JAMES KUNSTLER: Not Optional

[Tace]

James Kunstler -- Clusterfuck Nation

This is how deluded the American public is now: Various polls are showing that the war in Iraq has reached new lows of unpopularity. The dumb bunnies in the news media are implying that when the numbers get low enough, we will pull our troops out and go home.

This is not going to happen. Our inordinate hubris has led us to believe that this conflict is optional.

Notice, too, that the war-weary public has done, and continues to do, nothing to change its habits of profligate oil use which have driven us to project our military into the Middle East. We have not even begun a discussion of what we might do. We just expect to keep running American society exactly the way it has been set up to run -- as a nonstop demolition derby, with hamburgers and fries between laps around the freeway.

At the highest level of public discourse, the cluelessness is shocking. The New York Times Sunday Book Review ran a front-page piece yesterday on Francis Fukuyama's latest salvo, America at the Crossroads, which is largely about our Middle East war policy, without once using the word "oil." The reviewer, Paul Berman, is not a dummy, but he has evidently flown up the national rectum with the rest of the people who are paid to think in our society. To these guys, the whole issue is an effete argument over strategic fashions such as "realistic Wilsonianism."

more

http://worldnewstrust.org/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=2858

[IndyOp]

1. Disagree. We could extricate ourselves - with pain -

but it can be done. We could start treating Mexico and Venezuala with respect and buy oil from them. Outlaw Hummers and SUV's. Transition 'truckers' back into railroaders. Put the VAST amounts of money we are using to KILL people and put it into alternative sources.

It WILL be painful, very painful. It can and MUST be done.

[Strelnikov_]

2. "We Have To Make Other Arrangements And We Have To Make Them Now"

He is saying what I have been saying. Thinking we can simply pull back from the Middle East, without a WW II level of industrial and societal transformation, is courting suicide.

You can spin out any number of strategic scenarios about what is liable to happen in the Middle East from here on, with or without America trying to run a police station there, and none of them are good. They range from Iran gaining control of twenty percent of the world's remaining oil, to a free-for-all world war joined by virtually all the nations capable of projecting military power into the region. We'd be stuck with the consequences because we are otherwise too cowardly, lazy, and greedy to face our situation at home -- which is simply that we cannot keep running a drive-in utopia. We have to make other arrangements and we have to make them now.

[Strelnikov_]

3. Pulling Back From The ME Without A WW II Level Societal/Infrastructure

transformation virtually ensures disaster.

The Chimp has placed the nation in a Catch 22 over the near term (5 yrs +/-). The only way out over the long term to initiate the greatest energy transformation ever undertaken, today, so in 5 yrs. it will be far enough along we can pull back from the Middle East.

See anything happening?

The plain truth is, if anything happens to upset the current management and allocation system of the the global oil markets, the industrial economies of the world will collapse, and America's will collapse hardest and worst because of the way we have arranged things for ourselves. The global oil markets currently revolve around Middle East oil production. If the region is overcome by instability, than it's simply GAME OVER.

You can spin out any number of strategic scenarios about what is liable to happen in the Middle East from here on, with or without America trying to run a police station there, and none of them are good. They range from Iran gaining control of twenty percent of the world's remaining oil, to a free-for-all world war joined by virtually all the nations capable of projecting military power into the region. We'd be stuck with the consequences because we are otherwise too cowardly, lazy, and greedy to face our situation at home -- which is simply that we cannot keep running a drive-in utopia. We have to make other arrangements and we have to make them now.

On Edit:

Link to his blog w/comments. Some of the frequent posters, like jorge, are entertaining.
http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2006/03/not_optional.html#comments