The Rag Blog

The best way to feel hopeful about our looming energy crisis is to get active now and prepare for living arrangements in a post-oil society.

Editor’s Note: James Howard Kunstler is a leading writer on the topic of peak oil [and] the problems it poses for American suburbia. Deeply concerned about the future of our petroleum dependent society, Kunstler believes we must take radical steps to avoid the total meltdown of modern society in the face [of] looming oil and gas shortages. For background on this topic, read Kunstler’s essay, “Pricey Gas, That’s Reality.”

Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for being “Mister Gloom’n’doom,” or for “not offering any solutions” to our looming energy crisis. So, for those of you who are tired of wringing your hands, who would like to do something useful, or focus your attention in a purposeful way, here are my suggestions:

1. Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by means other than gasoline. This obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs could really prove fatal. It is especially unhelpful that so many self-proclaimed “greens” and political “progressives” are hung up on this monomaniacal theme. Get this: the cars are not part of the solution (whether they run on fossil fuels, vodka, used frymax™ oil, or cow shit). They are at the heart of the problem. And trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring system by shifting it from gasoline to other fuels will only make things much worse. The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car. We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.

2. We have to produce food differently. The Monsanto/Cargill model of industrial agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix this. Farming will soon return much closer to the center of American economic life. It will necessarily have to be done more locally, at a smaller-and-finer scale, and will require more human labor. The value-added activities associated with farming — e.g. making products like cheese, wine, oils — will also have to be done much more locally. This situation presents excellent business and vocational opportunities for America’s young people (if they can unplug their Ipods long enough to pay attention.) It also presents huge problems in land-use reform. Not to mention the fact that the knowledge and skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly retrieved from the dumpster of history. Get busy.

3. We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in our nation organized for car dependency is going to fail to some degree. Quite a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami …) will support only a fraction of their current populations. We’ll have to return to traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities (along with a productive rural landscape). Our small towns are waiting to be reinhabited. Our cities will have to contract. The cities that are composed proportionately more of suburban fabric (e.g. Atlanta, Houston) will pose especially tough problems. Most of that stuff will not be fixed. The loss of monetary value in suburban property will have far-reaching ramifications. The stuff we build in the decades ahead will have to be made of regional materials found in nature — as opposed to modular, snap-together, manufactured components — at a more modest scale. This whole process will entail enormous demographic shifts and is liable to be turbulent. Like farming, it will require the retrieval of skill-sets and methodologies that have been forsaken. The graduate schools of architecture are still tragically preoccupied with teaching Narcissism. The faculties will have to be overthrown. Our attitudes about land-use will have to change dramatically. The building codes and zoning laws will eventually be abandoned and will have to be replaced with vernacular wisdom. Get busy.

I have some comments on the whole question of Arab-language news and opinion in North America.

In a nation of 300 million souls, there is a lack (to put it mildly) of broad and deep coverage of public discourse in what is currently a region of great concern, namely the Middle East. This lack, in itself, is a fact that should be highlighted, because it is the source of a whole lot of other problems. The damage isn’t limited to having facilitated the “dancing in the streets” demagoguery ahead of the Iraq invasion. On the contrary, it continues to make American policy unstable and prone to other forms of demagoguery, new and old. The underlying problem is the lack of broad cultural literacy. I happen to think that as a long-term issue, the low esteem in which language-learning is held is an important part of that.

(If I had the energy and I was completely consistent as a person, I would cut back on the “missing links” format and instead post excerpts in Arabic with explanatory notes, vocabulary and so on, as an encouragement to autodidacts and others, and to show that while learning a language is difficult, getting a toe-hold in newspaper-Arabic with its repetitive structures and vocabulary is not as impossible as it is made out to be, so as to promote the idea of a culture of language-learning, which to put it mildly again, there isn’t.)

If there was a broad enough Arabic cultural literacy among commentators and others, you wouldn’t have this situation where people say “I know what is going on because I read so-and-so and I have read him for a long time”. I hope people never say that about me, because my coverage is as inadequate for that as the next person’s. Specific issues, having to do with who says this and who says that, are in large part the result of this thinness.

Each person has his aims and ideals and his perspective on the world. Mine is that people need to appreciate the variety of different views held by commentators and others in that part of the world. People need to understand these views and not just in a superficial way. And of course some of them I often agree with (for instance the consistent Bush-criticism of Samaha and Atwan); some of them I don’t (for instance the quasi-official Saudi views of Mamoun Fandy); and some I find sort of in-between (some of the writers classified as “liberals” for instance). But the risk is in not understanding people at all. This is not only dangerous for America policy-wise, but also it is a shame just on the human and cultural level.

Among the academics, Marc Lynch runs an open-minded and accessible blog at abuaardvark.com, useful not only because of the posts and the comments, but also for the thumbnail summaries and links in the column at the left, which I have often pillaged. No doubt he has his aims and ideals and perspectives on the world, which I wouldn’t presume to try and summarize, other than to note that he is a political scientist, so if I had to say something it would be about the dangers of scientism, and I would preach the need to drill down into what exactly people’s views are, avoiding the temptation to merely classify them. At Joshua Landis’ Syriacomment.com you can get a cross-section of opinions about the Syrian regime and its interesting strategic position, not only via Landis’ posts, but even more from the outspoken commenters, many of them Syrian, and many often at loggerheads with one another. No danger of getting only one side of the story there.

Among the non-academics, Helena Cobban at justworldnews.org, like myself, thinks in addition to the surface problems, there is a problem with ways of thinking, and her focus is often on the need to think about the resolution of conflicts and not always just about the conflicts themselves.

And there is Juan Cole at Juancole.com, a hard worker, to be sure, and whose archives can be a useful tool as well. But I think it is clear his aims and ideals are a lot more specific, and have to do with the solidification of an Iraqi regime controlled by SCIRI. There is nothing against having that as an aim, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of an even-handed account of what is going on. I think recently in a lot of cases it has gotten in the way of that, and given his influence, I think it is incumbent on a person to point that out as clearly as possible.

In his Iraq policy address on January 10, President Bush promised three new initiatives: a “surge” of American troops accompanied by a new “clear, hold, and build” strategy in Sunni insurgent strongholds; an offensive against Shia militias, particularly the Sadrist Mahdi Army which “U.S. military officials now identify as the greatest security threat in Iraq”; and forceful action to prevent Iran from further increasing its influence in Iraq and the Middle East.

Events in the last few weeks make it clear that all three prongs of this strategy are being enacted, even while the Congress is engaged in a prolonged debate over its (non-binding) opposition to the “surge” part of the new regional plan. The “surge” strategy was actually initiated one day before the speech was even given — in an offensive on Baghdad’s Haifa Street that briefly dominated the headlines. The new initiative aimed at Shia militias appears to have begun with a battle outside of Najaf in which about 200 members of the Al-Hawatim and al-Khazali tribes were killed by American and Iraqi forces — apparently because the tribal militias had been involved in a growing (if under-reported) “anti-U.S. and anti-Baghdad” guerrilla war that “has been spreading like wildfire” in the Shia south. And the new aggressiveness towards Iran is now being played out not only in Iraq, but in the increasingly credible threats of an American or Israeli, or combined American and Israeli, air assault on Iran itself.

We may have to wait weeks, or even months, to evaluate the consequences of American actions against those Shia militias and Iran. But the Haifa Street offensive, now almost a month old, already offers us a vivid portrait of the horrific consequences that are the likely result of the Sunni insurgent part of the President’s “surge” strategy.

Haifa Street as an Enemy Stronghold

Haifa Street, a moderately prosperous two-mile-long avenue just outside the American-controlled Green Zone in Baghdad, has been a center of Sunni resistance since early in the war. Despite the imagery of constant violence associated with the neighborhood in the media, it has, like most insurgent areas, largely been quiet — except when American troops attempted to pacify it.

Soon after the fall of Baghdad, anti-American forces became the military and political leadership in the Haifa Street neighborhood, setting up local militias to combat a wave of criminal violence that swept through the capital after the Americans dismantled the Iraqi military and police. By 2004, the insurgents were the local government in the area, institutionalizing their form of Sunni fundamentalism but at that early date still tolerating the presence of a Shia minority, who continued to live peacefully among the Sunni majority.

Sustained violence only occurred when American patrols entered the area. Then snipers, IEDs, and gun battles would — often successfully — be brought into play to divert the Americans from their goal of arresting or killing suspected insurgents. The ferocity of the resistance led American soldiers to dub the area “Death Street.” After one abortive attempt at conquering the neighborhood, the number of U.S. patrols dwindled as Haifa Street became one of many virtual “no-go” areas in the capital (not to speak of the country), “off-limits for American and even Iraqi soldiers.”

In November 2004, an IED exploded near one of those occasional American patrols, demolishing a Humvee and triggering a cascading set of events that culminated in an American helicopter shooting into a crowd and killing Mazen Tomeizi, a Palestinian reporter for the al Arabiya satellite news network of Dubai. Because Tomeizi was filming his follow-up to the earlier incident when he was shot, his death became one of the most horrific, widely viewed images of the war — at least in the Middle East — with his blood splattering on the camera as he cried, “I’m going to die, I’m going to die.” This incident, apparently, convinced the American military command to make another attempt to pacify Haifa Street.

Under the headline, “A Violent Street Finds Calm,” Christian Science Monitor reporter Scott Peterson described how the Americans took control of the neighborhood in a six-month military offensive, involving “rooftop snipers” and other “tough measures that reportedly included abuse of detainees.” This running battle, which began in January 2005, qualifies as the most violent period in recent Haifa Street history — until the latest offensive. But in American reportage, the emphasis was on the pacification and quiescence achieved, once — by the late spring of 2005 — the Americans had suppressed the active resistance.

Sprinkled in with the positive stories of grateful residents welcoming the end of the fighting were telltale signs of an unpopular military occupation: Some residents would “glower” when American troops passed by; “tensions [were] a little higher” whenever American troops entered a street; and graffiti proclaiming, “Long Live the Mujahideen,” were quickly restored after American soldiers tried to obliterate them. Nevertheless, in June of 2005, ABC reporter Nick Watt declared that “Death Street is indeed a thing of the past.”

That battle, now two years past, was a perfect example of how the new “clear, hold, and build” strategy that President Bush announced in his recent speech is supposed to work. An American clearing-and-holding operation was to be followed by a transfer of power to Iraqi military units, supposedly already “stood up” through intensive American training and advising. This particular turn-over operation was hailed at the time by occupation authorities as “a high-profile example of how Iraqi National Guard troops — trained, supported, and let loose by US advisers — can claw back territory from insurgents.” It was heralded as a giant step forward, “a template for spreading government control across Iraq and undercutting the insurgency.”

BAGHDAD, 13 Feb 2007 (IRIN) – Iraqi troops, US-led coalition forces and insurgents are all guilty of breaking Geneva conventions that govern the neutrality of hospitals, say health specialists. The increasing risk of being shot or arrested in a hospital in Iraq is preventing ordinary citizens from seeking medical attention.

“The Geneva convention states that a hospital is and should remain neutral and accessible to everybody, particularly civilians. Yet, when it’s occupied by armed groups or official forces, people would not have this free and humanitarian access,” said Cedric Turlan, information officer for the NGO Coordinating Committee in Iraq (NCCI).

Turlan said that hospitals are getting caught in the midst of violent clashes between insurgents and US or Iraqi troops, and between Sunni and Shia militias. In the course of these battles, ambulances are sometimes destroyed or confiscated and entire hospitals, particularly in the restive Anbar province, are taken over by a particular armed group – whether official or non-official.

This is deterring patients from seeking medical help in hospitals and is making the provision of health care an almost impossible task, say specialists.

According to Turlan, the most recent example of a hospital occupation happened in December 2006, in Ramadi, some 115km west of the capital, Baghdad.

The general hospital there is located in the highly tense district of Al-Sofiya. According to officials working at the hospital, 13 civilians were killed by snipers in the first week of November 2006 as they were entering the hospital to get treatment.

Snipers on the hospital roof

As such, less than 10 percent of the hospital’s staff was still working there when US-led forces burst into the hospital many times during the day and night looking for snipers on the hospital’s roof.

“The multinational forces were outside, surrounding the hospital but they intruded into the hospital on a daily basis. Now, people rarely go to the hospital because they fear being shot or arrested. Ramadi hospital also functions as a registration centre for the new Iraqi police and army,” Turlan said.

For several months now, patients have refrained from using the hospital for fear of being shot by snipers or by US-led forces.

According to reports received by NCCI, Mosul Hospital is also occupied by military forces these days and ambulances have been attacked regularly by all forces fighting in Najaf, Fallujah and other parts of Anbar.

A report released by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq on 31 December 2006 said that its Human Rights Office had submitted an official memorandum in November to Major General Thomas Moore, chief-of-staff of the multinational forces in Iraq.

The memo requested more detailed information on a number of incidents involving coalition force activities in Ramadi and Fallujah and raised the issue of the military using facilities protected by the Geneva Conventions, such as hospitals and schools. To date, no response has yet been received.

It seems the US is not alone in its belligerent, regressive policies.

February 12, 2007 – Mulsim Groups call for inquiry and apology for five men held in Canada without charge for up to 7 years.

“Maher Arar has been rightly vindicated in receiving an apology and settlement for Canada’s part in his ordeal of torture in Syria. But five other Arab-Muslim men currently detained without charges are not being accorded comparable justice,” says a statement released today by Canada’s largest Muslim organizations.

The Canadian Islamic Congress and the Quebec – based Canadian Muslim Forum are calling on Ottawa to act without further delay to resolve the cases of all five Muslim men.

Detained in the Kingston Immigration Holding Centre (now dubbed “Guantanamo North” by Canadian social justice advocacy groups) are:

– Mohammad Mahjoub: an Egyptian refugee with two small children – detained in June 2000;

– Mahmoud Jaballah: an Islamic school principal – detained in August 2001;

– Hassan Almrei: a Syrian refugee who operated a pita shop – detained in October 2001.

And detained under house arrest are Mohamed (Moe) Harkat and Adil Charkaoui.

At present, the three men held in the Kingston Immigration Holding Centre are dangerously weakened and ill from the effects of prolonged hunger strikes to protest their incarceration under CSIS security certificates.

Two other men are still being held under virtual house arrest after being released on bail. All five have been under investigation for periods ranging from five to seven years, yet have never been allowed to examine any of the so-called “evidence” which was used to lock them away from their families and productive lives.

Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) will introduce a bill called the “Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007” tomorrow, according to a website his presidential campaign put up today.

The bill will overturn parts of the “Military Commissions Act,” signed into law last October, which suspends habeas corpus for “alien enemy combatants.”

BAGHDAD, 12 February (IRIN) – Violence in Iraq is tearing families apart and destroying the country’s economy, two major factors giving rise to a mass of marginalised street children, child specialists say. Once on the streets, children can easily fall prey to gangs involved in drugs, violence and prostitution.

“Children are the first victims of violence and they are particularly vulnerable psychologically speaking. So it’s easy for an adult who would like to do so to manipulate and use children. There was already the case of a child who was used as a suicide bomber in late 2005, for example,” Cedric Turlan, information officer for the NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq (NCCI), said.

Ali Mussawi, president of the local NGO Keeping Children Alive (KCA), said that since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 there has been an increase in the number of children used by criminal gangs. Mussawi said that a major reason for this was that many homeless children quickly turn to drugs, including sniffing glue or vapours from liquids such as paint, which have large amounts of intoxicants.

“Many street children join criminal gangs to get money for their [drug] habits because the money they get from begging is not enough for them to eat and consume their drugs,” Mussawi said.

Mussawi added that some criminal gangs offer these children drugs in exchange for sexual favours.

Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits – a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.” ~~ Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

02/12/07 “ICH” — — If the Bush administration and the US mainstream media are united on any one issue, it’s an absolute refusal to rock the political boat as they sail mercilessly through the seas of corporate profit on the good ship Terrorbush. For the most part, each group is an incurious lot — undead creatures who neither care, nor dare, to glance over the side of the ship at the bloated, swirling bodies in the blood-red water below. From the beginning, their mission has been to perform so fantastically against a backdrop of such violent, explosive madness on so many fronts that we watch hypnotically but do not see — listen intently but do not hear.

They are very good at what they do.

In the last 10 days, as 36 Americans were killed in Iraq, we were inundated with a variety of devastating news — all of which literally beg for broad, investigative reporting from those whom the late, great Molly Ivins laughingly referred to as “alert guardian watchdogs of democracy.” For example…

~~A bleak National Intelligence Estimate was released, which stated flatly that what is going on in Iraq is much worse than a civil war and there is little chance that Bush’s escalation of 20,000-50,000 troops will do anything but fuel the fire. The media’s initial interest quickly faded when Vice President Dick Cheney called the report “hogwash,” and announced that he and Bush had the power to do whatever they wanted, and neither the Congress nor the people could stop them.

~~Bush appointed Adm. William Fallon to head Central Command (CENTCOM) — a Navy man to run the ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Formerly with NATO as Assistant Chief of Staff, Plans and Policy for Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic, Fallon has a history of high-tech war game tomfoolery that provokes the enemy to attack. With US carrier attack groups bumping into each other in the Persian Gulf off the coast of Iran, who you gonna call?

~~Nat Hentoff writes in the Village Voice that the giant aerospace Boeing is “supplying the CIA with the planes to transport the shackled, blindfolded, drugged passengers for interrogation in foreign torture chambers.” Hentoff credits The New Yorker’s Jane Meyer with breaking the Boeing story in October, wherein she quoted a former Jeppesen (Boeing subsidary) employee who was told by a top official, “We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights –you know, the torture flights…It certainly pays well. They” — the C.I.A — “spare no expense. They have absolutely no worry about costs. What they have to get done, they get done.”

~~The Pentagon’s Inspector General (IG) Report confirms what we have known for nearly five years — we were catapaulted into war with Iraq on a pack of malicious, treasonous lies dreamed up by Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who were obviously following Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s order on 9-11 to “sweep it all up — things related or not” to justify an attack on Iraq.

. . .In testimony last week before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Acting IG Thomas Gimble acknowledged, albeit in bewildering doublespeak, that Feith’s office had indeed “developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and Al-Qaeda relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community, to senior decision-makers.” Gimble plowed on with an admission that Feith “was inappropriately performing intelligence activities of developing, producing and disseminating that should be performed by the intelligence community.”

. . .Given that more than 600,000 Iraqi civilians have been slaughtered, more than 2 million families are broken and displaced, and 3,379 coalition troops (3,123 of them Americans) have been blown to bits, Gimble’s limp concession that what these creatures did in manipulating intelligence to go to war was neither “illegal or unauthorized” is almost as bizarre as the media refusing to investigate such criminal activity. Almost as bizarre as Wolfowitz’ grinning admission in Vanity Fair two months after the attack, “We settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.” Almost as bizarre as the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Ledeen, who boasted in 2002, “We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia. . . The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize.”

The U.S. media is beneath contempt, and can never redeem itself for the damage it has wrought on this republic by its fawning allegience to a band of crooked, war-mongering fools. By sinking to reading scrubbed-clean White House press releases, by relinquishing all pretences of honesty, values and integrity in order to ingratiate itself to the ravenous corporate beast, its members are little more than “enablers” who cannot remember why they became journalists in the first place.