Via Political Animal, this little nugget got me thinking:
In other words, the bill to bring Army and Navy battalions back to the status they were in before the invasion ... [will be] $50 to $100 billion. "The next president will face a staggering bill," Wilkerson says, not even counting the costs of further efforts in Iraq.
So, not counting the cost of the war itself, just returning U.S. armed forces to the fighting condition they maintained back in ye olden dayes of Feb. 2003 will cost as much as $100 billion. The estimates for the total cost of the war have been pegged as high as $2 trillion.
We talk a great deal about the "externalities" of oil. It's important to remember that one of its costliest externalities -- probably No. 2 behind climate change -- is American military spending in the Persian Gulf, and at least two major wars.
Of course, America is only dependent on Persian Gulf oil so long as it is dependent on oil -- but the inverse is true, as well: so long as America is dependent on oil, it will be dependent on Middle East oil, the cheapest and most plentiful source available. Indeed, the Gulf's share of global oil reserves is expected to grow in the future as non-Gulf supplies decline more rapidly.
That is why the first president to enunciate a strategic foreign policy with the Persian Gulf at its heart was not named Bush or Reagan, but Carter. This isn't a partisan issue, really: so long as America is dependent on oil, it is in America's national security interests to keep the supply stable.
Which brings me to one of the more tragic books in the English language, The Great Illusion by Norman Angell. Wikipedia has a nice summary:
The thesis of that work is commonly (and incorrectly) described as saying that the integration of the economies of European countries had grown to such a degree that war between them was unimaginable, making militarism obsolete. However this is not what Angell actually argued. His central argument was that war between modern powers was futile in the sense that no matter what the outcome, he thought both the losing and the victorious nations would be economically worse off than they would have been had they avoided war. [emphasis mine - JM]
Angell was right, of course -- even the nominal "victors" of World War I were deeply impoverished by the war. The Great Illusion was written in the last years before World War I, and Angell was writing in direct opposition to the sentiment in London, Paris, and Berlin that saw colonies and imperialism as the road to national greatness.
Angell proposed the remarkable heresy that it didn't really matter who "owned" India so long as British merchants could trade with Indian ones. Meanwhile, efforts to keep India, South Africa, and other colonies within the imperial fold were a substantial net cost for Great Britain. Rather than being a source of national greatness, Empire made Britain less Great with every passing year.
So why was Empire so popular? Well, it wasn't "popular" in the sense you or I would use the word -- imperialism has never had much electoral cachet, and doesn't today in the U.S. Rather, historian Douglas Porch argues that the classic imperialism of the 18th and 19th centuries was a result of commercial expansion coupled with a lack of political accountability: Merchants and far-off soldiers would "claim" some chunk of land for the mother country, and by the time the word got back to the capital, it was a fait accompli. Ah, the freedom the telegraph cost us.
Bills always come due, though. As Porch notes in his book Wars of Empire:
Lacking a deep wellspring of public support, colonial adventures could be continued 1) only if their costs were small and hence easily hidden from the public and 2) if colonial wars were also fought without significant costs in either lives or money. The Second South African War brought this harsh reality home as never before.
Before 9/11, you could expect a storm of protest if you described America's role in the world as imperial. This was before intellectuals like Ignatieff, Ferguson, and others began attempting to resuscitate the term. Either way, America's relationship with the Gulf states -- especially Saudi Arabia -- mirrors those of Great Britain in South Asia (though historical analogies are always inexact). Read any decent history of the Arab-American Oil Company (ARAMCO) to get a feel for this.
Which brings us back to oil. America has a massive commercial interest in oil and natural gas, two resources concentrated in the Persian Gulf. While the oil majors control relatively little of the oil produced in the Middle East, they control virtually all of the gasoline, diesel, and other products refined and sold in the United States. Most U.S. oil now comes from outside U.S. borders. (The U.S. produces less oil domestically than any time since Truman was re-elected.) American leaders have consistently said that the flow of oil from the Gulf is a strategic concern for the United States.
This means that, whatever else happens, so long as Americans consume gasoline (and perhaps, in the future, liquid natural gas) there will be a major U.S. military presence in the Middle East. That's costly, and leads inevitably to wars. Remember bin Laden's repeated statements about the intolerable U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia, if nothing else.
Meanwhile, those of us who advocate for a change from the status quo are, like Angell in his day, effectively aligning ourselves against the forces of nationalism and Empire. Getting off oil is synonymous with a threat to America's way of life. This resistance isn't reserved solely for the environmental movement, either: Exxon's reaction to President Bush's wish to get America off foreign oil was ridicule.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, oil imperialism costs us mightily, as it cost Empires back in the day. You can point to the hundreds of billions (perhaps trillions) for the war, you can point to climate change, you can point to any number of costs -- and the alternatives would be cheaper. (Ask Gar Lipow about that part.) Like the British of the early 1900s, the only thing that stands in our way is making the choice: give up the Grand Illusion that colonies/oil are vital to our national greatness, and decide that it isn't worth fighting a war over.
As the British began to change their relationship with their colonies after the Boer War, and especially after World War I, I hope Americans will begin the process of changing their relationship with oil after the war in Iraq reaches it's bloody end.
Comments
View as Flat
Bart Anderson Posted 6:08 am
28 Nov 2006
I think you may under-estimate the popular support for breaking our oil dependence. It is not hard to see it being made a patriotic issue; as Thomas Friedman says, "Green is the new red, white and blue."
One surprise is that smart thinkers in the military and intelligence communities get it - they understand that oil is central oil to a modern nation, and that we're at the end of cheap oil. The latest development is a presentation by scholars from the U.S. Military Academy (Peak Oil at West Point).
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Zarkov Posted 6:57 am
28 Nov 2006
Storing it is the problem, but only a paradigm shift away.
Oil, coal etc should be used for plastics, chemicals etc, and not to be burned as a waste product.
Yes war is useless in today's world
>> His central argument was that war between modern powers was futile in the sense that no matter what the outcome, he thought both the losing and the victorious nations would be economically worse off than they would have been had they avoided war. >>>
In the olden days insurrection of a defeated foe was avoided in the short term by killing all the able bodied men.
Humanity has no taste for that today, therefore war needs to be banned.
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Tom Philpott Posted 8:16 am
28 Nov 2006
Your point about the centrality of a huge U.S, military presence in the Gulf is on point. A year or two ago, Bush quietly pulled the US military out of Saudi Arabia, in essence satisfying one of Bid Laden's major demands. Why? Perhaps because he thought it might be easier and cheaper to maintain a base in Iraq? Fat chance of that.
And I love your point about how confronting war and empire is central to the environmental project. Can there be any doubt?
And that's why, Bart, I question your invoking of Tom Friedman. It wasn't so long ago that he was waving his rhetorical pompoms in support of Bush's project.
Let's keep this conversation going. Our nation is at war, people are dying, our tax dollars are going by the trillion to military contractors, and everybody acts so calm about it, like it's normal.
Victual Reality
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Bart Anderson Posted 8:31 am
28 Nov 2006
That's why Friedman is so significant. Since his cheerleading for the war, he has evolved to a position on which greens can find some common ground. He is Mr. Middle America, much better than greens at communicating with the broad population.
100% purity? No thanks! If we are to win, we need to work with allies with whom we aren't in total agreement. Let's keep in mind how FDR forged the New Deal.
BTW, I look forward to your food/agriculture posts, Tom. There's almost nothing like them in the mainstream press.
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auntiegrav Posted 9:10 am
28 Nov 2006
The energy crisis is the least of our problems in the near future. Most of the difficulties will arise around ideologies and nationalism that NEVER considers the Net Creativity of what we do. When it comes down to considering our Consumption, we just don't. We only consider our desires and what the 'next' person has. If someone else has something, we are supposed to have it, and our kids are supposed to each have one. It's all in the marketing. 9/11 was just the big red SALE! sign in front of the Depleted Uranium Toy Store.
"It's not me"-Martin Blank
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Tom Philpott Posted 11:08 am
28 Nov 2006
Victual Reality
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Bart Anderson Posted 4:03 pm
28 Nov 2006
Yep, me too.
Even on energy issues, he's not the person I would go to for my information.
On the plus side, he is building a bridge so that people in the center can move towards an awareness of oil, etc. No one in the mainstream media is pursuing the energy issue as doggedly or as comprehensively as Friedman. He ties together national security + economic success + global warming + peak oil (though he doesn't seem to use that term).
He made a documentary on the subject: Addicted to Oil. In particular, I liked the short videos appearing at: Friedman interview and Questions & answers.
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Whiskerfish Posted 5:01 pm
28 Nov 2006
Propaganda came to the fore (Winston Churchill, then a 'embedded' journalist, famously exaggerated all sorts of things for his British public, including 'swimming' through a river to escape his Boer captors that I used to walk ankle-deep though as a kid).
It was the first time a colonial power had to face off to a highly-organised essentially guerilla army (the Boers) who had an purpose-designed, very flexible command structure and innovated camouflage, trench warfare, and roadside bombs.
Needless to say, (as any American general in Iraq could tell you) despite massive numerical and technological superiority, the Brits were on the losing end until they innovated 1) concentration camps, which actually worked for them in the short term, forcing the Boers to capitulate to avoid the deaths of more tens of thousands of their women and children, and 2) the original 'scorched earth policy' during which they burned Boer farms and shot all their livestock (thus depriving the soldiers of sustenance), giving rise to decades of post-war Boer poverty and the subsequent rise of the pro-Nazi, pro-Apartheid Afrikaner Nationalists... and we know where that ended up.
I think the reason that Brit schoolkids don't get taken near this war is that ignorant men callously watching tens of thousands of women and children die of preventable diseases in their concentration camps really doesn't suit the image of the chivalrous, caring Brit soldier that the porpagandists of the time sought to cultivate. After all, the nasty Nazi's invented concentration camps, didn't they...
If the Anglo-Boer War is any lens through which to view the current Iraq, the US will have to be extraordinarily ruthless to win against the 'insurgents', and will have to deal with a century of blowback as a result. Seems like Rummie didn't read his history...
Cheers
Whiskerfish
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John McGrath Posted 4:42 am
29 Nov 2006
Tom: I too am befuddled at the "normalcy" of American politics at the moment. If nothing else, the fact that the Iraq War represents today a tragically large opportunity cost should be common sense, but doesn't seem to be.
I once said, after Stiglitz' $2 trillion estimate came out (re: war costs) that there was absolutely nothing I could think of that $2 trillion couldn't buy. Seriously. The colonization of Pluto would be cheaper. We could get America off all oil for chump change.
Add to that the fact that an intelligently-designed energy system would not create more danger in the world for America, as this war has, and I fail to see why George Bush is still President. But then, I am Canadian.
Whiskerfish: For some reason, Canadian schoolkids are never taught about our complicity in the Boer War, either. Gee. Wonder why.
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John McGrath Posted 4:45 am
29 Nov 2006
If he and James Woolsey can be useful to bring more people around to the national security implications of oil addiction, then I say a big Whoopee.
But the flip side of viewing oil as a military-industrial problem is, as I've said here before, that we're likely to get a military-industrial solution. Meaning, most likely, coal-to-liquids and oil shale extraction (if possible.)
On balance, viewing oil solely as a security matter will probably make the environmental movement's work harder, not easier.
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Bart Anderson Posted 5:39 am
29 Nov 2006
How useful is it to call Friedman an idiot? It makes us feel superior, but does not advance our understanding.
Friedman is energetic and far better at communicating to a large audience than any green writer. If we are serious about change, we need to challenge ourselves to learn from other people.
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JMG Posted 5:50 am
29 Nov 2006
But I will point out that Friedman is NOT better than any greenie at communicating with the great masses--far from it. He's just got a bigger megaphone.
Not to take away from what he's done right on energy since his shameful pro-war columns (which, bizarrely enough, extend to this morning, when he proposed a kind of "do over" in Iraq, where we REINVADE, only with enough troops this time . . . incredible how someone supposedly so smart can be so thick) but he has no audience because of his quality. His audience is because of his position.
Oh, and great posts throughout in this thread. This would be a good time for everyone to drop what they're doing and read or reread Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly."
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Bart Anderson Posted 7:19 am
29 Nov 2006
Friedman is NOT better than any greenie at communicating with the great masses--far from it. He's just got a bigger megaphone. The first step in becoming politically effective is to see things as they are, not as we'd like them to be. Nah, nah, you don't get to be lead columnist for the NY Times unless you're very good.
It doesn't mean I agree with him. Not at all.
Same with the wonderful propaganda/lobbying/communication apparatus that the U.S. rightwing has developed. I oppose them with every ounce of my being, and yet I recognize their accomplishment. Their think tanks, broadcasting networks and PR techniques are a high point in the art of propaganda. We are fools if we don't learn from what happened.
The problem with greens as communicators is that we've retreated into our little ghettos of like-minded people. We have our own jargon and catch phrases. We are too proud to learn to use modern communication techniques. We have an unfortunate tendency towards elitism and snobbery. We know that we are RIGHT, and too bad for the unfortunate hoi polloi who don't recognize it.
Yes, there are many problems in gettting a green message across (media consolidation, social inertia, etc. But a great deal lies within our control.
S-L-O-W-L-Y things are changing (and Grist is an example of a more effective approach).
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