What the United States is doing, and it can be easily seen on a map of US bases around the world (this is no secret), is throwing a ring around the Persian Gulf and Central Asia to protect the supply of oil for now and for the coming economic struggle with China, and to a lesser extent, India.  China is the fastest growing industrial economy in the world, and is lapping up oil at a rate that would even make us blush.  There is a finite amount of fossil fuel left under the earth, and a large portion of it that we know about is under the Persian Gulf and Central Asian regions. Nobody knows this more than the former Oil CEO's that have run our country for the last eight years, and as a result, we will do whatever is necessary, bear any burden, and pay any price, to insure the continuous flow of oil.
          The China of Mao Tse Tung and the Great Leap Forward was a much easier foe to control than the China that has started to beat us at our own game.  A capitalist-economy China with a billion low-cost yet efficient workers is a nightmare to the West.  Add India to the equation, with another billion low-cost workers, and the problem doubles.  The coming battle will be over oil, because it is a finite resource, and because all three of these countries need lots of it to grease the wheels of their economies.
          It boggles the mind that our country, with such immense achievements in science and technology, and with the creative minds that brought us such rapid advancements in communications and medicine, is still fighting a battle to the death costing hundreds of billions of dollars over such a Flinstone-esque commodity like fossil fuel. Does it really make sense that we can't find a better way to make our engines go putt-putt? The fact is, we have the technology, but it is an extremely expensive proposition to retool the huge infrastructure that undergirds the procurement, supplying, refining, and consuming of oil.  It is also a fact that no one is sure enough of what the next big energy source is going to be, whether hydrogen, biomass, wind, solar, or something else, to invest the hundreds of billions of dollars it would take to ramp it up, only to find out twenty years from now that they bet on the wrong horse.  Add to this that the Big Oil corporations are not about to let their grip on world transportation go easily.  If we spent one-hundredth the amount of money on developing alternative solutions to fossil fuels as we do defending them, we would probably already have an industry devoted to this problem and its solution.  Instead, we get a lot of talk about it, and very little action.
          In fairness to the Bush administration, this is a problem that they inherited, and one that has been a long time coming.  The problem is multi-faceted, but has two main components.  One is, the substance(s) that we use to make the world go 'round are going to run out.  Not tomorrow, but soon enough that there is a vital need to consider the alternatives today.  The other problem that goes hand-in-hand with #1 is that the energy that the earth uses today is already causing major environmental damage and will cause even greater damage in the near future.
          The legacy of energy in the Modern World has gone from wood, to coal, to oil and natural gas, to nuclear, and then there are the "others," like hydroelectric, hydrogen, solar, and wind.  There have been energy crises before: in medieval times, the forests were so denuded for firewood that a kind of state of emergency had to be declared in some places to allow the forests to replenish themselves.  Coal became the energy of choice for about three hundred years, but it was a dirty, dangerous business that blackened the skies of the major cities of the Industrial world, and caused innumerable health problems.
          The Age of Oil was ushered in on January 10th, 1901, when the massive geyser of black gold known as Spindletop erupted for the first time just outside of Beaumont, Texas.  Oil had been a relatively minor energy substance up until then, and although it was known to burn more cleanly and more efficiently than coal, no one had drilled down far enough to locate the massive amounts of the stuff that would be necessary to seriously compete with coal.  The United States (largely Texas and Oklahoma) quickly became the center of the oil universe, as huge amounts were found with better drilling techniques.  The invention of the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine sealed the dominance of oil as the energy of the future, and changed the way modern societies live.
          World War II was fought in part over the struggle for access to and dominance over oil, as the have-nots, Japan and Germany, fought to seize control over the energy-producing areas of Southeast Asia and the Caucasus Mountains, respectively.  The United States played a huge role in the Allied victory by supplying oil to Great Britain throughout the war.  
          By 1946, however, despite pumping one out of every three barrels of oil in existence, the United States had become a net oil importer.  The reason for this is that the U.S. was using one third of all of the energy in the world. From that moment until today, our very prosperity would come to haunt us and hold us hostage to the vagaries of dependence upon a product controlled in other parts of the world.
          The largest reservoirs of oil were found under the desert sands of Saudi Arabia, along with huge amounts in such places as Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, the Soviet Union, Mexico, and Norway, among others.  The Western industrial nations possessed the technology and the money to drill and pump the oil out of these places, many which were still rather primitive backwater states, and they scrambled to procure the rights to as much oil drilling as they could; in the United States' case, they agreed to provide security to the king of Saudi Arabia in return for the rights to drill for oil in the king's desert, as we shall see later on.
          One by one, these oil-rich nations realized just how much more money was to be had if they actually asserted their sovereign rights to the land providing all of this oil.  Mexico nationalized its oil industry in 1938, Iran in 1951, and step-by-step, all of the oil-producing countries in turn nationalized their oil.  On top of that, realizing that there was even more power in numbers, in 1961 a group of key oil states banded together to form the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC.  In a matter of just a few years, a global industry that had been largely controlled by a few multinational oil companies was now in the hands of a new kind of entity, the petrostate, as Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and other oil-rich countries were now labeled.  To add insult to injury, in 1970, the United States hit its oil peak, which meant that from then on, oil production in the U.S. would decline.
          It is only a matter of when, not if, the rest of the oil-producing areas of the world are going to hit their peaks. Although there are more than a few estimates floating around (and as one might imagine, these estimates are not immune to politics), the general consensus is that worldwide oil production will peak out around 2035.  That means around that time, the world's glass of gas will be less than half-full.  Add to that, much of the oil still in the ground (or under the sea) is harder and harder to get to, and the new strikes are smaller and smaller, making them more expensive to capture.  All of the "easy" oil has been gotten.  
          You want some more bad news? World energy consumption is growing by leaps and bounds, meaning that we're using this finite product at a greater and faster rate than ever.  It's not just gasoline for the cars; oil and natural gas (and coal, to a lesser extent) are the energy behind electricity, and electricity is one thing that everybody wants and everybody cannot get enough of.  The main measuring stick that a developing nation uses to judge "progress" is how much energy their country is consuming.  China's economy is growing at a terrific pace, and right along with it is their energy consumption.  India is on much the same road.  This is almost one third of the world population, and they want to be just like us... in many of the wrong ways.
          Americans are the kings and queens of consumption.  When politicians talk about preserving our way of life, they are to a large degree talking about our energy consumption.  It is our larger and larger houses, and the two air conditioners it takes to cool them, and the extra refrigerator or freezer in the garage, and the electric everythings in our houses, and the SUVs in the garage–this is what we're fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan to preserve.  This is what we as a society have decided that we can't do without, and we're willing to send our soldiers to die for it.  
          The war in Iraq is about oil, but it isn't as simple as that.  No one knows the truth about what I've just written better than the Bush administration–they're oilmen.  The fact that they've come up with every angle that they can think of to sell this war to the American people affirms my theory that telling Americans the truth about the looming energy crisis and especially telling them what they might have to give up is absolutely the closest thing to political suicide.  Much of this information has been known since the 1970s, and Carter didn't tell, (well, he actually did, but in such a somber, negative way, that he became the model of how not to do it, and future politicians saw what happened to him), Reagan didn't say anything, Bush Sr. was quiet, Bill Clinton was mum, and now George W. is saying anything but what is actually happening.  The person in the best position to level with the American people would be a president in his second term, like Ronald Reagan was, like Bill Clinton was, or like George W. is now. President Bush did say in his 2006 State of the Union address that America is "addicted to oil."  At the end of the day it’s just lip service, because there is too much riding on the next election to expend the political capital it would take to make the hard choices that we must make.  So, it gets put off, and put off, and it will probably get put off until we are at an absolute moment of truth; what that looks like, I don't want to speculate.  Suffice to say, it works just like nature; any repair you put off and put off gets worse and worse until you have to fix it, when it would have been much less painful to have just fixed it when the problem first arose.  We are headed in the short term towards $100 a barrel oil, and $4 or $5 gallons of gas. (Ha! BB-06/2008)  At some point, it's going to start to hurt, but unfortunately this will just be the tip of the iceberg.
          It is very easy for me to point the finger of blame at the Bush administration; unfortunately, in this case there are four fingers pointing right back at me.  We have to wake up.  This is our problem, and it won't even begin to get solved until a large amount of Americans realize what is going on.  Any electable politician will never have the cajones to do what has to be done about energy until it is far too late.  The truth starts in my home, today, not tomorrow, and I must admit that I am really embarrassed by what I see when I look around my own house.
          I'll leave Vice-President and former oil executive Dick Cheney with the last word about this, because, in fact, simply stated, frankly speaking, no one tops the VP in timely quotes. "We all remember the energy crisis of the 1970s, when people in positions of responsibility complained that Americans just used too much energy.  Even now, environmentalists are demanding that the government step in and force Americans to consume less energy; as if we could simply conserve or ration our way out of the situation we're in.  Conservation might be a sign of personal virtue, but is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy". (Italics added)   Spoken like a true, capitalist oilman.
          I have not even brought up the environmental calamity that goes part and parcel with our energy addiction. Instead, I have devoted another chapter of the book to this.  I will, however, share a real piece of irony.  Russia is fully aware of the global warming problem and the greenhouse effect that goes along with it.  For Russia, however, a little global warming is not such a bad thing.  There is a large amount of oil and natural gas in and around the Russian area of the Arctic Circle, but it is very hard to get to because of the severe conditions and the miles upon miles of frozen ice that it is trapped underneath.  Global warming is doing for the Russians what they can't do for themselves–melting the ice and warming the surface, making it easier to get at the oil, therefore putting more oil into the marketplace, which adds a little more money to their bank accounts, which puts off the problem a little bit longer, all the while adding more hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, further exacerbating the problem.

          This is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, speaking to the International Institute of Strategic Studies in Singapore on June 5th, 2005: "Among other things, the report concludes that China’s defense expenditures are much higher than Chinese officials have published.  It is estimated that China’s is the third largest military budget in the world, and clearly the largest in Asia."
(And....your point was.... China IS the largest country in Asia, and unless I'm mistaken our "Defense" budget was something like SEVEN times theirs!)
          "China appears to be expanding its missile forces, allowing them to reach targets in many areas of the world, not just the Pacific region, while also expanding its missile capabilities within this region.  China also is improving its ability to project power, and developing advanced systems of military technology."
(Ummmm.... why wouldn't a country like China, soon-to-be-if-not-already the biggest rival of the US economically and then militarily, not begin to set up some sort of missile capabilities when the United States has missiles pointing at them and every other potential rival around the world?? Did Rumsfeld really think the US could have a monopoly over these things?)
          "Since no nation threatens China, one must wonder: Why this growing investment? Why these continuing large and expanding arms purchases? Why these continuing robust deployments?"
(The United States military, the United States military, and....the United States military.)
  
         I mean, c'mon! This was the height of American arrogance. Imagine that we were the leaders of China, staring at this enormous colossus called the American Empire, with military bases in over 90 countries, including a ring of them around your country. This American Empire has almost outspent the rest of the world combined in yearly military spending, and this guy is pointing the finger at us for increasing our military budget? For developing advanced systems of military technology? Nah, let's just roll over and let them rule the entire world...
          Of course China is going to beef their military up. What does any rational person think they're going to do? China is the only country in the world with the potential to be our serious rival, unless you include the EU, and they are stagnant right now.
          Again, on October 17th, Rumsfeld, speaking at a school in China that grooms future Communist Party leaders, said this: "Many countries have questions about the pace and the scope of China's military expansion.  A growth in China's power projection understandably leads other nations to question China's intentions, and to adjust their behavior in some fashion.  The rapid, and–from our perspective at least–non-transparent nature of this buildup contributes to their uncertainty."
Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle.
Rumsfeld went on: "China's efforts to form regional institutions that exclude the US also has raised doubts about its intentions, and whether it will make the right choices–choices that will serve the world's real interests in regional peace and security." (Italics added)  This is like one fox telling another fox to stay out of the henhouse, while the first fox is spitting feathers out of his mouth.  I have to wonder if the Chinese students were sitting there trying not to laugh, or were they so stunned by the hubris of this guy that they sat there gaping, mouths wide open, casting sideways glances at one another.  This would have to be very similar to the Chinese Minister of Information lecturing students at Harvard's Kennedy School of Business on breaches of freedom of the press in America and unfair business practices at Wal-Mart.  

          In the fall of 2002, lost in the hoopla over the National Security Strategy document that basically laid out the neoconservative plan for pre-emptive war and unilateral decision-making was the release of the Air Force Space Command's projection for the next several years.  It said that the United States would move from "control" to "ownership" of space.  Let the words "ownership of space" sink in for a minute.  Beyond the question of how a nation can decide that it can "own" space, how do we think that China, or Russia, or the European Union, or anyone else is going to react to this? It seems completely logical to me, a songwriter, for gosh sakes, that we are fast approaching the not-so-funny reality of that cartoon that I was talking about in chapter eight, the one where Rumsfeld is standing in front of the map with "US" labeled on our country, and "THEM" on every other country. The only way that China or anybody else is going to have half a chance against this runaway train called the United States is to band together in a super alliance to stop us.  This has happened over and over again in history, every time one single entity gets, or is perceived to be, too big for its boots.  I don't pretend to know what the straw will be that breaks the rest of the world's back, but the phrase "ownership of space" has got to be a fairly scary gauntlet thrown down by the Americans.  
          So, once again, when Donald Rumsfeld lectured the Chinese on building up their military, or chided them for forming strategic alliances that don't include the U.S. (the current leaders in unilateralism), I seriously have to wonder whether he was really talking to the conservative base in this country, because I can't for a minute think that he was so delusional as to actually believe that China, or anyone else was going buy what he was selling.  This is not to say that the Chinese government is anything but the authoritarian Communist regime that it is.  The point here is not to make China look good at our expense, although Rumsfeld seems hell-bent on doing just that.  I simply don't understand how the United States government thinks it can lecture anybody on military spending and unilateralism at a time when we are the poster child for both.