147 comments on DrumBeat: October 30, 2006
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147 comments on DrumBeat: October 30, 2006
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I watched the news conference with Tony and Gordon. I get the feeling that there will be many new taxes in the budget, and quite a few new laws in the queen's speech.
However, at no time did they give me the feeling that they had any way to make US, China, and India deal with their CO2 production and signup to a 'framework agreement'. Without this, it's all for naught.
When US CO2 production is so far above everyone else, and China and India are increasing their production so fast the key question is to deal with the tentpoles first, not play around with carbon trading and deforestation.
Which is where it all becomes a joke.
Fairness be damned, what's needed is a statement "no growth in CO2, you're not making it worse because you didn't before". Otherwise all that happens is polluting industry migrates and overall CO2 production continues to rise.
There is a need for a credible route to
a) making substantial cuts in US CO2 production
b) a quick stop in India & China CO2 growth
otherwise what is the point in anyone else trying?
Well if the developed world was willing to reduce their GHG per capita emmssions to the global average we might have a chance to address this issue. As it stands, the Chinese farmer who buys his first refrigerator is not the problem. The problem is the Canadian who likes to wear shorts inside when it is -30 below.
And this is the very sad part.
Nothing will be done. Does anyone in their right mind believe the world will suddenly change its way of living because the threat of a warmer world several years, or decades, in the future. I have stated this fact at least one hundred times, people do not respond to dire warnings of coming catastrophies. In fact, people, in general, do not respond to arguments of any kind. They only respond only to events.
For every argument, no matter what the facts and logic behind it, there will always be someone making a counter-argument. People, again, in general, will then believe the argument that offers them the best possible outcome.
When the dramatic results of global warming start to be felt by the nations of the earth, then the tide will start to turn, people will clamor for something to be done. Most of them will ask; "why wasn't something done years ago?"
Well, I just told you why nothing was done years ago, and why nothing will be done until it is way too late.
A very few people look at all arguments and pick the one most logical. Emotion however, is so much stronger than reason. The vast majority of people look at the argument that makes them feel good and safe. All other arguments will then be discounted, without examination, as foolishness. And they will always believe that they are picking the most resonable argument.
Ron Patterson
IMO the outcome of the next decades really depends on how effective is our government and whether there will be real leadership to handle this issue. Don't hold your breath though...
However, the tricky bit is actually achieving the goal of substantial carbon reduction. Taxes (or "price signals" as the givernment likes to call them) are very blunt instruments that cause big problems for the less well-off, especially as many parts of Britain suffer from poorly-insulated houses and little public transport. As George Monbiot argues in his new book "Heat", what is needed is for the public to persuade the government to legislate to forse them (the public) to cut down carbon output. Quite trickly to get people to vote for legislation that will inconvenience a large proportion of them! As the saying goes '"less" is a four-letter word".
Taxing people to change the world hits the low and middle income demographic. If you live in Richmond, then a few quid more on a chelsea tractor wont bite. (especially if you set your own pay)
If you own a villa in southern France, a few bob on your cheap flight wont hurt. Hell it will keep the great unwashed at home, where they should be: Cleaning our first house so it is nice n tidy when we get back
Nope. Hate to say this as a life long libertine and free market capitalist, GW-PO is bigger than all of us.
It is time to start BANNING STUFF BY LAW unless it is really vital. Who needs a chelsea tractor? Who needs a second home in France? Who needs aspirational consumerism?
Problem is, who will dare stand up and say this? Especially when a looming minority of Chinese and Indian Middle Class are poised to get there share of aspirational consumerism.
Naah. It just gets worse. Nobody will vote for national penury, nobody will stop the economic arms race if there is a chance that another nation will overtake and devour our nation.
We just are not wired that way. What made us successful as a species in the trial of the ice ages is now working against us:
Greed for fats and sweet honey; Tribalism,bonding and social organisation; tool making skills; sheer brain power; capacity for abstract thought;planning and mapping.
Great stuff when there are less than 2 million clever monkeys on planet. ''Gives you a nice edge'' - to missquote Oddball.
Its all a little bit problematic when there are 6.5 billion (and counting)clever monkeys on the planet.
We are fucked.
But before we are finally fucked, just watch the alpha-monkeys suck even more tax out of us.
We are victims of our own success (a trite way of describing overshoot).
Or
Too clever by 'alf.
Without it I don't find carbon tax to be that good idea at all - to continue the analogy, it is known that sometimes the pain itself can kill the patient.
Otherwise, it looks and is just another way to "redistibute the wealth" or another little socialist/communist program.
The rich as a percentage of people do not make up the bulk of polution from personal activities. It is the masses of which the bulk are lower and middle classes with their 2+ cars(yes even the poor in America own multiple cars) AC/heated homes and 2+ TVs, Appliances, etc that the real problem resides in.
But then taxing the rich and giving a pass to the poor has been a social goal of the liberals for a long time, and if they can meld PO and GW into furthering this goal, all the better.
No, if you are serious about reducing energy usage, you make it hurt for the greatest number of people so that the greatest number of people reduce or stop using that energy. Compensation merely prolongs the amount of time they will use that energy.
I am proposing to progressively tax the exessive consumption. Thus the tax will not be tailored for any social group, but will be against the fossil fuel consumption itself, which approach when you think of it makes the most sense. We have already such taxes: for example are taxes on alcohol and tobacco against poor people (assuming lower classes drink and smoke more)? I don't think so. They are against the consumption of these products itself. A milioneirre that doesn't drink, smoke, and drives a hybrid may find himself paying much less taxes then a poor suburban family that drives SUVs.
We as a society can easily agree on some levels of consumption which are essential for the basic needs, and make people progressively pay for the extra. I see this most easily implemented using tax rebates or something like it.
Lessoning the effect for anyone however is a mistake. It needs to hurt, and needs to hurt as many as possible so as to curb usage of X product.
A straight tax on fuel is fine. It hurts everyone equally from a usage standpoint. Don't want to be hurt? Stop drinking, smoking, or putting around in your car.
As for what to do with that tax money in regards to energy, I'm all for using it to build alternative transit systems and renewable energy. In a sense I suppose this is "recompensation" but its a public return not an individual return and thus the public, whether upper, middle, or lower class get to all see the benefit.
Or do you have another way that wouldn't involve tax rebates to the poor or making the tax have no teeth?
Seems like an either or situation to me.
If we do not provide a way to guarantee covering the basic needs like heating, lighting, using mass transit etc. without penalising them we are basically promoting a 19th century style capitalism. We need to come up with some sort of combination between penalising taxes (alcohol&tabacco) and incomme tax.
Say Green Taxes collect £12bn pa.
60 million people in the UK.
Mail them a £200 cheque per person every January 1st.
This is more or less what Alaska does (shares its windfall oil and gas tax) via a personal credit.
The very poor will be better off than they are now. Everyone who emits less than the average amount of CO2 in a year will be better off than they are now.
The effect on individuals would be less than the effects of a big change in the exchange rate, or losing their job, or a big change in energy prices (another form of 'tax' that we all pay).
In the case of the UK, that is about £200/tonne of Carbon emitted, or £56/tonne of CO2. Some activities (long haul flights to Australia) will get a lot more expensive.
(the Stern report reckons the long term cost of CO2 is c. £85 or about £312/tonne Carbon emitted).
Owning a high CO2 car (say 240gm/km v. 120gm/km which is the most economical Peugeot diesels) would cost about £1200 more pa (on 10k km pa driving).
then I think they will only work (and maximise GDP) if the principle is one of revenue neutrality.
The ideal rebate would be to reduce the employer contribution to National Insurance. Basically we would be reducing about the worst tax in the UK tax system (a tax on employing people which therefore lowers employment, output and investment). Employment would rise, wages would rise, returns on capital and investment would rise-- the proportions depend on each industry and its competitive conditions.
Politically we could probably make the pill palatable by splitting the take equally between NI for employer and employee. Even the lowly paid pay NI, whereas a reduction in income tax would benefit the well off by much more.
To the extent that Green taxes led to increases in prices, those on state support would be compensated by the increase in the CPI. One might have to have specific programmes eg for fuel poverty.
Sadly governments dislike hypothecated taxation (ie a tax tied to a purpose) and they really dislike revenue neutral commitments!
[rant warning]
Maybe it is time for them to change what they like or dislike, if it is true that our leadership acknowledges GW as a serious problem. I strongly doubt that indeed. I'm not sure at what point the call for a "smaller government" translated in a call for a "passive government" but to me it looks like the roots of the current inaction lie somewhere around that point.
The poor (the truly poor) will sell their permits, and be richer. The well off will buy the permits they need.
Politically the dynamite will be in the middle classes because they will have to make tradeoffs.
This is all about the economic aspirations of the middle classes. Say the 5th-80th deciles of the British population.
And what you miss is that governments are just people too. Here in the US of A, the government is one of the main obsticles to doing anything about global warming. They have their shills that are actually making the very bad arguments, tha arguments that people just love to believe.
Governments, all over the world will do what is in their best interest. Not in the best interest of future generations but their own needs of the moment. Do you actually see India or China putting serious pressures on industry to cut greenhouse emissions? That would mean burning less coal and coal is the lifeblood of those two countries.
Remember, the mass of mankind, and this means governments as well, are ruled by the needs of the moment. Homo sapiens are emotional beings first and reasoning second. They will believe what is most desirable for them to believe and they live in a democracy, they will vote in the most optimistic, feel good cantidates. They want a government that assures them that all is well with the world. And by God that is the kind of government they will have. All Cassandras will be kicked out on their ass.
Ron Patterson
Empires have a way to make people do what they don't want to. A key attribute of that type of government which is missing in Democratic style governments.
Thus, is Empire a better form(or at least a potentially more capable form) of government than Democracies, in their various configurations in regards to enforcing "green" policies?
People keep saying Government will need to step in and do something but in the case of Democracies the government IS the very people who don't want to change until its too late.
And if the Democracies are not going to change until its too late, those government which could autocratically enforce new rules (like China) are not going to, because to do so would be to give up an economic/military advantage.
I guess my concern with all the people's statements saying government intervention is needed, don't realize that to be asking for that is to be asking for autocratic or near-autocratic enforcement. Hence that brings us right back to square one, where the best we can offer is an ARGUMENT and use that argument to win people to our view point... preferrably before its too late, but then that is the tough part.
Thinking of China as autocracy is oversiplification. A good part of their reasons are similar to ours. Their party leaders and people in charge are also humans, have kids, move within other people etc. They can not easily come up with some governing decision which is against the majority.
Hence that brings us right back to square one, where the best we can offer is an ARGUMENT and use that argument to win people to our view point...
I strongly disagree with this strategy. Humans are largely inert and egoistic animals. We will not accept changes, spare sacrifices voluntarily. If you expect to persuade people to make them and then to vote for people to implement them, then prepare for a huge wait. What we need is something in the middle - a autocrative leadership (think Winston Churchil, or maybe Putin from todays politics) coupled with a strong campaign (which we are more or less having already). It will not work without either one of these elements.
The difference is that I don't think it makes fighting GW a [completely] lost cause. It is probably pretty futile exercise now, and for the next few years or decades, but when things become really hot (literally) at least we are going to have some experience and [maybe] we will be able to soften the blow. I don't think that anybody has enough information or forecasting capabilities to actually know whether we will, but it is still a good thing to work for.
But still, there have been times in history when we as species have seem to be capable to commit to personal sacrifices in the name of the common good. Whether we will do it this time - personally I doubt it. I simply don't want to give up on the fight for it.
Tony Verbalis
The mystery to me is how some of us have evolved differently. There are some of us who have taken voluntary action at significant expense to cut our carbon consumption even though we know that political action is necessary to force change on a mass scale. We can only hope we are helping to point the way, but I will admit that it is probably a vain hope. Still we soldier on regardless.
But back to the point that some of us have evolved differently. Just because we are emotional beings does not mean we can not use reason to figure out what the problems are and what needs to be done. I don't believe what is necessarily desirable to believe unless you believe that I find it desirable to suffer. But why am I different and why are significant numbers of my fellow beings different.
The problem, I think, isn't so much that we are not evolving but that we will not evolve in time to do something about a problem that is reaching the tipping point to cause it to run away beyond control. Our society, for example, has evolved to the point that we are a much less racist society than we were 40 years ago and we are much more respectful to women. But we don't have 40 years.
Tstreet, the word "we" covers a lot of territory. Just who are you talking about when you use the pronoun "we"? Do you mean yourself and perhaps a few academics that have studied the problem? If so, then you are correct. But do you mean the majority of humankind? If so, then your conclusions are entirely incorrect. We are emotional beings and our emotion, for most people anyway, determines which argument we accept and which we reject. Realizing of course that any good debater can often make the most absurd argument seem reasonable.
T, we are all different. Any human characteristic is found in variable degrees in everyone. An example. (All figures in this example are not factual but used only to make a point.) Say the average height of the European male is five feet ten inches. And say the average difference in height between any two people picked at random is two inches. Then two inches would be what is called "one standard deviation"
There are other definitions for "standard deviation" but the one above is by far the most easy to understand. That is, it is the average difference between any two individuals, picked at random from the total population. And it can be applied to any characteristic.
From this we could form a bell curve of the height of all European males. Five feet ten would be the average and at the peak of the bell curve. Sixty eight percent of all European males would be within one standard deviation of five feet ten. That is, sixty eight percent of all European males would be between five feet eight and six feet tall, ninety six percent would fall within two standard deviations, either side of the mean and ninety nine percent would fall within three standard deviations of the mean. That would be between five feet four and six feet four, if two inches were truly one standard deviation in the height of European males. But don't count on that figures, two inches and five feet ten, as being correct because I just pulled those figures out of the air. But the point is made, whatever the true figure for height and whatever the true figure for one standard deviation, 99 percent would fall within three standard deviations of the mean.
Just as a bell curve and standard deviations can be applied to height, or any other characteristic, human or otherwise, it can also be applied to such things as "propensity to decide arguments on emotion." Most people, the mean, would use reason along with emotion to make decisions. There would be people on both side of the curve. Though the center of the curve, the mean, would give more weight to emotion than reason, more reason would come into play as you moved to one side of the curve and more emotion as you moved to the other. As you approched one extreme side of the bell curve, people would be extremely rational, in their decision making, and extremely emotional on the other.
And one more very important point. Since people generally seek as friends, others who think like they do, then it is likely that most of your close friends are more rational than emotional, provided of course that this is they you make decisions.
This natural variation, by the way, found in both plants and animals, is what makes evolution possible.
Ron Patterson
If this was a more political and less serious thread, this is where I would point out that my ass's name is being taken in vain, and that those rats be weasels. But PO and GW are serous subjects, so I won't.
Rat in a drain ditch
Caught on a limb
You know better but
I know him
Like I told you
What I said
Steal your face
right off you head
Rodney DangerRat
any serious attempt at stopping climate change will not work because of this.
As much as you know I disagree with you on many things you are so sensible here. Yhe one thing you are perhaps missing is that for some (some) in Europe global warming is present now. Try going to weather.com and pulling the chart of daily temps for London this October. Or Warsaw. Or Geneva. Anyone living there knows global warming has arrived.
Some know it. As opposed to those who are just enjoying the mild weather. Problem is we are locked in for decades even if (if) those who are aware took action now.
Ron Patterson
It becomes a joke when North Americans bring up India and China, where per capita consumption of oil and coal amounts to perhaps 10%, if that, of what we manage to burn.
Which is, as far as I've seen, where the Energy Depletion Protocol* fails. How will you get people to cut down on consumption when you use 10 times as much as they do? Why would China ever agree to that?
* I haven't read the book, review copy's stuck somewhere, but in no version of what has been presented prior to the book has this been addressed.
- The US needs to agree double digit reductions in CO2 production in short timeframes. It has to hurt and be seen to hurt enough that the rest of the world can overlook the extreme level of CO2 production that would still exist.
- At the same time India and China need to agree to zero percent growth in CO2 emission. Fairness is a great thing, but has nothing to do with this problem. We need a state where nobody makes the situation worse, and everyone acts to reduce their production. China putting out 24% more is not acceptable, no matter what.
Given that I don't see either of these three countries agreeing voluntarily to what's needed, we arrive at how can the rest of the world force them? If CC is that much of a threat to global ecology, then virtually any measure is justified - and indeed MUST be used.I agree! It must be done. But of course nothing will be done!
We can't force anyone to do anything because we won't do anything ourselves. And we are not the rulers of the world. We have not the authority nor the manpower to force anyone, especially large populations like China and India, to do one damn thing.
Don't you understand, what must be done and what will be done are two entirely different things. What will be done is exactly what is being done right now! What is being done right now? Absolutely nothing of course. Well, except a lot of talk and dire warnings, of which no one is paying the slightest bit of attention to.
Ron Patterson
I agree that dealing with PO and GW should be a primary concern of our gov'ts. But any meaningful measures to curb our "American way of Life" will result in an economic crash. That's why they refuse to deal with it.
- The US, as we know, is very susceptible to a run on the dollar and oil availability.
- China's growth is built on oil imports and goods exports.
- India similarly, but with that added call centre goodness.
Each can be 'forced', via those dependencies, towards desired behaviours. In particular all of them need oil and gas imports to sustain their problematic behaviours. Those in the rest of the world need to have the will equal or greater to their existing action on nation Kyoto targets.That's what I mean by all measures, and the WTO be damned.
Economic warfare will lead to real warfare if you try to corner one of those three entities, and any of those three entities have the capability to make the rest of world hurt badly, or even be killed outright.
As for cutting off oil to any one of those three... exactly what would KSA, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Nigeria, etc etc gain from doing that? What incentive could say Europe offer those countries that would be worth more than they make on oil sales, combined with the risk investment needed to cover the fairly high probability of invasion/attack?
There is no way the rest of the world is going to FORCE those three nations into changing course. The rest of the world needs to convince those three countries that it is in their best interest to avoid going down that path. Cause I assure you that it won't be in the interest of the rest of the world to force those three into compliance.
The Oil Embargo of the 1970s involved a small fraction of total OPEC production. If OPEC as a whole had shut off the spigots, OPEC wouldn't exist today and the entire area would be under some combined external autority headed by the US, Britain, and possibly even Russia.
No, we're headed for a "last man standing" scenario, and along the way we will burn all the oil, all the natural gas, and all the coal too.
Problem is, you cannot control war very easily when you unleash it.
Especially in a nuclear tipped world when all is to play for and your financial friends of yesterday are your military protagonists of today.
Short of a massive war of extermination, war nowadays is pretty well stale-mated. Who would of thought that Iraq would have lasted this long and have gone to such incredible failure? - Certainly not Bush n Blair.
Who would have thought to see the SovU loose in Afghanistan with such superiority in men and material?
Who would have expected that China, Russia and KSA would hold so many US -IOU's a decade ago?
The order of global complexity in commerce, banking, trade, military balance is now an order of magnitude more complex than a generation ago.
One sunken tanker in the Straights of Hormuz could kill Pax America.
Call to the USA and your Rogue President: It is time to think outside the box (to use that hoary old management psycho babble phrase)
Darling, we need to talk....
Firstly failure is a subjective term, and mind you I'm not one of the happy campers about Iraq either. But to say its over is a bit short sighted.
Secondly, the argument that the insurgents have held on this long is a sign that war nowadays is a stalemate is a completely naive look at both modern warfare in general, and Iraq in specific.
Militarily defeating Iraq isn't a problem. We could go in there crush them utterly and put the boot heel to their neck. But that's not the type of country the US is. Instead the reason for "failure" is not a military one, but rather a cultural/political one. I think the idea of democratizing essentially overnight a populace which has known centuries of autocratic rule is just insane. Especially when you throw in the sub-cultural history that make up the region of Iraq as a whole.
People I don't think appreciate the amount of time it took us Westerners to becomed "enlightened" in our democratically elected forms of government. Its taken western civilization near 2000+ years of philosophy, religion and cultural advancement to get to this point. Starting back to the Greek city states on up to the Magna Carta, The Reformation, a whole slew of governments tossed back and forth between monarchy, and parliamentary, and all the hybrids in between. And here we think we are going to go into places announce Freedom Rocks, and expect shining examples of democracy to just spring up like sunflowers.
It tooks us centuries to ween off the monarchical system, and we still have the remnants of it in a stripped down fashion in just about every European country I can think of, not to mention it still makes for great fascination and romantic interest in the "colonies".
But to say Iraq is a failure militarily is a mistake, especially if "smaller" nations think that such a sign of failure gives them an inlet of power on the economic theatre. The moment a small country(s) dares to stand up to a big one or the 3 big ones, will be the moment those three big ones stop looking at each other with as much distrust and looks at the rest of world as a buffet for the picking.
And if you don't believe the USA would go down that path or that the average American wouldn't go imperial, then you just try and take away their standard of life, and the promise of a better one for their children by FORCE.
Like I said... convince the American that the current way is not better, and you might get somewhere peacefully, but Americans do not, nor have ever taken kindly to being forced by an outside power. And given China's and India's rapid militarization, I get the feeling they too wouldn't be too keen on going along with a forced situation.
And this guy
http://www.idleworm.com/nws/2002/11/iraq2.shtml
The US doesn't have those troops without a massive mobilization which would be unacceptable to the American public, and we have sufficient vestiges of democracy, in spite of the efforts of Bush/Rove/Cheney, that the vehement opposition of 80% of the public would probably prevent such insanity.
A couple thugs playing dominatrix games in Abu Ghraib hardly constitute an unrestrained military effort.
I'm talking along the lines of take no prisoners, flatten cities, and firebomb neighborhoods.
The main reason air campaigns have a hard time being successful is because we have become a victim of our own success in technology. We are so precise that the expectation is no/little collateral damage. And if collateral damage is done, every body gets squeemish. Take that restraint off for just a moment.
Instead of trying to play pin the buster bunker on the hidden munitions, you instead carpet bomb an entire city like Falluja to the point where only rubble remains. Then you bring your ground forces to mop up.... not in a friendly door to door effort where you worry about civilian casualties... you go in and kill every living thing, man, woman, child, and pet dog while we are at it.
This world has enjoyed restrained warfare for the pass 50+ years because of the fallout of WWII. Someday that framework for warfare will go away. And when it does, its going to make Iraq look like a spa resort in comparison. The sheer ugliness of human aggression is EXTREMELY restrained right now, even under Bush and Co.
And if PO, Dieoff, and other catastrophic effects makes things desperate enough, you will see a return to what true warfare is about. And when that happens, Empires the likes of which the US, China, the EU, Russia, and India could become will look at smaller nations consider their resources for grabs, and their people as expendable.
And given the advancements in neutron bombs, we are even building the weapons to kill the people and leave everything else intact. War will get a lot uglier is desperation kicks in.
People point to Iraq and cry about the atrocities... those are nothing compared to what both sides in WWII and WWI did, and those are nothing compared to the wars before that. War is an extremely uncivilized activity, and despite the screw ups in Iraq, Iraq has been far more civilized as far as our side is concerned than most of our previous endeavors. But hey... you won't hear about the good troops actions... they don't make good print.
After you kill 1 million uncooperative Iraqis (pace estimates of 600,000 so far) in what sense have you 'won'?
And what do the other 29 million or so Iraqis do to you then?
Do they cooperate with you, help you, work with you? You drop nuclear bombs on Fallujah and Sadr City (in Baghdad), so how do you govern what is left?
Or do you kill another 1 million of them?
And what happens to all your Arab and Islamic allies and their friendly governments whilst you carry out this putative massacre? Do you think their 1 billion people stand by and do nothing? Do you think the Qataris will let you keep your logistic bases, and the KSA will keep selling you oil?
It's neat to speculate about this being the Ukraine in 1942, but as a matter of fact the Germans failed with the partisans there, too.
The US was able to conduct genocide on the American Indian, but then disease and starvation did most of that work, and the US was settling whites on their lands.
The US doesn't have the capability to settle white Americans in Iraq.
The US could have 'won' in Vietnam by destroying the Red River dikes, killing 1-2 million northerners. But then they would have been left with the same problem, ie a destroyed country where everyone hates you, and everyone is waiting for the moment when you turn your back to kill you.
I'm currently in the camp that thinks this is a lost cause given A) the amount of troop resources we threw at the problem, B) a severe lack of understanding of the Iraqi culture which I think prevents a Democracy in the form we think "it should be" from forming, and C) The lack of American will to see the job done fully, which includes some nasty things which currently America and the rest of the Western world are too squeemish to handle.
Versus a second argument:
Hypothetically if America was desperate enough, could we win in Iraq given certain objectives. In this situation I'm talking about a world where resources are the end objective, not spreading democracy.
In that event where the objective is to capture and claim Iraq's resources, not give a damn about Democratizing them, and to pretty much quash any rebellion in an effort to secure said resources. It may very well turn into Nazi style death camps, its not like we have not seen this type of behavior in the past. As someone else pointed out, when the Romans were done with Carthage, there wasn't much left, including all the people.
Hence I come back to do I think Iraq is "unwinnable", and I firmly say that it is winnable depending on the objectives and depending on motivation of the attacking party.
Of course if we are fighting over resources, chances are, its not the Iraqis we would be fighting so much, but rather another superpower who is equally interested in raping Iraq for whatever resources.
As hawk Max Boot wrote (sadly!!) in a recent column, Americans don't have the stomach to hold an empire.
That statement summarizes Telumehtar's point - we lack the stomach for this. But I can assure you that the Chinese are quite capable and so are the Russians. Kill 29 million? So what? If you are China you can find enough to replace that and not even scratch your own population. But the truth is that any occupier bent on control would not have to kill 29 million. Kill indiscriminately and broadly enough and the bulk of the remainder will do what most humans have done historically - complied in order to survive. One of the occupiers dies? The occupier kills 1000 of theirs. Repeat until the occupied population understands the message or no longer exists. (Note: I am NOT advocating this but simply pointing out that historically this is what homo sapiens does when confronted with these situations - they either force compliance from the subjugated or they eliminate them.)
Those who say this cannot happen today do not explain why it cannot happen. They just willy-nilly make that assertion without ever backing it up, allowing it to hang there as if the rest of the world is even capable of stopping such a thing once it begins.
20,000 insurgents (official US estimate) managed to pin down the world's most sophisticated and advanced army, and prevent it from securing the country.
Now the US is desparately seeking exit options.
It will look, to the world, like Mogadishu all over again. The mighty US and Great Britain humbled by a freedom fighter with an AK47, an RPG and the ubiquitous Improvised Explosive Device.
Read Thomas Ricks 'Fiasco' for a pretty good description of the mistakes, both at the political level (Bush/Cheney/ Rumsfeld) and the general command level. The Army hates the counterinsurgency mission, and it does not (did not) prepare for it.
http://www.amazon.com/Fiasco-American-Military-Adventure-Iraq/dp/159420103X
Its not the insurgents who pinned down the US and UK Army... its public opinion. The US and UK public along with World Opinion prevent the army from doing what it is capable of doing.
Whether that is a good or bad thing is irrelevant. But don't confuse lack of will, with incapability. The capability is there if we ever decided to use it, but to do so is going to mean collateral.
As I said, the US/UK is the victim of their own technological success. We develop all these pin point weapons to avoid collateral, and now that we can, the world won't accept anything except pin point perfection. Armies are traditionally good at breaking things with abandon, and with the expectation of collateral, and now they are not allowed to do that anymore, and so the Army is paralyzed.
Note you don't see the insurgents care about collateral, and hence that is why they are "winning".
Me. And just about anyone who ever studied military history and/or the history of Iraq in particular. The State Dept., the CIA, the Pentagon, etc. They all predicted it.
But they're just the reality-based community. What do they know...
It really disturbs me when I realize that sometime in December 2006 the US will have been in Iraq longer than it had been in World War II (approx 3 years and 9 months).
It looks like Daddy Bush is now having some of his fixers, such as James Baker, et al, trying to straighten ou the mess that Junior has made (once again).
Junior, being a typical spoiled brat, will never heed any advice from Papa regardless of whether it is obviously sound advice, and so the beat goes on.
However, once the real powers that be in the US conclude that a continuation of Iraq is getting to be bad for business, then you will see things start to change. But not until that becomes inescapably obvious.
In my softer moments I almost (and I stress the word ALMOST) feel sorry for Dubya, as he clearly is in over his head and had been from Day One. He was more or less 'selected' rather than elected.
bigcahunaau
I'm reminded of the tale of Ms. Fitts.
http://www.solari.com/media/summary.html
There is a galvanizing catastrophe. A big one.
There are leaders.
The leaders are amazingly smart and the people too scared to not play ball.
If there's a big enough catastrophe it's probably already too late. Seen a leader recently?
There are mechanisms and scenarios whereby something good could be salvaged. I'll contemplate a few more besides my own. The chances of this coming off? Very very slim
They have set a goal of reducing CO2 per unit of GDP by 20%, which is ambitious but doable.
The issue is the future growth of Chinese CO2 output, not their past contribution to the problem (miniscule) nor their current output (very substantial, but still less than Europe or the US).
India isn't even on the map yet, less than 1/4 Chinese CO2 output.
It's not feasible for either country to agree to reduce emissions. What is feasible is that we help them to use best practice emission control technology.
China is important to the Greenhouse Effect. However it still only produces 1/3rd the GHG of the US.
India, on bullish forecasts, will still not produce more Greenhouse Gases than the UK in 2020, I believe.
Of course, 80-90% of the existing GHG inventory in the atmosphere was created by activities in developed countries, so on any principle of equity or fairness they ought to be the ones that take the first steps.