What's our oil doing under their sand? Part 1--Logic

Jimmy L. Cash, Brig. Gen., USAF, Ret. His resume is long and impressive. He has held positions of responsibility that I would never accept. I would never get into an argument with him about strategy, tactics, or other matters of war. So when he states his case about why war with Iran is not only inevitable but also necessary, it may strike some as presumptuous that at 35 year old English teacher would contradict anything he has to say about foreign policy. So I will not. Instead I will stick to my realm of expertise and critique Gen. Cash's argument.

While he may not have written the subject line of the email I received--"War or Depression"--the contents of the email express the same sentiment. The last line of the opinion piece is:

HOWEVER, CONTROLLING IRAN AND DEMOCRATIZING THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE ONLY CHOICE IF WE ARE HELL-BENT ON DEPENDING ON THEM FOR OUR FUTURE ENERGY NEEDS. (Emphasis his)

Not only is this a logical fallacy, but it is also a morally unacceptable conclusion. This entry will deal only with the logical side.

When Cash suggests that we control Iran and Democratize the Middle East, he is suggesting several things to those who live in that region. Among the implied arguments are:

1. we have the answer
2. you will accept it regardless of what you would like--including by force

Neither of these sentiments can be sustained logically.

1. If we had all of the answers then we wouldn't need to rely so heavily on another's resources. Our ingenuity and our ability to solve problems would enable us to find another solution to this problem. Cash himself acknowledges this when he says:

I personally would vote for any presidential candidate who did what JFK did with the space program—declare a goal to bring this country to total energy independence in a decade.

The Apollo Alliance did just this, back in early 2000, after the attacks in NYC raised awareness about the dangers of over reliance on foreign nations for our energy supply. From their website:

The Apollo Alliance was launched by the Center on Wisconsin Strategy and the Institute for America's Future in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy to unify a broad-based constituency behind a bold plan of investment in clean energy technology and sustainable infrastructure that would reduce our nation’s dependence on fossil fuels and create millions of good jobs in America’s clean energy economy.

Harkening back to President Kennedy’s visionary call to meet the challenge of the Sputnik launch with an aggressive national commitment to landing the first man on the Moon within the decade, the Apollo Alliance spoke – and continues to speak -- directly to the core values we share as Americans: our can-do spirit, our inherent optimism, and the pride we feel (or want to feel) about our country’s place in the world. The subtext is clear: we did it before, we can do it again. This is America, the richest, most technologically advanced and industrious country in the world. If anyone can do it, we can do it. And we will.

The fact of the matter is that instead of looking forward, identifying the root of the problem, and working to solve the problem, our leaders instead looked to spend their time and energy posturing about being tough, attacked the symptoms (some not even related to the problem, as Cash also acknowledges), and simultaneously worked to undermine any possible advances toward energy independence by not calling for more conservation in all levels of society and instead called for more short-term solutions such as drilling in ANWAR which would not come close to meeting our demand according to most research not funded by oil companies. Vice President Dick Cheney held secret closed door meetings where energy companies wrote public policy that ignore the realities of our energy dependence and instead benefit the companies all in the name of economic stimulus. To this day, the participants of those meetings are not known; the amount of influence they had over policy is not known; and Cheney has not been held accountable. The secrecy has been preserved in the name of executive privilege regardless of the impact to this nation. The legislation that came from these meetings were passed by both republicans and democrats. Neither party has demonstrated the leadership to act as a check and a balance to this power-grab. The people have not forced a movement toward accountability. If this is the democracy that we are looking to export, I am embarrassed.

On the contrary, I know that as soon as it becomes an economic fact that alternative and sustainable sources of energy need to be found and need to be made commercially viable, then there will be no shortage of research, labor, employment opportunities, etc. made available for solving the problem. Already I see the commercial campaigns presenting the oil and car companies as falling over each other to demonstrate who is the greenest and who has been the most environmentally conscious the longest. I just wish that we as a society would have been able to make this work before now.

2. Cash, possibility inadvertently, points out the folly of the law of unintended consequences:

I watched Iran and Iraq shoot missiles at each other every day, and all day long, for months. They killed hundreds of thousands of their people. Know why? They were fighting for control of the Middle East and that enormous oil supply.

At that time, they were preoccupied with their internal problems and could care less about toppling the west. Oil prices were fairly stable and we could not see an immediate threat.

Well, the worst part of what we have done as a nation in Iraq is to do away with the military capability of one of those nations. Now, Iran has a clear field to dominate the Middle East, since Iraq is no longer a threat to them.

By trying to solve our problems by force we only create new problems. You can look to the history of west-middle east relations to demonstrate this point. Cash says that radical, fundamentalist Islam has been trying to destroy the west since the 7th century, but it certainly is not that one-sided. Looking carefully at history there will certainly be moments of Islamic aggression, but no more than the attempts of various kings and popes who wished to consolidate power or who wished to distract their people from real problems by engaging in the crusades. And it would be naive for anyone to say there is no link between the pre-WWII western imperialism and the current situation. Our long history of trying to manipulate the local leaders for our overconsumptive habits has not produced security, let alone energy stability. To think that now, this time, it will work seems to mirror the faith of a zealot rather than a strategist.

Then there is the problem of democracy at gunpoint. The postscript of Cash's piece reads as follows:

‘I’ll tell you what war is all about; you’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting.’ Gen. Curtis LeMay

Again, I do not know if Cash included this postscript himself, many times as things are circulated on the internet they acquire additional comments which may not be original, but since it is present in the document I will address it without attributing it to Cash. I can assure you that if someone offered any rational, thinking person this form of democratization, it would not only be rejected but scorned and hated. After this sort of war, what form of democracy would exist? Certainly not a political institution that arose from the people (demos). Rather, the current war in Iraq not only destroyed any nascent moderate movement in Iraq (much of the population--especially the women--feel they had more freedom and a better quality of life under Saddam. Whether that is objectively true or just the zeitgeist of a wartorn people--it does suggest something about our attempts at democratization), but it also gave the fundamentalists in Iran a platform to consolidate power just as there was a movement towards secularization. Our work in Afghanistan is for nothing. Even the overtures toward democracy in Russia, which conservatives like to point out as Regan's victory, are falling to the wayside.

Any attempts to force a people to bow to your will causes resentment. If what we have is so good, why do we need to force it on others by the point of a knife?

Tomorrow: Part 2--Morals