Here’s the continuation of last week’s article exploring the reasons for the desperation of George W. Bush.

Exhibit F: Grasping At Straws

How desperate are they? Desperate enough to lobby the IPCC and ask them to include in the summary for policymakers some nutty strategies for dealing with climate change, such as putting giant mirrors or a giant sunscreen into orbit, or pumping tiny droplets of sulfate, or reflective dust, into the atmosphere as “important insurance” against rising emissions. The IPCC demurred, calling the ideas “speculative, uncosted and with potential unknown side-effects.”

Some observers have connected these outlandish ideas with the very real-world phenomenon of aircraft vapor trails that don’t dissipate normally, so-called “chemtrails.” I will admit, there was a time when I wouldn’t give the chemtrail theory the time of day. But now that we know that such an idea has actually been suggested by the Administration, I’m not sure I can rule anything out.

Exhibit G: The Hurricane Threat

We’re six months away from the start of the hurricane season, and New Orleans and much of the rest of the Gulf Coast is still in ruins—apparently forgotten by the Bush administration, as it merited not one word in the President’s State of the Union speech.

If, by some miracle of climate effects, we get through the coming hurricane season without further damage to the cities of the Gulf, he might get away with it.

But if the warming waters of the Gulf play the same role they did in 2005, we could see even fiercer storms. And the President’s neglect of the areas damaged by “Katrita” will serve as a stark reminder to Gulf’s residents that they had better not pin their hopes on FEMA coming to the rescue this time, either.

Exhibit H: Military Refocusing on Africa

Peak oil observers know that the only remaining places on the planet where we may hope to significantly increase oil production are Africa and the Caspian Basin . . . both targets of intensive trade lobbying by China, which is rapidly sewing up long-term oil supply contracts in both regions.

So we have been watching and waiting for the Bush administration to go after them militarily, as they have in Iraq.

Unfortunately, given President Putin’s iron-fisted control of Russia and his aggressive moves to throw out the major international oil companies and nationalize all of the country’s energy assets, the U.S. is in no position to jockey militarily for a control point on the Caspian.

But Africa is another matter, and on February 7, that shoe finally dropped. Even as Chinese President Hu toured the African continent cutting oil deals, the White House announced that it will create a new military command for Africa by September of next year, consolidating under one aegis the responsibilities that have been spread among three commanders.

Other than to publicly counter the Chinese, there’s no reason to announce such a far-off program now. It was just another move and countermove in the global game of oil chess.

If you’re following the playbook, the next move should be for the U.S. to conduct some sort of false-flag operation in Africa, a Gulf of Tonkin maneuver to give us an excuse to start building an expanded military presence there.

Exhibit I: Iraq

I have saved the most compelling exhibit for last, because most of the Bush administration’s reasons to panic begin and end there, in pursuit of Iraq’s oil. The Bush and Blair teams have both repeatedly denied that our involvement in Iraq had anything to do with oil, but the facts speak otherwise. I think it should be obvious to any rational person—after all, as I like to point out, their main export isn’t broccoli—but I shall build my case like any good detective would, identifying the motive, the opportunity and the means.

The Motive

The motive by now should be clear: the peaking of global oil production, the growing dependency of the U.S. on massive levels of oil imports, and our lack of control over the foreign oil producers on whom we depend.

This motive is no longer a matter of speculation. As we now know from the many revelations of the last few years, and particularly from the ongoing trial of Cheney’s second in command, Scooter Libby, Team Bush went to extraordinary lengths to sell the war against Iraq. They knew their evidence was flimsy and that the contrary intelligence was significant, but they went with it anyway because they had long since decided that they must establish a strategic foothold among the oil-producing nations of the Middle East.

In March 2001, President Bush appointed Dick Cheney to head up a secret energy task force called the National Energy Policy Development Group to address concerns about oil and gas supplies. But rather than push for renewables and domestic alternatives, the task force chose to “make energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy” . . . a clear reference to ensuring that the U.S. would have access to foreign oil, no matter what. And, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, we know that the task force was looking specifically at “a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and ‘Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.’”

Thus the Bush administration’s intention to secure control of Iraq’s oil was clear, well before the attacks of September 11.

The Opportunity

The need for a good opportunity to achieve the geostrategic imperatives of American global domination was spelled out years ago, in two reports.

The first was by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was National Security Advisor during the Carter Administration, titled “The Grand Chessboard—American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives” (1997). In it, he made this famous observation: “As America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”

The other was by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC)—whose primary architects included Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (September 2000). In it, they recognized the same need for “some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.”

The 9/11 attacks provided the crucial opportunity, the “new Pearl Harbor.” And so the Bush and Blair teams ginned up support for the invasion of Iraq, using 9-11 as a springboard and conflating al Qaeda and the Taliban with Iraq and Saddam Hussein . . . connections that were endlessly repeated, never supported, and ultimately, roundly disproved.

Let us not forget that the very first thing American troops did upon entering Iraq was to secure oil facilities and the Oil Ministry—the only governmental agency, in fact, that was secured. They went for the oil straight away, even as an orgy of looting and destruction ensued in the rest of the country, leaving some of the most precious treasures of human history in the hands of black marketers.

The Means

The strategy for taking control of the oil is only now coming to light after years of behind-the-scenes wrangling, with the neocons arguing for wholesale privatization and the oil majors arguing against it, all too aware of the physical risks they would take by painting such a target on themselves.

Last month, in a very well done series on “blood and oil” published by the UK’s Independent, we learned that new legislation was to have been passed in December by the Iraqi parliament, but got derailed by the raging civil war. Iraqi officials were hoping to have the law enacted by March. “It would allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972,” they reported.

What the law would do is legalize the plundering of Iraq’s oil fields by the international oil majors via “Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs)” which give the companies a share of the oil produced in exchange for investing in infrastructure.

Naturally, the oil companies’ shares are obscenely large, double or more the usual shares under such agreements. Even better, the agreements are irrevocable for 30 years. Bo-nan-za!

And thanks to the structure of the PSAs, the Iraqis would still officially have ownership of the oil fields . . . they are merely “sharing” the revenue with their generous foreign investors! Privatization without all the ugliness of the actual word.

Nice trick, eh?

The legislation is being written largely by BearingPoint, “an American consultancy firm hired by the US government, which had a representative working in the American embassy in Baghdad for several months.” Apparently most Iraqis have never even heard of the plan. “Three outside groups have had far more opportunity to scrutinise this legislation than most Iraqis,” said one insider. “The draft went to the US government and major oil companies in July, and to the International Monetary Fund in September. Last month I met a group of 20 Iraqi MPs in Jordan, and I asked them how many had seen the legislation. Only one had.”

No wonder, then, that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told The Wall Street Journal two weeks ago that he wanted to bow out as prime minister before his term expires. I’ll bet he does . . . before his loyal citizens find out what he’s done!

All the Bush team needs to do now is hold things together in Iraq long enough for the parliament (before that, too, falls apart) to put the law into place. Then we’ll have an orgy of contract-signing and the job is done. As the Independent reported: “It’s a mad rush to get something there,” said James Paul, the executive director of Global Policy Forum, a New York watchdog group. “The companies are saying, ‘Before any troops are withdrawn, we have to have these contracts.’”

Apparently they have been busy. According to the US-based Centre for Public Integrity, more than 150 US companies have already won some $50 billion worth of oil contracts in Iraq.

So our case is complete: motive, opportunity, and means.

And the Bill

And then there is our indisputable expenditure of blood and treasure. According to the Congressional Research Service, the Iraq war has so far cost $500 billion, and Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz reckons the total cost of the Iraq war to the U.S. will be about $2 trillion. By comparison, the Vietnam war cost about $614 billion in today’s dollars.

And so far we have lost 3,111 soldiers and brought home another 23,417 wounded.

That’s serious commitment. Not the sort of thing you do just because, say, you’re sympathetic to those poor people over there who were suffering under that madman.

That leaves just one small issue remaining: how to maintain security such that the oil infrastructure can actually be built, operated and the oil exported successfully without getting blown up every 15 minutes by some insurgent?

So Bush is doing what he has always done when he finds himself deep in a hole: dig harder! The 21,000 troop “surge” is a joke, a Hail Mary pass that only rolls the troop levels back up to where they were a few months ago. Why should anyone think they will be more effective at stopping a civil war now than they were then?

There’s only one thing to call it: an act of desperation. Hardly anybody on the Hill supports the idea, and retired General Barry McCaffrey has called it a “fool’s errand.”

I guess that’s what you get for sending a fool to do your work, isn’t it?

So much for the bravery of minks and muskrats.

Panic Sets In

The Bush team has realized, or is about to realize, what most people already know: there is no free lunch and there is no free energy. There’s no way to bully or drill our way out of these problems. The problems are, quite literally, lapping at our feet. And these guys have been on the wrong side of every single bit of it.

One of my favorite energy observers is oil expert Dr Ali Morteza Samsam Bakhtiari, former senior adviser to the National Iranian Oil Company. “The biggest problem is the 120 million United States citizens who live in their suburbia,” he says. “They are the biggest force on the planet but no one in the U.S. is thinking about this. And when you don’t think, you panic.”

James Howard Kuntsler, a noted Peak Oil commentator, has a bit more sympathy: “Peak is making us insane and passing Peak will make us more insane. There may be no moment of clarity, only new kinds of delusion and disorder. We’ll keep behaving the way we do until we can’t, and then we won’t.”

Even U.S. banks are showing the signs of panic. In 2006 they increased their nominal holdings of commodity futures to $1.6 trillion as of Q3 2006 . . . nearly tripling their exposure in just nine months.

That might be speculation . . . or it might be panic.

And speaking of panic, that’s what we’ve been seeing in Mexico over the last few weeks, as poor people riot over the rising cost of tortillas, their main source of calories.

Why are tortilla prices rising? Because of the increased demand for U.S. corn by the burgeoning corn-ethanol industry.

Didn’t take long for that snake to eat its own tail, did it?

I hope that Bush’s late-to-the-party support for renewable energy is effective. I hope it with every ounce of hope I can muster.

But these are desperate measures, there’s no two ways about it. And if he’s panicked . . . shouldn’t we be, too?

Until next time...

Chris Nelder