Interesting, but I think Kunstler may be overlooking something. I'll go down to his opening paragraph:
At 09:58 21/06/2005 -0700, you wrote:
Ive been introducing a few bloggers and alternative commentators for awhile now on FW. This one several of you know, Im 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, Ive pasted links below. Color highlights, italics, mine. KwC
The Flux of Events: James H. Kunstler, June 20, 2005
Iraq is not Vietnam, all right, because there is no way the US can pull out now without severe consequences, namely the loss of our access to all the oil in the Middle East -- where two-thirds of the world's remaining oil is.
Kunstler may be overlooking the fact that the (largely unexploited} northern oilfields of Iraq are mostly within Kurdish territory -- or at least in areas the Kurds are claiming and steadily encroaching into. In recent months the Kurds have succeeded in driving out most Arabs (Sunnis and Shias) and Turkomen out of Kirkuk, the main city, and are now in control of all its institutions of power. Apparently some very nasty ethnic cleansing has been going on there but there's nary a cheep from the US administration. Apart from one or two rare attempts at terrorism there by Sunnis, the Kurdish areas are remarkably peaceful. Also, they have, in the last 15 years, managed to smooth over the previous intense and bloody rivalries between two factions and are indeed managing to progress towards a two-party system of government, having had, so far, two elections. Kurdistan, as they call it, is the nearest thing to democracy so far in the Islamic Middle East. They have also succeeded in educating a whole child-to-teenager generation in purely Kurdish ways and in the Kurdish language. Also, the Kurdish contingents in the Iraqi Securiy forces are the only ones that the Americans can rely on. In the seige of Falluja, the mainly Shia battalion simply turned back. Thus the Kurds are not only training their own security forces within Kurdistan but many are being trained by the Americans. If push ever came to shove and total chaos breaks out between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq proper, then well-trained Kurds could easily return to Kurdish territory and strengthen their own forces there.
It is not beyong reason that once the present constitutional drama in Baghdad plays itself through up to August -- when it is supposed to arrive at a constitution -- and will (probably) fail -- that Kurdistan may suddenly crystallise as a separate proto-nation. It could also be that the Bush administration has a secret deal with the Kurds that the US will help to legitimise the new state withing the UN and also give massive assistance to Kurdistan if, in turn, US oil corporations are given preferential access to its oilfields. It will take some years for significant oil production to flow but, by then, if Simmons and others are right, northern Iraq may well have more reserves than Saudi Arabia.
All this is only a speculation on my part but the circumstantial evidence I've outlined above seems pretty strong to me. It's all very Machiavellian -- but, then, that's what international diplomacy has always been about ever since the Treaty of Westphalia!
Keith
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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Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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