The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
Commentary on the Flux of Events
The war hawks are certainly banging the drum as hard as possible. I may be a war hawk myself, since it seems to me that engagement with Iraq is inevitable. Having declared our intention to dis-arm Iraq, with or without international help, it's now only a matter of when and how. Failure to engage now would have several awful consequences, not least, Mr. Saddam Hussein (with his new-found religiosity) could brag that he faced down the Great Satan and become a warrior-hero to international Jihadistas. Not to mention the abiding question of what kind of weapons he has, and in what way he might chose to deploy them.
Unlike some other war hawks, perhaps, I admit that the consequences are likely to be unpleasant for the US, no matter what happens, war or not. Even if we manage to get forces into Iraq cleanly (i.e., without a huge battle for Baghdad), our action is likely to galvanize Jihad enthusiasts all over Asia and north Africa. It is inconceivable to me that Saddam has not pre-rigged his oil wells to blow up at the first sight of a US soldier in a bio-hazard suit. Ditto, I'm convinced that he will greet US soldiers with every nasty weapon he does have on hand, and that could mean quite a bit of diverse nastiness -- disease, radiation, nerve gas, you name it. If nothing else, he's liable to leave enormous areas of contamination on the ground for the US to clean up in the aftermath.
The implications for our future oil supplies are therefore bleak. Even assuming we gained control of Iraqi territory, there would be huge expense in decontaminating it and getting the oil infrastructure back in operation -- and I'm not so sure we can actually control the territory there in any case (at least enough to prevent sabotage of oil wells and pipelines. The Saudi regime could cave in the aftermath of an Iraq Attack, and God knows what will be going on in Israel or between Pakistan and India. The stage would be set, in other words, for a comprehensive Asian land war which, beneath all the questions of weapons and ethnic animosity, would end up being a contest for hegemony over central Asian oil reserves. The winner: probably China, since it sits virtually next door to all that oil, and consumes more and more of the stuff as it rapidly industrializes.
As I've observed before, the idea that the US could control territories (or oil pipelines) around the Caspian basin is patently absurd, with or without China in the picture.
We'll be left then with a mess to clean up in Iraq, constant harassment by saboteurs and terroristas, and expenses likely to batter the US dollar. In the background lurk some other unappetizing prospects. The obvious one is a cratering of the ridiculous "consumer economy" -- that is, an economy based on the idea that you can get something for nothing -- goods without production, wealth without labor, imports without exports, assets without wealth, et cetera. The cratering of all these expectations -- with a concurrent cratering of an oil-starved suburbia (and especially of assumed real-estate values contained in it) -- is liable to provoke a disappointed former middle-class into scapegoating, recrimination, and violence at levels not seen since Germany in the 1930s. Americans have been practicing for Civil War II for more than a decade anyhow. It's not an accident that the most popular fashion among the lumpenprole males is camouflage cloth.
Since we are the main customer of China, economic austerity in the US could thrust that country into political turbulence which could before too long end up expressed as armed aggressive expansion.
Finally there is the prospect of trouble with our neighbor to the south. As the American "consumer economy" tanks, Mexico will suffer by an additional order of magnitude. This will produce two daunting and related consequences: political turmoil in Mexico proper, and a flood of people escaping it across the border into the US. We will then have to choose whether to take the idea of a border seriously, or continue to celebrate diversity as the American Southwest becomes, once again, contested territory.