[Peace-discuss] Sociologist and urban planner James Howard Kunstler on Mideast oil

[n.dahlheim at mchsi.com]

                         From his website about the Clusterfuck nation of suburban sprawl


The Daily Grunt (if I have anything to say)

January 11, 2007 
Okay, so the American adventure in Iraq is a fiasco. This is self-evident. The Iraqis exchanged a tyrant 
for a tyranny of factional violence. A democratically elected government was a nice idea, but somehow 
it can't prevent fifty to a hundred bodies turning up every day with holes drilled in their heads. Not so 
nice. What to do? President Bush still favors the "Dodge City" approach -- using the US Military as 
marshalls to clean out the "bad guys." The crux of his argument last night was to prepare Iraqi 
marshalls (i.e. the Iraqi police and military) to take up the job themselves. However, the Iraqi police 
seem to be completely infiltrated by sectarian interests and are themselves acting a death squads -- 
that is, carrying out the very violence that the police would theoretically be charged with stopping. The 
Iraqi army is a weaker force which could present exactly the same problem if it was given more 
weaponry. The US still has strategic interests in this part of the world. It would not be a good thing for 
Iran to gain control over the southern Iraqi oil fields. It would not be a good thing for Shia 
fundamentalism to be tempted to destablize the rest of the Arab world. The American public complains 
about this policing role in the Middle East, but is the American public prepared to do without Middle 
East oil?