by Jeff Jones and Eleanor Stein
Part I
On the march against the war in Washington, D.C. on January 27th, thousands of marchers wore buttons proclaiming, "No Blood for Oil," and some held placards demanding "The Separation of Oil and State." These slogans only begin to explain the link between war and environment, and especially, today, between war and warming. It was Earth First! leader Judi Bari who framed the demand best: "No war for oil. And no oil for war." Because we not only have to stop oil wars, we have to renounce the oil economy and the destructive and wasteful use of fossil fuels. As energy conservation visionary Amory Lovins points out, the Pentagon is the world's largest buyer of oil and the nation's largest single user of energy -- five billion gallons a year, 85 percent of all government energy use.
The connections have never been as visible or as urgent as they are today. Understanding the link between America's Middle East strategy and what Michael Klare calls the militarization of U.S. national energy policy reveals a new imperative for both the environmental and antiwar movements. We must now be working to unite these struggles to combine moral outrage at a criminal war with our determination to transform the fossil-fueled American Way of Life. Only this unified approach can ultimately eliminate the U.S. government's imperative for its Middle East interventions ...
To rally support for both the Bush Administration's energy policy and the Iraq War, Dick Cheney famously stated that "the American way of life is non-negotiable." That is his ultimate defense of the human and economic costs of the government's strategies. It started early. Environmentalists remember that Cheney's private meeting with energy and petroleum industry CEOs (which, incidentally, took place in New Orleans) during the administration's transition became the first test case of the Bush/Cheney policy of executive privilege. Six years later, we still don't know what was discussed at that meeting. Environmentalists also recall that the first campaign promise the new president broke was his vow to do something about emissions of CO2 , the primary greenhouse gas. Such a promise, uttered during the campaign in order to undercut Al Gore's strongest issue, was never intended to be kept.
Now we are deep into the consequences. The United States is losing the war, our military cannot cope with the urban insurgency in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, and the adventure is taking an unbelievable toll in human suffering – IraqBodyCount.org (1/15/07) reports nearly 60,000 Iraqi civilians killed by direct U.S. military intervention, with another study in the British medical journal Lancet estimating a death toll at over 600,000. The costs of the war in taxpayer dollars are also exceeding the GDP of most of the world's nations, and will soon exceed the cost of the Vietnam War, according to Harper's. For the corporate military suppliers such as Halliburton, profits are rising (so are share prices -- Halliburton is up about 400 percent with a split and regular dividends since Bush was elected) and everything is going fine, thank you, except that the plan to take control of the oil reserve under the western Iraqi desert -- the world's largest untapped field -- is unraveling. That possibility, as much as any other, seems to have been the reason for mobilizing the James Baker-Lee Hamilton-led Iraq Study Group. An oil man himself, Baker has stepped in with an emergency plan that hopelessly attempts to restore order to the strategy and prevent the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld fiasco from ending in a total rout for U.S. Middle Eastern energy interests ...
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/js070307.html
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