It’s the Oil, Stupid

As a wave of anti-Islamic hysteria sweeps the U.S. on the 9th anniversary of 9/11, patriotic pundits tell us that this behavior runs counter to our basic notion of American pluralistic tolerance and inclusiveness. Oh, really? Tell that to the Indians (the kind on the buffalo nickel, not the citizens of India). In the last 150 years, in addition to the Indians, the following groups have been on the receiving end of intolerance, bigotry, xenophobia, prejudice, racial violence, and outright hatred from good upstanding patriotic Americans— Irish Catholics, non-Catholic Irish, Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Mexicans, Italians, people with black-colored skin, people with brown skin who look like they might have a tinge of African ancestry, Jews, non-Jews who have Jewish sounding surnames, and most recently the Muslims. Add to this list, anyone who might have once entertained a private curiosity about Communism, or anyone who ever had sex with someone of their own gender. I apologize to anyone I might have overlooked who’s earned America’s contempt by being “different.”

This analysis would seem to suggest that Muslims are merely the latest group being picked on by a nation that has always picked on one sub group or another. Actually, the Muslim situation is far different. None of the other groups mentioned above owned any oil. The Indians, back in the early days, didn’t have any oil, but they controlled every other natural resource on the North American continent, and for this they were subjected to a century of genocidal extermination. Our government leaders constantly tell us that we, as a nation, are not at war with Islam. Yesterday, on 9/11, Obama expanded this to say, “We are not, and never will be at war with Islam.” The Bureau of Indian Affairs spouted pretty much the same message throughout the nineteenth century to a people who were being slaughtered or driven into refugee status. Watch and see what would happen if Saudi Arabia, the home of Mecca and the very center of Islam, ever cut off our supply of oil.

A Brief History of World War III... 9-11 Was Worse Than We Thought

The essence of naiveté is the failure to imagine. We had always assumed that our enemies were distant and compartmentalized. We assumed that our sophisticated and undetectable surveillance watched them, and distantly tracked their movements and accessed their authenticity while wielding our own unimaginable authority, endeavoring all the while to verify predicted tropisms that had been perfectly foreseen in our war game planning.

Looking back now, the surprising thing about 9-11 is that, at the time, it came as such a surprise. Pearl Harbor had also come as a complete surprise, but that attack had come from a distant island with a small population of only 75 million who plotted against us from across the largest ocean on earth. But in the half century since Pearl Harbor, the number of human beings on the planet had tripled, and modern air travel had put every spot on earth within a day’s travel time. We felt safe because we spent more on our military-industrial machine than the entire rest of the world was spending on their combined armaments. We had a military presence in 130 foreign countries. These were supposed to be sovereign nations, but we figured that was okay with everyone because we were the good guys. We had perfectly positioned ourselves to prevent another Pearl Harbor. Problem is, we lacked imagination. The 9-11 attackers were able to conceive, plan, organize, orchestrate, implement, and execute something that our superstar Generals in the Pentagon could not even imagine. By thinking at least five steps ahead of us, they had finally learned how to fight us, but it took them 48 years to do it.

In 1948 when Saudi Arabia started shipping oil abroad, and the true extent of the Saudi oil deposits could be calculated, the motive was there for eventually going to war. The founding of the country of Israel gave us a kind of forward operating base, and our policy of propping-up the so-called democratic regimes in Egypt and Lebanon was intended to give us allies in the area. As each of these things came into being, we thought that they were stabilizing forces working to our benefit. For the Muslims and Arabs in the area, however, our efforts in the Middle East only intensified their suspicion and distrust of the U.S.A.

Then in 1953, the CIA clandestinely deposed the rightful ruler of Iran and installed the Shah. To the extent that you can trace the origin of 9-11 to a single event, that was probably the one, and the average American didn't even notice. We were too busy watching Senator Joe McCarthy on TV and worrying about whether our neighbor might be a Communist, because we thought the Communists would be our adversary in the next war. Little did we know that war was already underway and the real enemy was totally off our radar. We would stay clueless until September 11, 2001.

The enemy that would eventually become al-Qaeda received a huge boost in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution in Tehran. This was the catalyst for the spawning of a radical fundamentalist faction within the Islamic religion, and that radicalized minority might have stayed bottled up in Iran if it had not been for the emergence and growth of the Internet. With the Internet, the means finally existed for hard core Muslim fundamentalist radicals to link up with each other from anywhere on earth. The result was al-Qaeda, and the result of al-Qaeda was 9-11.

Looking forward we know three things, none of them positive for the United States. Thanks to the success of the 9-11 attack, al-Qaeda now knows that even a small amount of destruction will be magnified a thousand fold by disruption in the complexities of our culture. Secondly, al-Qaeda has learned to franchise itself so that future attacks can come from any location and any culture on earth. And lastly, al-Qaeda has seen that the American intelligence apparatus is vulnerable because it lacks the ability to connect the dots.

Human events don’t happen in the isolation of a vacuum, and 9-11 was no exception to that rule.

Seduced By "Energy Girl"

I call her “Energy Girl.” We’ve all come to know her through her television commercials on behalf of the oil and gas industry. She first appears to us at some distance from the camera, dressed always in a black pants suit, and then she begins to walk toward us with her long slender legs and black high heel shoes partially hidden by the cuff of her black trousers, gliding in long elegant effortless strides, talking to us all the while in a reassuring voice about the abundance of energy in our own back yard. “Right here in North America, we have enough energy to power 50 million cars and 100 million homes for the next 80 years.” By the time she finishes this message, she’s close to the camera, and with her shoulder length blond hair and blue eyes she looks remarkably like the actress, Laura Linney. Energy Girl exudes reassuring innocence and integrity. Surely she wouldn’t lie to us. Would she?

There’s a problem. That North American energy is abundant, but lethal. Energy Girl is telling us a half truth. In Western Canada, on the border between Alberta and British Columbia, there is probably as much oil as in the Saudi Arabian peninsula. But whereas the Arabian oil is in subterranean pools of highly pure sweet crude, the Canadian oil is bound to rock and sand in something called the tar sands. To free the oil, the rock and sand is strip mined and then blasted with high pressure steam. It takes 200 gallons of pure water (steam) to make one gallon of oil. Amazingly, although pure water is the most precious commodity on earth, the supply of water isn’t any problem. Abundant glaciers cover British Columbian mountains at that high latitude, and the population of Canadians in that part of their country is quite sparse. One can debate about the morality of using the world’s most precious resource to extract oil, but in Canada there is plenty to go around. The problem is not with supply, but with disposal. For each gallon of oil, 200 gallons of contaminated water is created. What once was the liquid of life has become the liquid of death, for the water left over from the oil extraction process is some of the most toxic fluid on earth. British Petroleum (the company who first hired Energy Girl) initially started disposing of the contaminated water by storing it in a lake behind a thirty foot high earthen dam. Over the years, the dam has grown to 300 feet in height, and it is now the largest earthen dam on the planet. The huge and growing lake of lethal black water behind the dam is easily visible from space, and the nearby strip mine is even larger. Ducks that land on the lake die within a minute.

Energy Girl has seduced us into thinking we have a viable alternative to foreign oil. Speaking for myself, I say give me the old fashioned oil, and let the Muslims keep the profit. There are worse things in the world than rich Arabs.