During the run up to the invasion of Iraq I can remember the rising feeling of anxiety that was telling me the United States was poised at the precipice of a major turning point in its relations with the world. We were about to invade and occupy a foreign nation that had not attacked or even seriously threatened us in any way. It was to be a pre-emptive strike, the enactment of a new doctrine fashioned by Bush and his neocon strategists, who claimed that they could not wait for the potential threat to actually take shape and “appear in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Of course, the threat they perceived to be gathering was based on intelligence that suggested Saddam was intent on developing nuclear weapons, and other nasty agents of mass destruction. Now that no such capability has been discovered in Iraq, I have asked myself many times if the Bush administration simply got the facts wrong, a “simple mistake,” or if they really knew that Saddam’s gun was empty, and decided to invade for other reasons. And what would the consequences be for us, for the average American citizen, when our nation took this unprecedented action of “Pre-emptive war?”

When the fighting started I was entertaining a life-long friend and fellow writer, the poet Richard Gylgayton. We were heading out to dinner, driving along the well kept, orderly and pacific streets of my home town. We stopped at a red light, noting the quiet regulation of the traffic as motorists politely stopped their multi-thousand dollar vehicles to allow the cars in other lanes to use the intersection. It was all so civil and well mannered that I looked at my friend with a question: “Does it seem at all like we are now a nation at war?”

I could not hear the growl of the massive Abrahams tanks and the grinding clatter of the Bradley AFVs. I could not see the skies streaked with MLRS artillery trails, or hear their thunderous explosion on the far horizon. I knew nothing of the young soldiers, tense with anticipation and the inevitable fear, as they mounted their trucks and Hummers for battle. Iraq, to be sure, was not a happy place. The calm in Iraqi streets was imposed by fear and oppressive autocratic rule. But Iraq was shortly going to become a much unhappier place as the entire fabric of that society would come unhinged. The daily routines of its citizens would be completely disrupted. Their vehicles would become bullet ridden engines of destruction launched by suicide bombers. Their homes would be reduced to rubble as young US Marines cut through garden gates with bolt cutters and kicked down doors. Their sons were to be rounded up, blindfolded, bound, and taken away to a place called “Abu Ghraib.” And they were going to die, by the thousands, as they fled from one war-torn city to another in search of just a little peace and civility, the condition that surrounded me now as I drove to dinner with my friend.

The war was going to be very visible and present to the people of Iraq, and it would go on, and on, from one roadside bomb to another, as one holdout city after another in the die-hard Sunni Triangle was first made into a battlefield, then “shaped” by incessant nightly bombing, then stormed by the tanks and troops of the world’s greatest democracy, riddled by American firepower, whacked senseless, until all that remained were empty houses and buildings, half destroyed, burned, and finally “cleared” by the advance of the Marine assault squads. They would be cleared of terrorists…and cleared of life, of family, of civility and peace and all the things I saw around me now. The war was going to change the lives of every person in Iraq, irrevocably, forever.

I tried to imagine it here… imagine planes overhead targeting precision munitions on houses in my neighborhood that were suspected of harboring “bad people.” I tried to feel what it would be like to have to pack up all I could carry in my Honda, and flee along perilous highways to another city, wondering what I would find left of my home if I ever managed to survive the dislocation and return. I tried to imagine what it would be like not to have the quiet comfort of my office where I work—to have no job at all, to wonder how I would feed my loved ones, and keep them safe in a nation that seemed to be descending into chaos. I tried to imagine what any of the 300,000 plus citizens of Fallujah were doing now after they fled their city in the face of “the largest concentration of firepower on earth.”  But that was “over there.”

The words of President Bush returned to me, haunting, “We must fight the terrorists over there, so we won’t have to fight them here.” Was that what this was supposed to all be about now? It was no longer the weapons of mass destruction. Now it was some distant front line against terrorism. Nineteen men with box cutters had done something unthinkable—they had dared to disturb the thrumming commerce and activity of the greatest nation on earth. Now the lives of 23 million Iraqi citizens were going to change forever.  23 million would pay for the deeds of nineteen men. The connection seemed impossibly strained to me, yet it was hinted at, alluded to, then even argued by the Bush administration in the run up to the war. And it was a connection the president continued to build, by continual inference, long after the notion that Saddam had anything to do with 9-11 was proven to be a fallacy. But Saddam was bad. Saddam was evil. He was out there scheming, planning, hatching horrendous plots, like cultures of lethal germs in the secret labs and weapons factories of Iraq. Saddam hated freedom. Saddam had friends, bad friends, evil friends, and they were coming for us, intent on doing great and catastrophic harm.  Saddam wanted to upset the carefully balanced order of our lives. Saddam must be removed. The president told me so. He said not to worry about those airplanes plowing into corporate sky-scrapers in Manhattan. He said not to bother about the word, broadcast a thousand times in the month that followed, in big bold letters that crawled across the bottom of my TV screen: ANTHRAX, ANTHRAX, ANTHRAX. He told us not to get upset; just go about our daily chores, and keep shopping. He was going to take care of us.

Yes, ignorance is bliss.

Millions and millions of Americans believed the president and his associates when they told us about Iraq’s weapons programs. What else could they do? All they knew was what they were told. To learn otherwise would have required an effort of research that was beyond most. And why would the president tell them something if it were not true? The president, they thought, was an honest, god-fearing man. Then the soldiers “over there” went from one spider hole to another, looking for all those terrible weapons labs and stockpiles of WMDs, looking for Saddam and his thugs, looking for the terrorists that were flooding in across every unguarded border, perhaps intent on getting their hands on the missing WMDs as well. Instead they found huge stockpiles of conventional military weapons and explosives, all left unguarded and open to the rampant looting that prevailed after the fall of Baghdad. Is it any wonder that they have been exploding on our television screens ever since?

To “sell” the war the administration jabbed its finger on one of the most deeply rooted fears of the Baby Boomer generation, the people that now own and run most everything in the country. Nuclear bombs are things they grew up with. The Cold War had been freezing diplomatic relations for most of their lives. I remember being sent home from school as a very young boy, and seeing the face of another president warning us all of the threat from nuclear bombs. JFK went on TV to tell us that there were deadly missiles in a place called Cuba, and that evil people were pointing them at us, and wishing us harm. I still remember seeing my father come home one day that week and hide something on top of our refrigerator. One night, when he was out working a second job to keep all nine of his children fed, my curiosity overwhelmed me and I dragged a chair over to the freezer when my mother was off in the family room watching “I Love Lucy.” I climbed up to see what my father had hidden away there and, to my great surprise, I saw it was a civil defense pamphlet describing how to build a makeshift fallout shelter from items around the house.

That night , when I went to sleep in the quiet of my bedroom, I kept seeing images from an episode of The Twilight Zone playing in my mind. It was a story about a small town, and news that came over the radio about a war…about missiles with nuclear bombs that could be arcing up into the night sky and hurtling down on our cities. One family had built a sturdy fallout shelter, but the other families on the block had nowhere to hide. The episode focused on the rising fear and tension as the normally happy neighbors began to squabble over who should be allowed into the safety and security of that one small shelter. There wasn’t room, you see, for them all. Most would have to remain outside, and watch the bombs fall, see the bright angry glow of the mushroom clouds blackening the horizon, feel the horrific winds of destruction, and wait for the silent, agonizing death by radioactive fallout. But, in the end, the peaceful, god -fearing, religious and friendly neighbors decided that they would simply take up axe and hammer and break down the doors of that one family shelter. As the sirens wailed their warning, the ax heads began to fall on the last barricade. Even as the good citizens of everytown America broke through to the heart of the shelter, the all clear siren was sounded, and the man on the radio came back to say it was all a mistake, the war was not happening here after all.

Rod Serling meant the tale to be a damming commentary on human nature. He meant to show us how we could quickly disintegrate to the level of animals…if we became frightened enough. We would forget our civility, forget we were freedom loving Americans, forget about democracy, and family values, and church on Sunday, and we would reach for the axe and hammer, reflexively, and to our great shame.

This is exactly what we did in Iraq. We were told to be afraid, and many of us were. We had men with guns, men in tanks, and ships, and planes, that would go over there and take care of things. So we reached for the axe and hammer to make certain we would be safe, and the mushroom clouds would never darken our horizon. But nothing was found… nothing was there but a guerilla war of our own making.

Yet our story did not end like the Rod Serling show. There was no embarrassment, no shame, like the emotions I had seen on the faces of the townspeople when they broke into their neighbor’s shelter out of fear.  Instead, our president told us he thought he made the right decision after all! He told us that, even if he knew the warning sirens were all a sham and farce, and that there was no danger at all of that nuclear war, he would still reach for the axe —only this time he had a new reason.

Now that the great FEAR that had been broadcast at us for months and months after 9-11 had been proven to be a mirage, something else would have to be put forward as the reason for the war. What could it be? The answer, of course, was “freedom.” We were now invading Iraq to set them all free. Never mind that we had to kill unarmed civilians by the thousands to accomplish this. Never mind…Don’t think about it…Our president said we did the right thing, and he would do it all over again in the very same way. It was all about democracy and freedom now, he said. The president wanted to transplant the quiet manicured streets of Middletown America to the distressed cities of Iraq. How strange to think that the only way to bring peace and freedom to the poor people of Iraq was to first starve them with a decade long regimen of economic sanctions, and then to send the strongest military on earth into their country to find all the evil terrorists and bad men that were preventing them from sharing in our “American way of life.” Oddly, these terrorists were never there either…until we came, bringing the exact opposite of what we claimed—war instead of peace. I cannot help but be reminded that this was one of the defining maxims of Orwell’s 1984: WAR IS PEACE.

There are some 300,000 fewer Iraqi citizens alive there now—all killed by the grinding buzz saw of war. Millions more have been displaced, lost vagrants in their homeland or forced to flee to other countries. Give them liberty. We never knew who they were and they did not live near us. Ignorance is bliss. And the war? The war is still “over there.” We are busy setting faceless Iraqi citizens free over there, just five minute news reports to us as we go about our busy lives. Occasionally we hear rumors of fighting in Fallujah and numbers of the fallen soldiers we sent to keep us safe. But mostly we just watch sit-coms, survivor series shows, and hang on the fate of Scott Peterson or Michael Jackson, the mandatory “celebrity trial” that our news organizations entertain us with...  not the distant, unfelt war in Iraq. We get numbers...three marines dead today...32 Iraqi citizens blown up...60 Iraqi police recruits killed in a gun battle....The numbers are so easy to slough away.

The pain and suffering and sacrifice of a nation going to war seem entirely absent here in the US. A few American families who felt the pain first hand. They were the ones who were visited by men wearing military uniforms and an Army chaplain. They were the ones who heard the unbearable words, spoken with solemn affection:  “We regret to inform you…”  They were the families who found they were missing a son or daughter, or saw their beautiful young boys come home maimed for life. But the rest of us were not allowed to see them. Pictures of the caskets and burials were kept secret. Interviews with the grieving parents were nowhere to be heard. The agony and suffering of this war are things to be felt by other people.

Driving to dinner with my  friend that day, a strange truth came to me about the war. We looked around, noting the calm affluence of the city surrounding us, the well manicured lawns, clean streets, new homes and retail stores, but the war was nowhere to be seen.  We were a nation of such power and strength that we could go to war without even the slightest blip of inconvenience in the homeland. Oh, the price of a gallon of gasoline had edged up from $1.95 to $2.10, (it was to double again in just a few short years), but that amounted to no more than $0.75 cents when I would make my next stop at the gas pump to put five gallons in my economical Honda, all I would need for another two weeks of commuting about my town. Yes indeed, ignorance was bliss. The less a person knew about the decisions and actions of their government, the more content they would be.

You could, if you chose, simply turn off the news broadcasts, web sites and newspapers, and you would know nothing whatsoever about it, because there was no other perceivable cost to us here for waging war. You could just watch any of a hundred other entertainment channels on your cable TV and remain blissfully ignorant—and many in the US have. It it took almost 20,000 dead in Vietnam before the pain and suffering of that war actuated a growing opposition here in the US. Even then, the death toll reached 58,000 before we pulled out.

Perhaps it was mathematical, I thought. You take the number of dead and wounded, and multiply by a number representing their parents, brother, sisters, close friends. This is the pain factor of war, and it seems that the number had a long way to go in Iraq before America started to really feel it. The self proclaimed “war president” did not want us to feel it.  Ignorance is bliss.

Then it struck me full in the face: “The War” had been arranged to make certain my little town stayed just the way it was—quiet, peaceful and orderly, with well stocked shelves in every store and well fueled gas pumps at a reasonably low price. As the sun set, the street lamps and neon signs began to glow, lighting up the roads and shopping malls. I realized, at long last, what the war was all about. The lights must never go off. The signs must always glow. The orderly flow of traffic must never cease—ever, for if it did, the order of our whole society would rapidly disintegrate into…something less pacific.(To see what this might look like read: The Perfect Storm)  The president was correct…at least partly. It was not that he ever really thought cadres of mujahadin were going to slip into our country and set up hostage slaughter houses in the urban jungles of American cities. No, that was not why the war was being fought. The notion that “foreign fighters” could infiltrate across the seas and start a guerilla war in the US was ludicrous. But the war could start here all on its own, only it would be Americans fighting it this time, with the very same assault weapons congress put back on the streets this year…

Would Americans ever do a thing like that? Not while they were all well fed, well fueled, with access to plenty of revolving credit, a secure job, and lots and lots of distracting entertainment broadcast at them 24 hours a day. This was the great transformation that the energy economy had created here in the US. This was “the American way of life,” founded on real values and principles, but degraded into ceaseless consumerism. We are constantly being prodded to acquire more, to get ahead, to “go for all the gusto we can get .” Yet, in actuality, this association with acquiring the good things of life is just used as a means of filling the corporate coffers with profits in this country. Look around your house.. .look at the plastic you bought this Christmas...with plastic money that you’ll be paying 19.99% interest on. What a good life we have here, yes?

Mustapha Mond, the “World Controller” in Huxley’s Brave New World had an interesting conversation with John Savage at the end of that landmark novel. Speaking of the transformation of the world through mass production, he said:

“But industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning…Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. … People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were the sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years' War. That made them change their tune all right. What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? … People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness. One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for.”

What was that about the wheels stopping? I had to think about that one very hard before I realized it could easily come true…if the wheels ever stopped turning, and the lights ever went out. No amount of FEMA money could ever cure that, and so the war in Iraq was being fought to make sure the wheels would all keep turning—at least for now. The wheels need fuel, and the fuel isn’t here—it’s over there. And so, to keep us all happy, and fed, and out on the highways and byways of our nation, driving in style, we had to go over there and set people free. We felt no compulsion to set anyone free in Ruwanda, or Sudan, or Sierra Leon, or the Ivory Coast but, for some reason, it seemed imperative that we set people free in Iraq. I wonder why?  Could it have anything at all to do with that little matter of the wheels…the fuel…the oil?

The Bush Administration has made the strategic assumption that America’s security rests entirely upon assuring a steady flow of carbon based energy—oil, gas and coal. They know, as well as I do, that the lights and cars must always work. The problem is this: the fuel is running out, and what remains is going to start getting very expensive. The Big Five energy concerns are now in the process of trying to shift much of their infrastructure from a reliance on oil and coal to a mix where natural gas, liquefied at the source and then shipped over here to be re-gasified, becomes a primary fuel for our electricity needs. We have coal in abundance, but it is a far dirtier fuel than Liquified Natural Gas (LNG). It will take some time, some years, for the shift to be realized. In the meantime, the energy companies need access to more and more crude oil to replace their inventories each year. Production is peaking and starting to fall off in one formerly oil-rich region of the world after another. To make matters worse, demand is continuing on an ever upward track. So… we need fuel, and plenty of it, if we are to keep our streets quietly ordered, our economy running, and our people happily content and ignorant of the whole dire problem.

Yes, most Americans are completely ignorant of the energy situation now facing the Western developed nations, chiefly, the US. They have lived in the abundance of the energy bubble provided by cheap oil and gas for most of their lives. When the rolling brownouts and power failures started in California a few years ago, it was an absolutely unprecedented event. When have we ever pushed a switch and not found abundant, cheap energy there to animate our electronics? While the brownouts were later found to have been the result of price fixing, collusion among power generators and the desperate cry of the utility companies being squeezed by outside providers, the incident was most effective in sending a message—that power and energy, and all the wonders it provides, must be paid for—that the era of cheap, endless energy was coming to an end. The legislators bailed out the utilities, gave them permission for hefty rate hikes, and then the lights came back on, just as they always have. But the message was received. Now most Californians receive it each month in the form of a hefty electric bill, sometimes reaching $400-$700/month  for a small office building at commercial rates.  Americans hate to be inconvenienced, but they end up accepting these rate hikes in electricity and gasoline, as long as the increases are gradual. As Mustopha Mond said, happiness has to be paid for.

Still, most Americans remain blissfully ignorant of the true scope of the crisis ahead. People don’t really know the urgency with which our government is now busy with the task of keeping the wheels turning, and keeping us safe. I remember thinking, early on, that the Bush administration was taking enormous political and economic risks in pursuing the policy it has chosen with its “war on terror.” The consequences have been so dire, nearly half a trillion (a trillion by 2008), in added debt, a dollar that is sliding in value all across the world, tattered alliances, huge upwelling of ill will toward America, a growing insurgency in Iraq being fed by terror cells that seem to be multiplying each month. And they did all this knowing they would be held accountable by the electorate in 2004…Or would they? The voters went to the polls and while 55.5 million opposed the direction Bush was leading the country, they were overshadowed by another 59 million who gave all these consequences a pass, being more concerned with weighty matters like stem cell research and the sanctity of marriage being exclusively between a man and woman.

The Bush administration has now skipped by the one great obstacle to their plans for America—the electorate. Now, unaccountable to the voters again, the plan may accelerate to achieve the desired ends. The energy resources we will need in the decade ahead must be found, and guarded well. The oil we need is in the Middle East and Central Asia, and that is where the US Army will go, and stay, and fight to “set people free.” Never mind if all that oil belongs to another nation. Executive orders, infantry, and the world’s best tanks and planes have a way of taking care of little details like that.

In his book “The End of Oil,” author Paul Roberts writes:

“Thus it is that we Americans (and most of our media) are largely untroubled by Secretary Rumsfeld's absurd claim that the Iraqi war was "not about oil." We're not upset that the White House has steadily refused to disclose the names of the energy companies that helped write U.S. energy policy. We don't think it odd that the White House Energy Task Force was studying maps of Iraqi oil fields and pipelines as early as March 2000 — more than eighteen months before the September 11 attacks — or that the vice president's former oil company, Halliburton, won a multibillion-dollar U.S. government contract to repair Iraqi oil fields even before the second Iraqi war was under way. Or that one of the first actions by U.S. military forces in Iraq was to establish a tight security perimeter around the Iraqi Oil Ministry in downtown Baghdad, while hospitals, schools, utilities, and other critical elements in the infrastructure were left to be burned and looted. We refuse to be troubled by facts like these because even to look closely at them might force us to see them as extensions of an out-of-control energy system that begins at home, in our own cars and houses… Americans' rising energy obliviousness is not, on the whole, good for a democratic system nor is it particularly favorable to the making of smart energy policy.”

Roberts goes on to argue that the current Bush energy policy continues to emphasize supply, more drilling and production, as the only answer to the impending energy crisis. Such a policy is also strongly favored by the oil and energy companies, who have billions invested in the current order of things and a decided interest in maintaining the status quo. It is not much of a leap to realize that the new brand of “terrorism” espoused by Bin Ladin in one message tape after another, is a reciprocal reaction to the continued incursion of the West, notably the US, into the oil rich lands of the Islamic Crescent. At first the terrorists worried mostly about the plight of the Palestinians. They hijacked airlines and cruise ships, and attacked Israeli athletes at the Olympics to redress the wrongs they saw in the Palestinian equation. But if you look at the situation honestly, the “terrorists” now worry mostly about us…about America, and so the attacks have shifted to US embassies, US barracks on Muslim soil, US warships docked in Arab ports, oil tankers in the Red Sea, and then came 9-11.

Bin Ladin, the driving force in this new shift in terrorism, has prompted the Bush administration to frame his entire foreign policy as a “global war on terrorism.” At the root of all this, however, it is a war to secure American power and control over the vital oil and gas resources we need to keep the wheels turning—to keep us all happy, to keep the streets here quiet and peaceful.

So, my dear fellow Americans, the war is being fought over there so that you don’t have to suffer any inconvenience over here…it’s that simple. And the hardest thing about all this is lurking even deeper:  The terrorists that the government really fears, after all, are not Arabs wearing dish towels over their faces, but YOU. The real fear is that the fuel could run out, the wheels could stop turning, and YOU could decide, like the good citizens in that Twilight Zone episode, to start taking matters into your own hands. Then we would have our war, only it would be here, in our cities and towns, and it would be very messy and inconvenient. How much of a stretch is that—from the war over there, to the war over here?

The infrastructure that currently sustains the oil based energy system the developed world relies on is a very fragile thing. The pipelines stretch for miles over barren deserts, and they can be easily attacked, as we have seen in Iraq. Oil refineries are huge, multi-billion dollar investments that are…highly flammable. The oil terminals, in places like Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia’s primary oil port, are very vulnerable; LNG terminals even moreso. For some reason , Bin Ladin and his associates have chosen to focus their effort at striking Western targets, and they have left the oil infrastructure alone in Saudi Arabia. But that could change. Suppose the insurgency in Iraq were to spread, by infiltration, into Kuwait, into Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States? We have seen how easy it is for foreign fighters to come and go across the porous borders of the region. Suppose the radicalized Islamics finally get their wits about them and realize they can be much more effective by focusing their attention on the oil infrastructure of the entire region, instead of trying to fight it out with the powerful US military forces in Iraq. That is the real fear. A shift in objectives by the insurgents could place the already strained energy supply system into a severe crisis mode. That is the danger of igniting the fires of war near all these highly flammable investments and fuel depots.

Imagine the price of oil, now an unprecedented $50 per barrel, skyrocketing through $70 to $100 per barrel. (It was to hit a high of $137 by May of 2008). The wheels may not stop turning altogether, but they would get very expensive to keep running. That cost would ripple through the US economy and the pain would finally be felt here at home. Talk about jobs and the economy, now absent from our TV screens with the election debate over, would suddenly be made real again. And if the wheels ever stopped? What then?

If you think “the war” could never happen here, guess again. Remember the week-long riots and wholesale looting in Los Angeles after the Rodney King trial verdict upset the orderly behavior of thousands of lower and middle class citizens? Remember the massive dislocation of commuters when the East coast suffered a big power outage, with thousands stranded in the densely packed cities, and the highways a mess of unregulated traffic as darkness began to fall?

Without those street lamps, and traffic signals…without all the glowing neon signs attracting shoppers, without the phosphorescent hue of the TV screens, the yammer of radios, the hi-res monitors of home computers…I wonder just what would be going on around me now? If the lights ever do go off, then refrigerators would slowly warm, spoiling all those Swanson dinners, ice-cold sodas, and other goodies. Air-conditioners would falter and fail, and the summer heat would rise oppressively from the hot, concrete of the cities. The gas pumps would not operate, and soon the tanks of all our vehicles would begin to run dry. The SUVs would sputter out first, their big engines gasping the last breath of power-sustaining petro-vapor, then they would die. Not even my little Honda would be spared, though its life might extend a week or two beyond that of the larger, heavier vehicles I’ve been trying to dodge and see around on our highways these days. It would all come to a wheezing STOP. Would the people be sitting home reading books by candle-light and burning wood in their barbecue pits while they sing Kumbaya? Would America take an extended camping trip where no end was in sight? I think not.

Then what?  Would polite civility give way to roving gangs of thugs in our streets, out to get while the getting was good? What would all those well armed American citizens do, accustomed as they were to three sumptuous meals per day, 3000 calories, and a healthy dose of sugar and fat? How long would it take for all the store shelves to be stripped bare, and the food to run out? Then would we have the war here in my quiet little town?

While this dire possibility is not likely to happen any time soon… ‘soon’ is a relative term. It is estimated that the oil we have access to now may begin to become so expensive that a little of that pain, the pain of fighting a war, will soon start to be felt here in the US. Gasoline prices have been kept artificially low, largely because of our special relationship with the Saudi Royal family.

For decades, Saudi Arabia has been content to be a major supplier of oil to the US. Its massive, excess production acted as a stabilizing force in the world oil markets. The Saudis had the power to either ramp up production, or cut it back, forcing other OPEC nations to do the same and thus controlling price. But the dirty little secret that very few Americans know about is this: The Saudi production will have to double in the decade ahead to keep pace with the rapidly accelerating world demand for oil. Even now, the Saudis are finding that they no longer have enough “spare production” to act as a moderating force on the world oil markets. As non-OPEC oil sources dwindle in the US, the North Sea and elsewhere, nations like China and others will come to rely more and more on OPEC oil. And the other dirty little secret most Americans are ignorant of is that the Saudi’s are finally realizing that even their own vast reserves may not be enough to feed the growing demand.

As Roberts reports, at Ghawar, the “Mother of all oil fields” in Saudi Arabia, a field so large that it once held nearly 15% of the world’s known oil, the engineers must now inject millions of gallons of seawater into the field to keep up the pressure required for extraction. Predictably, the mix of what they pump out now contains more and more seawater….The oil is running out, and what remains will be more and more difficult and expensive to extract . No one knows just how long it will take, or how many years we still have left. Some say 50 years, others say 10. One thing is certain: the era of cheap oil is already over. And  neither side denies the basic, geological imperative: the oil is running dry, and the Bush administration is acting with an urgency that would make one think things are far worse than people generally believe.

Do 150,000 US troops in Iraq start to make sense to you now? Do you think we have any intention of simply watching the Iraqis vote next January and then shipping our soldiers back home? One of my friends wrote recently that Bush will eventually be forced to “declare victory” in Iraq and withdraw, leaving behind a ruined country and a bitterly resentful people. My response was that he had no intention of declaring victory, or ever completely leaving Iraq now that the US has a foothold on the #2 proven reserves of oil in the world. Iraqi oil is some of the most desirable ever found: light, sweet crude that is easily refined. Decades of warfare, between Iraq and Iran, the first Gulf War, the crippling sanctions and now “Operation Iraqi Freedom” have severely diminished the production of that oil. The world, (chiefly the US) needs to get it up an running again, to help offset the coming crisis that may begin to exert real pain and inconvenience as early as 2008. (Note: This prediction was dead accurate). But the danger inherent in the region, with the festering , unsettled wound of Palestine, the persistent insurgency in Iraq, and the impending issue of Iranian nuclear development, all add up to one thing: continual occupation and a significant American military presence in the region for years, and certainly US economic  and  corporate control there for decades to come.

The war in Iraq will not end. The insurgents will not pack up and quietly go home, depressed that they cannot eject the hated American military. They will not quit their fight any more than Hamas or Hizbullah have quit their long campaign against Israel. The war will go on, and on—at least on some level. Young American boys, now blissfully going about their carefree lives as middle and high school students, will some day be called to fight for oil and gas—over there, in one Iraqi city after another, as the insurgents are driven out, dispersed, only to regroup, re-infiltrate, and continue their terror based tactics. And some time in the course of it all, we may get what president Bush said this was all about in the first place. We may get an attack here, on American soil, like the one recently endured in London. And god forbid that we ever get an attack based on some “weapon of mass destruction” —the things that started this whole mess in the first place.

That will be the sad, inevitable conclusion of a policy aimed at securing our peace and happiness by waging war elsewhere, in the cities, living rooms and gardens of other families. You see, the wheels have stopped over there in Iraq. If there is anyone on earth who might feel immediate empathy with Tom Cruise as he flees from Alien Tripods, it is the Iraqi people. They just endured the invasion of a technically superior military, with laser rangefinders, GPS guided munitions, stealth jets and what have you. They were the ones who just fled from the shock and awe, the machines growling along their highways, the apache helicopters thrashing in the air, and in Fallujah, the block by block grinding destruction of one neighborhood after another. They were the ones who stumbled into their cellars to find the crazies waiting with their anti-American jihad.

But to keep us all in line over here, the lights will stay on, the wheels will keep turning, and there will be lots and lots of stuff to watch on cable TV. There will be blockbuster movies out every other month, with DVDs on their heels; there will be plenty of food, and the price of gasoline will be kept as low as possible...for as long as possible, though that may soon change. Futures traders are already locking in oil bids in the $80. to $100. a barrel.

Every so often, lest we forget, we will be treated to a nice little official government warning. Rumors of a terrorist plot will elevate our color-coded alert system, and the new media will latch on to the story with delight. A new Osama tape will float across our awareness, reminding us that the “bad people” are out there, hating our freedom, and that they wish us harm. (It never occurs to us that their entire effort may be a reaction to our continual incursion on their culture. Our way is right, theirs is wrong—or so most Americans might think.) Real attacks when they come along, like the attack in London, are perfect little coal stokers for the effort to convince us that the war on terror is “worth it.” The president latched on to it to build, once again, the word bridge between “freedom” and the war. It’s a little like the VPS treatment in Huxley’s Brave New World…

"V.P.S.?"

"Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly, once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenalin. It's the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences."

"But I like the inconveniences."

"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.

"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. "You're welcome," he said.

The good citizens of Iraq already have a fair measure of all those horrible things the World Controller was talking about. There were bodies lying in the streets of Fallujah for weeks. Twelve miles outside the city there were some 2000 displaced families who were subsisting on flour and water, their homes destroyed, their town ravaged by war. The power was off, the water was off, typhus was spreading and the pain must have been unspeakable. The wheels stopped turning for them, and they have paid the price for our comfort over here. Explain that to the young Iraqi boy, (below) huddling in fear as the war comes to his city, comforted by his father’s arm as Tom Cruise tried to shelter and protect his daughter. So if you have some inclination to be thankful of our brave men and women in the military for the sacrifice they have made for your comfort, you might also want to put in a good word or two for the citizens of Iraq, who have lost so much more than we seem to know …or care to know.

Ignorance, after all, is bliss.

Let us hope the people of Iraq gain some small measure of what the President promises them with this war—that they gain something worth the price we have paid with our soldiers lives, with the billions of tax dollars spent, the disrupted and destroyed lives of thousands of Iraqis. Will it truly be peace, freedom and democracy, or will it be a long simmering insurgency... intermittent terror attacks... continual presence of foreign troops at one base or another... continual U.S. corporate management of their Oil and gas resources for decades... and all so we can remain ever so comfortable over here.

Article by: John Schettler

If there is anyone on earth who might feel immediate empathy with Tom Cruise as he flees from Alien Tripods, it is the Iraqi people.