While driving to work last night, a financial analyst on NPR claimed that the Dow Jones rose above 11,000 points for the first time since June 2001 due to a warm winter and lower heating bills. That would be a plausible scenario if it resembled reality which it does not.
Despite my home being no less structurally sound than it was last winter and taking additional steps to use less natural gas my bills are nearly 60 percent higher than what I paid during these months in 2005. I’m still waiting for the piranha I purchase gas from to reply to a letter I mailed last Friday requesting their official reasons even though I have a good idea what those will be. According to the website of one of my worthless Senators, they are sticking to the same excuse used last fall for rate hikes at gas pumps, that Katrina and Rita are to blame. Chuck’s PR release also blames it on “slightly colder” temps. The truth is yet to be revealed.
It’s not surprising to me that Russia appears to side with the West over Iran’s nuclear pursuits as the two countries have long been engaged in a contentious dispute over offshore oil rights in the Caspian Sea and pipeline routes. Between what rock and a hard place would such a coalition of the willing put the U.S. this time?
The Mirage of Empire
By John Gray
Volume 53, Number 1 | 12 January 2006
The New York Review of Books
The invasion and occupation of Iraq may not have produced anything resembling a colonial administration, but it has allowed the expropriation of the country’s oil reserves. There are many in Iraq and elsewhere who see regime change as a pretext for securing American control over Iraq’s natural resources, and while this may be an oversimplified view it identifies a crucial factor in American policies. America remains critically dependent on the depleting oil reserves of the Gulf at a time when demand is rising inexorably in China and India. Faced with this situation the US has reverted to classical geopolitics. Its forces are in central Asia, in such countries as Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, to secure American interests in the current rerun of the Great Game in which it is in competition with other countries for the region’s energy resources. American forces serve the same strategy in the Gulf.
However, it is far from clear that this exercise in geopolitics can succeed. Because of the anarchy that prevails in much of the country, multinational companies are unable to operate in Iraq. Oil production has failed to reach the levels it achieved under Saddam, and if oil facilities elsewhere in the Gulf come under persistent attack it may not be possible to ensure their security. The underlying political reality in the region is pervasive hostility to American power. As a result of its oil dependency America has committed itself to a neoimperial strategy of military intervention that can only aggravate that enmity. It is doubtful whether the US has the capacity to sustain the indefinite period of war that could result, and more than doubtful that the task is worth attempting.