Re: <nettime> Iraq: The Way Forward

["Benjamin Geer" <benjamin.geer@gmail.com>]

On 11/01/07, Michael H Goldhaber <mgoldh@well.com> wrote:

> b) Venice is in fact becoming de-populated, with its natives moving
> to the car-unfree mainland;

That's because tourism has driven up real estate prices to the point
where locals can no longer afford to live there.  There are ways to
prevent this from occurring in car-free cities, and some of these are
discussed in the book _Carfree Cities_.  The author emphasises that
Venice is not an ideal car-free city, and that it should be possible
to build better ones; hence his detailed design proposal.

> c) it is a complete mistake to think that Americans' access to oil
> depends on having troops in Iraq  =97or anywhere in the middle east
> for that matter.

How do you explain the proliferation of US military bases in the
Middle East[1] if those bases aren't intended to protect American
access to oil?[2]

> On this last point, when Iran threw out the Shah and held the
> American embassy staff hostage, it continued to sell oil on the
> world market, like any other OPEC country.

Iran's oil production plummeted in 1979, and oil prices shot up as a
result.[3][4]

> As it is, the invasion of Iraq has certainly not increased US oil
> supplies or lowered prices, but in fact done the opposite. The war
> is conceivably a war for oil-company profits (which have gone way up
> since it started) but not a war for oil itself.

The invasion of Iraq looks to me like a colossal miscalculation, but I
find it difficult to explain except as an attempt to turn Iraq into an
extension of the Arabian peninsula, i.e. of an oil-rich region with
US-friendly rulers and plenty of American military bases.

Ben

[1] http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/centcom.htm
[2] http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050425/klare
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_energy_crisis
[4] http://www.wtrg.com/prices.htm


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