This is a guest essay by Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, University of California, Berkeley, one of our country’s foremost academic specialists in comparative politics.:
“…for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something
familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by
the process of repression.”– Sigmund Freud.
On assuming office, President Obama shifted US military action from Iraq to Afghanistan and then, more squarely, to Pakistan, where he claimed the terrorists responsible for 911 were hiding. In doing so, he tacitly acknowledged the nefarious character of the rationales of the Bush administration in invading Iraq, rationales that are now widely accepted as being cynical fabrications to wage a war that was planned well before the Trade Towers were destroyed.
Then, on November 24th, 2009, in the drum-beat that preceded the announcement of additional troops to be sent to the Afghan “theater,” the President decisively announced his intent to “finish the job.” With all the untruths that the American public heard about Desert Storm, Operation Enduring Freedom (earlier concluded in 2003) and the Afghan war, (earlier won in 2001), one might ask what this “job” is. Why has the administration decided to induct “moderate” Taliban into the “democratic process” underway in Afghanistan and relocate the core of its military campaign in Pakistan’s province of Balochistan?
To make Americans believe that this is still a war against Al-Qaida is disturbingly easy. There is a romance to this war that has an particular exonerating charge for the collective American psyche: A black president forcefully pursuing “lawless” “tribes” across inhospitable, dangerous terrain. The silent, sneaky enemy that blends with the terrain: The heady rush of the frontier myth without the off-putting eventuality of chattel slavery.
A similar collective need is at work in Great Britain, where a palpable nostalgia for Empire mingles with the fear of being over-run by post-colonial migrants. No surprise, then, that the long, traumatic decline of the British Empire (in which three full scale wars were lost to the Afghan) resonates with American efforts to heal the wound inflicted by the Vietnam debacle. The “job” Obama wants to “finish” has many facets. One of them has to do with re-writing national history and then believing it.
By the time “conspiracy theories” are proven true they are typically irrelevant. More importantly, they are normalized. In the United States, where the art of “spin” has become central to governance, policy drift is retroactively streamlined and rationalizations sprout up like so many mushrooms in the rain. Invoking “Conspiracy theory” allows us to dismiss unpleasant realities. Yet we all know that conspiracies occur. At the time conspiracies are afoot we retreat from naming them because we resist challenging the veracity of those we have endowed with authority.
The word “conspiracy” conjures a one-track, goal oriented operation pursued to achieve a specific, limited objective in a planned fashion. By this measure, the war being waged by the United States in Afghanistan and, now, in Pakistan, is neither a “conspiracy” or a “coincidence”: It is a serial effort to achieve two, much broader goals. First, it is a belated and doomed push to gain access to Central Asian oil and LNG resources. This endeavor began with the easy-to-market but unachievable goal of stabilizing Afghanistan by eliminating the Taliban, demolishing “Al-Qaida Central,” and finding a friend in Kabul.
But after the first invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban re-consolidated, Al-Qaida Central moved on (and will continue to do so), and the Afghans were not pacified. The next serial effort, currently underway, is much more insidious. It involves securing “other routes” to Central Asia, routes that must go through either Iran or through Pakistan and Afghanistan. On January 11, 2010 we heard General Petraeus say that bombing the nuclear facilities in Iran was not “ruled out” and that no new elite force of the US army “guards” Pakistan’s nuclear cite at Kahuta. Now we hear Gates protest that the US has no designs on Pakistan’s territory. The larger cause to which all of these efforts is dedicated is to stem China’s massive economic and political influence in South and Central Asia. Wait and watch: very shortly we will hear minority groups in the CARs and in Xinjiang Province cry out for democracy and human rights.
These turbines provide 6-7 percent of the country’s energy needs
When the wind is high, or domestic usage is low, the existing wind turbines can power all German households for a part of the day.
North Sea and Baltic Sea wind turbines are projected to produce 25 percent of Germany’s power needs by 2050, or 140 terawatt hours of electricity.
Even the conservatives in Germany are against building any new nuclear power plants and don’t see nuclear as significant to their future.
Germany’s energy policy was set by the Green Party when it was in coalition with the Social Democrats years ago, but has become so successful and popular that subsequent governments have stood by it.
“The public expects us to act firmly and swiftly if we see any social misbehaviour by women, and men, who defy our Islamic values. In some areas of north Tehran we can see many suntanned women and young girls who look like walking mannequins.”
This sort of talk is not at all new. After a period of liberalization in personal freedoms under President Mohammad Khatami 1997-2005, the new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, began to institute a crackdown on women in 2007.
This time, the imposition of puritan mores has a political edge. The hard liners see the Green Movement around Mir Hosain Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi as a vehicle for the assertion of foreign, loose morals by the wealthy in North Tehran. Attacking fashionable women is, in Sajediniya’s mind, equivalent to shutting down political reform. It is not true, of course, but then the atmosphere among Iran’s high officials is frankly paranoid.
Let us contrast reality to the fantasy that Big Oil projects for us on our television screens. I have long despised the character of the lady in pantsuits, played by Brooke Alexander, who assures us, in the Energy Tomorrow ads, that we really, really need Big Oil’s products. Yeah, like we need a hole in the head. I think Ms. Alexander, who used to play a con artist on As the World Turns, should be required, while speaking, to be smeared with black oil– sort of like Shakira in “La Tortura”– instead of showing off that crisp and supercilious outfit.
1. By saying we need energy from “all” sources, it implies that hydrocarbons must be part of the mix and are as desirable as alternative green energy. But this is a lie, at least in the long term.
2. It ignores the enormous damage to the environment caused by pumping more carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.
3. It alleges that Congress has put “much” of US energy resources out of play for development. But all offshore petroleum in the lower 48 if it were drilled could only supply about 400,000 barrels a day of oil. In a good economy the US uses 20-21 million barrels a day, so all that offshore drilling would yield a mere drop in the bucket. That isn’t “much.”
5. It ignores the environmental damage to beaches and wildlife and tourism of the inevitable oil spills.
BP, by the way, is British Petroleum, a descendant of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The Iranian parliament asked for a better deal from the AIOC in the late 1940s and early 1950s (they wanted a 50/50 cut of the profits, which was what ARAMCO offered Saudi Arabia). The AIOC absolutely refused. In response, the Iranian parliament nationalized the AIOC holdings in 1951. It was in order to restore Western Big Oil to its Iranian holdings that the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953, putting the shah back on the throne as a megalomaniacal capitalist dictator and puppet of Washington. The enraged Iranian public overthrew the shah in 1978-79, establishing the Islamic Republic that has been a thorn in Washington’s side ever since. So, BP’s earlier arrogance helped produce our current crisis with Iran, just as it’s current incompetence has produced the massive Delaware-sized oil slick now devouring Louisiana.
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