Oil and 9-11: The Connection

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 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 thecountry, 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.