No War for Oil

Please let us think a moment.  I know that's difficult at times, and during the media blitz about Turmoil in the Mideast, with its focus on the shootings and bombings of unarmed demonstrators very far from easy, but let me try it with you.

Muammar al-Gaddafi is no longer the leader of Libya: he can kill people, but they're not going to allow him to remain in control much longer.

But his departure from the world scene removes as well the option of an oil-financed, progressive faith-based Islamic political model.  That's what the much-derided "Green Revolution" was about, the creation of an indigenous, Arab-speaking answer to Westernization.  And if that political model is now on the scrap-heap (and it is, surely it is), then the political model of the Kingdom, of the heirs of Ibn Saud, is even more of an anachronism.  If charismatic blending of traditional Arab culture with selective adoption of Western technical advances has no chance of success, since the country where it is being tried has rejected it, then down-the-line traditionalism has no chance whatever.

And that's what Saudi Arabia has been, lo these last fifty years: no movement toward a separation of church and state, toward a concept of citizen participation, toward any adaptation whatever to the political liberties espoused by ever larger sections of the world since the French Revolution.

The American Empire is still not reconciled to the populist regime in Iran -- it is by no means democratic, but it does rest on popular consent -- how will it cope with an outbreak of populism in its major puppet state, on top of the largest oil reservoir in the world?

Presumably, by occupying it.

We are looking at perpetual war for oil.