by AlCzervik » Wed 26 Sep 2007, 20:38:10
Just so OilyMaster can get the fucking point on this issue. From a guy who has been in the trenches.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')t was, is, and will continue to be an Energy War. Energy is the material substrate of power; this is as inescapable – literally – as entropy. The plan was to erect a new network of bases in Southwest Asia in the wake of their expulsion from ever more fragile Saudi Arabia, and to use the GWOT as a pretext to develop a new body of law to attack domestic political enemies. The US military’s Cold War disposition was to be decisively abandoned; and the area around the oil-soaked Persian Gulf subjugated within a network of bases… lily pads, they called them.
Encroachment: Part I.$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'P')eople who study politics need to study maps.
The centrality of Iraq to the US is oil. You can dance around this plain fact until Hell freezes over, but if Iraq were not located in the middle of the world’s largest oil patch ( Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Kuwait) there would not be 140,000 US troops, 25,000 US mercenaries, and tens of thousands of US war profiteers there today.
The war in Iraq (and in Afghanistan, as well) is an energy war, first and last.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'C')ontrol over the largest patch of oil, on the other hand, is leverage against all competitors who rely on imported oil. That was always Europe and Japan. And since the 1980s, it is increasingly China.
Military power is the only card the US has to play in this new Great Game. Forgive the paternalistic analogy that emphasizes the imperial standpoint, but as any parent knows, when we must resort to force with our children, it is an indication that all other measures have failed.
They are not expanding their power. They are trying to manage their decline. The violence of that management is a reflection of the depth of the crisis, and the question of how to manage that decline goes to the heart of the struggle developing between the neocons and the technocrats.
The leverage that petroleum gives over the rest of the over-developed world, as well as nuclear Russia and industrializing China is absolutely and inescapably logical from a strictly mechanistic, military point of view. This is the reason that Southwest Asia is now the epicenter of world crisis.