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Those who control oil and water will control the world
John Gray, Guardian
New superpowers are competing for diminishing resources as Britain becomes a bit-player. The outcome could be deadly
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… At present, a race for the world’s resources is underway that resembles the Great Game that was played in the decades leading up to the First World War. Now, as then, the most coveted prize is oil and the risk is that as the contest heats up it will not always be peaceful. But this is no simple rerun of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, there are powerful new players and it is not only oil that is at stake.
… Now, Britain hardly matters and India and China, which were subjugated countries during the last round of the game, have emerged as key players. The struggle is no longer focused mainly on central Asian oil. It stretches from the Persian Gulf to Africa, Latin America, even the polar caps, and it is also a struggle for water and depleting supplies of vital minerals. Above all, global warming is increasing the scarcity of natural resources. The Great Game that is afoot today is more intractable and more dangerous than the last.
The biggest new player in the game is China and it is there that the emerging pattern is clearest. China’s rulers have staked everything on economic growth. Without improving living standards, there would be large-scale unrest, which could pose a threat to their power. Moreover, China is in the middle of the largest and fastest move from the countryside to the city in history, a process that cannot be stopped.
… Although oil reserves may not have peaked in any literal sense, the days when conventional oil was cheap have gone forever. Countries are reacting by trying to secure the remaining reserves, not least those that are being opened up by climate change.
… The scramble for energy is shaping many of the conflicts we can expect in the present century. The danger is not just another oil shock that impacts on industrial production, but a threat of famine
(30 March 2008)
John Gray is a UK intellectual, rather difficult to pigeonhole. -BA
UN rejects water as basic human right
Mike De Souza, Canwest News Service
The Harper government can declare victory after a United Nations meeting rejected calls for water to be recognized as a basic human right.
Instead, a special resolution proposed by Germany and Spain at the UN human rights council was stripped of references that recognized access to water as a human right. The countries also chose to scrap the idea of creating an international watchdog to investigate the issue, choosing instead to appoint a new consultant that would make recommendations over the next three years.
Federal officials in Canada said last week that the government wanted to ensure the meeting’s outcome reflected the fact that access to water is not formally recognized as a human right in international law. But a social advocacy group said that the position was designed to protect the right to sell water under the North American Free Trade Agreement.
(25 March 2008)
Steve LeVine interview: The Oil and the Glory (epic Caspian struggle) (audio)
Financial Sense Newshour
The Oil and the Glory:
The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea
Steve LeVine
The Oil and the Glory tells the heretofore little-heralded story of the long, epic struggle for fortune, glory and power on the Caspian Sea.
It takes the reader behind closed doors to watch the players themselves act out their self-interest in negotiations in the region itself, in Moscow, Paris, London, Caribbean islands, the United States and elsewhere.
The conclusion is both spectacular and tragic, as huge oil is found and fortunes earned, the United States scores one of its sole significant foreign policy triumphs of the last decade, but at the same time two Caspian presidents find themselves as unindicted co-conspirators in U.S. corruption cases, and the region’s biggest foreign dealmaker of them all is charged with bribery in New York.
At a time when Moscow has dramatically reappeared as a powerful international player, the book also answers the question: can Russia be trusted?
Steve LeVine was based in Central Asia and the Caucasus for 11 years – starting two weeks after the Soviet collapse through 2003. He ran The Wall Street Journal bureau for the eight-nation region, and before that covered it for The New York Times.
From 1988-1991, LeVine was Newsweek’s Pakistan-based correspondent for that country and Afghanistan. Before that, he covered the Philippines for Newsday from 1985-1988. He worked on The Wall Street Journal’s oil staff through January 2007.
He is currently writing a new book on Russia that, among other things, will explain its string of high-profile murders.
(29 March 2008)
Peak “Surge Success”
Jeff Vail, rhizome
The much hailed success of the “Surge” of American forces in Iraq, led by Gen. David Petraeus, is beginning to fall apart. It’s important to understand why it worked (temporarily), why it’s falling apart now, why this will be a gradual disintegration, and why this was inevitable all along.
… colonial powers (as well as those later powers practicing economic colonialism) have pitted one ethnic group against another to most effectively control their far-flung empires. This is what I call the “exploitation model,” and typically involves empowering a minority group to rule a territory with the implicit understanding that the minority group must act according to the will of the colonial power or be abandoned to the mercy (or lack thereof) of the majority.
In Iraq, this took the form of long-standing British and then American support for a Sunni minority government in a Shi’a majority territory. The problem of mutually exclusive overlap arises with the development of Iraq’s vast oil potential. The Sunni majority enjoyed several decades of wealth and prosperity, subsidized entirely by their disproportionate share of oil export revenue.
Now that the Shi’a are in power, they expect at a minimum a proportionate share of Iraq’s oil revenue (60%), which is virtually all of Iraq’s southern oil production as the Kurds have geographic and de-facto control over Iraq’s northern oil reserves which make up about a third of Iraq’s pre-war oil production potential.
So this creates a situation where the Sunni society, economy, and psyche in Iraq is predicated on the subsidy of more than half of Iraq’s oil production, because they have enjoyed exactly this for decades. Likewise, the newly empowered Shi’a have an expectation of more than half of oil production.
For both groups this is a non-negotiable minimum, and they will fight for what they consider their birthright. Unfortunately, this represents mutually exclusive overlap-with both groups expecting, at a minimum, essentially all the oil production available outside the Kurdish zone, they cannot both be satisfied.
This cannot be solved by increasing Iraq’s oil production because the expectations are proportional, not empirical, and will only suffice to provide a relative advantage, not actual wealth, even if Iraq’s production were to reach 8 million barrels per day (a wildly optimistic figure four time current production) due to their growing population and dire economic problems.
There is no nice way to put it: this problem will not be solved, and will result in conflict-the only question is when.
… What is relatively certain is that neither 45,000 nor 145,000 American troops on the ground will be able to keep the peace. We entered this conflict with an almost awe-inspiring naïveté, and I have little confidence that we’ll figure out how to exit any more gracefully.
… see my suggestion for solving Iraq’s problem with mutually exclusive overlap (yes, gardening *is* the solution…)
(28 March 2008)
Jeff Vail’s post that describes the solution is excerpted below. Jeff’s original article has much more on the details of the current impasse in Iraq. Jeff Vail is “an author, former intelligence officer, and law student. He is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy.” -BA
Solving the Problem of Mutually-Exclusive Overlap in Iraq
Gardening *is* the solution
Jeff Vail, rhizome
… There are other problems with trying to translate the very limited success of erasing mutually-exclusive overlap in the former Yugoslavia to Iraq. But perhaps the one most worth mentioning is that much of the former Yugolsavia is locally self-sufficient.
The Serbs and Slovenes and Croats generally have their own localized industry. Their own localized agriculture. Their own localized tourist revenue. They, for the most part, don’t rely on the dole. They are a geography of small cities, local markets, domestic production, and localized agriculture. Iraq is not.
Iraqi population has exploded over the past decades on their oil wealth. They are fundamentally reliant on it. They are not agriculturally self-sufficient. They have virtually no export product beyond oil. So whatever region does not receive the share of oil revenue that they have come to rely on (and the Sunni Arab regions have traditionally received the vast majority), they no longer have the surplus necessary to maintain the standards that they expect. That they demand.
This is why, without an even distribution of oil wealth, there cannot be peace in Iraq–it is the classic problem of the “Arab Street.” Many young men on the dole who have no legitimate prospects to support themselves or their families. But with the lengthy history of oppression of the Kurds and Shi’a, these newly empowered groups will not accept their traditional, disproportionately small share of oil revenues.
This is one source – probably the key source – of mutually-exclusive overlap in Iraq. And the Balkan model does not provide a solution here. This problem is only solved by moving the Iraqi economy away from its dependence on oil.
Can this be done? I think that it can, and I think that it is informative to look at why the former Yugoslavia was more successful in erasing mutually-exclusive overlap: its higher degree of localized self reliance.
If Iraq is to ever erase this mutually-exclusive overlap, it will require a focus on creating localized self-reliance, not on some dream of establishing Iraq as a tourist center or manufacturing center–the solution must be possible within the zero-security environment that currently exists.
Anything that depends on first solving that security problem is getting the cart before the horse. Localized self-reliance–the ability to create a quality life on your own–is something that CAN be done in the current environment, and that CAN then pave the way to remove the reliance on oil and reduce the criticality of the existing oil-based mutually exclusive overlap.
I have only seen one example of this actually taking place: Geoff Lawton’s excellent, Middle East permaculture initiatives. With his wife Nadia he has worked to create local self-reliance in Jordan. And he has worked to create a self-dependent, permaculture orriented village in Iraq.
This is far too little, but it is creating a model for how this CAN be accomplished–something that, if seized upon by other NGOs or governments, could, one day, actually solve this problem.
(25 Oct 2006)
