First we had McCain’s first stunning observation, that he doesn’t know much about economics (which he quickly proved to be accurate, given his ludicrous gasoline tax proposal), and now we have this this beauty, in which he runs headlong into the truth and the only negative reaction from the voters is based on a “misunderstanding” of what he said:
McCain: Remarks on oil not about Iraq war:
Republican Sen. John McCain has been forced to clarify his comments suggesting the Iraq war involved U.S. reliance on foreign oil. He said he was talking about the first Gulf War and not the current conflict.
At issue was a comment he made at a town hall-style meeting Friday morning in Denver, Colorado.
“My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East,” McCain said.
The presumptive GOP nominee sought to clarify his remarks later Friday after his campaign plane landed in Phoenix. He said he didn’t mean the U.S. went to war in Iraq five years ago over oil.
“No, no, I was talking about that we had fought the Gulf War for several reasons,” McCain told reporters.
One reason was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, he said. “But also we didn’t want him to have control over the oil, and that part of the world is critical to us because of our dependency on foreign oil, and it’s more important than any other part of the world,” he said.
…
“After we win the war in Iraq, and we are succeeding — and it’s long and hard and tough, with enormous sacrifices — then I’m talking about a security arrangement that may or may not be the same kind of thing we had with Korea after the Korean war was over,” he said.
At issue is McCain’s answer, in January, to a question about Bush’s theory that troops could be in Iraq for 50 years.
McCain said: “Maybe 100. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, that’d be fine with me, and I hope it would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.”
There’s so much here to be enraged about, I barely have the blood pressure points to spare. But let me give it the best, most level-headed shot I can manage:
- He wasn’t talking about the current war in Iraq being over oil, he was talking about the prior war in Iraq being, at least in part, about oil. And the outrage among the US citizens, the calls from our “leaders” to take serous steps, including making (gasp!) personal lifestyle changes to reduce our country’s dependence on imported oil, is… where, exactly? How in the world did we get to this sad, pathetic, overextended point, where a politician can just blithely toss off a recognition that we went to war over oil and no one so much as raises an eyebrow? How many completely innocent civilians were killed in the first Gulf War? And why? So that we can drive our Yukons and Expeditions and countless acres of pickup trucks and snuggle in our ignorance of how the universe works, telling ourselves we can somehow, magically consume and pollute like this forever?
- Yes, McCain claimed the first Gulf War wasn’t entirely about oil. Everyone who believes this will now conveniently forget about all the other atrocities going on around the world before, during, and after that time that the US did nothing or virtually nothing about, sprout wings and fly to the moon. If the American public is this stupid, then we really do deserve the endless parade of marching morons we get in our elected officials.
- Who honestly thinks, after the tidal wave of books and articles we’ve seen showing how the case for the current war in Iraq, originally titled Operation Iraqi Liberation by this administration, incredibly enough, was manufactured out of imaginary WMD’s, that this is anything but a war for oil? No, it’s not an attempt to steal Iraq’s oil (but we’d do so in a heartbeat if we thought we could get away with it), but it is an attempt to keep other countries from locking up access to it through the open market, or taking over other oil production in the region through military force. And don’t forget Iraq’s natural gas reserves; North American natural gas production peaked in 2001, making access to overseas supplies all the more critical in the coming years. (For the record, Iran has vastly larger natural gas reserves than Iraq, about five times those of the US.)
- People constantly talk about the “two oil men in the White House”, but think about what this means. We’ve heard Matt Simmons talk about how he’s sure Bush knows about peak oil, as he asked Bush about what he (Simmons) is running around telling the world, and Bush told him to keep it up. Does anyone here doubt for a second that if Bush were convinced we were facing a near-term peak in oil production coupled with skyrocketing demand from China that his first instinct would be to wage a war to guarantee access to the vast portion of the world’s remaining reserves in the Persian Gulf region?
- What better way, if you’re sitting on offshore oil and natural gas, plus oil in ANWR, and you consider “conservation” to be a four-letter word, to approach the peak than to use up other peoples’ oil first? This is why all the constant yammering about drilling ANWR is so much balloon juice. Purely from the perspective of political tactics, ANWR = abortion. Many people have pointed out that the right wing in the US, which just loves to crow endlessly about outlawing abortion, would never actually do it. First, it would take away one of their most reliable tools for getting their base to vote. Second, it would result in such a mind-blowing political backlash that it would destroy their wing of American politics. Similarly, when it comes to ANWR the politicians aren’t stupid. They know that it won’t make any measurable difference to prices or our “energy dependence”, but it’s a useful talking point. And if they did open up ANWR and the sensitive offshore coastal areas, and the voters saw that it made no substantial difference, they would pay a heavy political price for every ensuing spill or report of immense oil company profits.
- To reprise a question from above about the first Gulf War: How many innocent Iraqi civilians did the US and our “coalition” kill in the current war? Estimates vary greatly, of course, but the most reliable ones seem to be in the hundreds of thousands. Anyone here feel like shopping for a Hummer? I hear they’re running quite the sale.
- The most convenient detail of this entire mess, at least from a politician’s viewpoint, is that there is at least some terrorist activity in the Persian Gulf region. This will give McCain the opening for his 100-year occupation, and it will give Clinton or Obama the grounds for a neck-snapping course reversal on a total withdrawal once in office. We’ve all heard the stories about the US planning to build vast “permanent bases” in Iraq, along with the world’s largest embassy. If you’re going to rule an entire region, including the Caspian Sea, you need somewhere to do it from, right?
- When I set up my CafePress site, I am seriously considering offering the following bumper sticker for clandestine application to friends’ Hummer-esque vehicles: “Your kid went to Iraq, and all I get is 10 miles per gallon.”
May 3rd, 2008 at 11:33 pm
I’m not sure where the surprise and indignation is supposed to be coming from.
In the 19th century, and in modern China, thousands of coal miners died each year in every country producing significant amounts of coal. If the Chinese are happy to have 6,000-10,000 coal miners die each year to keep their lifestyle nice and electrified, why shouldn’t Americans be happy to have 1,000 American soldiers and 1,000 Iraqi insurgents and 10,000 Iraqi civilians die each year to keep them truckin’?
Take a look at this essay by George Orwell, called “Down the Mine”.
“Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug is a sort of world apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing about. Probably majority of people would even prefer not to hear about it.
“In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants–all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.”
To have other people suffer and die for the sake of our comfort is nothing new in history. That people generally are indifferent to the suffering and death of others happening for their comfort is not new, either. Few would like Orwell take the trouble to even think about it - they’d rather not - still less would they go and have a look to see what it’s like.
Rather than being surprised that a political leader or candidate would say such things and ignore these other things, ask yourself how it could be any different.
Imagine a would-be President standing up and saying,
“Men and women are suffering and dying so that you can take your SUV to the burger drivethru, and get cheap foreign-made products. And with climate change, more will suffer and die in future. We want this to stop. No more burgers and SUVs. No more cheap foreign-made products. We are going to tax fossil fuels, use the tax to fund renewable energy, sustainable agriculture and help improve conditions in impoverished countries, and keep raising the tax until there is no more use of fossil fuels, and the foreign countries have reached a decent standard of living.”
Try getting elected on that platform, or any similar problem which tells Americans to consume and waste less, and points out their responsibility for other people’s suffering and deaths.
May 4th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Kiashu: Exceelent points about coal miners and (especially) the US voters.
I remember quite clearly a certain Jimmy Carter trying to do and say just a portion of what you mentioned, and he was ridiculed for it. (How much that had to do with his defeat in 1980 is debatable, but I suspect it did contribute, and probably a little more than most people think.) Sadly, I think that the fallout from that episode was that US politicians learned not to tell the inconvenient truth, to borrow a phrase, but to rely ever more on the convenient myth–hence the constant talk about “achieving energy independence” instead of “saving our butts from peak oil”.
I guess my growing frustration is really with how adamantly voters and consumers cling to their beliefs, even when presented with evidence to the contrary. I had a discussion with a friend just yesterday, someone who is very involved in these issues at a very high level, and she was surprised when I told her how hard it is to get mainstream Americans, including those with kids and, therefore, the most at risk, to believe that we’re facing some very serious problems on the energy and environmental fronts. Sometimes I find it hard to believe, too.
May 4th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
I stress that I’m not picking on Americans here. Almost every kind of society ever has been built on the suffering and deaths of its lower classes. Sometimes they’ve been slaves on plantations, sometimes cocoa farmers in Third World countries, sometimes coal miners down the shaft, sometimes people mining coltan in the Congo at gunpoint, sometimes the poisoning of people unfortunate enough to live near the pumps and mines, and very commonly soldiers dying in a foreign field.
And people don’t want to know about that. People don’t want to know the human cost of their wasteful lifestyle. Notice that even Orwell did not suggest that people could use less coal, so that less people would have to suffer and die in the mines, or that conditions could be improved. He viewed it simply as the natural though regrettable order of things.
I think Jimmy Carter didn’t present his message accurately or well. He told Americans they’d have to suffer a bit. Now, perhaps Americans are made of less stern stuff than me, but I do not think putting on a woolen jumper instead of turning the furnace on is actually in any way “suffering” or “sacrifice”. He would have done better to speak in Kennedy’s terms, to offer a positive vision of how with those changes life would be better, that it would be hard work but that “we do not choose to do these things because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
That the message is hard to get across shouldn’t be a surprise, either. You’re talking about their way of life, their daily lives. When Dick Cheney said, “the American way of life is not negotiable,” I don’t think he just meant he wouldn’t negotiate it - he meant also that changing the day-to-day lives and ways of thinking of 300 million people is a difficult thing to do, and political suicide to even try.
We can be braver than that Dick, though. In marketing there’s a concept of an adoption curve (a bell curve) with any new product or service - there are a few “early adopters” who take it on straight away, lots of “late adopters” who take it on once they’ve seen others try, and then a bunch of “laggards” who only take it on when the other 90% have, and sometimes not at all.
In spending a lot of time talking to peak oil and climate change deniers, what we’re basically doing is focusing on the “laggards”. Haven’t you ever had a friend who refused to get a mobile phone and the internet? How fruitless were any hours spent trying to persuade him to take them on? The marketer thus tries to discover who are the laggards so they can be ignored, and the others concentrated on.
The whole movement of people concerned about the environment, human rights, resource depletion and so on has a problem, I’ve found. They’re drawn into fruitless arguments with the laggards. Further, their problem is that they like to sound the alarm, but don’t always have positive ideas about what to do; or they don’t focus on them in discussions, which comes to the same thing.
See for example, 350.org, McKibben’s attempt to get 350ppm to be the widely-known and widely-accepted target for CO2 concentration. He just wants to spread that information.
Okay, so 350’s our target.
Now what?
What should we actually do?
And really, very often when greenish types get blank looks from people as they describe some horrific problem we have, the blank look isn’t incomprehension or disbelief, it’s, “why is he telling me this? What am I supposed to do about it?”
That’s why I offer things like the one tonne CO2 lifestyle. Is it the only idea? Nope. The best? Probably not. But hey, it’s a suggestion, it’s an answer to the question, “what am I supposed to do?”
We can only ring the alarm for so long. We’re so busy running around making sure everyone heard the alarm that we’ve forgotten to get people into orderly lines to exit the building.
People aren’t inspired by “doom!”, they’re inspired by, “this is what you should do.” Kennedy didn’t inspire people to go to the Moon by saying, “so we don’t lose the race” but by saying “so we can win”.
May 6th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
I have enjoyed your site for a few months now. Thanks.
I told someone many years ago, while studying cold fusion, UFO’s, government secrets, and the 9/11 fiasco, that the purpose of the war in Iraq is to get the populace comfortable with paying high prices for energy. Somebody’s got a plan. A very selfish plan, but a plan. Most of us may not even be in it, or they simply miscalculated the availability of food and the volatility of the environment changes from carbon. Either way, someone has very high levels of technology squirreled away and they only get one chance to sell it at a very high price. How much would you pay for a car that never needs fuel?
It doesn’t matter what the technology is, it has to involve a deeper understanding of the universe than we have been led to through tightly controlled media and ‘education’ Systems of systems. The simple fact of the existence of such technology is obfuscated through easily implemented disinformation programs.
Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? I don’t care. I have nothing to gain from it at this point in time. I just think it should be considered that killing a couple of thousand people is nothing compared to selling the world all of its future energy and eliminating the entire economic infrastructure of power systems, gas stations, oil wells, most utilities, etc.
And most people think that UFO’s are kept secret for religious reasons..Ha. Religion is only another form of marketing. It plays well in this context.
I’m also not suggesting that there is anything wrong with your suggestions, especially the one tonne lifestyle. Great stuff, and the more we get people in control of their own energy destiny, the less impact the future will have, regardless of the timing of disclosures, if they even happen in our lifetimes. Better to make life better Now than wait for someone else to do it for us.
The sooner we slow down and turn off the TVs, the sooner we can start to really examine our universe in depth. There is much more to science than computer games.
P.S. keep an eye on Dick, especially after he leaves the bunker. “Heare there be monsters, Maitey!”