Iraq And A Hard Place

Our favorite ray of sunshine, Jim Kunstler, rolls out some of the unpleasant options staring us in the eye in the Middle East.

From a US strategic point-of-view, none of the options available are very appetizing. Staying in Iraq looks increasingly like an exercise in futility. The Jihad continues full-strength, Fourth Generation Warfare-style (in the phrase of Bill Lind), an archetypal asymmetrical clusterfuck of "little guys" with potent small arms paralyzing a military giant. Being a Jihad, it is directed against all "infidels" including the "crusader" western soldiers, the Shi'ite-dominated provisional government members (for cooperating with the occupying crusaders), and the Shia populace for being Shia.

When he's right, he's right. These guys are Baathists and Sunnis, who are on the outs after decades of brutally pushing everyone else around (and thus have nothing to lose by these tactics), and foreign crazies looking to earn their virgins by making it hard for The Great Satan.

The US could conceivably withdraw from the population centers and remain within a set of "Fort Apache" bases strung out in the desert, but that would mean abandoning the pretense of bringing "freedom and democracy" to the Middle East, while leading to serious questions of re-supply, since it has already been demonstrated that we can barely control the highway from Baghdad's airport to the Green Zone. It also leaves the central political problem of infidels occupying Islamic terrain, therefore requiring continued Jihad wherever opportunity allows outside Iraq, i.e. world-wide terrorism.

Not to mention that, as we've been pointing out here, such a move would leave a lot of people vulnerable, and as the civil war escalates, you could count on a lot more internecine massacres. Except instead of random suicide bombings, more likely it's be defense forces abusing their power and taking out years of frustration against Sunnis, whether they were guilty of aiding the terrorists or not. Thus, the violence would accelerate, and against the more vulnerable segments of the population, since that's where paramilitary groups do the most damage.

I hate to introduce this hoary old idea, but I believe it is true: an American withdrawal will be interpreted as a sign of weakness by aggressive enemies (and we do have enemies). If the US diminishes or gives up its military presence (that is, our police station) in the Middle East, it may only be a matter of time before we lose access to two-thirds of the world's remaining oil supplies that happen to be located there. We would also have to wonder how long our military bases in Afghanistan and several former Soviet republics could hold out in the face of a withdrawal from Iraq -- with the additional problem of the combined displeasure of Russia and China militating against our presence there.

Exactly, and this is why, despite my misgivings about this botched occupation campaign, I still haven't been squawking to bring the troops back home instantly. It just seems that it would be counter-productive at this point. Yes, it would have been better that we hadn't done it at all; I think even a preponderance of Bushies may be privately admitting that much to themselves. And I won't even bother to qualify such a perception of the situation with the benefit of hindsight.

But the bottom line is, what do we do now? If we leave under less-than-ideal circumstances, not only do we risk abdicating our role as hegemon (and remember, we here at The Hammer believe -- for better or worse -- that the current natural conditions of statism require a dominant entity, which means that like it or not, either someone is going to be the hegemon, or you have a dangerous Cold War between hostile superpowers with nightmarish promises of mutually assured destruction. Take your pick.), but we also seriously risk losing a great deal of access to the majority of proven oil reserves.

For a second, I'm going to take a break from picking on the chumps that got us into this mess politically, and take another run at the street level, the folks who in the aggregate are just as responsible for getting us into this mess. They sneer at the notion of conservation; they think nothing of driving a Suburban by themselves to the post office and leaving it idle with the air conditioner on while they run in and dick around with the stamp machine.

This enormous ramping-up of demand, in the face of increasing reliance on exports, has played no small part in getting us where we are today. We assumed something else would just magically show up, because something always had before. We have tra-la-la'd our way through the last ten years with hausfrau-oriented gas-guzzlers, because milfs need their grocery schooners with seat-warmers, and us guys will buy our milfs whatever they want because -- well, because we like getting regular blowjobs, right? Why else would a man agree to pay several months' worth of income for a fucking ring, much less a truck with seat warmers?

Ahem. Anyway, oil. Peak oil, to be exact. We're there, folks, and that means there's no turning back. And doesn't it make so much more sense to start getting with the program now, rather than being forced into doing so down the road at great expense and pain? We've spent $300 billion so far attempting to rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq as democratic states, with miserable results. Imagine how much further along we could have been in our vital goal of energy independence if we had committed just 10% (or even 1%) of that over the last ten years, instead of paying with blood and treasure and environmental degradation to encourage the auto companies to saturate the country with millions of oversized gas-guzzling pieces of crap. We could have quietly extricated ourselves from the Middle East, and let the people there realize on their own that violent, medieval, oppressive cultures are just not going to get them anywhere in the modern world. Without being propped up by oil money, those societies would be forced to confront their internal problems.

What I believe will happen: the Jihadi violence will continue, the American public will lose patience with the attrition in Iraq, other flash points (North Korea, Pakistan, Venezuela, Mexico) will make it clear that the US Army is not capable of conducting land operations elsewhere, events will evolve to choke off oil imports to the US as our hegemony slips away, terror events in Europe will continue and provoke a backlash against Islamic imigrants, which will only inflame the Islamic world further, the US will revert to a naval strategy of attempting to protect our interests -- namely access to oil -- which will not be effective, and America will be plagued at home by political recrimation, blaming, scapegoating, and a futile campaign to keep the car-dependent utopia going.

Ultimately, the world will enter The Long Emergency, a horizonless era of conflict, withering global economic relations, and energy starvation -- with plummeting standards of living.

Meanwhile, we are doing nothing at home to prepare for this future, for instance a crash program to restore the American railroad system, or to restore true fiscal discipline to the mortgage industry in order to stem the insane spread of even more car-dependent suburban sprawl (a.k.a. the housing bubble). Where is the Democratic party (my party) on this? Lost in the raptures of sexual and racial pandering.

Kunstler may be putting forth an absolute worst-case scenario, but nothing he describes is out of the question, and many of his predictions are fairly likely to take place to some degree. The point is that a sensible, responsible country composed of sensible, responsible citizens -- who understand their place in the world's affairs and their individual roles as dynamic, informed participants of a culture of reason and intellect -- recognize these problems when they appear on the horizon, and start being proactive about it at that point.

Instead we have waited until those problems are right up in our collective face, and now that we have quite publicly stepped on our dicks in Iraq, we are running out of options. And judging by the recent conciliatory overtures taking place between Iran (home of the original values voters) and Dear Leader's Triumphant Experiment In Democracy, it's going to get worse before it gets better.

We may have to seriously start re-examining our current role as hegemon, and make a decision as to whether we can live without that role, because it may simply no longer be sustainable. Certainly we as individual citizens (at least a preponderance of Americans) are not only not doing enough, but are not doing anything to help with the situation -- in fact, we seem to be heedlessly chugging right along, which in a peak-oil paradigm objectively means making things worse.

Keep driving those Hummers, folks!