One of the unexpected gifts of Mr. Greenspan’s book and supporting promotional tour was his public acknowledgment that the Iraq war was in fact all about oil. While his rationale for arriving at that conclusion seemed a bit flaky for one of his renowned analytic abilities, his acknowledgment of what many of us have believed to be true from the beginning gives substance to what has heretofore been accountable only to justifiable, but not verifiable, cynicism.
His comment is also useful in giving context to other dots that need to be connected:
- Cheney’s 2001 Energy Task Force and the secrecy surrounding its deliberations;
- The report of the General Accountability Office (GAO), Crude Oil: Uncertainty about Future Oil Supply Makes It Important to Develop a Strategy for Addressing a Peak and Decline in Oil Production , gives substantive and independent basis to the motive.
Soooo...now that 'cat is out of the bag', so to speak, what do we do with this new-found knowledge? For starters, it might be useful to re-think our Iraq/Middle East Strategy. Given the impending presidential primaries, and the largely vacuous debates to date, why not throw a hypothetical hand grenade into the discussion and play with it.
If the Iraq war is really not about Weapons of mass destruction, and
if the Iraq war is really not about bringing democracy to the Middle East, and
if the Iraq war really is about "securing" (for the sake of discussion) America's Crude Addiction,
then what is our strategy for Iraq specifically, and the Middle East in general, in that context?
That question begs yet another upon which its answer must be based.
How can we dis-engage ourselves from the Middle East, as many Democrats would propose by virtue of their call for a swift withdrawal, without first insulating ourselves or at least diminishing our dependence on The Crude Addiction?
What is needed ( and this is not an original idea, but a restatement of the obvious) is a national policy for energy independence that goes beyond the fig leafs of ethanol and hybrids, and recognizes that the challenge has the urgency of the space race and the transformative imperative of World War II. Here the Republicans fail by seeing expanded domestic production as the solution, when at best it only temporarily forestalls the inevitable in the absence of a concerted effort to build alternative energy options and an altered economy based on them.
Neither the Democratic nor Republican candidates seem willing to embrace this reality. Therefore, there are no credible strategies to the Middle East, since there are no credible strategies for our Crude Addiction.
Even many of the people most concerned about climate change appear to underestimate the magnitude of changes that we must confront in order to grapple with our energy challenge and its related cousin, climate change. As a result, both environmental and energy constituencies focus on strategies of preference rather than strategies of necessity. Strategies of preference are generally predicated on preserving the status quo, or something pretty close to it, because the public polity will not take kindly to any significant disruption of their 'norm'.
But events are gradually spinning out of control. The issues of water supply in America's Southeast, Southwest and Midwest and in Australia are harbingers of what may face us with energy in all forms. We can sustain our complacency, as the Administration prefers to do, by citing our relative efficiency in using oil over time, but if our absolute use continues to increase, as it has, our relative efficiency is of little solace.
The illusion that escalating oil prices do not appear to have a direct and immediate impact on the consumer economy is due in part to the fact that we cannot readily cut back our transportation use, since substitution is not available in many cases. And our reliance on cheap imports for what was previously produced here further masks and morphs the true impacts of escalating fuel price into less direct, but no less tangible consequences. We cannot sustain this game of Three Card Monte for much longer.
The demands of a growing world population and a convergence of need on dwindling cheap conventional supply will force us, sooner or later, into a painful reconciliation of our assumptions and expectations with reality. The sooner we come to this epiphany, the better.
Thank you, Mr. Greenspan, for opening the door to reality.
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