murder and politically-created famine, and yet I do not
hear anyone suggesting that we go to war. No. We went to war with
Iraq quite simply because of our oil interests.
Our dependence on oil, a fact which
has dominated our foreign policy “for ever,” has led
us into some strange and unfortunate alliances. Iraq again is
a good example. If you remember, back in the 80s we supported
Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis in their war against Iran –
because we did not want Iran to dominate Middle Eastern oil. There
is even evidence that we helped Saddam gain some of his know-how
regarding WMDs (but that’s a whole other topic!). In the
90s we supported the Taliban in Afghanistan against the Russians
because we did not want the Russians to control potentially vital
pipelines from the Caspian region. In the 80s and 90s, continuing
on into the present, we have and are supporting a corrupt government
in Saudi Arabia.
Since we have cast our dice in
Iraq and Afghanistan, which means we’re likely to be stuck
there, let’s take a closer look at Saudi Arabia and a situation
that could become critical any day.
Saudi Arabia supplies some 11%
of our oil. This may not sound a whole lot, but one of the most
important things about Saudi “crude” is that it is
easily accessible, there’s lots of it, and it’s cheap.
The fact that we have considerable influence over the Saudis gives
us some control over the price of our oil. If an OPEC (the oil-producing
cartel) country, or non-OPEC country, decides to “put the
screw” on America by raising oil prices, America can do
the same to encourage the Saudis to produce more oil at a low
price. Very convenient. And very workable. Except for one unfortunate
fact. It involves supporting a corrupt, non-democratic government
ruled by the House of Saud with its minions of prices and other
less legitimate offspring. Not that there is anything new in this
kind of arrangement. The problem in this case is that the government
is so corrupt and the masses of people are getting so
fed up that even moderate Moslems are losing patience, with
more and more of them supporting the fundamental Islamists (the
Wahhabis) and groups such as Al-qaida. The House of Saud, to appease
the extremists, has given a fair chunk of its billions of dollars
of oil revenue to support Wahhabi projects such as the rebuilding
of mosques, and the building of schools and universities to teach
Islamic extremism! In a rapidly expanding population with a very
high percentage of young people, unemployment is high. Education
in Islamic extremism is, however, cheap. What are the students
going to do when they finish college? Your guess is as good as
mine. The House of Saud is sitting on a time bomb. It will blow
up – the only question is when. We shall then be in the
“unfortunate” situation of having to come to the House
of Saud’s defense. This is likely to lead to –
in fact we are already seeing this – an increase in the
number and severity of terrorist attacks, not only against the
ruling House of Saud but also against us. This may be limited
to acts of terrorism against Americans in Saudi but may include
acts of terrorism against America itself.
For a full account of what is going
on in Saudi Arabia, I can recommend the New York Times
bestseller, Sleeping with the Devil, by an ex-CIA operative
Robert Baer. Fascinating reading! Baer thoroughly documents the
extent to which the House of Saud has been corrupted, and how
the whole system of bribes and corruption extends not only to
terrorist-supporting “charities,” but also to American
government officials and the oil and armaments industries. Read
this book and I think you will agree that we are truly “Sleeping
with the Devil.”
We are in a trap, and it’s
the trap of classic addiction. A drug addict needs their drug
to feel good; when they don’t get the drug they suffer from
withdrawal symptoms, so they go for another fix; the fixes tend
to become less effective so there develops the need for a larger
fix; and so on. We need oil and we are addicted to it, in large
quantities, cheap. If we don’t get it, we’ll do whatever
we need to do (including going to war and “sleeping with”
corrupt dictators) to get it. How long can this go on? The politicians
are hoping, of course, as long as their term of office. But we
in the “real world” are not living in four-year terms.
Many of us will live another 30 to 70 years, maybe even longer.
We can continue to go for the next
“fix.” If Saudi Arabia goes under, there are plenty
of other sources of oil – maybe not as conveniently accessible
and “cheap,” but still plenty of them. The area around
the Caspian Sea has, it is claimed, oil reserves just as great
as those of the Middle East. But, take a look at the map. Getting
oil from this area involves tremendous logistic problems: pipelines
over thousands of miles of politically unstable territories, or
shipping by tanker through waterways that could easily be sabotaged
by terrorists. Sure there will be more fixes but each fix is likely
to become more and more expensive. And someday, quite likely in
the lifetime of most of us, the fixes will run out.
The alternative to “fixes”
is to fix the problem.
Easier said that done, but nobody
said breaking an addiction is easy. We have become so used to
the solution of “cheap oil” that we tend to think
it is the only solution. True it is a solution that has dominated
the world for over a hundred years. But is this a solution that
can or should dominate the world for the next hundred?
To come up with a real solution we need to look beyond the fix
of cheap oil. What we really need is not cheap oil but CHEAP ENERGY.
For the last century “cheap energy” has been synonymous
with “cheap oil” but it does not always have to be
that way. We have to recognize however that we cannot simply replace
“cheap oil” with some other form of cheap energy.
We tried that with nuclear power. It looked like a neat solution
for clean, cheap energy but then we started taking a closer look
at the environmental implications and terrorist risks. Maybe someone
will suddenly come up with a source of cheap energy. More likely,
however, is that we shall have to go through a period of withdrawal.
There are two ways we could do this: (a) cut down on our energy
consumption, and (b) replace some of the “cheap oil”
with more expensive oil from countries more politically stable
(such as Canada) or alternative fuels which initially, at least,
are likely to be more expensive.
A discussion of how to do this
goes beyond the scope of this article. But the first step is the
political will. Before we put a man on the moon enough people
had to decide that that was something we really wanted to do.
If we really want a solution to the “cheap oil fix,”
we’ll find it, we can make it happen. The alternative: continuing
political instability... and a never-ending War on Terrorism.
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