The Peak Of The Oil Wars - 7

"I wanna hold your hand"

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has posted various pieces over the years concerning the various aspects of the dark cloud of oil, along with its addiction that has been forced upon the people of the world, the people who make up current civilization.

Currently, oil wars have been going on for some seventy+ years --addressed later in this post.

Oil wars that bring death and destruction directly to weak nations who have oil under them, "making them evil" and therefore in need of rescue so as to bring them "democracy":

Yet Washington still easily maintains the largest collection of foreign bases in world history: more than 1,000 military installations outside the 50 states and Washington, DC. They include everything from decades-old bases in Germany and Japan to brand-new drone bases in Ethiopia and the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean and even resorts for military vacationers in Italy and South Korea.

In Afghanistan, the U.S.-led international force still occupies more than 450 bases. In total, the U.S. military has some form of troop presence in approximately 150 foreign countries, not to mention 11 aircraft carrier task forces -- essentially floating bases -- and a significant, and growing, military presence in space. The United States currently spends an estimated $250 billion annually maintaining bases and troops overseas.
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However, in the early months of 2001, even before the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration launched a major global realignment of bases and troops that’s continuing today with Obama’s “Asia pivot.” Bush’s original plan was to close more than one-third of the nation’s overseas bases and shift troops east and south, closer to predicted conflict zones in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The Pentagon began to focus on creating smaller and more flexible “forward operating bases” and even smaller “cooperative security locations” or “lily pads.” Major troop concentrations were to be restricted to a reduced number of “main operating bases” (MOBs) -- like Ramstein, Guam in the Pacific, and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean -- which were to be expanded.

Despite the rhetoric of consolidation and closure that went with this plan, in the post-9/11 era the Pentagon has actually been expanding its base infrastructure dramatically, including dozens of major bases in every Persian Gulf country save Iran, and in several Central Asian countries critical to the war in Afghanistan.

(The Lily-Pad Strategy). This should clue most readers in to the reality that the attack on the poor and middle class U.S. citizens is an attack under a guise of propaganda using words such as "entitlements" (Your Health Care Is Their Number One Enemy?).

The reality, however, is that the oil war schedule is reaching its peak soon because the largest oil grab in history is under way.

Then the booty of the oil wars, the poisonous booty with which oil-civilization makes extinct some 200 species of life per day, some 73,000 species per year, is being used to enrich the 1%, as it poisons the source of life of the 99%.

One of the Dredd Blog series deals with the prospect of addicting society to a finite (non-renewable) substance, and the consequential health impact of that policy on billions of people (see The Peak of Health and The Peak of Oil).

Recent events in Iraq (see Iraq: World's Number One Oil Producer?) bring up long-held concerns:

Are you in good hands with Oil State?

Negotiations are under way for Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP -- the original partners decades ago in the Iraq Petroleum Company, now joined by Chevron and Other smaller oil companies -- to renew the oil concession they lost to nationalization during the years when the oil producers [Iraqis] took over their own resources. The no-bid contracts, apparently written by the oil corporations with the help of U.S. officials, prevailed over offers from more than forty other companies, including companies in China, India and Russia.

"There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract," Andrew E. Kramer wrote in the New York Times.

(Making The Future, by Noam Chomsky, 2010, p.87). To understand the meaning of  "long term" in this context, take the statement made in a 1944 book for one clarifying example:

The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims, while incidentally capturing their markets; to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples, while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.

(Bully Worship: The Universal Religion, quoting 1944 book). A policy that goes back to 1944, almost seven decades, is a long-term policy, a policy older than most national policies still in effect today.

Oil addiction and destruction cannot be separated, whether it concerns the destruction of nations or the destruction of the Earth's ecosystem itself:

IT’S past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation. There will be remnants here and there, but the global coral reef ecosystem — with its storehouse of biodiversity and fisheries supporting millions of the world’s poor — will cease to be.

(A World Without Coral Reefs). National laws are generally ineffective against these mass murderers because those oil criminals have created a Private Empire that circumvents the regulatory reality that can guide sane ecological policy.

Powerful forces are keeping oil policy virtually the same from one U.S. administration to the next.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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