NOTE: this piece was written in late 1990, during the build up ("Operation Desert Shield") to the 1st Gulf War ("Operation Desert Storm").

MIDEAST HISTORY
The Mideast is known as "the cradle of civilization."  Mesopotamia, Babylon, Persia, Egypt, and many other empires flourished before the birth of Christ.  The cause of their rise and decline has been debated for many years, but it's increasingly apparent that the depletion of natural resources like trees and topsoil played a big part.  It's ironic that, three thousand years later, the natural resources of the Middle East are again pivotal to the fate of the greatest empires the world the world has ever seen.

Since the days of the Crusades, the relationship between Europe and the Mideast has been one of hostility and alienation.  Although Moorish conquests and the Ottoman Empire for a brief time threatened Europe's borders, since the Renaissance the relationship has been increasingly one-sided.  The technological superiority of the European militaries made it possible for them to decisively take control over much of the Mideast over the last two hundred years, a process of colonization that was only reversed in the aftermath of World War II.  When the colonial powers pulled out, they did all they could to make sure that the "special relationship" between colonizer and colonized would remain intact, by establishing puppet regimes which would not do anything irresponsible like using a country's natural wealth for the benefit of its own people.  And when the colonial powers left, they drew the borders, based not on tribes or nationalities, but rather on economics and European and American power politics.

One particularly obvious example of this is the way in which the British drew the borders of Kuwait.  Part of Iraq under the Ottomans, Kuwait was disincluded by British wanting easy access to oil and no inconvenient majority of poor Arabs who might expect some benefit from the wealth it would generate.  Let's use an American analogy.  Suppose seventy-five years ago Mexico invaded west Texas with all its oil, and set up a new country there which got rich off oil while the rest of Texas starved.  Don't you think that would cause some long-standing resentment?

GREED AT THE POINT OF A GUN: U.S. FOREIGN POLICY AND U.S. ENERGY POLICY
The word "imperialism" is often used to criticize U.S. foreign policy.  It's a loaded word, and many people turn off when they hear it.  However, everyone needs to understand the reality behind the word.  Declassified U.S. documents clearly show the operational mentality.  In 1948, key American policymaker George Kennan wrote these words in an official National Security Council planning document:

. . . we have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. . . . In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment.  Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.  To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.  We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. . . . We should cease to talk about vague and . . . unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. . . . The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.  The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

We need to be clear that Kennan's opinions are not the far-out ravings of some right-wing nut, but rather represent the solid consensus of this country's rulers.  These policies have been applied mercilessly in the Middle East, where World War II never really ended.  The region is still torn apart by conflicts with their roots in the ending of the big war, and there have been many interventions to "pacify" the region.  Let's look at some of this history:

1948: Israel is founded, with U.S. and British military support; 200,000 Palestinians are driven from their homes;
1953: CIA-supported coup in Iran overthrows nationalist Mossadeq and restores the brutal Shah to power;
1955: British crush nationalist movement in Oman;
1958: U.S. intervenes in Lebanon; British intervene in Jordan to support the king;
1961: Kuwait is founded over Iraqi objections;
1967: Six Day War--Israel attacks Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt;
1978: Israel invades Lebanon, creating 265,000 more refugees;
1982: Israel invades Lebanon again carrying out the Sabra and Shatila massacres;
1983: U.S. shells the coast of Lebanon; U.S. Marines bombed by Hezbulloh

Of course, the Iraqis have historically received their fair share of support from the imperialists.  Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party in Iraq was supported by the U.S. against the communists; in essence, the CIA helped Hussein's party attain power.  It's a similiar situation to Panama, where [Manuel] Noriega (drugs and all) was a great asset to the United States until he stopped toeing the line.

When Iraq declared war on Iran in 1980, the U.S. and its allies were quite pleased, and Iraq was portrayed as more or less on the right side through most of the war.  Iraqi oil was shipped through the gulf in U.S.-flagged Kuwaiti tankers.  France in particular sold billions' worth of weapons (like the Exocet missile which tore into the U.S.S. Stark) to Iraq, which was 40% of France's arms market by the mid-1980s.

In 1986 it was discovered that the U.S. had also been making substantial shipments of weapons to Iran, weapons which had enabled the Iranians to fight much better than they otherwise would have, and which resulted in prolonging the war and increasing the casualties on both sides.  Just think about it: an eight-year war with over a million casualties, supported on both sides by the U.S. and its allies.

It bears pointing out that ten years before, the U.S. had encouraged the Kurds (an oppressed nationality group who live in Iran and Iraq) to rebel.  The Kurds were given vague promises of U.S. assistance if they fought the Iraqi government, and then were completely sold out when it was convenient, to help the Iranians get more influence in OPEC.  They were slaughtered, of course.  Henry Kissinger, when asked about this double-cross by the U.S. Congress, simply replied that "covert action should not be confused with missionary work."  Life is cheap, as long as the oil keeps flowing, and the arms dealers make a profit. . . .

U.S. ENERGY POLICY
It's clear that oil is a key factor in the crisis.  Why is it so important to the U.S.?  To understand how we've gotten so hooked on oil, we need to go back and look at how U.S. energy policy has developed over time, to the benefit of neither workers, consumers, nor the environment.

The U.S., which has 6% of the world's population, consumes 25% of the world's energy.  Industrial production in the U.S. takes twice as much energy per unit as in Japan or West Germany.  How did this happen?  Not by accident, you can be sure.  Japan and Germany, which both import much of their oil, see that conservation is in their interest.  But higher oil usage in the U.S. has translated into bigger profits for U.S.-based oil companies, who have continually blocked attempts to encourage conservation and a shift to renewable resources in this country.

Oil companies who want to sell as much as possible, an economic system based upon the false presumption that perpetual growth is possible on a finite planet, and a U.S. government that wants to keep control of the world's resources.  How have their policies played themselves out in our daily lives?  I will discuss two specific issues: U.S. transportation policy, and the rise and fall of Project Independence, a serious attempt at envisioning a sustainable path carried out fifteen years ago.

Transportation
There's no clearer way to see the influence of big business and big money over U.S. policy than looking at the rise of the automobile.  There are many problems with the automobile, as we all know:

• It is the biggest single source of greenhouse gases and the largest single cause of urban smog;
• It's wasteful of fuel--only one-seventh as efficient as rail transportation;
• It's wasteful of space--10% of our fertile land is used for roads, highways, and parking lots, and an estimated half the land in an average U.S. city (2/3 in Los Angeles) is used for cars;
• It's wasteful of time; there's a 435% increase in traffic congestion projected between 1985-2005 in California, where the average vehicle speed is expected to drop from 35mph to around 15--Los Angeles drivers use 25% of their gas just idling in traffic jams, while traffic in London today moves as fast as it did in the days of horses and carriages;
• It's unhealthy, as one University of California study suggests that gas exhaust leads to 30,000 deaths annually, while accidents claim 48,000, an estimated $49 billion is spent annually in auto-accident related medical expenses, and personal autos are estimated to be three times as dangerous as rail transit and nearly twice as many U.S. citizens have died on the highway than in U.S. wars since 1776--isn't this a human rights question?
• It's expensive--local, state, and national government spend about $2,400 annually per car, or about &300 billion per year, according to Stanly Hart of the Sierra Club.
• Do-it-yourself auto mechanics dump an Exxon Valdez-worth of used motor oil every 2-12 weeks into U.S. water, and over 650 million cars have been junked since 1900, along with billions of tires which breed mosquitoes, poison groundwater, and catch fire.

Mass transit got off to a pretty good start in this century.  Partly as a result of popular struggles for better services, cities invested tremendous amounts in efficient rail systems in the 20s and 30s.  What happened to them is one of the sorrier stories in the history of U.S. monopoly capitalism, and gives the lie to the continued assertion that the "free market" always seeks out efficiency.

In 1935, L.A. had one of the largest mass transit systems in the world, covering a 75-mile radius with over 3,000 efficient and quiet electric trams which carried 80 million passengers every year.  However, the very efficiency of rail transit (six-to-one over trucks) is what made it unattractive to General Motors and Standard Oil.  Using dummy companies as fronts, these corporate collaborators "privatized" and gutted the L.A. mass transit system, forcing the populace increasingly to rely on private cars.  Through similar tactics, corporations in the rubber, concrete, oil, and motor industries managed to eliminate 88% of the nation's electric-streetcar network because it was too efficient and did not generate enough revenues.  As a result of this quite deliberate corporate conspiracy, mass transit has been cut 50% since its 1950s peak, back to 1900 levels.

Continuing actions by Big Auto and Big Oil are par for the course.  Personal auto expenses are tax deductible, but mass transit is not, thanks to the auto lobby.  In 1986, the automakers succeeded in rolling back slightly higher mileage standards, because (with all that cheap Kuwaiti oil sloshing around) Americans wanted bigger cars again.  Any mandated increases in gaz mileage, pollution control, or cuts in horsepower or size have been treated as nothing short of treason to the American Way by auto industry lobbyists.  Even buses are just too efficient; they'd rather have us all driving around in 10-mile per gallon boats, one per driver.

Free mass transit was experimented with during the 1970s by a number of cities, and the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment estimated that running systems free would double ridership (which would result, of course, in a corresponding reduction in car usage).  But we can't have such socialist subsidies for something so efficient and sensible as mass transportation.  We need to instead have capitalist subsidies so everyone can drive their own car on taxpayer-provided roads and highways which are monitored by taxpayer-paid state patrols, and fill their cars with Middle East gasoline paid for with tax-supported defense money (and now the blood of young men), cars which pollute the air, water, and land, the costs of which again are passed back to the taxpayer, along with much of the medical expenses which again are passed back to society at large.  Long live the free market!

This year [1990], [U.S. President George Herbert Walker] Bush wants to cut 20% from federal mass-transit subsidies and completely eliminate funding for Amtrack.  With the K$2.5 we spend a month [on the military buildup] in the Persian Gulf, we could double the annual budget of both programs.

Rise and Fall of "Project Independence"
The oil price increases of the early 1970s led to a Nixon-mandated study of the possibilities for making the U.S. energy independent.  This study, named "Project Independence," was given a $10 billion budget, and came up with some remarkable recommendations, including:

• Solar energy & natural ventilation to heat and cool houses;
• Increased use of photovoltaics;
• Increased use of biofuels such as methanol;
• Strong incentives for bicycle use;
• Electric cars;
• A decisive move away from air travel and back to rail transport;
• Organic farms ringing cities and increasingly moving inward, to reduce transportation;
• Increased use of cottage industries and telecommuting.

And of course, the corporate sector eventually had the program totally gutted by getting [President Ronald] Reagan into power, who cut funds for conservation by 75%, renewable energy research by 85%, ended tax incentives for solar power, while aggressively pushing for new oil drilling in some of the most ecologically sensitive areas of the U.S.--a push that's now intensified.  Subsidizing renewable energy is out of the question, but subsidizing Mobil's security in the Persian Gulf is expected.  When military subsidies are figured in, the U.S. paid at least $80/barrel in 1989, not counting interest on previous military excursions to secure control, which (depending on how you count it) raises the figure to the hundreds of dollars per barrel.

And we must not forget the sheer human cost of the fossil fuel business.  Areas like Brazil's Valley of Death, Cancer Alley in Louisiana, and the Triangle of Death in Poland show that intensive hydrocarbon-based industry is a problem no matter what kind of economic system you have: birth defects, lung disease, and cancers are an inseparable part of this type of industry, and are increasing in the industrialized countries around the world, according to the American Cancer Society.  The toxic byproducts of the oil business are strangling all of us.

RECENT HISTORY OF THE CRISIS
One of the central causes of the conflict is the Rumalia oil field, which is mostly in Iraq but extends under a small part of Kuwait.  The two countries have never negotiated a settlement over this oil, and Iraq claims Kuwait owes $2.4 billion in oil pumped from the field.  Iraq had an international surplus of $37 billion in 1980, which dropped to an international debt of $80 billion in 1989, largely due to the Iran war.  Much of this money was borrowed from Kuwait.  Iraq needed higher oil prices in the short-term to pay back these debts, but Kuwait continued to overpump, to keep volume up and prices low.  Kuwait was 700,000 barrels over its OPEC quota of 1.1 million barrels in 1989.  The alternatives for debt-pressed Iraq were quite limited: either impose further austerity measures on its war-weary population, or attack one of the main reasons for its financial problems and double its oil supplies in the process.

Of course, Kuwait has its side of the story too.  Kuwait's perspective seems to be identical to the major U.S. oil companies: that oil price hikes discourage consumption and encourage conservation, which is bad for OPEC in the long-term.  As a result of these policies, gas prices in the U.S. at the time of the invasion were at their lowest in 40 years, when inflation is taken into account.  Iraq claims that these depressed prices have cost it $14 billion in lost oil revenues.  Many analysts agree that there is no question Kuwait was engaging in economic warfare to force Hussein to the bargaining table.  Not only Hussein, but much of the Iraqi intelligentsia feels that Iraq is victim of aggression--hence the depth of his support in Iraq.  If he were truly a terrorizing despot with no legitimate grievances, he would face dire opposition from his people.

One final point that bears mentioning is that, the night before the invasion, the U.S. ambassador told the Iraqis that the U.S. had no opinion on Iraq's "border disagreement" with Kuwait, which was translated as a go-ahead for invasion by the Iraqis.  Having an understanding of these things does not mean that one supports the Iraqi invasion.  At the same time, however, true conflict resolution means getting at the roots of disagreements, and hearing everyone's side of the story.  This had been quite absent in the U.S. media, which has done its best to mystify Arab motivations and resentments by repeated stereotyping of Arabs as insane fundamentalist terrorists who cannot have any rational reasons for doing the things they do.

IMPLICATIONS
What about ecological context?  We still can't really appreciate the gravity of the current political situation until we understand what's going on ecologically.  There's no need to go into a lot of numbers here.  Briefly: topsoil is eroding all over the planet, and when it's gone, we won't be able to grow food.  The governments of Australia and New Zealand are issuing ultraviolet alerts, because the ozone is so far gone that anyone who goes out is risking skin cancer.  Most of our water is polluted.  We'll lose the last of the world's forests in ten years at the current rate of cutting.  The few fish left in the oceans after the drift-net strip-mining are being poisoned by toxis and radioactive dumping.  In Minnesota, mining interests want to destroy the top one-third of the state for a few quick bucks worth of gold and uranium, metals that take cyanide and strong acids to process.  And the situation is much worse in the Third World, where they've rarely had the economic surplus to afford ecological protection, and where any country that tries to protect its resources at the expense of the multinational corporations at best will get slapped around by the International Monetary Fund, and at worst will get subverted by the CIA.

What does all this have to do with the Persian Gulf?  Everything.  There's an ecological crisis, and now we've got a war on top of that?  There goes the [post-Cold War] "peace dividend."  War is a waste and a drain on the entire planet's ecological system.  It may provide an economic "shot in the arm" in the short term, but in reality it's a huge waste of human resources, ingenuity, and material resources desperately needed for ecological reconstruction.  War adds to the deficit, and contributes to pressure for a continued increase in economic activity.  It's important to realize what the deficit really means.  All debts are fundamentally a claim upon future labor, society's declining material resources and the Earth's endangered environment; they require that a set amount of productive activity will take place at a time when the raw materials for that productivity are in shorter and shorter supply.  Increased deficits now mean that even more oil will have to be burned later to pay the bills.  And who's going to have to pay these bills?  Not the people who ran them up; they're going to be in their graves when the debts come due.  It's today's young people who are going to be stuck with the tab, both for the party and for the war.

Increased oil prices will hit hard around the world.  Poorer countries will be forced to increase the exploitation of their environment to make foreign exchange to pay for increased oil prices.  Unlike fifteen years ago, there is no surplus of money to borrow from international sources, and many of these countries are defaulting on the debts they already owe.  For decades, these countries have been under tremendous pressure to "modernize" their societies, to become more dependent on oil-based agriculture, transportation, and intensive industrialism, and to move away from smaller-scale, community-based relationships with the land.  They're in a fix right now; they can't go back, and they can't go forward without the oil.  Their only alternatives to make the money they need will be to abuse their cropland, cut their trees, catch all their fish, and give in to toxic imperialism by taking in the industrial world's poisons.  Ecological protection will once again be at the bottom of the list; future generations just can't compete with starving babies today, even if people at some level realize that today's decisions will mean tremendous suffering and even greater starvation in a decade.

And more specifically to the Middle East, there already are tremendous problems with refugees developing.  There are 150,000 in Jordan, and 70,000 in Turkey, mostly immigrant workers from South Asia nations like India.  Many left their homes in Asian countries because of economic and ecological crises there.  Their families are often dependent on wages sent back home, and now that those have been lost ecological and economic pressures there will increase even more.  In the United States, the energy companies have not wasted any time capitalizing on the war situation.  There is rapidly increasing pressure for more nuclear power even though there are currently 20,000 tons of high level nukewaste sitting in "temporary" pools around the country right now that no-one knows what to do with.  There is also mounting pressure to give the oil companies a free hand to drill wherever they want, in sensitive marine ecosystems, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and other places.  There will be increased refining of dirtier oil, which is more polluting and more energy-intensive to refine.  Environmental restraints on the oil industry will be increasingly attacked as "detrimental to U.S. energy self-sufficiency."  Has anyone heard of the tanker-oil-rig slalom course off California?  This plan called for two one mile-wide shipping lanes in either direction separated by a two-mile wide median with offshore oil platforms (remember the Exxon Valdez was a mile off course).  Idiotic plans like this will be more difficult to stop, and in general the livelihoods of fishermen and others who live from the sea will be increasingly threatened.

And the irony is that there are only 5.5 billion gallons estimated on the entire outer continental shelf; 1/3 of which could be saved by raising the miles per gallon of new U.S. cars to 38.  A 50% increase in public transit could save more than 3 billion barrels over 20 years, which is more than three times the amount that the Department of the Interior estimates lies off the entire Atlantic coast.  Again, where are our priorities?  According to the Department of Energy, over 80% of U.S. needs could be met through conservation and domestically-produced renewable fuels by the year 2010.  But U.S. Energy Secretary Watkins, interviewed in last August [1990] about the need for conservation, said U.S. drivers should just put more air in their tires.  The war also provides military-industrial justification for continued military spending.  The Pentagon and its contractors were getting seriously worried about peace breaking out after the end of the Cold War, and the Iraqi invasion must have come as a Godsend to them.  We're shipping incredibly huge amounts of weapons to the Saudis, Israelis, and making it possible for a lot of General Dynamics' executives to keep making their payments on that second Mercedes that might otherwise have been lost to the end of the Cold War.  These people know which side their bread is buttered on.

And thanks to Ronald Reagan's huge military buildup, there are now lots of high-tech military toys in the hands of boys who want to play.  Their fingers were getting pretty itchy, and they leapt with glee at the chance to keep their jobs and try out all this high-tech murder gadgetry that's been gathering dust for the past ten years.  The U.S. intervention in the Gulf is costing about $2.5 billion dollars every month.  For Minnesota, that's about $22 million a month, or $267 million a year.  $2.5 billion is just about what the Worldwatch Institute estimates it would take to eliminate illiteracy worldwide over the next decade.  Two months, or $5 billion, is the annual cost of the proposed U.N. Action Plan to halt Third World desertification over 20 years.  Two month's of Minnesota's share would be just about enough to increase the Aid For Dependent Children grant by 10% for every welfare family, and give them childcare so they can get off of welfare.  With seven months, we could build every homeless person in Minnesota a house. And so on. . . .

It bears point out that all U.S. interventions since the end of World War II has been against people of color.  There's a real racist drumbeat to the media coverage of the Gulf crisis in combination with the economic situation, even though the U.S. was well into a recession before Iraq invaded Kuwait.  This country has always sought to blame its problems on someone else, and Arabs have been scapegoats many times before.  In Lawrence, Kansas, for example, a big banner was hung reading "Get the gas and kick their ass."  Pictures went out around the world, including the Mideast.  The war hysteria is clearly building.  But not everyone's into it.  According to the Wall Street Journal and NBC, only 41% of African-Americans support the war in the Persian Gulf, while 74% of whites do.  And the New York Times reports that poor and working-class people are much less supportive of the war than are the rich.

The bottom line is that the U.S. cannot treat the Mideast like Central America; it will be as bad or worse than Vietnam.  Apparent U.S. plans for a long-term presence in Saudi Arabia are dangerous.  If there's a long-term presence in Saudi Arabia and the region, the current resentment and instability will only intensify.  The Arabs see the invasion of Kuwait as a regional matter, and Arab problem.  There's an old Arab saying: "Me and my brother against my cousin; me and my cousin against a stranger."  Thus, while the Iraqi aggression was opposed by many Arabs, the heavyhanded U.S. intervention has only complicated the situation and effectively created more support for Hussein.  The world may be against Hussein, but it's definitely not for the U.S. military intervention: if the U.S. invades, it's going to find itself with fewer and fewer friends.

They hyporcrisy of the U.S. invoking the principle of international law has not been lost of the world in general and the Arabs in particular.  Israel's invasons of Lebanon did not provoke U.S. intervention, for example.  Many Arabs believe that the U.S. only supports the concept of international law in the Mideast when it is convenient.  Let's look at the worst case scenario.  It's all too probable that the U.S. will invade within a month or two.  This will lead to a full-scale conflagration in the Mideast.  We know their first plan is to level Baghdad, one of the oldest continuously-inhabited cities on the planet.  The Iraqi response will be poison gas against U.S. ground forces, and also to try and shoot up the Saudi oilfields.  The U.S. Air Force will try to pin down the entrenched Iraqi forces so they can't counter a U.S. ground thrust, but it's tricky business: U.S. forces could receive a lot of "friendly" fire or bombing by its own forces.  Those Iraqi defensive positions are dug in deep and armed to the teeth and aren't going to be taken without a lot of bloodshed on the ground; as we saw in Vietnam, you can't win a war just from the air.  The U.S. is talking about bypassing them, but realistically, the Iraqis are not going to surrender or be starved out.  Someone's eventually going to have to go in after them, or else they'll try a breakout.  Either way, there will be massive conflict on the ground.  We're talking up to 25,000 U.S. casualties within a week, and who knows how many with a month.

Israel has been itching for an excuse to invade Jordan, which is sympathetic to Iraq.  The right-wing Likud party has this vision of a Greater Israel, and if they take over Jordan they'll have a perfect place to ship all those inconvenient Palestinians.  Of course, if that happens, there's an excellent chance that 100 million Arabs will rebel.  There would be tremendous domestic pressure on all the Arab countries currently supporting the U.S. to change sides; the rulers of Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia would have to crack down hard on their people or risk being overthrown.  Bluntly speaking, we're looking at a recipe for World War III.  We know that Israel has nuclear weapons, we think Pakistan does, we know India does, and, of course, so does the U.S., the only country to actually use them in history to date.  The world economy will collapse like a huge house of cards.  Worldwide gasoline rationing will be imposed, Eastern Europe and the Third World will start to starve, oil will shoot up to $60-80 a barrel.  The U.S.'s biggest banks will start to fail as defaults spiral throughout the debt-ridden economic system, and the Japanese and Germans who've lent us so much money will start to get really worried.

And if all that isn't enough, think about the domestic repercussions.  There could be a draft, setting off campuses and cities across the country.  But being an antiwar activist has never been easy, and for the forseeable future it promises to be worse than Vietnam.  Remember Colonel Oliver North?  He had a plan to round up 250,000 people in this country and put them in internment camps if the U.S. invaded Nicaragua and there were massive protests.  In Minnesota, the National Guard actually was training against high school students brought out as mock protestors, to give them experience in crowd control.  The antiwar movement is always in grave danger when it starts to succeed.  But it will succeed.  The alternative is planetary suicide.  Ecologists have a crucial role to play.  We need to push for a comprehensive solution based on:

• The just distribution of oil wealth;
• Regional arms-control agreements;
• Multinational observer forces;
• A just resolution of Palestinian demands;
• International phaseout of fossil fuels;
• Ecological reconstruction of the once-fertile Middle East, so that the land can once again sustain the people.