Notes of a "Zionist Poodle"

James Howard Kunstler, August 14, 2006

The great weakness of the peace movement is its utter inability to think strategically. The deep wish for peace, for an absence of hostilities, eclipses the fact that hostilities abide. Thus, Israel becomes the new villain in the story for carrying the West's water in the struggle against the abiding hostility of Jihad.

     The peace movement does not believe in Jihad. By Jihad, I mean a trans-national ideologically-driven campaign to murder "infidel" non-Muslims and to extend Islam's domain geographically as far as possible. An important feature of the campaign is the elimination of Israel, an irritating piece of Western "infidel" grit lodged in Islam's throat.

     Ideologically, Jihad despises Israel because Hebrew culture represents the basis of notions central to western civilization -- that there should be rules regarding decent human conduct beyond whatever raw power itself may assert; that we are responsible for our conduct; and that someone above is watching our conduct and weighing our responsibility.

     Jihad is not interested in decent conduct per se. That's why many Jihadists endorse conduct like the indiscriminate murder of non-muslims per se, videotaped beheadings of non-combatants by the cruelest methods imaginable, the suicide / homicide bombings of discos and cafes where no military assets are present, and the downing of civilian airplanes with bombs. These things are merely expressions of raw power, which is the antithesis of civilized conduct.

     The leaders of Lebanon are not interested in responsibility for the conduct of their policies and the things that happen within their territory. They permit a rogue Jihadist army to operate freely on Lebanese soil, to amass rockets and other ordnance, to fire them at Israel at the behest of the Jihadist's sponsor, Iran, and to use Lebanese civilians as shields and sandbags to defend those military assets -- and then they complain about the consequences when those military assets are attacked.

     The peace movement doesn't take Jihad at its word. Jihad is not interested in peace. It is a war movement.

     The United States had to take Jihad seriously when Jihad hijacked airplanes and knocked down two skyscrapers and one side of the Pentagon. (And, by the way, I regard theories that Vice-president Dick Cheney "masterminded" the 9/11 attacks to be paranoid nonsense beneath discussion.) The US has engaged Jihad, but rather obliquely. Our "war" in Iraq stopped being a war in 2003. It has been a clumsy and unsuccessful policing job since then against two Islamic sects fighting over the oil production assets of a collapsed artificially-constructed 20th century state that was once known as "Iraq."

     The original strategic impetus of the Iraq war was to kick an Islamic state's ass as a reply to the 9/11 attack. Since the 9/11attack was not carried out by a sovereign nation, the US reply had to be made to a target that represented the next best thing, and by default Sadaam Hussein was selected because he and his state had caused a lot of trouble in the recent past. Strategically it was deemed that removing him from power would have additional benefits for stability in the region. It was a tragic miscalculation. Life is sometimes tragic and nations make tragic errors. The US effort since the initial invasion was intended to prevent that state from collapsing but turned out to have only stimulated and accelerated the process. The Shia and the Sunni antagonists were not really interested in the one thing that the US had to offer: institutions styled on Western infrastructures for justice and law. The two antagonists were only interested in the assertion of raw power.

     One thing the peace movement never considers: what if there had been no US reply to the injury and insult of 9/11? What if we had just sucked it up? I can't prove this, but I believe that such behavior would have only emboldened Jihad to seek more targets of opportunity, and probably enticed Mr. Hussein into the kind mischief and grab for leadership of trans-national Jihad that Mr. Ahmadinejad is now showing. Critics will hasten to point out that Hussein was a secular dictator. I would hasten to remind them that in his final years in power he had taken to such stunts of religiosity as building mega-mosques, and transcribing the Koran using his own blood for ink.

     (The 9/11 Dick Cheney fantasy is interesting insofar as it provides the nuttier elements of the peace movement with a justification for not replying to the attacks -- we did it to ourselves.)

     What is the meta-strategic objective for the US in the Middle East? It is to preserve the orderly flow of oil resources. Is that a good thing? I happen to be a critic of the way America uses its oil resources, that is in the operation and further elaboration of a living arrangement based on extreme car dependency. I am not convinced that a "cold turkey" sudden cut-off of our oil supplies would be a good thing for our society. However, I have a fatalistic view that sooner or later we will face the loss of these energy resources and that we had better prepare ourselves for the event.

     Something else is happening. The US's strategic objective of preserving oil flows is being pre-empted by the objective of defending the West against an increasingly restive and aggressive Jihad. Sooner or later Jihad will turn to its "oil weapon" to throw a wrench in the machinery of the West's defense -- but in the meantime, the greed for oil revenues trumps that action. Anyway, Jihad perceives the West's growing weakness without sacrificing its oil income. The addicts are killing themselves.

     Finally, it is apparent to Jihad that they face a horizon on the availability of their oil drug (and weapon). Peak oil is well understood by the Islamic oil producers. (Among the most articulate peak oil voices on the international scene is Samsam Bakhtiari, former head of the Iranian National Oil Company.) For the oil-producing Islamic nations, the dwindling of oil supplies, now imminent, has enormous implications. Chief among these is the very existence of large populations predicated on a single resource. Their fear of this future has stimulated millions of young men in these doomed societies to join Jihad, an apocalyptic cult seeking the resolution of last things.

     The West, too, has its share of apocalyptarians. While the Republican party in power has flirted with them for political gain, I do not believe that anyone really holding the reins of power, including George W. Bush, really subscribes to these ideas. At worst, George W. Bush subscribes to the idea that Americans should continue to live in an easy-motoring utopia. But the reality of peak oil must even impress him.

     So, as the oil predicament becomes untenable for both the suppliers and the addicts, we increasingly face this worldwide campaign of religious wrath. Though it is almost never expressed in the West, out of excessive politeness, Jihad can probably be described as a campaign of sheer vengeance against those who consumed Islam's energy resources and thus its future. The Muslim people got a raw deal. Their kings, princes, and despots enjoyed wealth beyond imagination, while the masses simply bred themselves into an ecological crisis. They possessed a geographical region, large at it is, that is mostly good for nothing except growing dates and sesame seeds. Their fantasies of vengeance are grandiose. The West has to contend with them, has to defend itself against them. Israel is on the front lines of that defense. The prospects for the other Western nations facing this implacable enemy are grim and frightful. We want there to be no fighting. We want everyone to be kind to everybody else. We want peace. They want war.

The Widening War

James Howard Kunstler,, July 24, 2006

     Israel says that nothing but the complete destruction of Hizballah will do for them, but they may have to settle for less. For one thing, it might require the complete destruction of Hizballah's landlord, Lebanon, which is something that world opinion won't swallow.

     But while we're at it, what actually is this world opinion? The nation-players and teams they belong to have various motives for adopting their positions. The Europeans are content to deplore the Israeli response to Hizballah violence for several reasons. One, they are terrified of their own Muslim immigrant populations and don't want any smash-up riots or subway bombings. Second, they want to appear sympathetic to the oil exporting nations (including Iran) in order to continue enjoying a regular stream of oil imports without paying extra costs, which they are content to shift onto Israel and the United States -- namely, the cost of engaging the aggressive enmity of a restive and belligerent Islam. Third, the Europeans want to capture the geopolitical moral high ground once occupied by US after the collapse of communism.

     And while we're at it, why is Islam in such a dark mood? Not just because the Palestinians are aggrieved at the Israelis. I think the violent intemperance of Jihad is the expression of an ecological crisis: too many people suddenly occupying a region of the world that could not support them without the artificial nutrient of oil -- plus the fact that this region has reached its point of all-time maximum oil production, with the awful prospect of having less and less oil from now on and absolutely no other resources to support these overgrown populations when that oil is gone.

       I think these circumstance have driven Islam, well, nuts. Jihad is carried out almost entirely by young men and the Islamic oil nations have a vast supply of young men with no other job opportunities except service in Jihad. Their despair at the prospects of their societies must be great, and easily converted into aggressive rage. Plus, they are given huge inducements to believe that this employment is a holy mission, and fabulous promises of deferred pay in the form of early retirement to paradise and the consort of lusty virgins. As Peak Oil becomes more of a reality in the Middle East, I think these societies will only act crazier.

      Where are Russia and China on this? Well, Russia benefits whenever the glare of Islam is diverted from Russia's vast, fractious southern border with dozens of Islamic states and quasi-states, like Chechnya, poised to make trouble. Since Russia is one of the world's top oil producers (though past peak itself), and is sitting on quite a bit of natural gas, too, it doesn't have to worry about a cut-off of energy supplies from elsewhere. Russia would also like to recapture the geopolitical influence it enjoyed back in the Soviet days, and anything that weakens American authority and power in the Eastern Hemisphere leaves a vacuum that Russia can reoccupy. China benefits from Islamic antipathy to the West because the less oil is available to the West, the more there will be for oil-poor China. The problem for them, of course, is that an energy-strapped, impoverished America would no longer be buying all those Chinese-made salad shooters at the WalMart.

     An interesting sidelight to all this is the emergence here in the US of a virulent strain of antisemitism. A lot of it has shown up in the "Comments" section of my mirror site (Kunstler's blog on Typepad). It seems to me, that it's mostly emanating from what remains of the US political left, who have either run out of homegrown downtrodden groups to champion, or been disappointed with the results of their previous efforts. Lately, the frustrating impotence of the left to formulate a coherent opposition to Bush-style conservative Republicanism has led them into a craziness not unlike the craziness of Jihadist Islam. If all the Bush Republicans were suddenly vacuumed out of North America by a righteous cosmic force, the American left would probably start an American Jihad of their own against a host of imagined "class enemies" in the remaining population.

     I hasten to add that I am myself an opponent of American culture and polity in many of their current manifestations -- everything from Nascar to US Department of Agriculture subsidies, and plenty in between -- and yet I do not regard any victory of Islamic Jihad, whether in Iraq or Jordon or the subway tunnels of London or the skyscrapers of Manhattan, to be necessarily a good thing for the world.

     Nobody knows where the conflict in the Middle East is headed now. My own guess is that in the weeks to come Iran will find new ways to enlarge and aggravate the situation there. A problem at the heart of things not much discussed in the public arena is the fact that a virtually limitless supply of potent small arms and rockets is available from Iran to anyone who wants the stuff. This has implications for any effort to disarm Hizballah or Hamas or al Qaeda or sixteen guys in a suburb of Dusseldorf. It remains to be seen whether Iran will try to produce more potent weapons. The West would be foolish to let that happen, but this dirty job, too, may be left to Israel and the US. I suspect that Iran will foment an oil crisis before that happens by shutting down the Straits of Hormuz by some means. When that happens, Mr. Ahmadinejad can put his head between his knees and kiss his ass goodbye.

Click here to return to our home page.