The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
Commentary on the Flux of Events
Saturday we had a fair complement of peace marchers occupying the four corners of our main street around city hall. I knew quite a few of the faces in the crowd and I was quite sure that many of them had driven their cars downtown to the peace march. This weekend was the climax of a prolonged six-week cold snap, and temperatures on Saturday were below ten degrees.
I don't doubt the sincerity of the peace marchers, but I worry that the extraordinary comfort we Americans have enjoyed the past thirty years is an impediment to understanding what is happening now in the world. We're about to go to war precisely so that peace marchers can drive comfortably downtown to engage in their civic and communal ceremonies.
Years from now when we look back on these days and ask ourselves what was the war about? what will we say?
That it was the first War of Proliferation? The ostensible reasons for going into Iraq are to 1.) prevent the despot in charge of Iraq from using or distributing to the enemies of his enemies extremely dangerous weapons; and 2.) to prevent the despot from using his oil wealth to gain political hegemony over the adjoining oil states which altogether contain over half the world's remaining reserves.
The war is not happening to enrich American and British oil companies, though they may benefit as a side consequence. The objective is to place Iraqi oil capacity in the hands of Iraqis who can be relied on to enjoy their profits peacefully, with the side benefit for the West of stabilizing oil markets and prices for a few extra years before the problem of world peak production brings on more contests over scarcity.
I happen to believe that the war will not play out strategically in a clean and orderly way. We are on a collision course with world Islam despite what the Boomer multiculturist rainbow people wish. The Jihadistas are not interested in celebrating diversity. They want to celebrate the death of the Judeo-Christian West, including especially its lead sponsor in the world, the US. I can't see any reason that hostilities will not at least continue at the margin indefinitely, and from time to time we may be rudely shocked when hostilities are projected at our center. It is ridiculously easy to move weapons and personnel around the US. Our borders are sieve, especially the one with Mexico, and I doubt that the average border guard could tell the difference between a dozen fruitpickers from Sonora and twelve trained Arabian Jihadistas under cover. Only five percent of the shipping containers coming through major ports like San Pedro and Norfolk are ever inspected. One of these days, a Heartland city like Chicago is going to get whacked. This is a war that is liable to go on for a long time and spread to a lot of fronts and cost a lot in blood and dollars, and there may be no way we can avoid it.
Right now, the oil situation in the world is becoming quietly very desperate. Venezuela is still a political mess and their oil industry is in lockdown. Nigeria, an OPEC member which sells more than half its oil to America, is about to go through a wrenching strike. In Colombia, pipelines are blown up practically every week. Everybody is now aware that Saddam Hussein is prepared to torch the Iraqi fields on a moment's notice. We're about to become a whole lot less comfortable. Oil industry reserves around the nation are at their lowest level in thirty years, barely enough to keep the refineries going (and refineries don't like to be stopped and restarted).
The danger here is that Americans have become so complacent, so comfortable, so narcotized by a sense of entitlement to that comfort, that we will fail to appreciate the meaning of the coming oil shock. We have to change the way we live and the way we do business in this nation. Suburbia is already obsolete and we don't know it, as is an economy based on recreational shopping, tanning parlors, theme park excursions, and Indian gambling casinos. When these imperatives hit us hard, and compel us to change, we may just start pointing fingers and acting like crybabies. Meanwhile, the Jihadista's will circle around in the gathering darkness.