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A US military attack on Iraq early this year looks likely. As Paul Rogers has shown (and Globolog acknowledged in its first edition), US grand strategy has long required, and continues to require, control of regional oil supplies. Favourable terms for access to this resource for the US economy (more than 30% of total world GDP) are at least as important from the administration's point of view as supporting its Israeli partner or preventing the rise of the kind of entrenched challenge in the Persian Gulf that North Korea presents to it in north-east Asia.
The smart money says that, so long as the US applies sufficient force, a war in Iraq will be quite short (notwithstanding the dangers of, for example, urban fighting hampered by civilian 'shields' and the possibility that the Iraqi regime will fire oil wells and contaminate them with chemical or biological agents). Of course, the smart money is sometimes wrong. But whatever the near- and medium-term run of events in Iraq and the wider consequences of an American campaign, one likelihood looms large: within the next decade, significantly larger quantities of oil from Iraqi reserves (the second largest in the world after those in Saudi Arabia) will be available on world markets. And the oil will flow whether this comes with help from French, Russian, American or even Chinese corporations - working together with regional players such as Turkey, who will strike a hard bargain in oil for their co-operation.
Some people think the wider Persian Gulf region may become so destabilised as a result of American conquest that reliable oil supplies will collapse (the "playing into bin Laden's hands scenario"). I think the balance of probabilities is against this. The world economy's thirst for oil is huge and rapidly growing, and the number and range of nations and organisations, both the most powerful economies (not just the US) and those that trade with them, with a vested interest in oil at a "reasonable price" (rather than the $140 plus a barrel suggested by bin Laden) is so great that the worst of enemies will become the best of friends to deliver it.
Nevertheless, wider ripples from an Iraqi war may have most unfortunate consequences. It's hard to see how the already highly uncertain future of, for example, Pakistan - just outside the oil-bearing region - could be anything but more unstable after an Iraqi war. Indonesia, among others, may also face severe challenges.
Justice for oil?
The US is planning for a heavy American military presencein Iraq for at least eighteen months after conquest. There should, say administration officials, be a rapid transition to a UN-appointed civilian governor as an intermediate stage to some form of democracy, military trials for only the most senior Iraqi leaders, and a quick takeover of the country's oil fields to pay for reconstruction.
American officials are keen to stress that the oil reserves will remain "the patrimony of the Iraqi people". What precisely this would mean in practice has yet to be determined, but if Middle East history from Mossadeq to the present day teaches the powerful anything it is surely this: allowing the locals a decent slice of the revenues from their own oil is the cheapest way of buying their acquiescence.
If this scenario were realised in a post-Saddam (and post-sanctions) Iraq, the possibilities for delivering justice to the countrys people after three decades of horror are considerable. This is especially the case if the Europeans and others bring heavy pressure to bear on US/Israel, and provide substantial additional resources and know-how themselves, in order to ensure that Iraqs oil wealth is used to facilitate improvements in the health, education, and social fabric of the country.
In this way, the Germans, French, British and others could achieve a necessary, threefold humanitarian leap: help to limit suffering in the aftermath of a US campaign, assist Iraqis in building a better future for themselves, and in a small way which will never bring back the dead or right the wrongs - gesture towards atonement for the collaboration and support which their corporations and elected governments (at least as complicit as the US and Russian military-industrial complexes) lent to the mass murder regime in Baghdad over many years. Peace would then not only be the absence of war; it could be, in Martin Luther King's phrase, the presence of justice.
Meeting the energy resource challenge
But peace and justice in our time are almost beside the point for what I want to begin to address in Globolog - namely one of the most powerful and profound forces shaping the future of humanity: energy technology and policy, and the consequences for the natural environment on which we depend.
The most recent column by Thomas Friedman, a globalisation pundit influential in the US, gestures towards engagement with this fundamental issue. Writing in the New York Times on 5 January , he voiced the thoughts of many who consider themselves reasonable Americans:
"I have no problem with a war for oil - if it is accompanied by a real program for energy conservation. But when America tells the world that it couldn't care less about climate change, that Americans feel entitled to drive whatever big cars they feel like, that they feel entitled to consume however much oil they like, the message is that a war for oil in the Gulf is not a war to protect the world's right to economic survival but Americans' right to indulge. Now that will be seen as immoral".
Next week, Globolog will get under the surface that Friedman scratches. It will trace some subterranean connections from the lower circles of hell (aka Washington DC, where King Coal still reigns) through to Russia - the Saudi Arabia of natural gas, the key fuel of the early 21st century. The journey through the deep underground of power politics may yield glimpses of how sane, practical policies that stand some chance of actually being achieved could meet the coming energy resource challenge amid the likely climate cataclysm.
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