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.

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.

Wheat needs to be done, of course, is that Americans need to radically speed up the pace of social change…

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…

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.

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.

The female university students are among Iraq’s few hopes for the future. Iraqi women were once 75% literate, but US/UN sanctions and the poor economy of the 1990s drove down the percentage to only 25%. So women well-educated enough to get to university are a small minority in Iraq. Fewer and fewer families feel comfortable letting their girls go out under these circumstances.

(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…)

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
Akita, Japan