Oil (#2965)
by Andrew Todd on September 26, 2002 at 12:42 PM

In the largest sense of the word William F. Shughart is surely
correct. One can dispute particular points-- for example, the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan could be seen as an advance
towards the Persian Gulf-- but the most basic point is simply
that there is nothing in the middle east except oil which would
remotely justify the sheer scope of american intervention. Even
in the case of Israel, American policy is driven by a need for
their army. We collectively told the South African whites to
either make their peace with the blacks or leave Africa because
we did not need anything in southern africa that badly.
However, one point I would add is the linkage between oil
money and weapons. Weapons do not simply exist. They have to be
manufactured. Manufacturing costs money, so the supply of arms is
ultimately an economic question. The cold war notwithstanding,
the Russians have tended to a considerable realism about
providing weapons. As Andrew Cockburn remarked in _The Threat:
Inside the Soviet Military Machine_ (1983), by the 1980's even
"the most poverty-stricken clients were being required to pay up"
(p. 130, paperback edition). Iraq's soviet arsenal was paid for
with real money, the proceeds of oil sales.
By contrast with its oil revenue, Iraq has chronically low
literacy. The official figure is 58%, and this should naturally
be regarded with some skepticism, since the newspaper circulation
is only about 27 per thousand. One of the rules of thumb of early
modern period historians is to be very dubious of literacy
figures which are not matched by the production of reading
material. Literacy figures often work out in practice to quota
fulfillment by the educational authorities. We are in practice
talking about a substantially illiterate nation. This low
literacy persistently limits Iraq's industrial potential. Iraq
has the weapons it could buy for oil, not weapons growing out of
the skills of its own people. Like most of the oil states, it has
a large urban "bread and circuses class," who forty years ago
camped outside the gates of the ruler's palace to claim their
share of the oil revenue, and have been there ever since. This
class's most valuable asset is its capacity for creating
disorder, so it has few incentives to modernize. Oil has few uses
outside of the context of a modern industrial economy, so the oil
states are overwhelmingly dependent on selling oil to the west.
Most of the oil states have little or no water resources, and
even the use of oil to power the desalination of sea water
involves expensive plants which have to be imported for want of
local skills. Iraq at least has the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,
but these are in the process of being diverted by Turkey
upstream. Even the bare ability of the oil states to feed their
populations is thus dependent on the oil revenue.
If the United States could eliminate the demand for oil, it
would in practice gain most of the advantages of a successful
invasion, without the associated risks. From the standpoint of
the United States, synfuel development represents a return to the
values of Washington's Farewell Address, with its fear of foreign
entanglements. Energy infrastructure takes time to build. It
takes less time now than it did in 1976, because there are more
computers in the loop, more robotics, more CAD/CAM, etc. Once
energy infrastructure is built, it stays built. The operating
expenses are usually so low that the infrastructure goes on being
used. Jimmy Carter had only four years to promote energy
independence, and that was not enough. However, technology moves
faster now, and a fairly short time window might be sufficient.
Once we ramp up energy independence, the world price of oil
will crash. The oil states will be forced to cut their weapons
expenditures, and possibly even to sell back the weapons they
already have. They will be forced to make a little extra money by
filling up the emergency stockpiles of the developed countries.
On another related point, security from foreign terrorism, or
even from weapons of mass destruction, can be gained by
dispersing the population. American cold war civil defense
planning called for dispersing the population when an attack was
threatened. This was of course somewhat impractical because it
presumed that there would be warning, and it made no provision
for housing the refugees. But now, in the age of the internet,
permanent dispersal is feasible. People can live in small towns
rather than gigantic cities. Oliver Morton has covered this issue
in some detail in his "Divided We Stand" (Wired Magazine, Dec
2001). I live in such a town in the mountains, and one basic fact
of life up here is that September 11 really didn't change
anything, the way it did down in the cities of the plain. We have
no giant buildings in the small towns-- they are not economic in
a place which is not overcrowded.
Most large cities are in long-term economic decline anyway.
The only real exceptions have been New York and Washington.
These cities do not manufacture much of anything, nor do they
produce very much information in any real sense of the word, say
in the sense of software or scientific research-- rather, these
cities are devoted to dancing attendance upon power. People go to
New York in order to prostrate themselves in the hope of being
given investment money, and they go to Washington to prostrate
themselves in the hope of being given government money. New York
and Washington have very little connection with the life of the
country, which is primarily based on people doing things for
themselves. Most of the country is substantially dispersed, and
in the process of becoming more so. In the long run, I suspect we
the people cannot allow the government to meet in Washington,
simply because the fact of meeting in one centralized place
will make its interests too divergent from ours.