It took the Earth
hundreds of thousands of years to produce all the oil in the world
and only about 140 years for us to use up half of it. Today,
the rate of extraction and consumption far exceeds what it
was early on. Some say that for all intents and purposes, at
current extraction rates we will use up the balance in about
40 years, others say it will take 100. Does it really matter
whether it takes 40 or 100 years? Does it make sense to try
to find and extract as much as we possibly can as soon as we
possibly can? That's what we have programmed ourselves to
do.
Human beings have been around for many thousands of
years. Presumably we would like our progeny to live at least
as long into the future as we are able to trace our own
ancestry backwards. If they get to live that long, wouldn't
it be nice, if when they think of us, they think of us as
responsible, loving, and caring human beings... which is to
say, loving and caring not only of each other, but of
them?
Do we have any responsibility to those who will
be around 40 to 100 years from now? Is this a question
of political partisanship or is it an appropriate question
that any caring, responsible person might ask?
In addition, here’s a
straightforward description of how the situation looks to me
right now from one perspective.
Because oil is vital to our economy and we do not possess sufficient quantities of our own to meet our needs, we (i.e., certain American interests) have decided that the oil located under the soil of other countries must be brought under our control; or, to put it more bluntly: the oil located in other countries is so important to us that we now consider that we have a right to own and/or control it. We are willing to pay a ‘reasonable’ price to maintain the fiction that we are purchasing it, but if the price gets to be too high or the availability becomes too uncertain, we are willing to forego that fiction and just take it by force instead. We are, in other words, not willing to lower our standard of living just because what we want belongs to other people.
To maintain the fiction that we are not a rogue state or global empire, we have constructed a foreign policy apparatus that functions secretly,
often illegally, and outside the scrutiny of civilian oversight so that we might lie to our own people and others about the activities we engage in,
in order to insure our access to resources that so far don’t belong to us. In the case of oil, our foreign policy objective is to insure that we will have access to the supply we need by whatever means necessary even if those means include overthrowing or destabilizing legitimate democratic governments (e.g., Iran in 1953), or protecting brutal dictatorships from democratic movements that threaten to overthrow
them (e.g., Saudi Arabia).
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1119-24.htm
The situation is akin to a person who lives well beyond his means, partly because he spends too much of his money accumulating weapons, and then when he sees he is running low on
what he needs, figures that since he has those weapons and can probably get away with it, he might as well take what he wants from others because they can’t stop him anyway. Such a person we normally would call a criminal, a thug,
and/or a bully.
Such a person has an alternative, of course. It would be to work hard, stop spending more than he can afford, and use his creative abilities to earn a legitimate living by producing things that other people want and really need, preferably using resources, technologies, and attitudes that do not disadvantage others and are sustainable for as far into the future as anyone can see. In other words, to behave as a decent and productive
citizen and human being, so that others have no reason to hate or otherwise want to make war against him.
Looking at things objectively, it was not Osama bin Laden who went around overthrowing democratic governments (e.g., Iran in 1953) or propping up dictatorships (e.g., Saudi Arabia) for his own selfish purposes. In fact, it was Osama bin Laden who took it upon himself to oppose the one
big kid on the block who was terrorizing others for personal gain. What Osama saw he considered wrong and unjust and decided to act on his own to teach that bully a lesson, because no one else appeared to be willing or able to do so.
This, of course, is not to justify the killing of innocent people, but if you don’t want others to think they are justified in killing innocent people,
maybe you shouldn’t go around killing innocent people either.
http://www.gpln.com/therealterrorists.htm
(And now there's Falluja.)
In addition, while it is true that Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator who terrorized his own people, you might want to go back and see how he got to be or stay in that position
for so long in the first place. We don't only
overthrow legitimate governments that get in our way, we are
willing to overthrow illegitimate governments, too.
— m.a.g.
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Note: A more recent essay by Clark can be found at:
The Real Reasons Why Iran is the Next Target: