Petraeus! Is Baghdad Burning?
An analysis of the Bush “surge” in Iraq
“Jodl! Is Paris burning?â€
—Adolf Hitler
Aug. 25, 1944
Backstage
The United States makes up about 5 percent of the Earth’s population, but as an aggregate we burn more than 25 percent of its fossil energy. That’s roughly true of all three main forms of fossil energy—oil, natural gas and coal.
The coal we get mainly by having West Virginians surrender their mountains, where coal operators now lop the tops off those mountains to get at the seams of coal and dump the rubble into nearby watercourses. That’s what we do for most of our electricity. Canada sells us most of the natural gas we import … nearly 90 percent in fact.
FULL ANALYSIS
ld:
Excellent stuff. Typically of Stan’s interventions into the world of “pwogwessive” websites, though, this article spawned the usual inane chatter suggesting that the way out of present and future Baghdad massacres is patriotic American green capitalism, which holds out the promise of restoring the US’ lost innocence by returning the US to its admirable Jeffersonian soul. Switchgrass plantations staffed by credit card debt defaulters, anyone? What is especially enervating is this: people are so relieved to find radical analysis that cuts through all the haze of the corporate media and the bullshit of the shill politicians, that they feel an instant camaraderie with SG, even though their observations
and prescriptions are standard issue left-liberal populist and/or conspiracy theory fare (far from what SG is putting on the table). The level of political education in the US is so woefully pathetic that the best intentions sink the historically necessary project of getting eco-socialism up and running before it’s too late.
Along the same lines, here’s my contribution to the Truthdig commentary section:
Anyone who endorses “ending the US’ addiction to foreign oil” and “developing clean, domestic, and renewable energy resources” in order to “avoid future overseas entanglements” misses the point, including the point of this article.
The US is not trying to run affairs in and around the Persian Gulf and West Asia more broadly because it needs to secure predictable flows of increasingly scarce petroleum for its own use.
Rather, the US is trying to maximize control over this region because this region is endowed with a huge portion of the world’s commercially recoverable supply of the one critical input the global capitalist system cannot do without.
In other words, US imperialism (and all its attendant environmental and social costs) does not derive from the contingent fact that the US is not self-sufficient in the energy resource department. Instead, imperialism is fundamental to the US’ vocation – as it would be for any other capitalist big power in the US’ shoes – and the serial Persian Gulf/West Asian invasions and occupations are just means by which the US is attempting to prolong its flagging domination of the global system. (One poster here nicely advanced this argument.)
Advocating a technical fix like government subsidies for green fuel producers (speaking of Archer Daniels Midland – and Barack Obama for that matter!) and other “eco-entrepreneurs” does not get to the root of the problem.
It might sound like a tired old saw, and I hate to utter cliches, but the only lasting solution is a transnational people’s movement (one that can involve sympathetic states as well) toward some kind of low-impact environmentally benign socialism. Unfortunately with each passing day and missed opportunity the lights are dimming on this already dim prospect.
Stan Goff has stated these essential truths more clearly here than elsewhere but it is certainly implied in his anlaysis of the coming awful bloodbath in Sadr City. Why then do articles of this type inevitably spawn naive commentary about tax breaks for ethanol refiners and solar panel manufacturers as being the keys to ending US militarism? Or platitudes about the US’ fundamental goodness being ruined by the Bushite usurpers? Is “progressive” US political culture really that intellectually bankrupt? Perhaps it is.
LD
16 January 2007, 2:10 amAkita, Japan
emma:
Stan have read your article and in regards to Moqtada as- Sadr after reading Abu Nasr’s article dated 15th Jan 2007 (Abu Nasr is on the Editorial Board of Free Arab Voice – He states that Jaysh al-Maliki, the militia of Moqtada as-Sadr and the Badr Brigades armed wing of the SCIRI led by Abd-al”Azis A-Hakim have met in Nafjaf and Karbala and have drawn up a plan to form the Bagdad Liberation Army. 40,000 fighters will be drawn from these groups. The Liberation Army intend to purge Bagdad of Sunni residents. (and no doubt secular Shiites – my comment)
This seems like the initial move to carve up Iraq.
It should be taken into account that not all the Shiite in the South are fundamentalists. And there are many secular Iraqis who vehemently oppose Sadr, I think this move is merely an attempt to consolidate A Shiite Sectarian Fundamentalist power in this area by attempting to obliterate all secular Arab opposition.
in other words ‘political cleansing’, or some of us would call it implementing genocide.
Surely, the question one should ask is that if Sadr was so popular within Sadr city why would he be relying on these other sectarian Iranian backed militias support.
It seems he is using them as he is using the poor in Iraq.
And why is Bush telling lies again when he says the same people he has put in power into Iraq he is now going to reign in. Its an old trick say one thing while doing another – it works like a dream – especially on the indifferent population.
The reality in Iraq today is that the US Forces along with the sectarian gangs of militias, whether it is Moqtada as Sadr’s gang or the Badr gang; are still
carrying out continual genocide of the secular Arabs in Iraq.
And the silence on this from many progressives is deafening
Stan,I still continue to disagree with you about Sadr’s popularity in Iraq. My Iraqi Shiite friends here hate his guts, and they are secular and have family living in Bagdad.
Also, I would be very interested to know from what source you are getting your information from regarding Moqtada as-Sadr. as I would like to read some more on the matter. And I would also appreciate your comments regarding the above-mentioned article.
As to the end game when the US leaves they will not do anything different to what they have been doing in Iraq for the past 17 years – “The United States might obliterate Iraq” – Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf lst Nov. 1990 ” We will return you to the pre-industrial age” James Baker 9th Jan 1991.
16 January 2007, 6:38 amCharles:
LD
Akita, Japan :
The US is not trying to run affairs in and around the Persian Gulf and West Asia more broadly because it needs to secure predictable flows of increasingly scarce petroleum for its own use.
Rather, the US is trying to maximize control over this region because this region is endowed with a huge portion of the world’s commercially recoverable supply of the one critical input the global capitalist system cannot do without.
^^^^^
16 January 2007, 5:23 pmCB: Couldn’t it be both ?
DeAnander:
Why then do articles of this type inevitably spawn naive commentary about tax breaks for ethanol refiners and solar panel manufacturers as being the keys to ending US militarism?
because these strategies translate to the promise “You can keep driving your private automobile, enjoying your 50 inch TV, eating junk food (or ‘organic’ produce for that matter) from 3000 miles away, etc.”
a commitment to ecosocialism, or a sustainable economy, means figuring out how to reduce the fossil consumption of Americanos (and by extension Canadians, Kiwis, Ozzies, and to a lesser degree Eurolanders, Japanese, and other first worlders) by 90 percent. not 10 percent, not even 50 percent but 90 percent. affluent Americans want to hear that they can fix climate change and other environmental disasters by shopping — buying more stuff, consuming more, replacing their boring old toys with more nifty novelty toys, maintaining their [let us be quite frank] pampered and infantilised lifestyle, just swapping in a miracle-tech infrastructure that will make it all clean and green. green cars. green biofuels. green nuke plants. green GMOs. oxymorons. every one of ‘em — and ecomorons, those who place their faith in carny artists who claim to beat the laws of thermodynamics on demand.
really addressing the problem means asking “of all that technology has to offer, what do we really need? what can humanity afford as a common standard of living?” and we know the answer to that question is a serious “lowering” of a 1st world affluent standard of living — I put this in scarequotes because it it not clear to me that a lower consumption level is really a lower standard of living, if we figure in things like mental and physical health, free time, autonomy, dignity, equity, etc.
just try telling Americans — or affluent Euros — that they may have to come to terms with a future of local food, public transport, no more cheap air vacation travel, no more disposable “convenience” products, no more fast food chains, perhaps no more 24×7 electricity, no more giant suburban trophy homes, quite probably not meat at every meal or even every day, quite possibly water rationing as well as carbon rationing. you will be met with every response from belly laughs to sputtering indignation to incandescent, foulmouthed rage.
you will also be met with accusations of Stalinism, of Luddism, of wanting to go “back to the Stone Age,” of being a sentimental ninny hankering after some kind of Burne-Jones poster of a bucolic England that never was; you will be accused of hating modernity, of being just like Islamic fundies, of being “anti human,” an “eco crazy,” a puritan, etc. etc. etc. never mind that Stalin was in love with industrialism and Taylorism, or that the Stone Age may have been one of the healthier and happier phases of our hominid existence (though we can hardly return to it now), or that there is a huge gap between a reasonably modern but frugal lifestyle and the 18th (or 2nd) century, or the late Neolithic.
the real reason behind endless repetitions of “the market will solve the problem” is that the people repeating the mantra secretly believe they personally have enough money to continue burning fossil fuel even if the price rises so high as to immiserate countless others; the real reason behind the gullible enthusiasm for the Energy Fairy in its various guises is a visceral inability to imagine giving up any of the luxuries that the affluent world now thinks are rights. it is entitlement that fuels the denial, the rage, the random namecalling and blaming and fantasising. eco socialist paradigms threaten to take people’s shiny toys away, and this provokes rage, resentment, denial. combine this with the general state of ignorance and denial about realpolitik and US imperial history and you’re into a very Laingian interaction. you’re saying things which must not be said, and having beeen said must not be heard, ahd having been heard must be misunderstood and reinterpreted as something more comfortable.
16 January 2007, 9:30 pmld:
To CB:
Well yes if you want to get down and dirty and dialectical about it, it is about both: supply constraint and political risk in oil regions outside the Persian Gulf means that if current trends persist the US will rely more heavily on petroleum imports from the Persian Gulf than it does at present. (There is of course a fundamental misunderstanding held by many that the US currently sources a disproportionate amount of its foreign oil from West Asia rather than Canada/Mexico/Venezuela.) So in that regard permanent military bases and reliable client stares in and around the Persian Gulf would both serve future US petroleum consumption needs and enhance US leverage over its allies and rivals in the global system.
The rationale for my framing the issue in this somewhat artificial manner is to clarify my objection to an all-too-common discourse peddled by populist greens and other such kindred folk, one that partakes in the pollyannish fantasy that US imperialism is driven by US need for offshore energy and hence will be magically ended by a green capitalist program of underwriting R & D of “clean, domestic, and renewable” energy. It is a ubiquitous trope that infects left-liberal “analysis” and ecological socialists should take pains to take it apart whenever and wherever they encounter it.
LD
16 January 2007, 10:04 pmAkita, Japan
DeAnander:
LD makes a good point, btw — that so long as other economies are based on fossil fuels, US hegemonic policy will require control of world reserves of those fossil fuels. even if the whole US ran on mystery black boxes brought by benevolent space aliens, producing infinite power on demand with no byproducts or side effects, the US would still want to control oil reserves so long as they are important to the rest of the world’s economies. the scarcer oil gets, the more insistent the requirement to control it. so in terms of changing realpolitik I tend to agree with LD that “solving” the US’ internal energy problems wouldn’t alter foreign policy. and foreign policy of this imperial and aggro type can’t be pursued without massive fossil inputs — air and sea transport for the projection of physical force — so it’s a gordian knot: the policy and the fossil dependence are one and the same.
17 January 2007, 1:35 amDeAnander:
(from Juan Cole this day)
So the Enlightened West, pursuing its ostensible goal of bringing liberation to the downtrodden and “backward,” managed to reduce the number of literate women in Iraq to 1/3 of what it was under the reign of a blowhard tinpot dictator? What an achievement.
Or was it more intent on making Iraq a ‘backward’ and ‘failed’ state, so that those brown people who talk funny would conform more closely to our myths about them? Beating them up so that we could ‘rescue’ them? (if you’ve ever worked with battered women that pattern will be familiar…)
17 January 2007, 5:56 pmNil:
I agree with LD and DeAnander’s analysis entirely. But when the very first lines of Stan’s piece are: “The United States makes up about 5 percent of the Earth’s population, but as an aggregate we burn more than 25 percent of its fossil energy.”… I’m not entirely sure Stan does.
If the key point is how much oil the US burns, than the solution is burning less oil.
To be sure, we need to burn less oil to keep from poisoning ourselves and everyone else. But our interventions in the mideast are not about securing oil for _us_ to _use_. To the extent they are about oil–and this is just one thing they are about–they are about controlling the oil that everyone uses. So why is it important what percentage of oil the US uses in understanding US imperialism? I don’t think it is, except to the extent that US oil use is a proxy measure of US affluence in general.
17 January 2007, 6:35 pmStan:
Agreeing with De and LD on what a hypothetical energy soft landing would look like is not inconsistent with taking a hard look at the reality of actualy existing society.
The 300 million people who live in the United States by and large do not know any of these things; and even if they did, they would not know what to do about it. We don’t know what to do about it either, frankly. Saying we “need to” do a whole list of perfectly sensible things doesn’t tell us the most important thing: How do we get there from here?
This is not an energy issue at the end of the day. It is a political issue. A handful of us volunteering to cut our energy use does not get us there, even though it is a very ethical thing to do that calls for emulation.
I saw a bumper sticker today that said, “Buy local organic food.” Good plan. But the neighborhood where it was displayed was 25 miles from the nearest farmer’s market, that is open only spottily. One person might drive there and back (50 miles) to support a local organic farmer, but the drive uses up two gallons of gas to get a bag of vegetables. This is voluntarism. Structural change would create more farmers markets, more well-distributed, that would encourage even those who aren’t seeing the bigger pattern to use them. Or it would be a gradual acretion of local gardens.
Getting the US off its energy addiction is not an engineering problem, when the right engineers are not even allowed in the room.
The vast majority of Americans — given where their consciousness of this problem is right now — do not WANT to stop using the energy they do, and won’t until circumstances force them to. Because they aren’t seeing this as an energy equation. They are getting by in their lives, and jobs, and families, et al, the best they know how, within the possibilities that they can see. (see the piece on pattern recognition and social indoctrination)
The reason the figure 25% used by 5% is important is that this represents a form of political inertia that will be very difficult to break — an inertia that is about to be broken by the finity of our energy substrates. Whomever is in office for the next two year or four years, and whomever is looking at the next election, is NOT going to tell people that we will have to go through a hard period of unpredictable dislocation at the end of which we will take fewer warm showers, eat simpler food, lose our automobiles, and have fewer appliances. Politically, this energy use represents a mass anesthetic; and the political doctors haven’t the slightest intention of waking us up. Instead, they will beg, borrow, and bomb to make sure that we stay under the anesthesia for one more election cycle.
They’ll throw Iraqis under the train, then whomever else, and when push comes to shove, they’ll start throwing designated parts of our own population under the train (already are!!!).
Imperialism is not a 100% externalized system. It has a home base that has to be kept acquiescent. How much oil the US burns is NOT the point. Identifying the social signposts is, and with them, the political breaking points. Because people are going to come face to face with this. What happens when they do? And what are we doing now to get ready for that?
We’d better be standing by with some plain, practical solutions to the serial crises that will come with these changes, so we can muddle our way through as humanely as possible toward those scenarios of right-living we imagine now. There will never be a grand plan that works. The universe ain’t that way.
We need to learn to play our instruments well, because we will have to improvise, improvise, improvise. The future wil not be shaped by a concerto, but by jazz.
17 January 2007, 7:20 pmDeAnander:
I think the percentage figures are important in that they could — with loud and forceful repetition — (a) create some sense of discomfort among Yanquis who have a conscience, about the disparity between the lifestyle they laughingly consider “average” and the true global average, and (b) put paid to the pernicious mythology of “development” bringing a firstworlder lifestyle to every family on the planet — this mythology being an antidote to the perception of injustice and privilege that a study of the hard numbers might enable. It’s pretty obvious that if 5 percent living like petrokings use 25 pct of the oil, then for 100 pct to live this way will require — quick, do the math — 20 times 25, or 500 pct of the oil. And we know that oil extracted per annum is going to be reduced, not increased, over the medium and long term. So we know the mythology of “a car in every garage in Tajikistan, Touva, and the Carterets” is BS, even if we don’t yet grasp the fundamental fact that industrialism requires an impoverished periphery to support an affluent and “productive” [destructive of raw materials and biota] core. The latter concept is harder to internalise — the 5/25 numbers are easier.
Americans will not curtail their energy use so long as they perceive their energy use as normal, rightful, majoritarian — themselves as merely “advanced,” enjoying today what everyone will enjoy tomorrow (the Eva Peron school of techno-optimism — “I keep these jewels and these riches only in trust for the people, blah blah”). Some number of them might curtail their energy use if they perceived it, more accurately, as grossly luxurious and wasteful compared to any realistic global average *and* never to be realised by any generation after them, or by any other national population (i.e. not vulgarisable).
In this sense the 5 percent/25 percent figures and the Global Footprint exercise are very useful. They are great teaching tools for providing a background body of knowledge and a moral sensibility that in turn encourage or enable more sensible voluntarist efforts, more curiosity and skepticism, more ability to see through government/industry propaganda and soothespeak. But they do not, in and of themselves, provide a rationale for the national and international mafia with offices in the US to change their ways of waging war via commerce and commerce via war. They provide only a lever for prying the proles free from the ruling mafia consensus…
17 January 2007, 7:40 pmLegume Sam:
well done, De.
Wheat needs to be done, of course, is that Americans need to radically speed up the pace of social change…
18 January 2007, 8:44 amCharles:
To be sure, we need to burn less oil to keep from poisoning ourselves and everyone else. But our interventions in the mideast are not about securing oil for _us_ to _use_. To the extent they are about oil–and this is just one thing they are about–they are about controlling the oil that everyone uses. So why is it important what percentage of oil the US uses in understanding US imperialism? I don’t think it is, except to the extent that US oil use is a proxy measure of US affluence in general.
Comment by Nil — 1/17/2007 @ 6:35 pm
^^^^^^^^
One main aim of U.S. imperialism _is_ to sustain the U.S. population’s using a disproportionate share of the world’s resources.
Imperialist booty is used in part to buyoff and placate a portion of the U.S. working class to prevent it from being radicalized by poverty, and changing the U.S. system.
20 January 2007, 9:49 amDayjob:
Hi Stan,
The line where you mentioned “yet another military manual on counterinsurgency (none of which has ever worked – ever)” reminded me of an article I just read in the Feb 2007 issue of Harper’s … “Dead End: Counterinsurgency warfare as military malpractice” by Edward Luttwak.
He takes a few pages to analyze the latest counterinsurgency manual by Petraeus, and points out that the really successful occupation forces of the past (like the Ottoman Empire, the Romans and the Nazis) have been successful by “out-terrorizing” the insurgents. For example, using torture or mass killings of civilians to make them rat out the insurgents. Given that a majority of Americans still get squeamish about a policy of torture or collective punishment, the conclusion is that we ought to get out of the occupying business altogether.
I was just wondering if you had read it, and if so, what you thought of it.
24 January 2007, 3:24 amDayjob:
Maybe “squeamish” is the wrong word to use above, or my sarcasm won’t come through clearly. Given that a majority of Americans still have a conscience when it comes to a national policy of torture or collective punishment, and given that successful occupiers in the past have relied on methods of terrorism, we ought to get out of the occupying business altogether.
24 January 2007, 4:40 pm