Peak Oil and the Remaking of Iraq
Michael Klare |July 14, 2009
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175095
Anthony Shadid has, without a doubt, been the finest American mainstream
journalist to cover Iraq in the period after the 2003 invasion. He's now back
in Baghdad for the Washington Post, telling the saddest story of all ("In the
City of Cement"). Here's part of what he wrote just after American troops
largely withdrew to the outskirts of town:
"Augustus boasted that he found Rome a city of bricks and made it a city of
marble. Baghdad was another city of bricks, and a coterie of American generals
turned it into a city of cement. Their concrete is everywhere -- from the
sprawling Green Zone to the barriers and blast walls that line almost every
street -- reorienting the physical, spiritual and social geography that for
more than a millennium was dictated by the lazy bends in the Tigris River.
"In time, though, those walls may matter less than the deeper forces that six
years of an American presence hastened. Baghdad is now a city divided from
itself. Shiite neighborhoods rarely have Sunnis. Sunni ones, far less numerous
today, no longer have Shiites. Christians have all but left. Potentates seek
refuge in fortresses, and the poor fend for themselves... The Americans created
none of it, but facilitated all of it, giving space to the region's worst
impulses."
In what follows, Michael Klare, energy expert and author of Rising Powers,
Shrinking Planet, offers another, quite different version of this same sad
tale: what if, after all the sound and fury, what happened really did signify
next to nothing, despite the devastation of Iraq and the loss of so many lives?
What if the new Iraq is now fated to be, as Klare suggests, just another
service station at a rest stop on the global road to... well, where? Tom
Will Iraq Be a Global Gas Pump? The (Re)Making of a Petro-State
http://ampedstatus.com/will-iraq-be-a-global-gas-pump-the-remaking-of-a-petro-state
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article23063.htm
http://www.truthout.org/071509S
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