OCTOBER

Surge not working for you? It may seem relatively quiet on the Mid-Eastern front, but with the new political season underway, we are into the twilight but still plenty of time for one last dance before Cheney goes. For the latest on the West's plans to attack Iran, see Seymour Hersh's detailing of the latest behind the scenes manoeverings. And note therein reports from some quarters that Grodon Brown is fully on board. (How could it be any other way with US technology and know-how being transferred, as we speak, for the upgrading of the UK "independent" nuclear deterrent? Same as it ever was since President Gerald Ford ...

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/08/071008fa_fact_hersh

MAY

THURSDAY MAY 10th 2007

THE YES-MAN'S YES MAN IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE YES-MAN'S YES-MAN!

With Tony 'six wars' Blair's departure from the highest office in the land being imminent we can only raise a brief glass of good cheer. What a time of unrivalled freeloading it has been for big business and what an utter and unmitigated disaster it has been for the rest of us. We have seen the trickle of news space dedicated to the pre-emptive salvaging of Blair's legacy and the floodgates will stay fully open over the coming weeks. But let us not fall for the utter drivel which will be written about him in the weeks and years hence by the re-writers of history

Defenders of the faith hail the minimum wage, improvements to education and the health service, which all looks very good in the government produced glossy brochures — and the Blair government has consistently remained the biggest spender on advertisement in the UK during his tenure — but the longer term picture at the sharp end looks very different. Longer working hours, less rights for workers, a generation of children who are the unhappiest and most obese in Europe and a health service that is being dismantled by stealth. A decent minimum wage, and better education and better health provision, had they any real meaning under Blair, would not be his crowning glory, they are the most basic of reponsibilities of the government to the people. We should not be patting Blair on the back for his 'great leaps forward' in these departments but remembering what little progress he has made and how it took him a whole ten years to do it.

Blair has excelled in his services to increasing the wealth of the wealthiest. He has bent over backwards to allow the expansion of airports, the road builders, the city planners, and ensured the best possible loopholes for the big polluters to avoid the existing paltry emissions standards. Indeed Blair has ensured our further dependence on fossil fuel , and whilst undoubtedly talking the talk on global warming, we have seen UK emissions increase during his utterly wasted ten years.

Yes Blair will be remembered for the unqualified disater of the war on Iraq and the entrenchement of British involvement in Afghanistan, but we should take into consideration why he did it. With North Sea oil well peaked Blair chose George W. Bush as his guarantee of a seat in the business lounge for Britain when the next and more intense phase of the scramble to control the world's oil distribution and supply lines takes place, in the coming years. Blair has proven himself to be, without doubt, the yesman's yes man.

Whatever it took and no matter how far he had to subvert democracy to do it: rolling out the red carpet for suicide bombers in London; a new generation of British nuclear missiles (controlled by the US); allowing the positioning of the US Star Wars systems in Britain if needs be; unfailing commitment to send British troops into wars for future oil; unwavering resolve to reduce Iraq to rubble and to stand shoulder to shoulder in unrefutable complicity in the deaths of hundreds of thousnads of Iraqis; and the roll back of civil liberties and human rights in Britain that will be necessary to control the population in the future that Blair wholeheartedly embraced on our behalf, but without our consent: a near future where global warming really begins to bite but where the chosen dependency on oil persists as the lifeblood of the world's elite corporations and their friends in governments. For vanity? For a seat at the table? For the wealthy? Certainly not for the good of us the general public. Blair has shafted us and our children down the polluted and disappearing river like no other.

Moreover, they may not have found a way to whack Iran yet, but that does not mean they have stopped looking at how best to pursue this.

And if we thought things were about to get better then think again. As Chancellor, it was Gordon Brown who found the means to put our tax monies into the war coffers for the inavsions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. And, it is Brown who has been so profficient in ensuring that big business gets away with doing their worst and some. His mantra has always been that nothing should ever interfere or impinge upon the abilities of the ever-expanding-economy to keep ever-expanding. Brown is unrivalled in his callous disregard of the fact that it is this ever-expanding-economy which is propelling us over the cliff of accelerating global warming and absolutely unparalled human catastrophe.

"Millions will die" as the UN put it recently, and indeed hundreds of thousands are already dying every year as a result of the impacts of man made globally warming climates. Blair and Brown accepted this long ago. They came to power in the late nineties in the rarified atmosphere of entirely successful global warming denial, and they have found each and every avenue to further accomodate the deniers as the the reality becomes ever more undeniable. Under Gordon Brown 'things can only get worse'.

FEBRUARY

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 8th 2007


WORLD WAR III - THE GLOBAL WARMING WARS AND THE BATTLE FOR THE PLANET



STOP THE WAR … ON THE PLANET

The first part of the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) five yearly report, officially released Friday February 2nd 2007, makes one thing absolutely clear. That radical change during the next ten years in the way we power our lives will be utterly crucial in determining the future good health of the planet. If we do not reject the 'second nature' of our fossil fuel rich lifestyles — which are especially fossil fuel rich for most of us who live in the western world comparative to most of the rest of the world — then we doom our children and grandchildren and the planet to a catastrophic future.

George Monbiot, in his excellent recent book Heat - How to Stop the Planet Burning, puts this into perspective:

If in the year 2030, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere remain as high as they are today, the likely result is two degrees centigrade of warming (above pre-industrial levels). Two degrees is the point beyond which certain major ecosystems begin collapsing. Beyond this point, in other words, climate change is out of our hands: it will accelerate without our help. The only means, (Colin) Forrest argues, by which we can ensure there is a high chance that the temperature does not rise to this point is for rich nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 90 per cent by 2030 (pp xi-xii)

Holding the lid on pressure cooker earth at 2 degrees by 2030may seem extreme by most current governmental targets but it what the science has been increasingly saying in the past five years and is confirmed again by the IPCC study. If reached, 2 degrees rapidly becomes 3 degrees; and 3 degrees even more rapidly becomes 4 degrees; and 4 snowballs into 5 and at 6.4 degrees most of the life on the planet is exterminated. This is runaway global warming.

Even the most optimistic scenario in the report based on the implementation of "global solutions to economic, social and environmental sustainability" would see a likely increase above pre-industrial levels in average world temperatures of 2.4 degrees centigrade by 2100. If there were an overnight moratorium on the emission of greenhouse gases then we would still seethe temperature rise because of the amount of CO2 etc we have already pumped into the atmosphere, and the fact that which is not absorbed by trees and the oceans stays there for anywhere between one hundred to two hundred years.

Of course if what we might call 'business as usual and some' continues—because world emissions have risen year on year then the warming will be much worse and much quicker than this. Here is what business as usual looks like since 1990: emissions rose by 0.8% between 1990 and 1999, but between between 2000 and 2005 have gone up 3.2%.

We do know that emissions grew like never before in the second half of the twentieth century, and have continued rise dangerously in the twenty first century as a 3.2% rise since 2000 clearly demonstrates. And, whilst extreme weather events are caused by combinations of factors, we also know that man made emissions have increased the frequency and ferocity of some of these events. For all who lived through the 1990's and the early 2000's as adults, the anecdotal evidence that the weather had gone askew is backed up by the hard science that 12 of the past 13 years have been the warmest on record. In other words we know that things have rapidly been getting worse.


As many people around the world are beginning to realise 'business as usual and some' — which actually means forever increasing our dependence upon fossil fuel — is obsolete and suicidal. It has outlived its usefulness and already overstayed its welcome by about seventeen years. The way we currently run our planet has become a dangerously deranged liability to all present and future generations.



THE SPECTACULAR DISCONNECTION

MediaLens provide a devastating indictment of why 'business as usual and some' continues so rampantly in the very face of this danger. (see MEDIA ALERT: IN THE SPIRIT OF NERO currently on www.medialens.org homepage ) Whilst the front pages and leader columns did grasp the gravity of the situation currently facing the planet, the same newspapers were laden with car adverts, cheap flight adverts and general bombardment for us to keep buy, buy buying. This spectacular disconnection is evident across the spectrum of consumer society.

Whilst we can now just about rely on the mainstream media to report global warming issues without feeling compelled to give equal weight to global warming deniers (and even the 'advert free' BBC was doing this until last year in the interests of 'balanced' journalism) we should not be surprised that they rarely challenge their own corporate sponsors.

The Independent and the Guardian have consistently been to the fore in being anti-the-war-on-Iraq and active in raising awareness of the causes and impacts of global warming and detailing some of the government shin-diggery therein, but they remain bound by the same unwritten rules as the rest of the corporate media. That is 75% of their profit comes from advertising meaning aside from a handful of journalists at both papers a large part of there function remains to recommend buying 'choices' to us.

The expanding morass of non-news glossy supplements that accompany our newspapers (roughly 75% by weight) are compiled by a staff whose job it is to sort through the marketing bombardment that is targeted at them. With little or no critical judgement from the 'journalist,' the products which are offered to us as buying 'choices' are those that have been placed by a paper's regular sponsors. It's a racket and we know all this but it continues to work for the sponsors because it is so relentless and in our faces.

There is no let up, and for most of us with busy working lives and families the successful companies are those which prey best on our learned weaknesses and who most successfully break us down — according to income and class

TV is the same. The car adverts that have been a constant backdrop to our lives offer this 'choice' with models coming in slightly different shapes and different colours — cheaper, moderately expensive and super expensive — but all powered by the petrol engine, the petrol engine, or the petrol engine. Our addiction to oil continues to be enforced because car manufacturers have traditionally strangled alternatives, such as the electric car, at birth. Moreover, because of the sublimated 'preferred choice' of high engine power, traditionally foisted upon us by car manufacturers, even many hybrid cars are actually no more fuel efficient/ emission efficient than their regular counterparts.



THE MYTH OF ENDLESS ECONOMIC GROWTH

I put the question in writing to David Miliband (British Environment secretary) in The Independent's Your Questions (January 29th 2007.)

We are all beginning to do our bit to reduce our individual carbon footprints, but this will be all but useless unless the big business interests — which the Blair government has spent ten years bending over backwards to exclude from the equation — do their lot(sic). Will you challenge Gordon Brown's mantra of 'endless' economic growth, and the lip service therein to taking the serious action that is required to stem the causes of global warming, or will you buckle at the alter of the corporate community as Al Gore did in the Clinton administrations?

Danbert Nobacon - Leeds


The question, albeit a little clunky, was designed not least to air the issue of connectivity between government complicity and the extension of the abilities of the fossil fuel giants to enforce the monopolies of carbon emitting fuels to power the planet as has happened in the ten years since Blair came to power. By extension, it was to ask these questions in The Independent because of the aforementioned conflict between its reportage of the threats posed by global warming and its promotion of those corporations responsible for global warming. My question was hoping to have the challenge to the paper's corporate sponsors appear in the paper itself by subterfuge, so to speak.

The Independent did print my question but in an edited decontaminated form (Only printing the non-bold type part above). I hear the stock excuse: the question was too long and the paper has limited space. Of course it does when it is forced to devote around 75% of its overall printed pages over to advertising.

(And, whilst perusing the online version of Your Questions, I mistakenly clicked my cursor a centimetre too far over to the right of the Independent's web-page and found myself being offered a test-drive for the latest model of a KIA car. You couldn't make it up.)

Miliband answered the question as he did all the questions, with predictable vacuous political fluff. Such appearing to answer the question but actually dodging it dodging is endemic in politics and on overdrive in Britain as Gordon Brown's people wait to fill Blair's shoes. Ditto the US with the Democrats, where the next would-be leaders are promising the world but — unless the corporate community is challenged — will buckle once in the driving seat. Exhibit A. Al 'eight wasted years' Gore. Exhibit B Tony "five wars ten wasted years' Blair .

Of course those individuals amongst us who are waking up to the reality that we have to drastically reduce our carbon footprints are beginning to make changes in our own lives, but with half a lifetime of ingrained carbon heavy habits this does not come easy, and is made doubly difficult by the aforementioned wall-to-wall barrage of marketing for products with no hint of the carbon footprint involved in the manufacture and distribution and advertising necessary, to dangle it under our noses.

The overwhelming force of the corporate community's marketing message of 'consume, consume, consume as usual' — often specifically designed to work on our subconscious 'urges' — remains as formidable as ever. And, the administrators of the fossil fuel infrastructure which benefits so highly from our dependency, are forever being excused from any moral responsibility in throwing fuel on the fire of the existential dangers to life on earth posed by man-made global warming.

The net result is that the savings in emissions we make from every energy efficient light bulb, every car journey or flight we avoid is at present instantly cancelled out, trumped at every turn by the message to carry on consuming and keep the economy growing.

Thus the fossil fuel reliant infrastructure of our lives, continues with only cosmetic changes being offered by 'responsible corporations,' specifically designed to make us think they are becoming environmentally conscious without actually changing the fossil fuel infrastructure. Gordon Brown has for ten years championed the corporate community with his unwavering dedication and intoning of the mantra remains that the economy must keep growing.

Historically speaking, Andrew Bacevich traces this modus operandi, crossing almost seamlessly from Republican to Democrat and vice versa, to the rising imperial fortune of the US during the twentieth century. The US corporate community did not invent the empire of oil but they have been and remain its chief beneficiaries. Citing the US historian the late William Appleman Williams the guiding principle of the American system works as a result of a charming but ruthless faith in infinite progress fuelled by endless growth," (being) central to the American way of life (and) expansion abroad "provid(ing) the sine qua non of domestic prosperity and social peace. (Bacevich American Empire p 25)


"Charming" this may have been in part — if we ignore the myriad of covert and proxy wars — during the twentieth century and the benefits to the modern world many, as the IPCC scientists tell us it is a luxury the planet can no longer afford. And as Bacevich notes, US adventurism abroad has in actual fact most often been paid for by the poor in the US. George W.Bush's recently announced budget is attempting to pull the same trick, diverting monies from initiatives in the US for the old and sick, to continue to pay for the war in Iraq.



THE OIL GIANTS … STILL REAPING IT IN LIKE THERE IS NO TOMORROW

Whist the US led war on Iraq has significantly destabilised the oil market and sent prices rocketing, this has not been a problem for the oil companies. In the run-up to the invasion the business pages of the papers featured 'human-face' planted stories about how oil companies were not convinced that invading Iraq was the right thing to do. What utter tosh.

If we digged deep and looked at the business pages on February 2rd 2007 (the day of the IPCC announcement but the day before the British newspapers could report it) we would find the headline "Profits up a fifth but Shell emits more CO2 than most countries." The piece continued: "ExxonMobil and Shell, two of the biggest carbon emitters in the world , reported combined annual profits yesterday of nearly £90million a day, earned largely from oil production, refining and petrol stations … Exxon's net income of $39.5billion (£20bn) last year is the largest ever recorded in US corporate history." Record profits for the oil giants have paralleled the record warmest years we have been having, at least since Iraq was invaded in 2003.

The piece emphasised that this comes at a time of "mounting fears world-wide about the impact of CO2 output on global warming" and that for the twelve months of 2005 Shell's operations emitted 120 million tonnes of CO2 "more than some 150 countries produce each." (Guardian Feb 2nd 2007) but it is left to the reader to draw the conclusion that Shell and ExxonMobil are continuing to exert a stranglehold on our lives, dictating, as the empire of oil has now done for a century, how the planet is powered.

The Guardian reported that for BP "annual profits of $22billion (£11.6bn) … represent a poor return after a year in which oil hit a record $78 a barrel." (Guardian 07.02.07. p1) What this actually means is that after a year beset by an abysmal safety record that BP has not profited as extravagantly as it might have.

Forever covering its tracks with its 'Beyond Petroleum' propaganda, — whilst reaping the same amount of profits from the real business 95% end of its is operations, ie 'from oil production, refining and petrol stations' — BP is in terms of maintaining the fossil fuel infrastructure that governs our lives, no different from ExxonMobil who have a record of a decade and a half (and counting), of sponsoring campaigns of global warming denial.

The oil giants are doing better business than ever and for all their marketing blather about sponsoring greener alternative initiatives the fossil fuel infrastructure remains as monolithic as ever. Indeed, reluctant as they are to reveal their annual advertising budgets, they are in the same range of millions of pounds as the money they spend on alternative energies. By contrast billions of pounds are spent annually searching for new oil and new ways to extract it, and as we have seen billions of pounds are made in profit. In this context locking down the oil in Iraq, even as the war is beginning to eclipse the cost of the Vietnam war to the US remains an economically sound investment, because it is known fact that Iraq has vast reserves of as yet untapped oil.


STOP THE WAR … ON IRAQ

We know the cliché of children being asked where potatoes come from, and replying 'the supermarket freezer' department, but the lack of connectivity is endemic. But where does the oil actually come from?

Oil — and specifically ensuring its free flow to the west based on a dollar economy — became a high priority US national security concern back during World War II and has remained at the real centre of US posturing, policing and in more recent years its forward positioning in the Gulf region. Traditionally this policy has been 'progressively' shaped by : the declining output of the US's own domestic oil supplies whilst US consumption has skyrocketed; the feeling of not wanting to be held hostage in any repeat of the 1970's oil shocks; and in the later twentieth century wanting to tie as much Gulf oil to US controlled distribution networks in a world where peak oil is imminent.

The continuing disconnection between the Bush-Blair resource war on Iraq — an ongoing geopolitical central plank in the survival strategy of US hegemony or what we might call the US military industrial fossil fuel complex — and our continuing enforced addiction to oil, is multiplied many times over when we accept that this operating system is at the very core of why the planet is warming and continuing to warm.

Ahh but if the Iraq war was about oil we would by now be seeing oil tankers by the dozen leaving Al Shaat waterway and heading west and on to the US by now? No. the war on Iraq has been and continues to be about who controls its oil pumps, and who will control the distribution of Iraqi oil when it does come online in increasingly large quantities in the critical period of next five, ten, fifteen, twenty years.

US national security planning is in many respects characterised by the driving ambition to stay one and to steps ahead of actual and potential rivals, by trying to anticipate world geo-politics ten and twenty years into the future, and by acting accordingly in the present to mitigate in favour of US vital interests.

What we are seeing now in Iraq is the 'future planning wish fulfilment' of the disgruntled members of George Bush Senior's administration — namely Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, and Zalmay Khalizad, who were unhappy with leaving Saddam in power after the Gulf War, and hence leaving Iraqi oil up for potential grabs by the would-be rivals of the US.

At a 'bottom line' level it does not matter, for the time being, to US planners that the war on Iraq has been such a disaster because at least China, Russia and France no longer have oil deals with Saddam. In addition Saddam was unable to see through switching Iraqi oil form the dollar currency to the Euro, and Cheney and Bush were happy to see the investigation into the US role in making Saddam the dictator that he was, end with him choking at the end of a rope.

Take the 'surge' of US troops being sent to Iraq, announced to widespread disbelief in January 2007? Bush again seemed to defy all world opinion and now even that inside the US, especially given the report of The Baker-Hamilton Iraq Survey Group in December 2006?

But if we look a little closer those candidates from both the Republican and Democrat sides hoping to be the next US president and currently falling over each other to court US public opinion, are seeking only to attach themselves to a cosmetic withdrawl of US troops from Iraq before the US 2008 election, without being inextricably bound by any such commitment.

If we look at the small print, as Ed Harriman wrote recently:

The unpleasant truth is that George Bush, James Baker's study group and many who support them agree that Iraq is much too important to American interests to be trusted entirely to the Iraqis. They also agree that US troops are going to stay in Iraq to fight on their own and to run the Iraqi army. Which means there are going to be a lot more dead Iraqis even if — and it's a big if — there are fewer body bags carrying dead US soldiers by the next American elections.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2003055,00.html

The behind the scenes ongoing machinations continue apace. The Independent on Sunday January 7th 2007 front page 'broke' the story under the headline "The Spoils of War" of how the US led invasion of Iraq is on the verge of stitching up the Iraq's oil for the next 30 years. "Revealed: How Western firms will cash in on Iraq's oil wealth." "Leaked: to 'IoS': Plan to give UK and US up to 75% of profits." To be fa ir the Independent did break the story back in 2006 and as was mentioned on these pages (see http://www.danbertnobacon.com/blognovember2006.html and Joshua Holland's detailed article, Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil, October 2006 at: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/43045


The details, which apart from the aforementioned stories has been almost completely ignored by the mainstream media, is that this legislation currently being pushed through the Iraqi parliament by the US's Iraqi yes-men in the green zone. If we wondered why George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were so keen to ignore the advice of the Iraq Survey Group, US and world public opinion, and the feelings of most Iraqis — to announce the sending of more troops into Iraq in January — then battling in the streets of Baghdad whilst making sure that the Iraqi parliament pass the legislation on oil over the next couple of months, offers them a pretty good reason.




STOP THE WAR … ON IRAN

Also alongside the news of the IPCC recent report are updates on the US 'surge' in Iraq and the drumbeat of stories now coming in to the near distance of the US and Israeli talking up the idea ' a need' to embark upon some form of attack on Iran before the year is out. The lack of connection between the causes of global warming and the defining resource war dimensions of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq is deafening. Double ditto the connection between the causes of global warming and the geo-politics of oil re: Iran.

For most of us who are not taught anything about current geo-politics when we are taught history and geography Iran's southern coast frames the Strait of Hormuz by which most Gulf oil heading for the west by tanker travels. For as long as oil powers the US military, economic and corporate infrastructure there will be anti-Iranian sentiment from the White House (completely regardless of the state of Iran's nuclear power programme).

In a world of imminent peak oil and resource wars to lock down oil distribution networks, as the impacts of global warming kick in, US military planners are looking to the near future (as they have done throughout the Bush years) to anticipate how the world will be in five, ten, fifteen and twenty years. This is why now, after the WMD arguments for the invasion of Iraq have been buried, and all the high talk of bringing democracy to the Middle East has quietly been side-lined, that the 'surge' in Iraq seems so starkly out of step with what the world thinks about the US presence there.


If we think Bacevich's view of endless economic growth fuelled by expansionism abroad to keep the people happy at home, is over-simplified and outdated then let us consider Alexander Cockburn's recent observations:

There are some benefits for Washington in escalating the conflict with Iran. The Bush administration has specialised in creating demons responsible for all the ills of Iraq. First there was Saddam Hussein and then Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Both were killed last year but the war has continued to escalate.

Iran is now being promoted as the new demon. It is supposedly behind the provision of roadside bombs that have killed so many US and British troops — though the technology involved in these simple but deadly devices could generally be found in a garden shed.

… probably … the anti-Iranian tilt of the Bush administration has more to do with American politics than Iraqi politics. A fresh demon is being presented to the American voter … (and) the US media, gullible over WMD, is showing itself equally gullible over this exaggerated Iranian threat … Confrontation with Iran, diverting attention from the fiasco in Iraq, may be (the Republican's) best chance of holding the White House in 2008.

(Independent Wed Feb 7th 2007)


In fact the Pentagon has had a "global strike" operational since 2004 plan for preemptive attacks using conventional and/or "tactical" nuclear weapons against to take designated enemies perceived to be a threat to US interests, aka 'CONPLAN 8022' see:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/05/14/AR2005051400071.html
As I have argued in these pages over the last six months there is a determination in the White House to launch such an attack to 'sort Iran out' before George W. Bush leaves office in early 2009.

The given reason why such an attack on Iran would use "tactical" nuclear weapons is because US military planners claim they need such weapons is to penetrate the deep underground bunkers where Iran is allegedly developing its own nuclear weapons. Of course, there is no mention of what the effect the radioactive fall-out will have, nor the psychological ramifications of the US and/or Israel will have in launching a nuclear attack.

Last year I reported that Israel's political and military leaders have determined to bomb Iran before 2007 is out http://www.danbertnobacon.com/blogoctober2006.html using the pretext of stopping it from developing a nuclear weapon. John Pilger reporting in New Statesman notes the real reasons why the White House is gearing up to hit Iran:

As the American disaster in Iraq deepens and domestic and foreign opposition grows, "neo-con" fanatics such as Vice -President Dick Cheney believe their opportunity to control Iran's oil will pass unless they act no later than the spring … The well informed Arab Times in Kuwait say that Bush will attack Iran before the end of April.

(see John Pilger Iran. The War Begins at: http://www.newstatesman.com/200702050030

The Spring deadline is not least to launch the attack before Tony Blair is forced to stand down as prime minister of Britain. One last act of loyalty, one last dance before he hands over the back legs of the pantomime horse to Gordon Brown.

Given the Republican losses in the 2006 mid-term elections, the fact that most Americans want the their troops out of Iraq, and the worsening situation on the ground in Iraq, despite their fantasist desires to take Iran down a peg or two, how could Bush, Cheney et al, even be seriously thinking about all this even being an option politically? Well for starters Bush and Cheney do not have to worry about re-election.

Indeed coming in the immediate wake of the announcement of the 'surge' in Iraq has been a comparative surge in anti Iranian propaganda emanating from Bush, Cheney and Condoleeza Rice. When Donald Rumsfeld as force to resign and Robert Gates (who also sat on the Baker ISG) was nominated as his replacement the mainstream press signalled a major shift in US foreign policy. No such luck. It now seems clear Gates would have known exactly what he was signing up for, not least seeing through to fruition the attack on Iran. Of course gates went on record this week as saying there is no intention to attack Iran.

One of Russia's most senior military strategists, General Leonid Ivashov, says the US will use nuclear munitions (to attack Iran) delivered by cruise missiles launched from the Mediterranean. "The war in Iraq," he wrote on 24 January, "was just one element in a series of steps in the process of regional destabilisation. It was only a phase in getting closer to dealing with Iran and other countries. [When the attack on Iran begins] Israel is sure to come under Iranian missile strikes . . . Posing as victims, the Israelis . . . will suffer some tolerable damage and then the outraged US will destabilise Iran finally, making it look like a noble mission of retribution . . . Public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian . . . hysteria, . . . leaks, disinformation et cetera . . . It . . . remain[s] unclear . . . whether the US Congress is going to authorise the war.
(cited in Pilger ibid.)

And the real reasons for all of this this? Stretching across the Republican-Democrat continuum, is that US secret planning remains fossilised in pursuing the economic growth demanded by America's vital interests.


SEVENTEEN WASTED YEARS AND COUNTING

In parallel, to the US planning based on oil as a primary national security concern, has been the increasing knowledge of what burning large amounts of oil, and other fossil fuels, is doing to our planet. After twenty years of exploratory and independent scientific study (during the 1970's and 1980's) and increasing concern that the unremitting emission of man made greenhouse gases seemed to be having real detrimental impacts upon our planetary environment the IPCC was founded and it began its work in 1990.

Not coincidentally, it was during the early 1990's that the fossil fuel lobby began its covert and forever mutating campaigns of climate change denial. And let us be honest the doubt they managed to sow during the 1990's worked for a long time on most of us. The fact that Al Gore, now a leading advocate of combating the causes of global warming, was vice president of the US during the era when emission-based 'business as usual' aka 'globalisation' went into overdrive in the immediate post Cold war world, speaks volumes. For a full fifteen years (1990-2005) the denial campaign worked with our leaders offering lip service to the notion of addressing the causes of global warming, whilst bending over backwards to accommodate their sponsors in the corporate who most profit from an oil based economy.

The exact point at which US oil based national security and climate change denial fused will not be located until secret documentation from the 1990's and early 2000's is unearthed, but we can be pretty sure that it is not far from the secret meetings of Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force, see:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cheney_Energy_Task_Force

Vice President Cheney made his first priority in early 2000 to convene his Energy task Force made up of the heads of oil, coal and nuclear industries (and no environmentalists) in communication with foreign policy and military planners. Cheney's resume in the ten years prior to George W. Bush's election thunders volumes: Defense Secretary for Bush the elder, and then CEO of Haliburton, making him the living personification of the US military industrial fossil fuel complex.

We know that toppling Saddam Hussein was high on their list of demands and we know that one of the first things the Bush administration did in 2000 as to renege on its election pledge to enforce US companies to have mandatory CO2 emission cuts, followed by a the swift rejection of the Kyoto protocol.


FUTURE RESOURCE WARS HAPPENING NOW. WORLD WAR III: THE GLOBAL WARMING WARS (2000-20??)

All he is saying is 'Give War a Chance!'

We went into this largely united - in our assumptions, and in our convictions. And whatever you voted for, you did not vote for failure. Our country is pursuing a new strategy in Iraq - and I ask you to give it a chance to work. And I ask you to support our troops in the field - and those on their way.

G.W. Bush, State of the Union speech January 2007


Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. We went into this war with the biggest ant-war demonstrations the world has ever seen. But though we maybe did not realise it at the time, amidst the genuinely warm feeling on that bitterly cold February day in 2003, as protestors we were far too polite and as such were too easily ignored.

'Business as usual and some' continues in the form of a chosen dependency on oil, a choice made by our political leaders, on behalf of their friends in the corporate community. And, it happens counter to what most ordinary people want ie genuine measures to tackle global warming.

Paul Rogers concluded in his book A War Too Far - Iraq, Iran and the New American Century that because:

close to 70% of the world's oil reserves (are) are located in the (Persian Gulf) region, and with China joining Japan, the United States and Western Europe as dominant oil importers, the significance of Gulf oil is already substantial and will increase greatly over the next two decades. For this reason alone, a full US withdrawal from Iraq is so unlikely that, if it were to happen, it would be the biggest foreign policy disaster for the United States in 60 years. It also remains a core reason for US antipathy to Iran.
(Paul Rogers p 287)

The future resource wars envisioned by environmentalists and Pentagon planners alike, from computer models predicting the effects of abrupt climate change and the resultant strains on our system of global organisation, are by many rational indices already happening. The real pre-emption of the Bush administration is that of planning and acting to avoid an oil crisis in the coming years by going the whole hog of choosing dependency on oil, and going after locking down every avenue to it that it possibly can.

Indeed the two things that have characterised the Bush presidency from the outset are its propensity for increased militarism up to and including so called 'pre-emptive' war, and its rejection of anything that seriously challenges the causes of global warming. (Even pre-emptive war, in the usual context of US planners to avert a potential threat by strangling it before it is born, is a misnomer, if such wars are consistently forward looking resource wars). The bottom line in both these policies has always been preserving and extending the abilities of the US corporate community to conduct its 'business as usual and some,' and in this respect Bush is only the latest in a long line.

The problem with 'business and usual and some' and its current and seemingly imminent resource wars is, is that this becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. In seeking to lock down future oil supply and distribution, the fossil fuel infrastructure remains intact, growing and forever ramming our dependency upon it, down our throats.

Worse, even if we take a highly optimistic view that over the next twenty years US planners are merely seeking to extend the stability of the western economies whilst science miraculously comes up with a solve-all answer to replacing our reliance on oil, the amount of oil which the world will burn in that time will almost certainly tip the planet's atmosphere over the edge in terms of saturating it with CO2 and fuelling runaway global warming.

The ongoing insanity is that the S600 billion that the US has spent on its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could have paid for the research and development and implementation of an emission free infrastructure across the US and had plenty of change left over. completely new carbon free infrastructure. And had the US opted to do this after 9-11 and actually decrease the threat to US citizens by cutting its umbilical reliance on Middle eastern oil — which Bush claimed he wanted to do in this years State of the Union speech — the US would now be significant leaps down the road in leading the world on this.

Throw in the second biggest defense budget in the world (Britain) and the proposed billions on top of that, that the Blair government wants to spend on buying a nuclear weapons upgrade of Bush. Throw in the fact that the oil giants are already carving up the oil rights for the waters underneath the melting Arctic ice and rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of the ice being removed as an obstacle to oil exploration and you sense how perilously close to the planet being doomed and who is largely responsible for this horrifying state of affairs.

Instead of moves to a non fossil fuel infrastructure and real funding for research and development to provide this, we have the ExxonMobil's current covert campaigns to finance scientists who are prepared for money, to rubbish the IPCC report and the White House attempting to force changes in wording on the IPCC to downplay the impacts of global warming.

Until we make the connections and call the wars that are happening, and the wars that are about to happen what they are: ie geo-political global warming wars then we are losing rapidly disappearing ground in the struggle to arrest the causes of global warming. The planet is creaking under the strain and its people are beginning to demand a radical shift in the way our 'representatives' are continuing to run it into the ground.


HARNESSING THAT 'OTHER' ENEGRY

In November 2006 I saw George Monbiot in Leeds on his book tour. At the end of his talk (and his book) Monbiot does not outline how we make the necessary political changes, to effect his practical solutions to scale back the British economy to pioneer a vision within the 2 degree/2030limit. He says that is up to us, all of us, to decide how we can best be agents for forcing these essential and radical political changes.

Over the past twelve months (in Britain at least) there has been an avalanche of long overdue publicity, which shows no signs of abating, surrounding the daily increasing evidence and effects of what we are doing to our planet. Popular scientists from David Attenborough to Stephen Hawking have publicly joined the calls upon our leaders to make combating global warming the highest priority. The Stern Report late last year pointed out the blindingly obvious — and as environmentalists have been urging since the nineteen seventies — that it will more economical by a measure of zillions to address global warming now, rather than to wait a few years until it is escalating out of control.

Talking about the war on terror Robert Fisk recently highlighted the other rarely juxtaposed disconnection, that the War on Terror is a picnic on the beach compared to the current and escalating dangers posed by global warming. In an article called Fear climate change, not our enemies (Independent 20.01.07.) Fisk said yes we should be afraid, not of our enemies who come and go, but "of what we are doing to our planet."

It is estimated by the UN that 150,000 people a year lose their lives as a direct result of global warming and many millions more are displaced (and counting). Whilst terrorist attacks on the west are sometimes real, the threat posed by them to human life is comparatively small in the wider scheme of things. Of course we need to address security but the energy devoted to this (and for often highly specious reasons) by our governments is out of all proportion.

More chilling, when abrupt climate change does happen — as to all intents and purposes seems to have been accepted by those of our leaders choosing a dependency on oil — all the restrictions on civil liberties will put in place in recent years will be used expressly against ourselves who are seeking to challenge the status quo.

Whilst it remains that public pressure has yet to snowball there are many good reasons to hope that it will. Not least, and perhaps the most encouraging thing in all of this, the polite 'English' exchange of conversation in talking about the weather, has become talking about how fucked up the weather is. Moreover, wherever we are on the planet we are feeling and experiencing this fucked-up-ness on a regular if not daily basis.

Monbiot suggests the struggle against global warming is unusually difficult because it is a struggle against ourselves, a war on our on lifestyles. He is right on some levels and we face daily challenges to adjust our carbon heavy lifestyles in what remains an as yet very un-amenable climate. Whilst, in the words of John Lennon "we're all doing what we can" and we can doubtless do more, there remains a
need for short-cuts and a need to tap energies which are forever left out of the equation.

In an attempt to counter the disconnection that enables our political, economic and business leaders to continue to get away with murder we have to reconnect the dots. Opposing the war on Iraq, the proposed strikes on Iran and the forces which seek to keep us hooked on the burning of fossil fuels that are warming the planet, is all part of the same struggle. If we want to see US and British troops leave Iraq (and not just some fudged scale down for electoral purposes ) then we have to wean our governments from their chosen dependency on oil and to do that we have we have to target the empire of oil, and the oil giants who have profited so richly from it, for so long. On many levels this is the shortcut to saving the planet.

Whilst we all bear personal responsibility for our carbon footprints our leaders in bending over backwards to consolidate and extend the fossil fuel infrastructure, are culpable many many times over by a ratio comparable with our own incomes measured against the size of the profits that their friends in the corporate community make from maintaining that infrastructure. This is the real algebra of the ongoing destruction of our planet.

And as Medialens point out:

This is easily put to the test. Where are the discussions about the corporate stranglehold on economics, politics, culture and society? About the fanatical, age-old Western determination to control global resources and markets? About the West's repeated crushing of regional self-development in Latin America, southeast Asia and elsewhere? About the psychopathic corporate imperative to yield, at any cost, shareholder dividends for rich investors? And about the patently unsustainable business model of endless economic growth&Mac226;?

That none of this is up for serious discussion - even as the planet teeters on the brink of the greatest mass extinction since the end of the Permian era, 251 million years ago - is actually no surprise at all.

(Medialens ibid)


STOP THE WAR ON IRAQ, ON IRAN AND ON THE PLANET

In other words for every energy efficient light bulb we install, we have to translate the potential energy of the emissions saved into the real vocal energy of raising the level of awareness of the complicity of those driving forces that are keeping fossil fuel king,

All of these issues are matters of political will and the vast resources of largely untapped energy are human. The energy is our anger about what is being done to our planet, whilst our political, economic and business leaders with their foot slammed down on the gas ignore our polite protestations. And given the lost seventeen years since the IPCC was first convened, the untapped energy is our mounting anger at the years of climate change denial, ie that our leaders have knowingly and wilfully kept the juggernaut hurtling down the road to oblivion in pursuit of the short term profit.

And where the political will of our leaders is lacking we have little choice but to continue and escalate our rubbing their noses in it until they get the message. It is time to uncork the genie from the lamp, and if we have to cut off our own noses to spite our faces to do it, then when forced to choose, many of us will be forced to choose to fight. And, if emissions continue to spiral out of control it will have to be 'by any means necessary'.

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