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The Iraq war, global warming and control of global energy resources
Analysis by Howie Baer
In the early days of the Bush administration, Vice President Dick Cheney convened his secret energy task force that included various captains of the oil, gas, and energy industries. While we may never know exactly what the deliberations were of this august body, it is reasonably certain that they paid attention to matters beyond each other's golf scores.
The matter at hand was likely oil - the fuel that powers the economies of most industrial nations - and the long-term plans of the energy industry. The problem is one of so-called "peaking of world oil supplies.''
In any oil system - be it one small oil well or the total global oil production network - extraction begins slowly, mounts to a time of peak production, and then trails off as the limits of the non-renewable resource are reached. Estimates are that global oil production has reached its peak or will reach it shortly. While demand for liquid fuels is mounting due to emerging economies such as China and India, the oil beneath the earth is becoming more difficult to extract.
The lore goes that countries controlling large fossil fuel reserves will be powerful while those that don't will find their economies faltering and will be subject to the political will of those countries controlling large oil reserves. In addition, as the prices for this increasingly scarce commodity increase, there will be the potential to amass enormous profits. Thus, as the captains of the oil industry met, it is likely that one major topic - if not the major topic - of discussion was control of or access to global energy reserves, especially oil.
The location of most of that oil was smack dab in the middle of the crescent of instability - an arc of countries stretching from the Sino-Russian steppes across Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia to northern Africa. Countries such as Russia and Iran would be major players in the world energy market since they controlled large reserves of natural gas and oil. The western-based oil conglomerates had access to the riches beneath Saudi Arabia, but nearly equal reserves were off limits in nearby Iraq. That country, weakened by the first Gulf war and a decade of sanctions, would be an easy target to establish another American foothold in the Middle East as long as a pretext for invasion could be found.
Lo and behold, 9/11 occurred, and Congress, the media, indeed the majority of American people gave George Bush free rein to wage a global war on terror. After an initial assault on Afghanistan, where actual terrorists resided, Bush and Cheney turned attention to Iraq, a country where the dictator Saddam Hussein wouldn't even let terrorists in because they were a threat to his own power. A variety of pretexts for war were established with little opposition, and the war began. While the initial invasion was quick and relatively painless on the U.S. side, the resulting occupation has been a U.S. foreign policy disaster of enormous magnitude that has crushed the Iraqi people in a manner far worse than anyone might have anticipated.
After finally coming to grips with the reality of this disastrous war, Congress finds itself facing only options that are bad. However, while debate about how and when to withdraw occurs, it is not at all clear what "withdraw'' means. What it likely means to war planners in Washington is "partial withdrawal'' while leaving behind sizable contingents of American forces in various multi-billion dollar bases that have been constructed out of sight of the media but with an eye towards permanent occupancy.
The ability to rapidly deploy American troops back into these bases and thence into the Iraqi cities and countryside would support the original idea of setting up an American client government that would allow oil companies access to Iraq's oil riches despite any Iraqi government collapse.
While global attention has largely focused on this disastrous war, a much more formidable long-term threat has emerged in the form of global warming. Aside from a host of terrible consequences such as desertification, monster storms, and species extinctions, there is the likelihood that in the next 50 to 100 years, much of the earth's coastal regions will be submerged under rising sea levels, presenting billions of people with Katrina-like conditions, albeit with no receding of flood waters.
It will take fearless political leadership, stiff conservation measures, and technological innovations to advance real solutions to the looming crises in energy and the environment. Many things are required: global population reduction, stringent conservation measures, and the development of alternative, environmentally-friendly energy sources.
We will need a global will toward solving problems rationally and for the long term. A re-direction of resources away from war-making and toward green solutions to the problems of global warming and environmental destruction would be most welcome.
That way, we might build a society that has no need for Iraqi oil.
Howard A. Baer is the J. D. Kimel Professor of Physics at Florida State University.
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