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LINK to a Print Version of this piece; http://jaygaskill.com/ThePetroLords.htm
THE PETRO-ABUSE SYNDROME
What do these four governments have in common at the moment?
The Chavez regime in
The Putin – Medvedev regime in
The Khamenei and Ahmadinejad clique in
The former military regimes and the new Yar'adua
civilian regime in
Look at these current approximate oil production figures in millions of barrels per day:
U. A. E. 2.66
With the exception of
Each country has a history of expropriation of its oil assets, placing them under the direct political control of a ruling clique or regime.
With two notable regime exceptions (and two almost-exceptions), each country has a history of oil revenue funded mischief in the region.
The two major exceptions are the
The two almost-exceptions are:
[1]
[2] Saudi Arabia which is a nominally friendly non-democratic family oligarchy, the ruling clan of which is thoroughly corrupted by wealth and infiltrated by a simmering subset of angry Islamists who have used the Wahhabi ideology to promote terrorism.
The greed and power lures that inhabit the darker side of the human psyche always seek to exploit openings in our economic and political arrangements. Money buys power, military technology, amoral atomic scientists, missiles, and more. Easy money almost guarantees this will happen given enough time.
Greed is usually mitigated by economic failure. But power lures are only contained via internal checks and balances, by starvation or by outright defeat. When the internal checks are ineffective, starvation works better than defeat in the long run, although sometimes it happens too slowly and hurts too many innocent people.
The American political design (the genius of which is the
product of a perfect storm of 18th century character, courage and
worldly wisdom) seeks to divide power against itself. But ideologies and
religious fanaticisms tend to work in the opposite direction. The psychological dynamics of bruised
resurgent nationalism (think post
When an expropriated
money-well falls into the exclusive, plenary control of any governing clique,
the effect is like tossing firearms into a drunken mob. Sober reflection and ethical debate is a rare
exception. The lust for hegemony is nearly irresistible.
Without internal checks and balances we are left to the external ones. While no single nation can afford (and we shouldn’t attempt) to take up arms at every difficulty, injustice and evil in the world, the naiveté of the policy pacifist is the path to ultimate enslavement. [Note I identified policy pacifism, not individual pacifism. We need not all be warriors, but we all need warriors as well as healers.]
This is because human nature is not perfect. There will always be thugs who seek to lord it over the weak and innocent. They will not police themselves. They are not frightened of the UN. They do not quail before diplomats.
As Thomas Jefferson put it—“Every citizen
should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be
that of every
If we are to remain free, we need to be in
an increasingly free world. Therefore every citizen of a
JBG