To: Rick Shenkman,
History News Network
Re:
Ronald Radosh, The Old Sixties Left Wages Another Campaign,
before Sept 16, 2002
http://hnn.us/articles/972.html
and
Don B. Kates, Shouldn't People Who Favor Gun Control Favor War
in Iraq?
before Sept 16, 2002
http://hnn.us/articles/962.html
I see little point in arguing about the ethics and legalities of
invading Iraq until it is first proven to be a policy of good
sense. I am further convinced that such an invasion would be
nothing more than the continuation of a policy of comprehensive
stupidity. I wasn't particularly surprised to find that Mr. Kates
is a lawyer. We engineers have learned from experience to expect
that kind of thing from lawyers.
American policy in the middle east is comprehensively driven
by oil. The reason the United States sold various advanced
weapons to the arabs was to buy oil. Our military interventions
have no purpose save to seize oil. From an engineer's
standpoint, this amounts to one big colossal blunder. You can
find ways to run an automobile on coal for now, and windmills for
later. Furthermore, these methods cost much less than war-- in
money, that is. The highest cost of war is lives, of course. Dick
Cheney is comprehensively implicated in the whole middle east
process, both as an official, and as an oil company executive. I
feel entitled to say that he is an utterly stupid, incompetent
fool. The same goes for his cronies like Donald Rumsfeld, and
Paul Wolfowitz, and the whole Bush family.
I don't hold much of a brief for Bill Gates. I'm a committed
member of the open-source-software movement, with a stack of
public-domain programs to prove it. However, Bill Gates would
never have been dumb enough to get us into the mess Dick Cheney
has gotten us into.
Cheney knew twenty years ago that the oil would not last
forever-- where was his migration path? The beauty of hydrogen as
a fuel is that you can economically manufacture it from almost
anything that will burn, or from any source of electricity.
Hydrogen is like electricity. It serves as a flexibility layer.
Your automobiles and home furnaces are not locked into particular
mineral deposits. By contrast, gasoline is a mixture of octane,
hexane, etc. compounds which are comparatively expensive to make
from anything except oil. People who have thought seriously
about energy for years have repeatedly come to the conclusion
that you have to develop hydrogen wherever you can't use
electricity. Cheney and his cronies persistently neglected
alternative energy in order to stake everything on repeatedly
invading the middle east. The dumb donkeys just kept on stupidly
plodding ahead.
I would seriously recommend to Don Kates and Ronald Radosh
that they read the major works of Alvin Toffler, notably _The
Third Wave_ and _Future Shock_. John Naisbit's _Megatrends_ is
another good book, along the same lines, but more accessible. It
is less given to reflection on big ideas, and more given to
simple, immediately practical, advice. Naisbit is to Toffler in
techno-economic thought as Jomini or Lidell-Hart is to Clausewitz
in military thought. One of the best tests I know for a book is
whether it still makes sense after twenty or thirty years have
gone by. These books pass muster.
Here is a closing anecdote. Shortly after 9/11 I was talking
with an elderly civil engineer. We talked in engineer's code,
where a frown or a grunt, or a raised eyebrow requires about
twenty pages of translation for a layman. I had come to the
conclusion that the World Trade Center could have been prevented
from collapsing if about ten percent more had been spent on it.
The elderly civil engineer, on the other hand, had been trying,
without success, to find a solution that only cost one percent
more, because he judged that ten percent was not within the realm
of practical politics. I defer, of course, to his greater
judgment of practical politics. However, since practical politics
are a social artifact, created by men like Dick Cheney, I can
only repeat: Stupid, Stupid, Incompetent Fools!
Andrew D. Todd