Tony Blair was right to support President Bush & Invade Iraq

Imagine the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, standing up in Parliament in late November 2002 and making the following statement:

“I have decided that the UK will support our allies and friends the USA . In close consultation with President George Bush we have decided that Saddam Hussein must be overthrown, and Iraq occupied by allied troops. Regrettably, this is the best form of action at the moment because Iraq is of such strategic importance to this country and our friends the USA . The oil resources of Iraq and its neighbouring Middle Eastern countries are of vital importance to us. Without Middle Eastern oil we would not be able to maintain our standard of living, and our current way of life would be placed in jeopardy.

We therefore have no choice but to commence military action shortly to secure the ME and its supply of oil.”

Of course such a statement is preposterous; it's completely unbelievable, absurd even.

Neither Tony Blair nor any other politician would ever commit ‘political suicide' by saying what most of us in fact think.

What's interesting in this subterfuge is firstly that although we think it is indeed true that there is a connection between Iraq and the London bombings, we would never expect our political leaders to say so ‘out loud'. Politicians exploit our (mostly unconscious) “power allower”. That's the principle that the more power you have the more whoppers you are allowed to get away with. In fact it's a measure of how much power you have, try it sometime, but be careful! It's probably not a good idea to experiment with your boss. President Bush had a term for this- “political capital'. He said two days after his second election victory that he had earned “political capital, and now I intend to spend it”. In other words, the American people had bought his lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction etc, and had reacted by giving him more power, and with it the power to tell more lies! Neat! (Hmmm I wonder what went wrong? But that's for another piece.)

Is our political process so degraded that we so readily accept our leader's Orwellian contrivances - and make the necessary ‘truth adjustments' in our heads? Will we ever or can we ever expect truth and transparency in our political process?

Secondly, it is remarkable how many of us believe what Tony Blair fervently wishes us to disregard – that securing our oil supplies and the Iraq war (and its unintended but inevitable consequences such as terrorism) are both ‘cooking in the same stew pot'. This open secret has become almost a given and not just in the blogosphere!

Overwhelming UK public opinion believe it, a recent UK poll put the number at 85%, (I take anything over 80% as virtual consensus). This fact is reflected in the unsurprising conclusion by the influential Chatham House think tank that, “ Supporting the US-led invasion of Iraq put the UK more at risk from terrorist attack. ” . In fact the Downing Street mantra – that 9/11 happened before the Iraq invasion, therefore the two have nothing to do with each other - is as feeble a straw man as can possibly be imagined. Does Tony Blair think we could have forgotten about the first Gulf War already? What about the permanent garrison of US troops in Saudi Arabia (and the Muslim Holy Land) that served as Osama bin Laden's original gripe? Or the USA 's backing of corrupt Middle Eastern tyrants - the list goes on and I haven't even mentioned Israel yet.

However, the big question that remains for me is how widely are oil, terrorism, and the Iraq war seen to be one and the same problem? This bothers me most; how much do most people really know? How aware are we of ‘Peak Oil' – and in the not too distant future? Or how much the current oil world market is set to be ‘deformed' in a way that will make ‘The Market' inoperable- and all the consequences of that? There seems to be, in the UK at least, a gut understanding of the oil problem. We know Tony and Co are lying to us when they try to maintain the Iraq war wasn't about oil, and terrorism isn't about the Iraq war.

Of course since I started to write this piece, (it's taken me several weeks I'm afraid to admit) many have let the cat out of the bag. There's Larry Elliot's piece in Thursday, 18 th of August's Guardian, Edwardian Summer. Although he doesn't make the direct connection between this war and oil, he states, “ global demand for crude is likely to remain high at a time when many experts say production is about to top out. If supply constraints start to bite, any declines in the price are likely to be short-term cyclical affairs punctuating a long upward trend. In those circumstances it would be the height of folly to assume that there will be no economic consequences or that there will not be an intense - perhaps even bloody - struggle for the resource that more than any other has shaped the modern world.”

Meanwhile over Stateside, Derrick Z. Jackson's op-ed piece of 17/8/05 in the Boston Globe, ‘Guzzle gas and Pretend' makes the direct connection between America 's gas guzzling habits and having to fight a war to enable that to continue. James Howard Kunstler as always is spot on the money, in his August 15 th piece, he states, “… reminds me of my neighbor here in Saratoga Springs , the lady with the "War Is NOT the Answer" bumper sticker on her Ford Expedition . For people who want to keep on enjoying an easy motoring utopia, war is the answer.”

So we have connected the dots, and the picture comes out, let me see…ugh, “ships company to Captain Tony: we like our lifestyle, it all good, keep the ship on course. We need more energy. Over That means more oil? Over Fine, no problem. Oh and we will probably need some renewable energy sometime, lets get those on board too. Over and out.”

It seems like thinking has gone so far without being able to draw the necessary conclusions. Perhaps following through the consequences of oil depletion is a step too far? This is what my workshop, Living on the Cusp , is about; drawing the necessary conclusions and then acting on them in the necessary time scale.

But maybe the severity of the oil crisis is understood only too well. And maybe the unspoken understanding is that we don't like this war but we will put up with it because we need the oil. Maybe we have consciously or unconsciously connected the dots. Maybe we are all, to some degree, complicit in this subtle self deception, our society wide ‘ Power Allower' .

Judging by any standard of international law, we have created a situation where our Prime Minister is a war criminal. Tragically we have allowed our government to find itself in this particular corner, and the only sensible course of action was to use our military might, (well, piggy backing onto the US 's military superiority), to protect our way of life. How harsh is that?

Energy is at the bottom of this spectacularly smelly heap. The bald fact is we need and are absolutely dependent on the raw energy oil supplies to run our lifestyles, institutions, food supplies, and very way of life. The tragedy is there is no one to blame. We are all just doing our jobs, living how we have always lived, and gone about our normal lived completely oblivious to this crushing threat to our, now very apparently, unsustainable lives.

We have had plenty or warnings which began with the Club of Rome report in the early 1970's, and now almost daily warnings from climate change scientists. But they get sidelined or ignored by our media. Politicians can conveniently ignore long range unpalatable and unpopular problems. We can simply go on living our lives and worrying about the kid's educations, or where our next holiday will be, or ‘paying the mortgage'. And Tony Blair is only playing his part- and he was, and still is, right. We had no choice but to invade Iraq . If only he could stop talking about “evil ideologies” own up about the weapons of mass destruction fiasco, and give us the real reason, then I for one would be a whole lot happier.

Naresh 23 August 2005