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I’ve been
introducing a few bloggers and alternative commentators for awhile now on FW.
This one several of you know, I’m sure, as the author most recently of The Long Emergency, but also The Geography of/Home from Nowhere books
and The city in mind: notes on the urban
condition. This is
online commentary at his webpage, under the title of Clusterfuck Nation
Chronicles, commentary of the flux of events. If you are interested in reading
more, I’ve pasted links below. Color highlights, italics, mine. KwC The Flux of Events: James
H. Kunstler, June 20, 2005 In Vietnam, there was
the primal fear that if we cut-and-run all of Indochina would "go
communist," whatever that meant. What actually happened after we
cut-and-ran in 1975 was Pol Pot and the killing fields of Cambodia, a military
dictatorship in Burma, and Vietnam becoming the friendliest tourist country for
westerners (including Americans) in all of Asia. It is actually hard to
tell whether the strategy to "democratize" Iraq is a childish
pretense or a cynical cover story. There may be some grownups in the White House, Pentagon, and
State Department who believe that a functioning, democratically-elected Iraq
government would be such a mind-blower for the people of other nations in the
region that all the jihadistas of, say, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and
Afghanistan would enter a mystical transport and wake up as Jeffersonian
democrats. The Iraq adventure so
far seems to indicate that wishing can only accomplish so much. For instance,
despite desperate US offensives in Karabilah and Anbar province this weekend,
Iraqi hostiles managed to blow up fifty of their fellow Iraqis in Baghdad. The
New York Times
had an interesting way of capturing the mood: "Life along the street
running past the restaurant quickly returned to normal. Older men 80 yards away
resumed curbside games of checkers before men had finished sweeping away chunks
of flesh." In America these days, a wish is sometimes just another horror
movie at the cineplex. My own is theory is
that the war is a desperate attempt by a nation desperate over its energy
supplies to retain a foothold, and therefore an economic claim, on the region
where the oil is. Iraq was supposed to be our police station in a strategically
vital bad neighborhood. The salient questions are: 1.) assuming we can't stay
there forever, how long might we
hope to stick around there? And 2.) at that point somewhat short of forever, will we lose our ability to even
buy Middle East oil? The conventional
belief is that oil is fungible, meaning that once it enters the universal
market pool, it finds its own way to customers, determined by who will pay the
most for delivery. This idea was based on the assumption that there would
always be a swing producer -- some entity that could always open up the valves
and goose up the world supply, keeping global prices within a reasonable range.
The global production peak -- Peak Oil in shorthand -- seems to have obviated
that mechanism. It's especially problematic that even Saudi Arabia and the
Middle East generally appear to have peaked (see Twilight in the
Desert by
Matthew Simmons). From
now on, access to oil may be determined by other things. It was Amercia's hope that by turning
Iraqis and other Middle Eastern people into democrats, they would magically
become much friendlier and that our military presence would be happily
tolerated -- and that eventually all the Middle East would become so
democratic, friendly, and stable that our presence there would be regarded as a
Godsend. Whoops, wrong God. For starters. The world may no
longer have a swing producer of oil, but this period can probably be viewed as
a swing period of history. By that I mean a period when we hoped that there was
a quick and easy way to keep the oil flowing westward and
found out that it wasn't so. The time is now coming when the American public
won't tolerate a dozen US casualties a week, nevermind fifty Iraqis. But
Americans won't tolerate $5 a gallon gasoline, either. We'll now see how the
public will reconcile these intolerances. We enter this week
with oil nearing $60 a barrel. Global finance, hedging, interest rates, and the continued
zest of America's last remaining industry,
real estate, will all hinge on the price of oil and on America's
prospects for getting it at any price. President Bush last week shifted the responsibility for an
energy policy to congress, because the ideas coming out of the White House have
been so transparently lame (the hydrogen
economy). My guess is that we
are about to see the first act of the Hooverization of George W. Bush. http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary14.html Kunstler Homepage http://www.kunstler.com/index.html No Problemo: delusions run deep in the easy-motoring economy http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oo/curmudgeon/index_NY_Auto_Show.html |
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