Oil's Well That Ends Well - 3

Less oil requires more control

In this series we have been discussing foreign relations that result from the U.S. activity around the world that is necessitated by the addiction to oil.

This is not a discussion of dirty oil's pollution, global warming induced climate change, or economic problems developing because of the rise of oil prices (see e.g. New Drug Dealer - Same Addiction or New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage for examples of coverage of those issues).

Today's post in this series is more to the point about the policies involved causing the Libyan and Egyptian attacks on the U.S. embassies (see 'US ambassador killed' in Libya protest and Protesters attack U.S. diplomatic compounds in Egypt, Libya).

Today we argue that those embassy-attack events of 9/11/12 are of the same nature as those that happened during the presidency of Ronald Reagan (see 1983 Beirut barracks bombing), which we call "blow-back" or "unintended consequences."

For example, when we invaded Libya it had a system that guaranteed health care, education, home loans, cheap energy, and the like to all its citizens:

... the fact that the Libyan people were cared for by their government (they shared in the revenue when their oil was sold, and it was deposited into their bank accounts; they had benefits at no cost to them such as health care, full education, zero interest loans, $50,000 upon marriage, free land use for farmers together with seeds and tools, cheap gasoline at .14 cents per liter, half of the purchase of a vehicle provided to them, and on and on) was not the reason they were invaded "in order to save them from their government".

(MOMCOM And The Sins of Libya). Is it too hard to see that removing those citizenship benefits and giving them to The Private Empire would cause problems?

Let's remember that this is an old U.S. foreign policy, shown by a quote from a book written in 1944:

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.

(Iraq: World's Number One Oil Producer?, quoting 1944 book). We can get to a detailed explanation in a more recent book:

"How America 'manages' Eurasia is critical. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources."

(Oil's Well That Ends Well - 2, quoting The Grand Chessboard). That book by Zbigniew Brzezinski incidentally also points out the problem we have run into:

"Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense [war] spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization."

(ibid). No democracy has done it before, but the myth of American exceptionalism generates a foreign policy that won't work long because it will bankrupt any nation that tries to exercise that myth:

"In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last."

(ibid). So, now we are experiencing economic problems that do not go away easily because those problems that cause it are not going away (see The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy and War Is The Highway 61 Of The 1%).

The series The Peak of the Oil Wars and Fleets & Terrorism Follow The Oil point out that the addiction to oil can't be healed by fighting for more of the dirty oil drug.

The previous post in this series is here.

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Randy Newman, "drop the big one":

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