Katrina & Iraq & Iran

Following up on the previous post, have you ever noticed that just as commodity traders and oil executives get ready to calculate their year-end bonuses and do some Christmas shopping, someone predicts a "worse than normal" winter in the northeast United States and oil prices go up through the holidays?

That's not enough anymore. Now you've got to get the US government to rattle its useless sabre at Iran to make sure those first quarter profits stay high as well.

Black gold. The universal motive.

Katrina & Iraq

A couple of puzzles in Bushco's behavior yield to the same key:

1) Why did Bushco have no post-war plan for Iraq, beyond Bring. It. On. ?
2) Why was the response to the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina so laughably, criminally inadequate?

If you remember that Our Leaders were formerly oil men, the answer to both questions is easy. There was never a post-war plan for Iraq because a coherent strategy might have led to a stable country that could have exported oil quickly to help pay for its reconstruction and improvement post-war.

Exporting oil quickly from the world's second-largest known reserve would have driven oil prices downward. Possibly by a few dollars, possibly by as much as twenty dollars a barrel, negatively affecting the profits of oil companies. That idea was never going to fly within the Bush administration.

How much better to throw the world's second-largest oil reserve into chaos, permanently raising the price while there's still enough to ensure strong profits for some time to come. The longer Iraq remains in chaos, the better the oil profits for every oil company in the world. That's why the United States, in outspending the entire world in aggregate on "defense", can't subdue a single third world nation in 3 years, even though the same country and its allies could end a world war in 4 years. There's no incentive to "win" for the people in charge, when the perpetual war is so much more profiable for everyone concerned.

As for Katrina, it's easy to imagine this conversation in the Oval office last autumn:

Michael Brown:
Mr. President, a large hurricane is about to obliterate New Orleans and a substantial portion of the Gulf Coast.

Bush: Huh. Will that make energy prices rise?

Cheney: Yes it will, Mr. President

Bush: Okay, great. Thanks for dropping by, Brownie. What's next on the agenda?

Nuclear Non-Proliferation is for Morons

Paying attention now?

Looks like the Bushco's getting all hot and bothered, panties-in-a-bunch, over Iran breaking the seals on a couple of IAEA nuclear research sites and is starting the drumbeat whose unmistakeable message is: "...Vote for us. We'll protect you. Vote for us. We'll protect you..." With Our Rulers looking unpopular going in to the 2006 mid-term election cycle, clearly it's time for a little fear- and war-mongering to get the rubes lined up to pretend the voting machines aren't gamed and to keep the charade of democracy going long enough to consolidate their permanent hold on power.

And this time, Europe's on board with this Iran's-going-to-destroy-us-all nonsense. You'd think the EU would have taken a lesson from that other country next door to the Satan-of-the-week.

Face it, folks, the whole idea of nuclear non-proliferation was idiotic from the outset. Maybe we could have had some success if we'd gunned down Oppenheimer, all his colleagues, their friends, their families, all the Nazis working on heavy-water experiments and then expunged the memory of Einstein and his work from all records around the world and outlawed the study of nuclear physics everywhere, but once you've got E=MC2, you know that matter is energy and the conversion from one to the other is going to make a pretty big bang.

It's amazing that the nuclear club has been kept so small for so long, mostly thanks to the Cold War and alignment of everyone in the world with one nuclear arsenal or another, but the idea of nuclear non-proliferation implicitly asserts that you're going to keep the means, methods and materials necessary to the production of nuclear weapons locked away forever.

Forever's a long time.
Take all the time you've waited in the offices of physicians and bureaucrats, bus stations, for your significant other to show up, for your tax refund, and multiply that by the number of atoms in everyone who has ever lived on this planet, and you're not even close to taking a fingernails pairing off forever. It's long, and it's beyond the scope of anyone to imagine, and it's no time scale for planning to keep a secret.

Lots and lots of people know how to make nuclear weapons. It isn't easy, and isn't terribly cheap, and you need a good industrial base and some exotic materials, but if Pakistan can manage it, I'm guessing a whole lot of other countries could manage it as well.

If they wanted to.

As the Bard said, "There's the rub." Hoping your enemy doesn't get the weapons you have is a short-term strategy for wartime, when you're about to obliterate your enemy forever (see above). Unless the USA and Europe are willing to begin bankrupting and pointless genocidal wars of conquest around the world to prevent nuclear proliferation, the only sane long-term strategy is to figure out why someone might want to attack you and change their minds.

Unless, of course, it's because they hate freedom.