Bush and his team must now be feeling thoroughly humiliated (and so must Blair, too, in the privacy of 10 Downing Street) and becoming more desperate by the day. Unless they can kill or capture Saddam in the next six months, then American and British troops will have to leave Iraq because they will not be able to patrol the streets in safety, never mind restore the basic services to Baghdad and other cities in Iraq. Either that or there will have been a mutiny already and public opinion in American and Englands will insist that the troops should be brought home.
This increasing desperation must now be added to (and might start to outweigh) the original -- but still continuing -- desperation that Bush and his team felt when Saudi Arabian terrorists brought down the Trade Center towers on 11 September 2001. This original desperation was not due to the terrorism that was so dramatically and instantly displayed to the world, even in the depths of the countryside in Italy where I was on holiday at the time. After all, any small dedicated group of terrorists -- and they could be home-grown, too -- could produce the deaths of thousands of individuals in any densely-populated developed country if it had a mind to.
The original desperation was due to the fact that the 9/11 terrorists gave as strong a signal as anything could be that the Americans cannot rely on Saudi Arabian oil from now onwards, or at least preferential treatment. The hated royal family regime in Riyadh which the Americans have been cultivating for years will be brought down at some stage fairly soon, whether by a populist uprising by the unemployed (unlikely) or by a complete take-over of power by the Wahhabi clerics asssisted by Al Qaeda. The Bush administration now know that nothing is more inevitable than this. And, as I argued in my previous posting ("073. When will America invade Saudi Arabia?"), any disruption of exports of SA oil to America, or even a substantial price rise (which is more likely), would be a death knell to any possibility of continuing American economic growth.
At this stage, any reader who has got this far might be saying: "But what has all this got to do with evolutionary economics?" However, our present dependency on cheap fossil fuels has everything to do with it. Let me recap my view of evolutionary economics in one sentence. Ever since early man starting trading for status goods, which were, and still are, the main stimuli for economic growth, it has needed a double-infrastructure of both an intangible nature (trade routes, currency, mercantile law, banks, etc) and a tangible nature (hay to feed the pack animals, fossil fuels to supply freight transport, electricity power stations, and factories, etc). To all intents and purposes modern civilisation, particularly as it has developed over the past two hundred years, depends on cheap fossil fuels.
And the future of America depends on the continuing (and increasing) supply of cheap Saudi Arabian oil even though, at present, it only imports 20% of its needs from SA. And now that the possibility of replacing this with almost-as-cheap Iraqi oil is fading by the day, so America's desperation grows.
America will have to control Saudi Arabian oil and gas for at least the next 20 to 30 years in order to continue economic growth and be able to afford to invest in research and development of a sufficiently large new energy technology to replace the decreasing world supply of cheap fossil fuels. America is already augmenting its nuclear power programme but any marginal addition to its electricity production will do nothing to supply the transportable fuel (such as hydrogen) for freight and commuting purposes to replace petrol and diesel, except at a price some 20 times higher than at present.
America has already been so desperate that it has virtually written off any continuing friendly relationship with Europe except with this country. This is already an historical change of immense proportions. It has happened because America knows that there simply won't be enough energy in the world that can supply the whole of the existing developed countries --America, Asia and Europe -- much beyond the next ten years or so. From then onwards, it will be downhill for many developed countries.
America is remaining friendly with Russia and will continue to do so as long as Russia has inter-continental ballistic missile capability (degrading by the month) and will be super-friendly with China for several very good reasons. Among these are that China is a vast new investment and consumer market for American multinationals, China will be able to supply absurdly cheap, but high quality, consumer goods to America (as it is already doing) and, very importantly, China is already drawing ahead of America in several critical new technologies such as processor design, ballistics, transportation (maglev) and genetics.
In one way or another, America has got to continue to control Saudi Arabian oil production for the next 20 or 30 years. Given the political control of the Wahhabi sect in SA I cannot see how this can continue without an American invasion. Saudi Arabia is too opaque a country for the Americans to have any chance of sponsoring an internal uprising to take advantage of, so it will have to be a frontal invasion and hope that it can get the young unemployed on its side as quickly as possible with promises of work. There must already be fully worked-out invasion plans. Otherwise America would not be building up large numbers of troops in Kuwait and Qatar, nor the other Special Forces units in Yemen and other places around SA.
Politically, America only has about another six months before it must decide whether it is going to be able to institute a legitimate friendly government in Iraq in order to encourage the western oil corporations to invest there and start pumping oil. If it cannot do so by then, it will have to start planning to invade Saudi Arabia. Bush will have to find a pretext on which to oppose Wahhabism directly and put as many as possible of their 150,000 clerics behind barbed wire as soon as invasion occurs. Perhaps Bush will start to make friendly noises to the persecuted Shia Moslem minority in SA quite soon? If he can pull this trick off (as he's managed to do with his adoptive fundamental Christiantiy) then he might start to pacify Shia opinion in Iraq somewhat and, more importantly, perhaps neutralise opposition from Shia-dominated Iran. It's a weird thought, but many weird ideas are being produced in the White House these days.
KSH
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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