It is exactly this – this wilful refusal on our part to learn from Humanity’s recent collective mistakes – that makes following this looming war exactly like watching George Bush’s bad movie rerun: a road accident in slow motion, running on a permanent loop.
Oil, of course, is just very, very old dead dinosaurs and dead-dinosaur fodder.
Fossil fuels are just that: fossils. Not unlike grumpy old neo-cons and angry lefties who go round quoting Marx, they are the rotting remnants of an age long past, when human beings were mere unthinking animals too, and the Law of the Jungle was not a cliche but an unavoidable lifestyle choice.
Transcending that meaningless way of existence – timeless, truthless, based on sheer brute power and rat cunning – is what has defined Mankind’s journey. It’s what has lifted us half-way out of the gutter, and half-way to the stars, or at least Mars. It doesn’t really matter whether you choose to believe that the spark of Human self-consciousness which first kicked off our miraculous journey was Divine, or Darwinian, or applied by visiting aliens, or just another weird kink in the very kinky Human genome. We think, therefore we have Free Will, therefore every single individual and collective thought we as a species choose to translate into action is our responsibility, and ours alone.
So I’m afraid we can’t blame God or Allah or Satan or even Milton Friedman for whatever it turns out we are about to unleash in the Middle East.
Nor will it be a function of ‘just the way the world is’. Nor is it ‘inevitable’. Nor is it ‘realpolitik’. Nor will it be any expression of ‘moral clarity’, or ‘patriotic duty’, or ‘scientific imperative’, or ‘philosophical logic’, or ‘the Market’, or ‘the moral high ground’, or ‘Manifest Destiny’.
It will simply be what our most powerful dinosaurs decided to do on our behalf, once upon yet another time when our ugliest abstract thoughts ceased to be abstract, and became ineradicable facts of history. Truths, the only earthly ones we Human Beings can ever really be sure of: That which we did yesterday.
Tomorrow, all the fine abstract arguments about the approaching war in Iraq, including mine here, will blow away on the hot desert winds, and the bloodiness in the Middle East will simply become what we chose to do – yesterday, and yesterday, and yesterday. Never to be undone, never to be wished away. The reasons simply won’t matter.
But it’s not tomorrow yet, and so the reasons for war, which are all bad on this occasion, still need to be pulled apart, urgently. Which is why I’ll gladly repeat myself, and at length: This invasion and occupation is all about oil. All about dead dinosaurs, and dead-dinosaur fodder.
I’m well aware that many readers will have thrown their hands up in contempt or despair at my simplistic reductions last time – ‘a violent crime of theft’ (No Blood For Oil!) – but the scarier truth is that sometimes, just sometimes, the simplistic reductions are the right ones.
This is an invasion for oil. Push it, prod it, poke that truth any way you like, write a million clever words explaining carefully why it’s not, but it is. What we are about to do is invade and occupy Iraq to ‘secure’ the energy future of the West. If some people find that too intimidating, too much like ‘Western self-blame’, then that’s just too bad. Since September 11, I’ve already been called every ‘anti’ under the sun anyway; the one ‘anti’ I refuse to expose myself to is ‘anti-truth’.
Yep, this invasion and occupation is about securing (what some energy industry dinosaurs anachronistically insist must be) the energy future of ‘Western Civilisation’. If that places me too didactically close to the likes of Osama bin Laden and his various nutty mouthpieces of late, then that’s not my fault, either. Like John Avery (see Murdoch: Cheap oil the prize), I’m among the many who’ve been trying to argue, since ten days after S11 (More on War Fever), that we should concentrate on hunting that very creep down and trying him like the minor criminal he is, as our very highest priority in this ‘war on terror’. Rather than doing our best to turn him into some hateful modern-day ‘Messiah’, which is exactly what our glorious global leaders have now almost managed to do.
I’m among the many arguing for the isolation, the de-legitimisation, the ruthless, focussed targeting of Al-Qaeda, not its exact opposite, which is what this invasion will represent. I’m not the warbloggy pill pushing hysterically from the geeky safety of my little closet Trekky bedroom, for an entirely unnecessary, counter-productive and wasteful invasion and occupation of Iraq to get rid of Saddam, either.
No, in this ‘war against terror’, I’m more than happy to fight hard where necessary, but I’m buggered if I’m interested in fighting stupid, in fighting like a twentieth century dinosaur. Like many, I’ve presented what I think is a workable alternative for dealing with Saddam (Looking for John Curtin). I find it grimly amusing that the pro-invasion crew sneers at such allegedly ‘unrealistic’ plans as that proposed by the French and the Germans, too, when the cunning ‘disarmament’ plan they are helping push into actuality is the wackiest, most disproportionate, most strategically-suicidal, most apparently short-sighted and most potentially-disastrous military folly in the history of the United States.
Mark Latham was dead right: America is currently being run by clowns. And still the only response, as from the refreshed Miranda Devine in the SMH yesterday morning, is: We cannot stick our heads in the sand and do nothing about Saddam. Nothing, Miranda? Nothing? As if anyone is remotely proposing doing ‘nothing’ about Saddam Hussein.
The international community has been doing ‘something’ about him ever since he stopped being America’s second best Middle Eastern mate. These invasionists are like brattish children; if they can’t get things exactly all their own way, they stamp their little feet and call Mum a terrorist-lover until she gives in.
In any case, as I have said before, and will keep saying until I am proven wrong by the explosive resurgence in the next few years of a wildly wealthy, free and politically-autonomous Iraqi populace, this invasion is not about Saddam Hussein, it’s about dead dinosaurs.
A first step is a Socratic one, to ask ourselves this question: Would this invasion be occurring if Iraq had no oil reserves at all? The answer is obviously no. All the key invasion arguments are themselves only important because of the global leverage Iraq’s asset lends them. The trumped-up WMD/rogue state line is as much about the threat of economic blackmail as activated, enabled terrorism. The fear of a regionally-emboldened Saddam is based upon what it would mean for the oil market. Even the Human Rights-democracy line is grounded in oil in a way, for it’s the external ramifications of Saddam’s dictatorial powers that matter geo-politically – the absolutist method of ‘governance’ that gives one power-crazed man the kind of omnipotent, focussed control over Iraq’s national ambitions that democratic rulers can only envy, and how those national ambitions might just include hijacking the global economy.
This is what the Western hawks really fear about The Butcher of Baghdad; how his vicious political rule might one day translate itself onto the world stage, not all the nasty things he does internally to dissenting Iraqis to maintain it. To agree that this would indeed be a bad thing for Humanity is one thing; to support the West’s application of Saddam’s very own methods to prevent it from happening – pre-emptively applying our global brute force to neutralise his potential global brute force – is quite another. The end doesn’t justify the means; the means are the end.
To note all this is not to say that these secondary arguments for invading and occupying Iraq aren’t genuinely embraced by many of those who present them; it is simply to recognise that without the oil, these arguments become largely moot. Remove the dead dinosaurs from the Iraq equation, and Saddam Hussein becomes, even at the very worst, just another minor, regional, terrorism-supporting, WMD-craving, HR-abusing anti-freedom thug; a Khaddafi, a Ceascescu, an Idi Amin, a Pol Pot – there’s never been a shortage of such beasts, and successive US governments have never been particularly averse to tolerating them before.
Nor will they be in future. Successive US governments have most certainly never invaded and permanently occupied another country just to remove one; the preferred methods more usually include equipping and training guerrilla groups, sponsoring coups, a little light heavy bombing.
Iraq aside, the current Administration is no different, and arguably far more fast and loose with concepts like HR than most. (To claim that the Bushies are something ‘new and visionary’, that Rumsfeld and Cheney and Wolfowitz are democratic ‘idealists’, is a jaw-dropping perversion of language.) They can still – thankfully – quite happily ‘chat calmly’ with a bristling North Korea, for example, unquestionably the most terrifying and unstable regime on the planet. They feel no great need to go to war with China. They are ‘relaxed and comfortable’ with dozens of other dictatorships elsewhere which also give rise to equally urgent WMD, terrorist, HR-abuse and ‘anti-West’ threats. Many such dictatorships, in fact, are right next door to Iraq. No; Saddam only matters because of Iraq’s mighty stockpile of dead dinosaurs and dead dinosaur fodder. How anyone can pretend otherwise beggars belief.
In many ways this invasion and occupation would be far easier to swallow if the US Administration was honest about the reason for its inevitability. The same applies to the posturing of the French, German, Russian and Chinese governments, too, whose machinations in all this, while far more ‘idealistic’ than the US grasps, are also heavily influenced by the oil spoils they either stand to retain or lose themselves or simply don’t wish others to get.
And I’m not pretending to be an ‘energy saint’ in this either, just by the way. I use as much oil energy as the next wasteful Western citizen. But this is exactly why what we really need right now is some brutal leadership, right from the very top. We need George W. Bush to come right out and ask us all, straight up, if we support going to war for the sake of our own oil energy future.
And then we would all have to ask ourselves where we truly stand on this invasion. None of us could be in any doubts about what is at stake, and why the post-S11 killing is about to escalate. At the very least, a little brisk openness of this kind from the war leaders would result in far less damage to NATO, to the UN, to the broad Western secular liberal accord. The diplomats could go home, the bleeding hearts and poets could fall silent, and those who were still willing to be part of the ‘coalition of the willing’ could go and slug it out on the sands in honest combat, winner take oil.
Not that this will happen in a million years. All the dead-dinosaur industry dinosaur-leaders are ‘horrified’ at the prospect of war in their name, naturally, and no sane democratic leader is ever likely to be so ruthlessly frank. One mustn’t ever ruffle the self-deluding savoir faire of the dainty East Coast patriarchs and the down-home Texas boys, the clubby Brits and the smooth Europeans, the hard-eyed new breed of Russian corporate mover.
And why yes, I just bet some of these chaps are Masons, and some might even be Jewish. Fancy that. Butan evil global conspiracy? What bloody rubbish. It’s no conspiracy, it’s simply the complicated and interlocking headless beast of international business doing business, doing its ‘accidental conspiracy’ business-machine thing.
Like the men who drove Enron and Worldcom and the IT revolution into the ground, these oil men are not evil, they’re not vicious, they’re not hateful, and they doubtless would indeed be ‘horrified’ if they ever had to see up close and in bloody detail what it will actually require us in the West to do, if we are to make Rupert Murdoch’s charming vision of our economic future come to pass: “I have a pretty optimistic medium and long-term view but things are going to be pretty sticky until we get Iraq behind us,” says Rupert. “But once it’s behind us, the whole world will benefit from cheaper oil which will be a bigger stimulus than anything else.”(See Murdoch: Cheap oil the prize.)
Now Rupert Murdoch is in fact a pretty decent sort of bloke as bastard media tycoons go, and he is about to become a father again soon, too. I wish he and his wife nothing but joy and a safe and easy confinement, but when he can do no more than say prissily, of the coming savagery in Iraq, that it might indeed get ‘pretty sticky’ before the price of oil drops and the global economy soars anew, I cannot comprehend that we are members of the same Human tribe, with the same fears and hopes and fleshy vulnerabilities.
No, it is no ‘conspiracy’ and the casual callousness is not intended. The collective oil industry’s refusal to contemplate the ugly truth is just another human moral self-defence mechanism, not so very different from the head-in-the-sand response of the world’s civilised people to the rise and rise of all the other, the more explicitly totalitarian, dinosaur Big Lies of the last century.
“We only want to do our job,” is what the oil men of the world are saying to each other right now, and we are wrong to blame them for this war for oil because their job is to make our economy function, and if they don’t, then we are the very first ones to complain. It’s no conspiracy, and it’s nobody’s fault; we are all in this together, and none of us are being honest about what ‘this’ really is.
And yet we should know better by now. This is dinosaur stuff, yesterday’s news. We should have learned by now what happens when good and decent people refuse to confront Big Lies, and early, and most of all in ourselves, the small roles we each play in allowing them to grow to dangerous sizes.
It is exactly this – this wilful refusal on our part to learn from Humanity’s recent collective mistakes – that makes following this looming war exactly like watching George Bush’s bad movie rerun: a road accident in slow motion, running on a permanent loop. It makes you want to scream in desperation at what Mankind is in danger of becoming, again; to observe from afar so many intelligent, powerful, privileged, educated men behaving like brain-dead dinosaurs, for dead dinosaurs.
How pathetically twentieth century this all is. How soooo Second Millennium. This charade is from another era, surely, a testosterone-driven age of swung fists, angry bleating, chest-thumping, dirt-pissing. Some woman, I forget who, once wrote that waging war is the only thing men can do to stop women laughing at them.
How true that is; and how deeply embarrassing it is to be a man right now. How pitiful, this masculine squabbling in the desert over someone else’s booty, these little puffed-up egos trying to make grand ‘moral clarity’ excuses for what they will soon choose to do – kill and maim a lot of powerless people to get their hands on the loot.
All while a brutal dictator – another pathetic man – laughs at the fuss everyone is making over him; all while a religious maniac – another pathetic man – whips up an opportunistic storm of perhaps unprecedented fury; all while the powerless people who will suffer the most wait patiently to be bombed by all sides again. The old joke about why the Irish got spuds and the Arabs got oil – the Irish chose first – doesn’t seem funny at all, now.
So you really don’t think this is about dead dinosaurs, huh?
Well, it should not be necessary to explain by now just how thoroughly the West’s continuing economic hegemony and ‘way of life’, as we have arranged things, depends on the smooth flow of masses of it. It should not be necessary to point to the steady increase in US imports from the Middle East, nor the rising oil-energy requirement projections in most Western societies, but especially in America. It shouldn’t be necessary to remind the world of what happened in 1973, and the far-reaching implications that many now-powerful figures recognised clearly, even back then. It shouldn’t be necessary to point out the various reports, writings, and investigations into the looming US energy crisis, many of them written well before September 11. All this is no great big secret, no ‘conspiracy’, either.
It’s hardly any sort of grand revelation to point out that America’s oil energy requirements have increased by a third since 1973, and that the rate of the increase of Middle-East imports (since 1995) is itself increasing. It’s not controversial to point to the serious problems in the US refinery industry, and the fact that no-one wants to invest in it there because the profit margins in crude refinement are, in fact, hardly worth it, especially in a Western labour/environmental standards domestic marketplace (the new big capacity refineries will certainly all be in the new West-friendly Iraq; billion-dollar infrastructure contracts + cheap local labor + no pesky Greenies = Western economy heaven!).
It’s not controversial to point to the shortage of heating oil in this harsh US winter; it’s no crime to point out the sudden, marked reversal, around 1995, in the to-then growing popularity of fuel-efficient vehicles in the States; it’s not being anti-American to point out that the excessive US energy consumption per person in comparison with other countries has since S11 increasingly become not a matter of individual citizenly concern, but a swaggering point of patriotic pride.
It is, I’ll concede, a cheapish shot to point out the overwhelming interfusion of the US energy industry and the Bush Administration, and the recent dropping, in despair, of the lawsuit requiring identity disclosure of the government’s energy task force ‘advisors’. A cheapish ‘conspiracy’ shot, sure, but one simply has to ask: if the Bush Administration insists it’s not about oil, why such reticence? Not about oil? Then prove it, George and Co: Dump all your personal energy industry investments. Come clean about the Halliburton fiddles at last, Dick Cheney. You could knock all these silly oil conspiracy theories for six in one go, guys, with a full and frank disclosure of every oily backroom detail. No-one’s holding their breath.
None of this stuff is rocket science. Neither is it brain surgery to note that the non-ME sources of oil energy have dwindled or are not yet competitive with ME oil, and in fact simply never can be, no matter how much of Alaska is turned into a sump. It’s not quantum physics to point out that Venezuela, America’s fourth-largest oil provider, is hardly a paragon of political stability and ‘economically-rational’ globalisation, these days. Nor is it genetic engineering to see that the once manageable political-diplomatic nexus between the West and OPEC took a dramatic, and fatal, turn for the worse just after nine o’clock on September 11, 2001.
On current economic trends the West will need more and more and more oil in the next decade, and it will have to come from the Middle East. At the same time, on current political-theological trends, the Middle Eastern countries will grow less and less and less inclined or able to provide it via a peaceful market transaction, of their own accord.
You only have to note that Saudi Arabia has indicated that they will ask American troops to leave their country once Iraq is secured to grasp what sort of dramatic geo-political changes are underway right now. Have a look in an Atlas, and you will see that by this time next year, a small American beachhead will have been secured in the midst of what only a moron could pretend will be an increasingly friendly region.
There it will stand, a lone Judeo-Christian, charging capitalist dinosaur ‘state’ bang in the middle of a close scrum of mad Muslim, dying socialist dinosaur states, cheekily sucking out the natural wealth prize for the far-away benefit of the West. At best, the new Iraq will be a vaguely democratic beachhead, at worst a bristling GI-guarded oil tit perpetually under siege, an unstable arrangement far, far worse than the awful isolation the oil industry pointmen have endured to now in the friendly Saudi Arabian expatriate compounds.
And next door Saudi Arabia, with their highly-developed Western technologies, will have no reason not to become fully anti-Western ‘hot’, for the West will have destroyed their oil market dominance forever. There’s an awful lot of pent-up resentment between the US and Saudi Arabia, an awful lot of blood waiting to be let.
I do not think that the American population has remotely grasped what it is their leaders are about to embark upon here. It is pure colonisation; outright economic Empire-building from less than scratch in the most virulently anti-American region on the planet. Without the massive oil lure, no sane US Administration would remotely contemplate this kind of permanent geographical presence. What possible American interest is served by removing Saddam in this, the hardest and costliest of all ways, if not the energy pay-off? The answer is none, which is why this invasion and occupation is about oil, and why I continue to oppose it ferociously.
And I oppose it for America and the civilised West’s long-term sake, most of all. For God’s sake, I oppose it for the purest of self-interested, pro-American reasons.
This invasion and occupation will ultimately hurt America grievously, and America is the global superpower basket in which all of Australia’s security eggs, for better or worse, now rest. If America becomes entangled in a protracted northern hemisphere fiasco, or worse, withdraws into a new isolationism, stung by an Iraqi disaster and with her global credibility and force-projection greatly reduced, then Australian is in some trouble.
In my view, both outcomes are not merely likely, in neat turn, they are practically guaranteed. A simple perusal of the colonial history of the region – and it goes back a long, long way – should be enough.
Do the American people truly have the endurance for this? Do they have any idea of where it might, where it must, lead? Despite what a Daniel Pipes might argue about the grim necessity for an all-or-nothing ‘blood-letting’ in the Middle East as an ugly but requisite precursor to any serious, lasting Arab-Jewish accord, Israelis in particular should feel deeply anxious about what might transpire over the next few years. It will come down to a matter of American staying power, and democratic governments and mainstream public opinion can change with alarming swiftness.
But clearly now, Western Energy Inc. considers that the time is right and the risks are worth it. In a way, on the oil-energy question, the US is now damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t; inextricably locked as she is in a terrible energy impasse.
But it’s a tragic one too, because the vicious assaults of September 11 could have and should have marked a major turning pointing in the Western world’s energy vision for the future. Had we been intellectually tough and smart enough not to shout down completely, as ‘self-blaming’ and ‘anti-Western’ those who pointed out that the core source – yes, the ‘root cause’ – of the attacks was the unhappy historical confluence of brutal Middle Eastern dictatorships (and their ‘necessary’ tolerance of extremist religious clerics), and short-sighted, even if well-meaning, international oil companies, then the last eighteen months might have presented Humanity with an excellent opportunity to step firmly off the fossil fuel treadmill forever.
September 11, 2001: the day the world really did change, and the dinosaurs became finally extinct. Has a ring to it, even if only a bittersweet one, now.
Because all over the non-US Western world, and in many, many constituencies of the US population, too, the Global Green movement is gathering momentum. Energy habits are changing on a generational scale, treaties are being signed, sustainable business and industry is emerging as a major force, billionaires like Bill Gates are pumping enormous amounts of cash into private research, new technologies are emerging – startling, bold, breathtaking, far-reaching ones.
Ideas are being thrown up everywhere, even from cheeky speechwriters to a half-hearted oilman like George W. Bush. A nuclear powered spaceship to get us to Mars. A hydrogen powered car to get us to work. Roll-your-own cigarettes and flushless dunnies. Green politicians, too, are lining up in droves to pull power away from the old left-right divides, away from the fossil-burning fossils. (The German green revolution is no silly passing fad; it’s now deeply ingrained in that country’s political consciousness, a permanent feature of the legislative-power landscape.)
We’re hovering right on the brink of a major social transformation, and all that is really needed is a big healthy nudge from our global leaders, seriously big bucks, a degree of collective will, and just a little more time.
Except for the dead dinosaur men, and their dead dinosaur obsessions. Here we are, all itching to turn Green, and yet here our leaders are, on the point of committing us all unwillingly to decades of bitter fighting over more Black Gold. We grown-ups are about to start scrabbling violently (again) for a ‘prize’ that our kids just don’t want. To start with, anyway. To start with, this new Middle Eastern war will be over those few puddles of inefficient, go-nowhere-fast, dead dinosaur juice; before too long, it will have blossomed into an even more pathetic dinosaur fight: a clash of civilisations that will be wholly uncivilised, a Holy War in which none but a few scarifying zealots on either side believe in their ‘god’.
Yet another bestial jungle fight to the death, the reasons for which, at that death, no-one will remember anyway. Behaving like animals again, when ninety-nine percent of the world’s six billion are desperate to evolve forwards, and not backwards.
It’s hardly being anti-American or anti-capitalist or anti-energy to point all this out. ‘Nobody wants a war’. That’s what everyone (save a few idiots) says before every big war, and it’s what everyone (save a few idiots) is saying, now. So let’s do something different, this time: let’s not have one. It is up to us, after all. We have Free Will. Let’s all get naked, well-pissed, and drunk on love, too, instead. Being scared is a bloody bore, frankly.
This war is about oil, and oil is about our ‘Western way of life’, and since S11, our Western way of life is in danger of coming to mean little more than our capacity to protect ourselves and those we love by keeping the barbarian hordes at a distance, and by force.
To point out that this coming confrontation in Iraq is driven mostly by our frightened instinct to maintain the West’s protective inequalities, to shrink back behind our security fences rather than step boldly beyond them with our arms extended, is not being a Western self-loather. It’s being truly Western.
It’s in the traditions of intellectual rigour, secular reason, individual responsibility, Free Will, the sentient transcending of all external gods and gurus, of all ‘absolute abstract truths’ but the two that are inexplicable and irreducible: Love and Death. The only other truths Humanity can ever know are the things that we did yesterday, and yesterday, and yesterday.
Unless we are determined to doom ourselves to eternal dinosaur-hood, we cannot go on killing every one of those fellow Human Beings who happen to scare us. Most of our enemies are every bit as scared of us as we of them, and they do not have brute-force Tomahawk cruise missiles. But more and more of them every day are turning to their rat-cunning weapons, and they are rat-cunning weapons that our brute force ones cannot possibly guard against. The only way to defeat the dangerous among those fellow Human Being who scare us – those who our true enemies – is to use our brains, not just our muscle.
The people of Iraq, and even in many ways Saddam Hussein himself, are not our truly dangerous enemies. Yet they very soon will be, unless we use our brains.
So it may be harsh. It may be simplistic. It’s certainly a slogan, and it’s definitely a most unsophisticated reduction. It is also highly intimidating to us all, in the West. But it’s true. We are going to invade and occupy Iraq not to defend the essence of our ‘Western Way of Life’, but merely to secure more of the dead dinosaurs that give us the pretty clothes to dress it up in. It’s an invasion and occupation to secure Iraq’s oil for the West. Remove it, or better still remove our need for it, and there would simply be no invasion, and no ‘War Against Terror’. There would still only be what, in reality, we have to now been engaged in: a co-ordinated global campaign to reduce, and perhaps even eradicate, the nihilist crime of Islamic Fundamentalist terrorism, a fight that is far, far easier for the Civilised West to win.
Personally, I think it’s mystifying that our leaders are so intent on locking our future economy into an energy source that is so old, so messy, so inefficient and so passe. (And so not ours to take.) Petroleum oil is ugly, sticky, smelly and slow. Plutonium. Hydrogen. Wind. The Sea. The Sun. Now these are sexy fuels. These are the fuels of tomorrow, the fuels America’s industrial and technical and economic might – the greatest innovative powerhouse in world history – should really be seeking to secure for the West. For us all.
I’d like very much to get a little bit closer to the stars before I die. Oil will never, ever, ever, ever pull it off. It’s a dead monster of a fuel. It’s yesterday’s fossil.
I say let’s leave Iraq’s buried in the ground, along with all the other redundant dinosaurs of ancient Human history.