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Courage: Then and Now
Oil as a Reason for the Iraq War Part #2: Access In a previous post Oil as a Reason for the Iraq War Part #1: Control, the motivation for the Iraq war as a way of projecting military and economic power over other nations was discussed. The key to this was to ensure U.S. access to oil while denying it to your potential adversaries. Intervening in the middle east at any point was appealing for this reason. However, an additional set of circumstances is needed to explain why a group of people very similar to those in power in the first Bush administration had such an increased zeal to intervene in Iraq when they re-entered power in the second Bush administration. The change was the increasing demand and decreasing supply of fossil fuels that occurred in the period between the wars. Important backgrounds to this discussion are the posts The Bush Administration's WMD Case for the Iraq War: Intelligence Sought to Justify a Decision Already Made, which discusses the main reason put forward for the Iraq war and argues that this could not be the actual motivation, and the Peak Oil Primer which gives a summary of warnings that the planet is facing an increasingly scarce supply of oil. With that ground covered, we can go on to analyze the motivations of those who most vehemently pushed for war with a special emphasis on the main protagonist in the push for war, Vice President Dick Cheney.
Continue reading Oil as a Reason for the Iraq War Part #2: Access.
Oil as a Reason for the Iraq War Part #1: Control The reasons for the Iraq war appear as a moving cloud of smoke. Everyone seems to acknowledge that every premise put forward for the war bordered on absurd and that there was a huge push by the administration to lead the public into war with faulty information. (The now thoroughly debunked case for Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction and whether this could have been the motivation for the administration is discussed in this post, with more information coming from Ron Suskind's book "The Way of the World.") From there, however, people seem to stop thinking and shrug their shoulders and say "oh well". The consensus view is summarized by George Packer in "The Assassin's Gate". WHY DID THE UNITED STATES invade Iraq? It still isn't possible to be sure - and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq War. Richard Haass said that he will go to his grave not knowing the answer. It was something that some people wanted to do. Before the invasion, Americans argued not just about whether a war should happen, but for what reasons it should happen - what the real motives of the Bush administration were and should be. Since the invasion, we have continued to argue, and we will go on arguing for years to come. Iraq is the Rashomon of wars.The summary of Rashomon is the following: Based on two stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke (Rashomon and In a Grove), it describes a rape and murder through the widely differing accounts of four witnesses, including the perpetrator and, through a medium, the murder victim. The story unfolds in flashback as the four characters--the bandit Tajomaru (Mifune), the murdered samurai Takehiro (Mayasuki Mori), his wife Masako (Machiko Kyo), and the nameless woodcutter (Takashi Shimura)--recount the events of one afternoon in a grove. Each story is self-serving, and all are mutually contradictory, leaving the viewer unable to determine the truth of the events.Is this really the best we can do to dissect such a travesty? Voltaire once said "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities". This seems like an apt summary of what has happened in Iraq, with the civilian death toll following the invasion now being approximated around a hundred thousand to over a million. Why is it that the administration was so willing to distort, if not outright lie about its motivations to start a war with Iraq? The motivations for wanting to exert influence over the middle east are clear; the region has over half of the world's oil and nearly half the natural gas energy reserves. Mainstream politicians seem allergic to mentioning oil in the context of Iraq. Save for Dennis Kucinich and a few others, this discussion is completely absent from the discourse from the Democrats. Other mainstream figures have been outright derisive of those who would dare say that Iraq had anything to do with oil. Donald Rumsfeld back in 2002 said "It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil." In January 2003 Tony Blair stated that Iraq "has nothing to do with oil, or any of the other conspiracy theories put forward." To move the discussion past the level of a "conspiracy for oil" to a well grounded, well reasoned argument for why the United States is in Iraq we first need to look at the strategic importance of oil for the political and military strength of nations and then look at the importance of oil to the world economy, in fact, to civilization itself. These two threads are each important, but different in nature. The first is basically insensitive to the total amount of oil available, as long as you have the ability to ensure access to it yourself and deny access to it for your enemies. The second is very sensitive to the total amount of oil available. Indicators to policy planners that there may be an oil shortage in the future could quickly incite people to action. This first post looks at the role disparities in access to oil has to play in strength of nations and how this fit in with the foreign policy doctrine of the Bush administration.
Continue reading Oil as a Reason for the Iraq War Part #1: Control.
Fareed Zakaria's GPS: US Russia Relations Discussion There was a good discussion of US-Russia relations on the CNN sunday show GPS (Global Public Square) with Fareed Zakaria recently. The guests for the discussion were NYU Russian Studies and History Professor Stephen F. Cohen and longtime diplomat and Kennedy School Professor Nicholas Burns. The first part of the interview is linked here. The more interesting part of the discussion comes in the second half: The transcript for the show is linked here. The dialog goes basically as Nicholas Burns defending the policies towards Russia including NATO expansion, and Stephen Cohen offering a critique. Here are some highlights: COHEN: I mean, the problem is, the Russians don't trust us anymore. We've broken so many promises to them. And it's not just Putin and Medvedev, it's the Russian policy class. They see us as aggressive.Stephen Cohen also posed the following question to Burns, which went unanswered: "What's the difference between Kosovo and Ossetia?" probably referring to the analogy between the Kosovo and Georgia situations described in this HIPJ post. There is another interesting discussion on democracy and other issues in Russia on Charlie Rose with Stephen Cohen and Gary Kasparov:
Olmert Advocates West Bank Withdrawal Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has recently been advocating for a large scale withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank in order to reach a new peace with the Palestianians. Below is an excerpt from an article in the New York Times: On peace with the Palestinians, Mr. Olmert said in the interview: "We face the need to decide but are not willing to tell ourselves, yes, this is what we have to do. We have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the meaning of which is that in practice we will withdraw from almost all the territories, if not all the territories. We will leave a percentage of these territories in our hands, but will have to give the Palestinians a similar percentage, because without that there will be no peace."There is more coverage in the Israeli press, with the following pieces from Haaretz; first a description of the remarks: In an interview with the Yedioth Aharonoth daily, Olmert said that as a hard-line politician for decades he had not been prepared to look at reality in all of its depth.Second, an "analysis" piece in Haaretz commenting that this is too little too late: At the age of 63, just moments before his departure from premiership, Ehud Olmert has reached an extraordinary epiphany. In order to make peace with the Palestinians and the Syrians, Israel must withdraw from "nearly all the territories, if not all." As he told Yedioth Aharonoth in a holiday interview, even East Jerusalem must be given to the Palestinians.It remains to be seen if a sitting Israeli leader, not plagued with scandals as Olmert is, will come to the same conclusion and follow through on it.
Revelations in Ron Suskind's Book: "The Way of the World" Pulitzer prize winning author Ron Suskind recently came out with a book called "The Way of the World". The book is a hodge podge of several stories with some connection to the "war on terror". There are several new revelations in the book which are very important and should be receiving more attention in the mainstream. The revelations are (in no particular order):
Former HIPJ Member and Democracy Now Producer Arrested at Republican National Convention Former HIPJ member Nicole Salazar, who is now a producer at the nationally broadcast newsprogram Democracy Now, was arrested while trying to cover the protests going on at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota. Below is a video of her arrest: There are more details on her arrest available at Democracy Now as well as the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. There is a letter writing campaign opposing the arrests organized by Democracy Now. The two producers, Salazar and Kouddous, are currently facing the prospect of felony "probable cause riot" charges. A country where one can not only get arrested for protesting but arrested for even reporting that there is a protest is approaching Orwellian territory.
Georgia, Russia, Gas, Oil and Kosovo Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili gave an 11 minute interview on the BBC describing what he called an outright Soviet invasion. He claims that the Russians are intentionally targeting civilians and oil pipelines going to Europe. He also points out, in response to Russian claims of protecting a minority in Southern Ossetia that this has been the excuse for previous Soviet invasions of Poland, Hungary, Finland, Afghanistan, Czechoslovakia, and although he doesn't add, this was also the excuse of the Nazis for invading the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia. There are two salient points to touch upon in other coverage of the conflict. The first is a theme of Russian imperialism, that it is doing this primarily to try to reassert influence over the southern Caucus region where the construction of alternative oil and gas pipelines going to Europe could undermine Russian control (where the current pipelines are) over the region's energy resources. A long piece in the New York Times by James Traub comments on this: Marshall Goldman, a leading Russia scholar, argues in a recent book that Mr. Putin has established a "petrostate," in which oil and gas are strategically deployed as punishments, rewards and threats. The author details the lengths to which Mr. Putin has gone to retain control over the delivery of natural gas from Central Asia to the West. A proposed alternative pipeline would skirt Russia and run through Georgia, as an oil pipeline now does. "If Georgia collapses in turmoil," Mr. Goldman notes, "investors will not put up the money for a bypass pipeline." And so, he concludes, Mr. Putin has done his best to destabilize the Saakashvili regime.The book by the Harvard scholar mentioned, Marshall Goldman, "Petrostate" is available to search inside on Amazon.com. The fact that this may largely be a play to control the region's energy resources, as opposed to simply being a case for "humanitarian intervention", increases the chance that the west could ponder a military or economic response. The second theme is the role of Kosovo in the Russian justification for its actions. This is also touched upon in the piece by James Traub in the New York Times while recounting the history of the conflict: This brief interval of talk came to an abrupt end two summers ago, when Mr. Saakashvili sent troops to retake the Kodori Valley in Abkhazia -- in order, once again, to curb banditry (of which there was, in fact, a great deal). Both the Abkhaz and the Russians took this as a sign that Georgia was prepared to fight to regain its former province. Indeed, last year Mr. Saakashvili traveled to the Abkhaz border and promised a crowd of Georgian refugees that they would be back home within a year.Another article in the New York Times mentions the same theme: When Kosovo won Western backing for its bid for independence from Russia's historical ally Serbia, the Kremlin answered by vowing to win similar status for South Ossetia and for the Black Sea enclave of Abkhazia, which fall inside Georgia's borders. Georgian leaders, meanwhile, hoped to quiet the conflict once and for all before applying for NATO membership.Regardless of how slighted the Russian leadership actually feels for the support of the West for the unilateral declaration of independence of by Kosovo, it has allowed them to stoke feelings of Russian nationalism as a cover for invading and taking innocent lives in a nearby democracy. By what clear criteria can the west say that its support for the breakaway republic of Kosovo is different than Russian involvement in Southern Ossetia?
Stephen Kinzer: America's Century of Regime Change Former New York Times Reporter Stephen Kinzer has written several books about regime change as a tool of US foreign policy. In 1982 he co-wrote Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala and has written two more recent books All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (2003) about the US engineered coup against Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (2006), an omnibus history of 14 US engineered overthrows of foreign governments starting in 1893. There are several talks available online where Kinzer talks about Overthrow and All the Shahs men. Here is a talk from Fora.tv where he discusses Overthrow: The 14 interventions Kinzer discusses in Overthrow are:
You ask about the motivations, and that is one of the patterns that comes through when you look at these things all together. There's really a three-stage motivation that I can see when I watch so many of the developments of these coups. The first thing that happens is that the regime in question starts bothering some American company. They start demanding that the company pay taxes or that it observe labor laws or environmental laws. Sometimes that company is nationalized or is somehow required to sell some of its land or its assets. So the first thing that happens is that an American or a foreign corporation is active in another country, and the government of that country starts to restrict it in some way or give it some trouble, restrict its ability to operate freely.Kinzer's books are worth reading and his interviews worth listening to.
The Bush Administration's WMD Case for the Iraq War: Intelligence Sought to Justify a Decision Already Made Current US strategy in Iraq is dependent on why the war was waged in the first place. If it was for neutralizing weapons of mass destruction programs, and removing a potential base and allies for terrorists then the strategy today will be substantially different than if the goal was to promote a regime pliable to western access to the region's resources. The goal of this post is to analyze the evidence that was available before the war demonstrating that there was a credible threat of weapons of mass destruction development by the government of Iraq. The conclusion reached is that the evidence was so shoddy that it is next to impossible to believe that this was what motivated those who most ardently pushed for war, ie Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. Instead the Bush administration used whatever evidence it could find to justify a decision to invade Iraq that they had already made. In the years since 2003 many reports and good books, most notably "Hubris" by David Corn and Michael Isikoff, have emerged painting a clearer picture of whether this really could have been the casus belli for war in the minds of the instigators. In the extended entry a summary of this material is given. If this evidence convinces us that WMD couldn't have really been the driving force for war, we can go on to analyze what was.
Continue reading The Bush Administration's WMD Case for the Iraq War: Intelligence Sought to Justify a Decision Already Made .
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