On Saturday, October 23, 2004, at 09:02 AM, Jan Straathof wrote:
Malcolm i concur with your overall analysis of the world political
and economical landscape, the prospect seems quite grim. It seems
the oil markets have gone mad much urlier than i expected; banks, financial
institutions and large private investors are now buying oil
too: it all has become a great speculation game, driving up the price
much faster .... do i hear 100 USD a barrel, anyone ??
Yes, supply is only just keeping up with demand and Saudi Arabia seems incapable of bringing on any spare capacity, apparently its own production has been declining slightly the last 4 months in a row. China and India are experiencing accelerated growth and both are looking at building their strategic reserves at a time when the US is filling its own to capacity. At the moment we consume around 82 million barrels, or about 13 billion litres of oil every single day and the shipping and refinery infrastructure is having a hard time keeping the flow going at such gigantic volumes. The underlying problem does seem to be geological though, we use four times as much oil as we discover each year and discoveries peaked in 1964 and have been declining ever since. The more or less constant growth in oil extraction over the last 150 years may be reaching a peak plateau.
I am still not convinced that opening up another front (Iran) will bring
any new stragetic advantage in the war on terror or the pacification
of the Middle East.
Totally, it would probably usher in a world war. The Iraq conquest is already a very alarming precedent, akin to Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia or Poland.
To invade Iran you'll need at least an army of 500.000 and the US
can't supply that at the moment, so do you think that Howard will
send in a 150.000 and Blair too ?
Yes, eventually, if they're still in office when it happens. Both leaders sold their souls to the devil when they threw their full support behind the criminal invasion of Iraq and the subsequent collapse of international law. Australia followed the US blindly into the Vietnam disaster and instituted a military draft to do so. This time around we're even more sycophantic as the stakes are exponentially higher. An attack on Iran would probably require a military draft in the US and that would mean an intensification of the US war effort, or a real war on the home front. The US managed a gigantic war effort in WW2, they ground the Japanese to a pulp, supplied the Russian war effort and invaded western Europe. Iraq is expensive and difficult with a 'peace time' volunteer army and domestic economy but once total war is initiated I think US industrial and military power would be capable of a lot more chaos on a much grander scale. Just ask Richard Perle.
And further a conventional land-
based attack on Iran will mean some real heavy fighting and losses,
because the Iranian amry is well equiped with modern Russian air
and battlefield missiles.
If it gets seriously out of hand there's always tactical nukes. Besides the main strategic aim would be to control the Iranian's Persian Gulf oil fields, the rest of the country could be bombed back into the stone age like they did to Cambodia or Laos. The same goes for Saudi Arabia and any other energy rich minor power. Iraq is the precedent that makes the Bush national security strategy the new reality and law of our international order, now and for the future. The US has forcefully demonstrated that it will attack any nation it deems to be a threat to its interests, and its national interests are fundamentally aligned with its energy security. I think the main difficulty wouldn't be so much how the Islamic world responds to an attack on Iran but how Russia, China and Europe would react to US control of the Middle Eastern oil spigot. On the one hand you have the interdependent global economy and on the other you have the collapse of international trade as the world goes to war. I'd hope they could reach some sort of business compromise before launching preemptive nuclear strikes on one another but who can guarantee that MAD will work during a terminal energy decline, especially given the neoconservative push for world domination?
To think that the US, or the West, could dominate or should guide
the socio-political emancipation and the economical development
processes of the arab/muslim world, is a mistake of gigantic historical
proportions.
Truly gigantic, but these are the most gigantic of human times where gigantism is a function of the will to will and its global ordering. I imagine the Israeli military, itself effectively a de facto US force, would be used to initiate a conflict. Any attack on Iran is likely to erupt in a wider Middle Eastern war and that may well be what the neoconservative hawks are planning on. If the end game is to control Persian Gulf oil for the next few decades then a global war is most probably inevitable, the US can choose to ignite it at any time. In a sense it already has with the conquest of Iraq.
If the West truely and honestly wants the integration of
the arab/muslim regions into the modern world-system, we should
empower them, strenghten their identity and independence and above
all give them the support and tools to solve their own problems.
I'm not sure this is part of the plan, who in the western world really cares about Arabs? We want electricity 24/7, unending credit to buy what most of the world would consider luxury goods, and we want it all guilt free, so sure, in principle everyone should enjoy 'democracy'. But it's their oil we're stealing and have always stolen, if their kids get in the way we simply annihilate them through industrial warfare. That seems to be what is happening in Iraq at the moment and historically that is the promise of our 'democratic' national self-interests. Here's an interesting bit of disinformation for you, how about a pre-election US attack on Iran launched in the next 2 weeks? http://207.44.245.159/article7113.htm
But
no, we arrogantly think we should fix that for them: we invade them
to bring democracy, privatize their economies, write their curricula,
train their judges and police, commercialize their media and so on,
because we think we know better, because we think we are better ....
yeh .... pride goes before the fall.
Hubris and imperial arrogance result in either the fall of civilisations or their brutal perdurance. God only knows how it's going to turn out and unfortunately He appears to be well and truly dead, apparently we are the ones who killed Him and took His place. Our shared, modern subjectivity and its planetary ordering are probably well overdue for a fall, and perhaps that fall would be better sooner than later as runaway global warming may become catastrophic by 2050.
Regards,
Malcolm
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