Oil
Wars: Fueling Both U.S. Empire And Ecocide
By Dan Brook
21 August, 2007
Dissident
Voice
Dripping,
spilling, spreading, burning. Welcome to the New World Chaos, what the
Bush administration is now calls “the long war”.
The cost is mounting: over
3,700 Americans and perhaps three-quarters of a million Iraqis, as well
as over 100 British and over 100 people from other countries —
not to mention over 1,000 privatized “contractors”, whose
outsourced jobs were formerly done by soldiers — now dead from
this latest oil war, in addition to the tens of thousands (or more)
with physical and mental injuries, each one a human being with a family
and friends; more international ill-will and terrorism, due to U.S.
aggression and arrogance, as well as a raging civil war; fewer civil
rights, due to the so-called Patriot Act and the Military Commissions
Act; less privacy, due to domestic spying; hundreds of billions of dollars,
perhaps even a trillion dollars, in public tax money gone and at least
$2 billion more each week; and hundreds of billions of dollars in private
profits for giant corporations (ExxonMobil, the world’s largest
oil company, announced soaring profits of $36 billion for 2005, exceeding
any corporation in U.S. history, based on revenues of over $1 billion
per day, which include continuing subsidies from the U.S. government).
In his 2006 State of the Union speech, Kingpin Bush admitted the obvious:
“America is addicted to oil”. What George Bush the Lesser
didn’t admit, among other things, is that the U.S. military is
the world’s largest consumer of oil and the world’s largest
polluter. America is also addicted to war for oil, with the Bush Administration
addicted to lying, deception, secrecy. Indeed, the warmongers and war
profiteers have us over a barrel. As they say, “to the victor
go the oils”.
Prior to formally ordering
the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003, self-declared “war
president” George W. Bush (who even the Washington Post repeatedly
calls the “worst president ever”) sternly warned the Iraqis:
“Do not destroy the oil wells”. The war on Iraq was, reportedly,
originally named Operation Iraqi Liberation, instead of Operation Iraqi
Freedom. Someone quickly realized, however, that the acronym would be
OIL. That wouldn’t make for good PR — not that it didn’t
clearly represent their interests, but not the interests the criminal
Bush gang cares to advertise. In either case, they seem to have meant
liberalization of the economy instead of liberation and free markets
instead of freedom.
We can suppose, therefore,
that it was a concession as well as a salute to their Capitalist-in-Chief
to name some of the U.S. military bases in newly-occupied Iraq after
oil companies. (The 101st Airborne Division really did name a Base Exxon
and a Base Shell somewhere in the deserts of Iraq!) While there are
now reported to be over 100 U.S. bases in Iraq, both large and small,
it appears that the long-term plans are to build and maintain four to
six “permanent super-bases” — each as large as 20
square miles and as sprawling as American suburbia with its requisite
multinational fast food outlets, not to mention movie theaters and golf
courses — costing “several billion dollars”.
Following the recent U.S.
wars in former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, U.S. military bases
have mushroomed in these regions, adding to the already extensive empire.
With occupied Iraq slated to have the largest U.S. Embassy — staffed
with more than three thousand personnel and costing $1 billion to construct
— in addition to the “permanent super-bases”, those
immense material and human resources should be able to adequately guard
their financial interests and liquid assets.
In the first “combat
operation” of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, navy Seals claimed a
“bloodless victory”, according the New York Times (22 March
2003), seizing two oil terminals “in the battle for Iraq’s
vast oil empire”. Tellingly, administration officials are now
referring to “the long war”. The battle is fixing to be
longer than a transcontinental pipeline.
Even though Commander-in-Mischief
Bush declared an end to “major combat operations” on May
1, 2003, after landing under a giant banner on an aircraft carrier barely
off the coast of San Diego announcing “Mission Accomplished”,
and transferred so-called “sovereignty” to Iraqis on June
28, 2004, the business-oriented Bloomberg News reports that “The
battle for Iraq’s oil is just beginning” (June 18, 2004).
Whether speaking of insurgents, pipelines, or profits, in July 2003,
bombastic Bush brashly declared: “Bring ‘em on!”
Oiloholics Bush and Cheney
both have deep and dirty connections to the oil industry, not to mention
former National Security Advisor and now Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice, who actually had a Chevron oil supertanker ship named after her.
Many others in the Bush gang are up to their necks — and wallets
— in oil. It is not just that so many in the avaricious Bush regime
have closely worked for — and with — oil companies or in
the energy sector more generally. There is also the issue of the legalized
system of bribery, including campaign contributions and the revolving
door of jobs in business and government. Oil dollars have been gushing
into Bush campaign coffers for years.
With millions of petro-dollars
pouring into mostly Republican campaign war chests, and with billion-dollar
subsidies and other favorable legislation and tax laws for oil companies,
the slick and symbiotic relationship is powerful and sickening. Oil
kingpin Bush and his gang are economically — and therefore politically
and militarily — addicted to oil. They have been lusting after
oil for years, as the Bush-connected Project for the New American Century
has made clear since its founding in 1997, fantasizing about a “new
Pearl Harbor”, which they — and, sadly, we — got on
September 11th, 2001. While most mourned, some salivated.
Americans, more generally,
have also become addicted to oil. The U.S. consumes one-quarter of the
world’s oil supply, and about 40% of that is burned in passenger
vehicles, including the tank-like Hummers, which get a measly 10 miles
per gallon, and other SUVs. It’s a little harder to calculate
how much a gallon of human blood costs, but the brutal regime seems
to think “the price is worth it”, as former Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright once quipped about the deaths of hundreds of
thousands of (civilian) Iraqis, most of whom were children. Similarly,
Donald Rumsfeld remarked that “the carnage was horrendous and
it [is] worth it”. Those and other costs, including pollution
and global warming, possibly the most serious threat to our planet,
are efficiently externalized to the rest of us, and our descendants,
and indeed all life on Earth, with dire consequences.
Iraq has the third largest
proven oil reserves in the world (way behind Saudi Arabia and slightly
after Iran), accounting for about 10% of world supply according to Oil
and Gas Journal, but with newer technology engaging in further exploration
and analyses, Iraq may very well prove eventually to have quite a bit
more oil (though if some of the reserves are “paper barrels”,
as some countries are alleged to have, it might be less). That has made
Iraq a favorite target for the “oiloholics”, as Rabbi Arthur
Waskow describes them (“Oiloholics and the Burning World”,
Tikkun, March/April 2003). Iran may not be far behind. In 1990, when
Dick Cheney was Secretary of War for the first Bush Administration,
he stated it plain: “We’re there [in the Persian Gulf region]
because the fact of the matter is that part of the world controls the
world supply of oil… Whoever controls the flow of Persian Gulf
oil has a stranglehold not only on our economy but also on the other
countries of the world as well.” Having control over oil means
that it can be kept flowing to U.S. allies (especially in Europe, Japan,
and Israel) and can potentially be withheld from adversaries (notably
China, whose economy, oil imports, and influence are rapidly rising).
Evidence reveals that the
Big Oil Bush administration actively albeit secretly thirsted for Iraqi
oil “within weeks” of Bush taking office in January 2001,
as Greg Palast’s investigative reporting exposes (www.gregpalast.com).
The Downing Street memos, as well as subsequent evidence, further corroborate
Bush and Blair’s fraudulent misleadership. Though Bush’s
wars are certainly about oil, neo-con petrotheism is not just about
access to oil, or even control of the “preeminent strategic commodity”
of oil, what more than one presidential administration euphemistically
calls “energy security” (recall the signs at anti-war rallies
asking “how did our oil get under their sand?”). And this
is only likely to increase as we reach — and pass — global
peak oil.
War against Iraq is also
about controlling the price of oil, controlling those prices in U.S.
dollars instead of Euros and Yen, and controlling the flow of petro-dollars,
the money made by selling oil which is then invested abroad —
so as to more efficiently grease their palms and portfolios. The vicious
Kuwaiti royal dictatorship, for example, reportedly makes more money
from their oil-funded overseas investments, primarily in the U.S. and
Britain, than they do through direct oil sales. The BBC estimated, according
to media critic Ben Bagdikian, that the Saudis have about three-quarters
of a trillion dollars worth of U.S. investments — in real estate,
treasury bills, and the like.
Further, petro-dollars flow
to the U.S., and to a lesser extent England and elsewhere, in exchange
for military hardware, such as advanced fighter jets, attack helicopters,
late-model tanks, assault rifles, and other offensive weapons of destruction,
designed to be used against both external and internal threats to the
authoritarian status quo. Petro-dollars also buy U.S. bonds, financing
low interest rates in the U.S. and therefore political stability in
the world’s only military superpower. Additionally, U.S. and British
banks have been “recycling petro-dollars”, as Henry Kissinger
described it, by over-lending to dictatorial third world governments,
thereby, with the help of the IMF, gaining long-term leverage over these
countries, including their
economies and resources, extending economic colonialism, national dependency,
and injurious poverty (cf. John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic
Hit Man).
During Gulf War I, Pulitzer
prize-winning New York Times essayist Thomas Friedman remarked that
“the U.S. has not sent troops to the Saudi desert to preserve
democratic principles… This is about money, about protecting governments
loyal to America and punishing those that are not and about who will
set the price of oil” (August 12, 1990). It becomes less surprising,
then, that the Bushies have crudely tried to get their unguinous hands
around the necks of oil-connected countries — Iraq, Afghanistan,
Iran, Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Liberia, Sudan, Angola, and others
— and cozying up to brutal pro-western oilocracies — Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait, Nigeria, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan,
Indonesia, Morocco, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, et al. — while virtually
ignoring other (drier) locales. It is in this way that Michael Klare,
author of Blood and Oil, argues that “oil and terrorism are linked”:
Al Qaida and other terrorist groups arose and increased their power
in reaction to the U.S. imperialism’s oily, albeit firm, embrace
of authoritarian Arab governments. Of course, some of these clerical
fascist groups also received military and other material support from
the U.S. to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
A geography of the so-called
“war on terror”, acting much like a war of terror, is essentially
a geography of the world’s oil reserves, as Gopal Dayaneni and
Bob Wing indicate (in their “Oil and War”, special to War
Times). With the U.S. consuming about one-quarter of the world’s
oil, this is no small matter. Indeed, as Daniel Yergen discusses (Washington
Post, October 17, 2003), petro-power has become a key fact of the global
political economy.
Reflecting on the intimate
— “embedded” and “wedded” — relationship
between state and corporate power, what Mussolini reportedly referred
to as fascism, Friedman laid it plain in The Lexus and the Olive Tree,
his intellectual love letter to corporate globalization and U.S. imperialism:
“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden
fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the
designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps
the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is
called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” Free
markets? Not quite. The unspoken capitalist mantra has always been “free
markets for thee, not for me”. In his latest book, The World Is
Flat, Friedman at least concedes the possibilities of blowback —
a CIA term to describe situations in which (usually covert) operations
have a boomerang effect, e.g., support for Osama bin Laden, the mujahadeen,
the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, and other unsavories — and that U.S.-led
economic globalization could as easily lead to socialist revolution
as social development.
Although Secretary of Offense
Rumsfeld quipped, with a perfect poker face, that the war against Iraq
has “nothing to do with oil”, various other political and
military leaders made much about securing Iraqi oil wells very early
into the invasion. “It is no mere coincidence”, the Amnesty
International Annual Report states in May 2004, “that, in the
Iraq war, the protection of oil wells appears to have been given greater
priority than the protection of hospitals”. This, of course, remains
true. More recently, in response to Bush again denying that “we
acted in Iraq because of oil” (January 10, 2006), news anchor
Ted Koppel, in his New York Times essay “Will Fight for Oil”
(February 26, 2006), whose title alludes to the needs of the poor and
unemployed, reminds us that “the reason for America’s rapt
attention to the security of the Persian Gulf is what it has always
been. It’s about the oil.”
It is worthwhile to note
that when asked by talk-show host Charlie Rose how the war was going
on April 1, 2003, shortly after the invasion began, General Joseph W.
Ralston, former Supreme Commander of NATO, didn’t hesitate, stating
“We own the… oil wells.” As with corporate leveraged
buyouts, Bu$hCo. seeks to pay for its war and the privatized reconstruction
of Iraq using revenues from future Iraqi oil sales, originally claiming
that the war “would pay for itself”, while undermining the
power of OPEC through deliberate oversupply and undermining the United
Nations through unilateral actions.
It shouldn’t surprise
anyone — though it may disgust them — that while the U.S.
military allowed Operation Iraqi Looting, especially the ransacking
of the Iraqi libraries and museums which contained priceless Mesopotamian
antiquities that epitomize human cultural history, it very carefully
guarded the Oil and Interior ministries with heavily-armed U.S. Marines,
tanks, humvees, and razor wire. Likewise, it is disturbing, but again
not surprising, that the U.S.-installed leader of Afghanistan, Hamid
Karzai, was once associated with Unocal and made his first order of
business the opening of an oil pipeline desired by the ever-thirsty
Bush administration. So unpopular, President Karzai still cannot freely
travel around his own country and must, at all times, be guarded by
U.S. soldiers.
Documents from Bechtel and
the U.S. government further evidence an obsession with Iraqi oil, and
the Aqaba pipeline to carry it to Jordan, at least since Rumsfeld’s
1983 friendly meeting with Saddam Hussein, though almost certainly earlier
than that. The record also shows absolutely no concern — let alone
obsession — with Saddam’s disgusting use of torture, chemical
weapons, or his infringements of civil and human rights. Quite the contrary.
Prior to the first Gulf War, official praise for Saddam Hussein was
enthusiastic, even after committing atrocities, with U.S.-produced ordnance,
that were later used to “manufacture consent” and “justify”
war against Iraq, apparently long-planned and much-desired at least
by those steering the battleship of U.S. empire.
The U.S.-run regime in Iraq,
whether a military or civilian dictatorship (almost the first thing
the new Iraqi “civilian” interim president did was to declare
martial law), will undoubtedly promote promiscuous privatization as
a key plan — of oil, of course, but also of other “commanding
heights” — i.e., transportation, communications, banking,
utilities (notably water), and other prime resources and infrastructure
— what Naomi Klein describes as “privatization without representation”.
Iraq has effectively become a private gas station and Mid-East mini-mart
for the U.S. élite.
As feminist Grace Paley says,
“today’s wars are about oil. But alternative energies exist
now — solar, wind, [tidal, wave, geothermal, hydrogen fuel cells,
cellulosic ethanol, biodiesel, biomass (including hemp), methane hydrates,
methane digestion, et al., not to mention significant conservation and
energy efficiency through hybrid technology and other means] —
for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only human
work that cannot be done without oil is war” (Ms., Spring 2003).
Therefore, she concludes, “men lead us to war for enough oil to
continue to go to war for oil.” While oil fuels the war, war fuels
the need for more oil. This vicious, biocidic cycle is like a well-oiled
imperialist machine, doing different types of damage at home and abroad,
while financially benefitting pathological, parasitic, piratic and GOP-connected
mega-corporations, such as Halliburton/KBR, Bechtel, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco,
Unocal, DynCorp, Citicorp, JP Morgan Chase, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin,
Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Blackwater, CACI, Fluor, Shaw, the Carlyle
Group, the Alexander Group, and their greasy
associates.
“The country might
be better served”, Lewis Lapham suggests, “if the[se] corporations
fielded their own private armies, noting that this practice has precedent
in the Italian Renaissance (“Condottieri”, Harper’s,
June 2005): “Citicorp and ExxonMobil would do well to follow in
the footsteps of the Medici — the military operations conceived
as venture-capital deals, the soldiers promoted to the rank of shareholders
and dressed in uniforms bearing the corporate insignia, the print and
broadcast rights firmly under the control of the publicists, the loot
divided in accordance with the rules governing the orders of battle
in the National Football League.” If not better served, at least
the country’s line of command would be more clear. Like our current
leadership, corporations cannot be enlightened; they can only fulfill
their self-serving raison d’étre, seeking and maximizing
profit above all else.
In “The American Empire
(Get Used to It)”, (NY Times Magazine, January 5, 2003, cover
story), Michael Ignatieff states that “because [the Persian Gulf
region] has so much of the world’s proven oil reserves”,
it is “the empire’s center of gravity”. Ignatieff
refers to this as “the burden of empire”. The following
day the London Daily Mirror, also with a cover story, pictured a graphic
showing a tough-looking Bush with his tough words interspersed with
oil company logos. Underneath, the tag line reads: “Now can you
guess why George W. Bush [was] hellbent on a war with Iraq?”
According to recent polling,
over 90% of Iraqis seem to realize what an increasing number of Americans
do: that the U.S. is an occupying force in Iraq, not a liberating one,
with little interest in real democracy and should exit Iraq as soon
as possible. Further, a recent meeting of all three major Iraqi faction
, along with their Arab and Muslim neighbors, came to a consensus that
the U.S. should remove its military forces from Iraq. Democracy is neither
one bullet-one vote nor one barrel-one vote.
The propaganda offensive
by the military-media complex in the U.S., however, has once again worked
wonders, though the disinformation campaign is wearing thin and people,
now including politicians and military leaders, are increasingly speaking
out. Whether it’s cheap political rhetoric from Washington, D.C.
or cheap corporate commodities from China, too many people are still
all too ready to “buy American”, demonstrating their “patriotism”
in the only ways offered. Little surprise, then, that while the U.S.
government is racking up record-level budget and trade deficits, and
crushing record-level public debt, Americans are over-consuming to the
point of negative savings, and record-level personal debt, a scene last
witnessed in 1933, during the Great Depression. Of course, corporate
greed and power, a shift to impoverished Wal-Mart-style service-sector
jobs, declining union strength, lower real wages and benefits, skyrocketing
healthcare costs, and increasing levels of foreclosures and bankruptcy
— all related — don’t help.
Yes, there is an empire and
there is a burden of empire. It is not, however, that the U.S. must
“reluctantly” (as Bush and other misleaders claim) be an
imperial power — it has quite often rushed to the occasion, as
history amply demonstrates. Unfortunately for the misfortunate millions
(and billions!), it is the citizens of the world who bear the burden
of empire by paying its tremendous costs, while the élite reap
their tremendous profits by wielding their tremendous power.
“The U.S. invasion
and occupation of Iraq is a war not only for the maintenance of U.S.
hegemony, but for the strengthening and enlarging of an Empire”,
Steven Rosenthal and Junaid Ahmad declare (“The Problem is Bigger
than the Bushes”, ZNet, July 1, 2004). “That is something
much bigger than the corrupt war profiteering of Halliburton or the
sleazy relationships between the Saudi ruling class and the Bush family.
It is much bigger than the ideological fantasies of the clique of neo-conservatives
in the Bush Administration.” Now, as Baghdad smoulders and survivors
continue to dig themselves out, and as the insurgency is in full force,
the bells of Operation Iraqi Freedom are still ringing in the ears of
Iraqis like the sounds of night time air raid and now daytime ambulance
sirens. And they unfortunately will for quite some time.
Investigative journalist
Jim Valette, author of a report called Crude Vision, reflects on U.S.
policy in Iraq: “Is this pursuit of oil or the pursuit of empire?
… Right now it’s really two sides of the same coin”
(CounterPunch, April 9, 2003). While it may seem that the U.S. empire
is increasing its reach and strength with military victory in Iraq,
it is also following in the footsteps of all other historical empires.
U.S. war against Iraq may not simply be a war of (expanding) empire,
but may in fact represent the imperial desperation of an (economic)
empire in decline, despite its military supremacy. As Saul Landau says,
“wars kill empires as well as people” (The Business of America,
2004).
Excessive military budgeting
(equal to the rest of the world combined), rising deficits (contributing
to a public debt of over $8.5 trillion and growing), imperial overstretch
(as Paul Kennedy termed it, with as many as 1,000 U.S. military bases
in over 140 countries and territories in addition to several thousand
in the U.S.), the disregard and disrespect of allies and others (including
France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and Mexico, in addition to the UN and
international law, while enraging the “second superpower”
of world opinion) and outrageous arrogance (the many offensive and deceptive
words and deeds of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Bolton, Negroponte,
Rove, et al., duly reported by the corporate mass media stenographers)
all lead to an unsustainable system of oppression and obfuscation that
frays from the edges inward and rots from the top down, as all empires
eventually do.
Further, the revelations
of torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib in U.S.-occupied Iraq, Bagram
in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay in U.S.-occupied
Cuba, and other prisons, whether secret CIA ones or not, by U.S. soldiers
and so-called “private” contractors — aside from the
“extraordinary rendition” (read: kidnapping) of “ghost
detaineees” transported to locales (Egypt and Syria, for example,
as well as what had been described as “black sites”) where
torture is less taboo — is a phenomenon typical of empires and
considerably inflames this
increasingly explosive “theater of operations”. It is further
shameful and inflammatory that the U.S. has flattened, crushed, damaged,
and destroyed many ancient Babylonian archeological sites in this “cradle
of civilization”, which forms our collective cultural heritage
and is, in many cases, being lost forever.
Professor and social critic
Cornel West, speaking of the necessity of “Finding Hope in Dark
Times” (Tikkun, July/August 2004), begins by saying that
We are living in one of the
most frightening and terrifying moments in history. In this age of the
American Empire, imperial policies and imperial mentalities are becoming
pervasive in a variety of different forms. America has become a superpower,
a hegemon, a leviathan, a colossus, with no competing or contesting
power. Becoming an empire is always dangerous because every empire in
history … has been filled with hubris, arrogance, and nihilism.
Every empire we know of in human history has succumbed to the idolatry
of power.
West concludes that we need
to speak truthfully, act courageously and democratically, pursue justice,
be loving—in short, we need to create communities of resistance.
We must be that “second superpower”, as a front page New
York Times news analysis described the millions of anti-war protesters
who rallied around the world (Patrick Tyler, “A New Power in the
Streets”, New York Times, February 17, 2003), many of whom accurately
predicted the sorry state of affairs we’ve been thrust into. We
are left with the choice between U.S. hegemony or global survival, as
Noam Chomsky indicates (in Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest
for Global Dominance and elsewhere), true for generations but with much
higher profits and deadlier stakes now. One path of survival has been
neatly laid out by George McGovern and William Polk (Out of Iraq), which
detail a how a small fraction of the enormous amount being spent on
the war could instead go towards securing and rebuilding Iraq, with
substantial benefits for all sides.
Much is the same in this
imperialist “game” (as one military leader called it) of
conquest — old oil in new barrels, so to speak — though
a tragic line has been crossed by the U.S.: first-strike unilateralism
— with mass manipulation and mass media warnography, mass murder,
mass public expense, mass privatization and private profits, mass ecocide,
mass terror, and mass destruction — including the U.S. use of
weapons of mass destruction, such as depleted ranium (with a half life
equivalent to the age of the Earth!), white phosphorus (used in the
siege of Fallujah, the presumed site where the Babylonian Talmud was
written), napalm/MK-77, cluster bombs, Daisy Cutters, and other massive
bombs containing chemical slurries. The Bush regime also threatens to
use nuclear weapons — especially against China, Libya, Iran, Iraq,
North Korea, Russia, and Syria, according to the U.S. government in
2002 — while continuing to research, build, and modernize nuclear
weapons, including so-called “low-yield”, “tactical”,
“bunker-busting”, or “mini” nukes. The consequences
of acting in these ways will reverberate in very painful ways, as history
will undoubtedly demonstrate, unless something is quickly done to reverse
this horrific trend.
We have already traded way
too much blood for oil — sacrificing the young for a greedy gambit
and risking life on Earth for a short-term power grab — while
Bush and his capitalist cronies extend U.S. empire, enrich themselves,
bust the budget, increase fear and mistrust, reduce social services,
suppress civil liberties, and undermine national and indeed global security
by further destabilizing volatile regions and increasing the threats
of terrorism—both against and from the U.S. Oil wars should remind
us that the empire — as well as the emperor — has no clothes.
The impeachment of Bush and
Cheney would be a good start, but they — and others in their criminal
gang — should be in prison. More importantly, we need to impeach
the system that puts profits ahead of people, fossil fuels over sustainability,
corporations above citizens, and prioritizes war over education, healthcare,
jobs, housing, mass transportation, protection of the environment, and
social security.
In the seventeenth century,
the famous Japanese Zen poet Basho wrote a time-honored haiku:
Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers’
imperial dreams
Public health advocate Susan
Clarke, though, adds:
Not even grasses remain
when toxic war waste undermines
their very nature
The war will end. U.S. troops
will return home. The empire is running on fumes and will eventually
stall out. The only questions are: How many more people will have to
die before that happens? How many more billions of dollars will have
to be wasted?
Dripping, spilling, spreading,
burning. At least the Bushies will get their oil fix. They — and
we — need to kick the habit. No one fights over the sun and the
wind.
Dan Brook,
Ph.D., is the co-author of Understanding Society (2007), author of Modern
Revolution (2005), and dozens of articles. He also maintains Eco-Eating,
The Vegetarian Mitzvah, No
Smoking?, and can be contacted via [email protected].
Visit Dan's website.
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