Conventional technologically advanced oil recovery—the offshore, tar sands, and shale sources that policymakers in the 1970s called “traditional alternatives”—has begun to decline, as their production costs rise and their environmental impact becomes a political imperative. Stevens’ prediction, based largely on an analysis of increased Asian demand, brings more gloomy news, especially for those who believe in the close connection between oil prices and the world economic health.
A similar crisis arose thirty years ago, when an increasingly integrated global economy faced oil prices that quadrupled in 1973-1974 and more than doubled again between 1978 and 1980. In 1980, Jimmy Carter declared foreign oil dependence “a clear and present danger to our Nation’s security.” But, by 1982, the traditional alternatives, as well as other new production, brought supply in line with demand and oil prices dropped. Ronald Reagan had the solar panels installed by Carter on the White House roof removed in 1986.
Today, as the recent debate over offshore drilling has shown, many commentators employ the lessons of the past to hold that a strong position by the federal government will do little to ameliorate our energy problems. Some analysts, often taking a strident ideological position, argue that the combination of an always-innovative energy industry and the free market will again resolve the dilemma of global energy upheavals. Others, historians of science and technology who put forward a more nuanced position, still essentially hold a similar belief: In a century of stunning technological advances, most critical breakthroughs have rarely occurred as a result of government policy, but rather as a confluence of individual creativity and steadily growing scientific knowledge.
That was then. This is now. The emphasis on traditional alternatives in the 1970s and 1980s led to problems within a global society that remains, in the words of the Group of 77, “unduly oil-oriented.” The changes in the world economy fueled by the explosive growth of those decades, as much a result of relatively inexpensive energy as anything else, today points towards oil’s decline.
Nowhere else are the problems of energy dependence more disturbing than in American diplomacy. Even though the Obama administration’s national security strategy, released in late May, emphasizes the deepening of relations with increasingly assertive “emerging centers of influence”—China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa—relations have floundered, especially in energy diplomacy. Most recently, Turkey and Brazil reached a deal with Iran for the shipment of enriched uranium abroad, in spite of Washington’s misgivings. This setback followed the Copenhagen climate summit last December, when U.S. suggestions were hauled over the coals by an informal alignment of developing nations, including China, India, Brazil, and South Africa.
Given the gravity with which most experts view our energy future, government policy needs to stand at the forefront of changing the national and international energy infrastructure. Major new investment in energy alternatives, well above the levels currently considered by the energy industry and the current bills before Congress, is necessary.
It is clear that Obama understands the imperative of a green energy revolution. Yet, the administration has offered few specifics, despite opportunities to orchestrate such change. If the government ups the ante in a comprehensive energy bill, perhaps by transferring a large part of the Senate’s recent $35 billion subsidy to the oil industry to research and design of alternative sources, it will be easier to draw the colossal investment necessary for the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
This substantial increase in government funding will mitigate many potential problems. Most broadly, by pushing industry to do away with the pathologies of oil dependence, such a policy would help diversify the domestic economy. In the field of diplomacy, more specifically, the escalation of home-grown energy technology will have multiple uses. Foremost, in the ideological frame of promoting a global green revolution, technology transfers will help the major developing nations that stand at the center of the national security strategy to overcome the considerable barriers to clean and sustainable economic development.
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Christopher R. W. Dietrich is a PhD Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin and Smith-Richardson Fellow in International Security Studies at Yale University.
Despite Republican senator John McCain’s conviction that “We’ve already won that one,” i.e. the Iraq War, actually you couldn’t say either that the war is over or that things are going well politically in that country. It lacks a new government, the political wrangling is interminable, the apparatus of state is paralyzed, and big bombings are undertaken with frightening efficiency.
Two bombings by guerrillas killed at least 40 Shiite pilgrims and wounded 68 in the holy city of Karbala, where hundreds of thousands of devotees had gathered to commemorate the hidden Twelfth Imam, who this branch of Shiism holds will return in the future as a sort of messiah figure (analogous to the return of Christ for many Christians). The time and place of the bombing made it especially dangerous for Iraq’s inter-sectarian politics. Karbala is sacred ground for Shiites, the burial place of the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, Imam Husayn, who was killed by the Muslim Umayyad dynasty in 680 CE (AD) and so is considered the supreme martyr. A big bombing in Karbala reverberates throughout Shiite Iraq and among Shiites everywhere. In February of 2006, when guerrillas blew up the golden dome shrine of Imam Hasan al-Askari (a descendant of both the Prophet and of Imam Husayn), the 11th Imam and father of the Twelfth Imam, Iraq descended into an orgy of sectarian violence that killed as many as 2500 civilians a month.
Also on Monday, the offices of the al-Arabiya satellite television news network were bombed, killing 6 persons and wounding a member of parliament from the secular Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi, Salam al-Zawbaie. The al-Arabiya offices are near to the Iraqiya headquarters.
The bombings may have been intended as interventions in the political wrangling about the formation of a new government, something that still has not happened all these months after the March 7 election. (In Iraq’s parliamentary system, they hold the election first, then see who has enough seats to form a government; so far no one has put together a viable coalition, unlike what happened in Britain recently, where the election did not yield a majority party but the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats managed to form a government together despite their significant ideological differences.)
Big bombings in Karbala make Shiite caretaker prime minister Nuri al-Maliki look weak and ineffective, undermining his claim to a second term, which is based in part on his partial successes in restoring some security to major cities such as Basra and Baghdad.
The bombing of al-Arabiya, in the vicinity of the Iraqiya Party, may have been a strike at Sunni Arab interests (al-Arabiya is based in the United Arab Emirates and is sympathetic to moderate Sunni Arabs in Iraq).
Leaders of the major parties are said to be planning to meet in Baghdad, including Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Alliance, Iyad Allawi of the secular Iraqiya Party (mainly voted for this time by Sunni Arabs), Nuri al-Maliki of the middle class Shiite State of Law Coalition, and cleric Muqtada al-Sadr of the fundamentalist Shiite Sadr Bloc. Al-Sadr is said to prefer not to meet al-Maliki face to face. A parliamentary session is also planned to discuss the prerogatives of al-Maliki’s caretaker government, which remains in power 5 months after the election, given the constitutional crisis and relative power vacuum (parliament has not been meeting regularly in the absence of a new government). One plan is to strip al-Maliki’s caretaker government of many of its prerogatives, allowing it only to deliver government services.
The problem is that the army reports to al-Maliki and neither may be interested in what parliament thinks. Nor is it clear that what Iraq needs at this point is a weaker caretaker government.
In light of the Wikileaks Pentagon documents are full of allegations by US military personnel of Pakistani collaboration with the Taliban, and they have increased tensions among the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is worth taking a step back, however, and remembering that not everything in classified documents is true or well founded. It is also worth remembering that some of the allegations of meetings with Taliban center on former head of Inter-Services Intelligence Hamid Gul, a hard line fundamentalist who is retired and, even if the accusations are true (which is not yet proven), who may be involved in rogue ISI cells not under Islamabad’s direct control. Moroever, the alleged meetings occurred in 2006, before Pakistan’s military took on the Taliban. Brian Cloughley replies in a guest editorial for Informed Comment to those who cast doubts on Pakistan’s efforts against the Taliban :
Against a Rush to Judgment: Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban
A paper published on June 13 by the London School of Economics states that Pakistan, at the highest political and military levels, fosters and supports insurgents in Afghanistan.Its author, Matt Waldman of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government,declares that “as the provider of sanctuary, and very substantialfinancial, military and logistical support to the [Afghan] insurgency,the ISI [Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter Services Intelligence]appears to have strong strategic and operational influence –reinforced by coercion. There is thus a strong case that the ISI andelements of [Pakistan’s] military are deeply involved in the insurgentcampaign [in Afghanistan].”
The ISI of Pakistan is headed by Lt General Ahmad Pasha who meets frequently with senior American and other foreign intelligence representatives. Pasha’s direct superior is General Ashfaq Kayani,chief of the army, who also has discussions with the highest ranking US military officers, such as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, who came calling in Islamabad last week.
Two days after publication of the Waldman paper a band of about 600 well-armed brigands – call them ‘Taliban’ or whatever – from Afghanistan attacked an isolated border camp in Pakistan manned by two platoons of the locally-recruited Frontier Corps which is commanded by officers of the Pakistan army. The post was one of the few that has to be supplied by air, there being no road access, and the garrison ran out of ammunition. Ten soldiers were killed and some thirty captured and taken into Afghanistan. Most were later released. Six bodies were sent back to Pakistan.
Waldman wrote that “American and other western intelligence agencies must be aware of Pakistan’s conduct” in allegedly supporting the Afghan Taliban insurgents. But if they have evidence of this supposed behavior it is presumed they would have conveyed their awareness to senior military officers, including Admiral Mullen. They could hardly sit on such important information. After all, their own soldiers are being killed day by day in ever-greater numbers by insurgents in Afghanistan, who are automatically referred to as ‘Taliban’ – this “James Joyce-style portmanteau word” as defined so pithily by Pepe Escobar – or, in more headline-luring style, as ‘al-Qaeda-associated Taliban’.
While the futile war in Afghanistan continues, with insurgents having killed 102 foreign troops in June, Mr Waldman asks us to believe that the most senior officer in the US military is content to associate with a man who he says supports the slaughter of US soldiers by purportedly endorsing “very substantial financial, military and logistical support” to the ‘Taliban’. Presumably – if the Waldman paper is kosher, as it were – the direct military representative ofthe President of the United States must have cast aside all loyalty tohis soldiers who are fighting a hideously difficult war.
There are no shades of grey, here. Either Admiral Mullen knows that the armed forces of Pakistan are assisting the enemies of the United States, or he doesn’t believe that they are doing so. If he does not know it, then the people who refrain from telling him about“substantial support” – the US intelligence agencies who Mr Waldman says “must be aware” of this extraordinary duplicity on a massive scale – are treacherous filth.
But if Admiral Mullen has been convinced by his intelligence advisers that Pakistan’s military officers of the highest rank are condoning and even supporting the slaughter of his soldiers, he is a giant-pack, five-star, Olympic-sized traitor for continuing to associate with them. Even if he only suspects, way deep down, that General Kayani,the Chief of Army Staff of Pakistan, and his frequent and genial interlocutor, is in some fashion nourishing enemies of his country,then he must, in all honor, blow the whistle on him.
Then we are asked to believe that General Kayani himself, the commander of over half a million troops, of whom 150,000 on the border with Afghanistan daily risk their lives for their country, permits or even encourages some of his subordinates to be “deeply involved” in the insurgency in Afghanistan which results in the killing of his own soldiers when the Afghan Taliban attack Pakistan’s border posts.
* * *
We live in a weird and worrisome world, but it will be a strange day indeed when America’s most senior military officer shakes hands and talks with a foreign army chief who he has been told is “playing a double game of astonishing magnitude” that results in the deaths ofhis nation’s soldiers. And I state flatly that no military leader would ever aid and abet insurgents who attack his country and kill members of his own armed forces, which is what Mr Waldman asserts that General Kayani is doing.
* * *
Of course Pakistan’s ISI is “involved” in Afghanistan. It would be peculiar were the agency not committed to intelligence operations there, just as are the CIA, Britain’s SIS, India’s RAW and almost every other spy organization of note.
Mind you, the CIA team in Afghanistan is, to put it kindly, amateur,with the magnet of massive money attracting people who tell them what they want to hear. The Brits are much poorer and comparatively tiny in presence, and in product tend to condescend to their allied spooks, but have proved easy to penetrate to the extent that the Pakistanis have quiet giggles about some of their operatives and operations. The Indians try hard, but – in spite of what the Pakistanis say – are almost entirely without influence in Afghanistan, although they fund a badly-run training camp in Nimroz for a gang of moronic malcontents who call themselves the Baloch National Army.A musical about Afghanistan’s all-singing, all-dancing, international spook drama could be titled the Zigzag Follies.
* * *
Afghanistan is an enormously important neighbor of Pakistan, and the ISI would be failing in its duty were it not to have agents in as many places – politically, militarily and geographically – as it can manage to contrive.
ISI’s operatives, just as their counterparts in other nations’ agencies, are not purring pussy cats. They move in freaky circles and mix with some people who would be considered by most of us to be psychotic criminals. They meet and speak with their countries’ enemies whenever they can set up such contacts. General Kayani told me three years ago, when he was head of ISI, that “of course” his people talked with members of militant ultra-Islamic movements because otherwise “how can we keep track of them?”
We may not approve of the methods of Intelligence operatives, many of whom are jokes, but those of us living in democracies get what our governments consider to be best for us. If that involves some decidedly dubious activities in the course of seeking pre-emptive intelligence that might save our fellow citizens’ lives, then so be it. Talking with vicious insurrectionists is repugnant, certainly –but as the commander of the British army said last week, recollecting that British spooks talked with the brutal fanatics of Irish murder gangs at the height of their terrorist onslaught that killed so many innocents, “If you look at any counter-insurgency campaign throughout history there’s always a point at which you start to negotiate with each other . . . ”
This is exactly what the ISI has been planning for over the past six years. Of course its agents have many contacts among Afghan insurgents. And they try to help bridge the gap between fanatical barbarism and the rule of law.
But that doesn’t mean Pakistan gives “very substantial financial, military and logistical support” to the savage Afghans who wage war against it.
It is lunacy to imagine that the chief of the Pakistan army helps kill his own soldiers. And anyone who thinks that the most senior officer in the US military would support him in doing so belongs to a different planet.
The Afghanistan war now has its own Pentagon papers– 90,000 documents leaked to Wikileaks and then to The Guardian and two other newspapers, which show a pattern of covering up the killing of Afghan civilians on the part of NATO and the US.
Of course, leaks aren’t necessary to know about bombings of civilians. The Afghans complain bitterly about such strikes. The Pentagon is investigating an air strike this weekend that is said to have killed 45 civilians. BBC reports of a relative of the victims, Haji Rahim, that he said, “They can see something as small as an insect just four inches on the ground, so how were they not able to see all of those women and children when they bombed them?”
Farhang Jahanpour writes in a guest editorial for Informed Comment:
Iran, Turkey and Israel: New Global Realities
Ten years ago this month (11 July 2000), in a last-minute attempt to bring peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, President Bill Clinton invited the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to talks at Camp David, trying to broker a deal between them. After exhaustive talks, the summit ended on July 25 without an agreement being reached. Many participants in the negotiations, including Yossi Beilin, Shlomo Ben-Ami and Gilead Sher on the Israeli side; Ghassan Khatib and Ahmen Qurei on the Palestinian side; and Dennis Ross and Aaron David Miller and of course President Bill Clinton on the American side have written their accounts of the talks.1
If we set aside the spin and stick to the facts, the main issues of contention were and still are the status of millions of Palestinian refugees, the Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territories, the final borders of Israel and a future Palestinian state, and the status of Jerusalem. On the issue of Palestinian refugees, the Israelis were adamant that the refugees could not go back to their old homes or to anywhere else in Israel, but to a future Palestinian state if they wished. On the issue of the settlements, it was agreed that most of the large, established settlements would remain on Palestinian territory but the small outposts would be dismantled. On the issue of borders, it was agreed that both sides would regard the Green Line, the pre-1967 border, as a permanent border with minor adjustments to allow for the large Israeli settlements. However, the deal broke down over the issue of Jerusalem as the result of Israel’s insistence that it was the “eternal, undivided capital of Israel”.
If agreement had been reached at that summit, the history of the past ten years would have been completely different from what it has been. The Israelis and Palestinians would have experienced a decade of peace and security. We would not be talking about the presumed danger of an Iranian nuclear programme, or the estrangement between Turkey and Israel, and we probably would not have witnessed the terrible events of 9/11or the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Instead, the world is going through very difficult times at present. The global economic recession, which according to the Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman could yet go through a double dip recession or even a depression,2 the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict, and the scourge of international terrorism have produced a situation more dangerous than at any time since the Second World War. All these events are fuelling extremism on both sides. On the one hand, the Israelis are talking of the existential threat that they face from a future Iranian nuclear bomb, and on the other hand we hear talk of a Zionist conspiracy and a Jewish-Christian crusade against the Muslims.
Now that we are talking about anniversaries and landmarks, let us look at some of the following events. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops in Afghanistan passed 1,000 and for the British troops 300; on June 3rd US troops had been in Afghanistan for 104 months, more than eight and a half years, surpassing Vietnam as the longest war in American history. Meanwhile, after nearly nine years of war, the situation is getting worse, not better. In the past year Britain has lost almost as many soldiers than in any year since the invasion of Afghanistan, and civilian casualties are also mounting. In June the Congressional appropriation for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeded one trillion dollars. This of course does not include the cost of taking care of war veterans. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes have estimated that the long-term costs of the war in Iraq – taking into account the costs of taking care of wounded soldiers and rebuilding the military – will ultimately cost three trillion dollars.3
In June we also had the hundredth anniversary of the start of production at the first Iranian oil well in Masjid-e Soleiman, one of the largest oilfields in the world.4 The discovery of oil in Iran at the beginning of the last century changed the geopolitical map of the Middle East. Now, oil has developed into a six trillion-dollar industry. The production, distribution, refining, and retailing of petroleum, taken as a whole, represents the world’s largest industry in terms of dollar value. It has become the most strategic commodity responsible for many wars and conflicts all over the world.
On top of all these conflicts, the tension between Iran and Israel and by extension between Iran and the West is perhaps the most urgent and the most dangerous issue facing the international community. Meanwhile, relations between Israel and Turkey have also soured. Given earlier strong and friendly relations between Iran, Turkey and Israel, it is important to look back and see how we have come to the present situation. My aim is to look back at the events of the past few decades and also look to the future to see whether there is any prospect of peace in the region in ten years’ time, or whether the region and the West will be engaged in a much greater conflict.
As the result of the Islamic Revolution in 1978-79 Iran witnessed the massive and unprecedented transformation of the most stable and the most pro-Western country into a virulently anti-American and anti-Israeli state. Massive demonstrations in the streets of Tehran and other cities led to the collapse of the 36-year reign of Mohammad Reza Shah and the 58-year reign of the two Pahlavis. Shortly before the Islamic revolution, relations between Iran and the United States were at their peak. When President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger flew directly from the Moscow summit to Tehran in May 1972, it was a flattering sign of US support for the shah and the evidence of his importance to the Americans. During that visit, the two countries signed a protocol for a 45-billion-dollar trade deal (which was a huge sum in those days).
Aware of these fears, earlier this week in Kabul, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged that she will stand by Afghan women. She stressed that women’s NGOs will have an important role in post-conflict Afghanistan, basing her view on her experience with other post-conflict societies. Presumably she was implying a pledge to throw some US AID development money to local women’s groups.
The move is reminiscent of the 1998 letter the Project for a New American Century signatories sent to President Clinton, putting pressure on him to initiate war on Iraq. They did maneuver him into pulling out UN weapons inspectors and bombing Iraq. The US removal of the inspectors made the West blind as to the lack of Iraqi weapons programs, since their absence could no longer be certified. In turn, Iraq’s opaqueness as a result of the Clinton actions allowed the Bill Kristol crowd and the rest of the Israel, war industry and oil lobbies to propagandize America into the fruitless and ruinous Iraq War. Now they are repeating this pattern with regard to Iran.
Think about how weird it is. Nearly half of Republicans in the House are from the South, which has relatively few Jewish Americans. So this resolution is likely emanating from the Christian Zionists like John Hagee (who once said that God sent Hitler to punish the Jews for being outside Israel). It is not impossible that the people behind this resolution are fervently hoping for the Judgment Day to come more quickly and look forward to a Middle East apocalypse as a step toward the Return of Christ and the end of that pesky but temporarily necessary Judaism. In other words, for these right wing Americans to call for Israel to go to war on behalf of America is just one more case of white Christians sacrificing Jews for their own interests and is a form of anti-Semitism.
The likely outcome of an Israeli military strike on Iran is as follows:
Iran will use Shiite operatives and militiamen to kill the increasingly vulnerable remaining US troops in Iraq (once there are less than 50,000 non-combat troops in that country, they are not troops, they are hostages).
Iran will stir up its substantial number of clients in Afghanistan to hit the United States, widening the insurgency from mainly Pashtun Taliban to include fundamentalist Tajiks and Hazaras. The US will remain mired in that war, perhaps for decades, as a result.
Iran will probably bide its time and act in covert and hard to trace ways against US interests in the region. There could be more operations like the Khobar Towers bombing of US troops in Saudi Arabia or the 1983 attack on a Marine barracks in Beirut. All US commercial and government offices in the region would become targets.
A fair likelihood exists that Hizbullah would do something to Israel in revenge, possibly provoking another Israel-Lebanon War. The last war did not go well for Israel, despite its massive military superiority. A fourth of Israelis were forced to move house, chemical gas facilities in Haifa were threatened (and the Dimona Nuclear plant that makes all those Israeli nuclear warheads could be), and Hizbullah had broken Israeli radio encryption and knew all the Israeli army plans beforehand.
Not only would the democratically inclined opposition movement in Iran evaporate, but Muslim fundamentalists in Egypt, Jordan and other US allies would mobilize and perhaps gain in popularity out of anti-imperial solidarity. (Only 6% of ordinary Arabs is worried about an Iranian nuclear bomb, whereas almost all are disturbed by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians).
The price of oil would spike, likely to 2008 highs of $140 a barrel, throwing the world back into Depression.
Once such hostilities began, and given these likely responses, the US could well get sucked into a third major Middle East war, against a country geographically much bigger than either Iraq or Afghanistan, and more than twice as populous as each of them. At another $1 trillion, that cost would push the US into $14 trillion in indebtedness all by itself, and since that is American annual gross domestic product, it could trigger a downgrading of American credit, making the interest servicing on existing and future loans far more expensive and, along with crippling high oil prices, beginning America’s final spiral down into poverty and weakness.
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