Slip Slidin’ Away II

I’ve written about this before but it didn’t go anywhere. But that seems to be the case whenever the topic of oil comes up in relation to current U.S. foreign policy. My experience is that the minute the word “oil” or the phrase “war for oil” is uttered, people just stop listening.

It was uttered again today, by Vermont’s Sen. Jim Jeffords.

For starters, Jeffords, who opposes the war in Iraq, predicted the Bush administration would start a war in Iran to help elect a third member of the Bush clan to the White House.

“I think it was all done to get oil,” Jeffords said of invading Iraq. “And the loss of life that we had, and the cost of it, was to me just a re-election move, and they’re going to try to live off it. Probably start another war, wouldn’t be surprised, next year. Probably in Iran.”

“Do you think that’s likely?” VPR host Bob Kinzel asked.

“I probably shouldn’t even talk on it, I just feel so bitter about the thinking that’s gone on behind them, and the reasons they go to war and went to war,” Jeffords replied. “But I feel very strongly that they are looking ahead, and that there will be an opportunity to go into Iran and try to get their son elected president. I don’t know, but you do it each time they (are) going to have a new president. I’m very, very (Jeffords chuckles). Oh, well, I better be quiet.”

As former Republicans go, I like Jim Jeffords, and maybe he’s on to something. He’s not the only one who thinks Iran might be next on the hit parade. Scott Ritter, former UN Chief Weapons inspector in Iraq, seems to think so too. In fact, he thinks it’s coming in June of this year. Ritter was ignored by most of the media, even though he didn’t mention oil, as Jeffords did.

I can’t entirely get my brain around why it’s verboten to mention oil in the same breath as the war in Iraq, or our foreign policy, or why it gets reactions like the one Jeffords got.

“That is the highest level of irresponsibility to suggest that the president has taken the nation to war and put thousands of lives at risk for political purposes,” [Vermont Republican Party Chairman Jim] Barnett said. “It’s really outrageous, and reason enough that we ought to question Sen. Jeffords’ ability to serve Vermonters in a way that makes us proud.”

But, in looking at Iraq, and the rest of our foreign policy—and with two oilmen running the show, for cryin’ out loud—it seems to me that it can’t not be about oil, at least in part. It seems like there’s a big, black elephant in the room that almost no one is talking about, though I’ve recently heard a couple of voices pipe up on the subject.

Steve Soto at The Left Coaster addresses Peak Oil Theory, and the likely aftermath of its effect.

With domestic refining capacity now limited, demand encouraged here and abroad, and new supplies located in volatile areas or fields still underdeveloped, oil companies will be the only short-term winners as they get higher and higher prices from overseas customers while the US economy tanks.

Since getting quick control of Iraq’s supposedly “they can finance their own recovery” supplies has proven to be trickier than PNAC assumed, how far behind can a manufactured crisis in Iran be?

This jumped out at me from Blogging of the President.

Peak oil is the technical problem, but there are two responses to it. One is simply to concentrate access to the scarce resource. This is mathematically analogous to creating a famine. As long as the voters in the US think that they can do this, they will. In fact as the previous article, collision course, makes clear, that is what they have backed already – to concentrate oil based growth in the United States.

Vicious circles are far more adaptable than people give them credit for being: addicts will follow the spiral all the way down rather than change, whether the addiction is alcohol for a person, or oil for an economy. Consider cases in the past where a group of people have accepted grossly suboptimal growth in order to hold onto an old system: the American South did not accept the verdict of the civil war in order to maintain a racist – in the most rigorous sense, as the ideology of government – system. If the civil war isn’t a big enough crash to shake a peoples willingness to engage in destructive behavior, peak oil won’t be either.

The root of the problem is not then, raw oil supplies, but the relationship of culture and monetary system which our current economic arrangements create.

I’ve thought for a while now that our relationship with oil and its role in our economy pretty much fits the addiction model, up to and including the addict’s characteristic denial of the addiction. Maybe that’s why you can’t talk about oil in relation to Iraq or the rest of our foreign policy and still get people to listen. Think for a minute about what was just quoted above. “One is simply to concentrate access to the scarce resource. This is mathematically analogous to creating a famine. As long as the voters in the US think that they can do this, they will. In fact…that is what they have backed already.” That may be what we’ve decided, but that doesn’t mean we want to know that’s what we decided, or that we want to even know that we know. Who would want to believe that about themselves? So it’s easy to ignore or dismiss anyone who brings up “the ‘o’ word.”

But how long can we ignore it? I haven’t read very much about peak oil theory, but the little I have learned about it makes sense to me.

Or am I just crazy?