The Oil War, And Why I’m For It

So the Anti-War crowd’s main chant against the coming war against Saddam Hussein’s regime is that the whole thing is a scheme by the Bushies to get control of that sweet-sweet pot of Iraqi oil. Although this is a simplistic view of the situation, I can’t deny there is some truth to it. Oil is vital not only to our national security and economy, but to the very survival of billions of people, and we are right to fight for it.

Oil is what runs our modern civilization. Even more important than the convenience of cars to get us from our various destinations, is the gas-powered transport network that gets us our cheap and nutritious food, heats our homes, and allows the vital goods and services that make a sanitary and healthy life possible. Trucks, trains, planes, and ships all depend on petroleum-based fuels to operate. Without these transport methods, not only would food be much scarcer in the developed world, but famines would run rampant throughout the developing world, which, in many areas, is far from any kind of local agricultural sustainability.

I am one of the least oil dependent persons in America. I don’t drive a car. I ride electrically powered buses, and my apartment is heated by electricity generated from hydroelectric dams in the Cascade Mountains. But still my life is in so many ways dependent on oil. The food I consume for nourishment is shipped to my local grocery store from around the world via energy intensive shipping methods. The emergency vehicles that would take me to a hospital in an emergency are all powered by oil products. Many of the products which I depend upon to make my living (the plastics in my computer for instance) are byproducts of the oil industry. The corporations that greedily consume so much oil are the ones paying the taxes supporting this city, state, and nation’s infrastructure, and without oil they would have no way to go about their business and would go bankrupt (thus no taxes to support that infrastructure I use). In these and many other ways, my very life is linked with the oil economy.

The alternatives to the current system are few and unimpressive. Hydrogen and electric power are both heralded by eco-friendly folks as viable alternatives to oil, but neither are sources of energy. Hydrogen, for fuel cells and other power uses, requires energy in order to be extracted from other sources, and of course electricity must be generated. For either of these solutions to work, we currently have a few sources of real energy to work with:

• Coal, which is cheap and readably available, but nasty on the environment
• Natural gas, which is relatively clean burning, but linked at the hip to the petroleum industry
• Solar, which will never be very efficient, and if used as extensively as we need it, would probably alter world weather patterns with the solar energy it removed from the environment
• Hydro, which is great, but kills fish, and is already almost maxed out
• Wind, which is a joke
• Geothermal, which only works in a few volcanically active places
• Nuclear, which is clean, efficient, but disastrous in the case of accidents. Plus we don’t have a lot of fuel for it.

Cheap fusion power would be swell, if anybody could ever get it to work, but, in reality,
this motley collection of technologies is all we’ve got to work with. And using any of these sources in any higher levels than they’re used now would be insanely expensive, take decades to complete, and produce little net gain in available energy. It’d be great if this wasn’t the case, but it is. Den Beste has recently gone over these and other alternatives in his usually giant brained thoroughness, if you wish to go into the issue further.

What I’m getting at here is that the petroleum-based world is what we’ve got. Anything else just isn’t viable for maintaining current population levels. If all the world’s oil fields dried up tomorrow, humanity would certainly survive, and maybe technological civilization could continue, but there would be many fewer of us, and most of us who were still around would be more worried about our subsistence farming effort rather than reading blogs and wondering if that email spam we got about Britney Spears and the donkey was for real or not.

As transports stop running, The Children™ of the developing world will die by the billions as those sweet, delectable American (and Canadian, Australian, Ukrainian, etc...) grain supplies cannot cross the oceans. We’d also have our problems. Instead of resisting Vivid Video pay per view movies as our greatest daily struggle, we’d have a real life Mad-Max world to deal with. And, yes, I believe that violent, mohawked, post-apocalyptic psychopath is indeed looking at you lustfully. *wink* *kiss-kiss*

Now that I’ve established why oil is a vital part of everyone’s life, I need to bring it together with why I believe an oil war in Iraq is not only justifiable, but vital. The world could certainly live without Iraqi oil. For the most part, we have been for the past ten years. No, a real reason for removing the Bathist regime in Iraq is the threat it poses to the rest of Persian Gulf oil production. That’s the very reason we have troops stationed in Saudi Arabia and other nearby countries in the first place. Once Saddam gets his cherished Nukes, which he’ll have sooner or later, he can dictate terms to the rest of the region, and to us.

The Europeans (and the Japanese) have far more to lose from a powerful Saddam, as they get the majority of their oil from the Persian Gulf region (10% of US oil imports are from the gulf, compared to 30% of Europe’s and 80% of Japan’s imports. We get most of our imports from Latin America). Yet they seem eager to appease Hussein’s regional ambitions. When Iraq gets its arsenal of nukes, it can stop regional oil production at a whim, and can devastate Europe’s entire economy. We’ve seen how Europe dealt with economic crises in the last century (Communism, Facism, French surrenderism, all that good stuff), and we must not allow a similar (or possibly far worse) situation to repeat itself due to energy shortages.

European stability is a compelling case in itself for removing Saddam and placing a saner regime in his sted. For me though, the most important argument for regime change is the liberation of the Iraqi people. America has at least a century’s worth of tradition of coming to the defense of oppressed or threatened people in their time of need. Saddam has spent the last several decades turning Iraq into his own private, well armed, hell-hole. No people have suffered more from Hussein’s vile rule than his own people. American policy should not be simply the removal of the current Bathist regime to be replaced by a new, US-friendly, dictatorship.

Like all people, the Iraqis wish to live comfortably and provide a future for their children. Iraqi oil wealth will be critical for developing a democratic and free Iraq that can provide those simple human needs to its people. That nation’s great potential wealth, freed from Hussein’s control, will create jobs, and hope, for its struggling people. As a relatively secular and educated nation, Iraq has a unique opportunity to shine in a region mired in despotism and cultural failure. But it can’t do anything productive while Hussein is still in control.

As an added bonus, and, perhaps more important for our direct security needs, a free Iraq will compete against the xenophobic Wahabism of the Saudis for the minds of Arabs, and show the mullah-oppressed masses in Iran another way. However, there is no hope for progress in any middle-eastern nation while Saddam can hold much of the world’s energy reserves hostage.

So, yes, in many ways, this war is about oil. But this war is also about the future destiny of countless millions of Arabs, and the security and well-being of billions of other people around the world. To allow this fascist in Baghdad to continue his reign of terror is immoral, and dangerous for the rest of the world. We should have done something about it a decade ago, but we didn’t. Freeing the Iraqis from Saddam’s tyranny is the first step America can take in bringing the rest of the Arab-Muslim world into the twenty-first century, thus making up for past mistakes.

 

Posted by Captain Mojo at October 01, 2002 03:02 AM | TrackBack