The Iraq War: America and the Politics of Oil

“It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction ... a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard ... The only acceptable strategy is ... to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy."

- 1998 letter from Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle to then President Clinton

It seems fairly obvious from this statement in this statement published in 2001 in the Washington Times of the real objectives behind the justifications given for the Iraq war. If anything, the one statement that unified popular opinion in the different countries of the Middle East, it was that the real motive behind the war and Saddam’s eventual removal was that it was in order to control Iraq’s oil. In fact several Middle Eastern paper printed some of the most sardonic cartoons to make the point. An example of which is one that appeared in Al Akhbar (an Egyptian daily) the cartoonist Mustafa Hussein drew two Iraqi women whispering a rumour that whenever a coalition soldier feels dizzy in the desert, they make him sniff oil. This perspective strongly reverberated with that very popular slogan seen internationally in massive anti-war marches throughout the world, namely “No Blood for Oil”. Therefore, the belief that there is a connection between oil and the Iraq war has been quite widespread. Yet analysis of the relationship between the war and oil interests has been a distinctly invisible element of mainstream war coverage. If anything, the Bush administration during and after the war, were unmistakably tight-lipped about its oil interests in determining war policy and the same goes for the new Obama administration, regardless of its promise to “Pull Out” of Iraq.

Regardless, control over oil in the Middle East was one of the central goals of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). PNAC was an American think tank based in Washington, D.C. that lasted from early 1997 to 2006, whose members exerted a great deal of influence on the Bush Administration's development of military and foreign policies, especially involving national security and of course, the Iraq War. Since its beginnings, PNAC had been agitating for control of Iraqi oil and to that end had formed the “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq”. Furthermore the letter sent to Clinton in 1998, makes it explicitly clear that Rumsfeld and his ilk believed that control over Iraqi oil should lie not in Hussein’s hands, but in those of the United States. To them, after being long frustrated with Clinton’s lack of military ambition, the 9/11 attacks were a timely geopolitical godsend for muscling into place their bellicose enterprise. The difficulty remains that even though we now have a good understanding of the imperial ambitions of the Bush administration, this paper believes we still lack a systematic analysis of why oil was a driving force behind this war. What kind of eco-liquidity[1] would have been provided to the United States in controlling Iraqi oil at that particular political conjunction?

In “Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West”, Buck-Morss sets out that the end of the Cold War wasn’t marked so much by the “power of the enemy other”, but by the need to “rectify the… materialist contradictions inherent in the mass utopia dreamworld’s of both East and West.” Thus, geo-economics came to replace geopolitics, that is, as Edward Luttwak its key champion says, war by other means. So now, the new and arguably the first, truly global ideological form is consumerism in all its hyperreal, differentiated, and constantly changing forms. In propelling this latest ‘dreamworld’, the Clinton administration engaged in aggressive policies for economic restructuring that successfully furthered geo-economic interests. Conversely, as Michael Klare pointed out, when neo-liberalizing restructuring alone is cannot to push aside the obstructions to easy resource access for ensuring geo-economics goals, it is inevitable that armed conflict again becomes the order of the day. So given the requirements of today’s techno-infrastructure, it is important to maintain the eco-liquidity of that strategic commodity, oil, as it is central to capitalism’s fluidity and this has entered shaky ground in recent years. After all, geo-economics was born from the shock waves of the 1970s OPEC oil crisis. These shocks did not only changed the global oil regime but they were also intimately connected to the massive post-Bretton Woods transformation of the global financial order. As Keohane explained, access to a readily available supply of reasonably cheap oil was central in the development of the open and non-discriminatory monetary and trade system sought by the United States needed. Therefore, oil was “at the center (sic) of the redistributive system of American hegemony” and the Middle East was as Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defence, called in 1981 put it “the umbilical cord of the free industrialized world”. The Carter Doctrine of 1980 further states “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force”.

Even though the international oil market has evolved considerably since the 1970s, the Middle East’s oil reserves maintains being the centre of economic gravity as the fact remains that the region still holds just over half of the global oil supply. Right now, outside this region, producers are forced to venture into less productive and more difficult localities many of which have already reached peak oil. Thus, long-term projections now show that OPEC and the Arab Gulf producers will become increasingly important. While Saudi Arabia possesses the largest reserves globally standing at 262 billion barrels or Giga barrels (Gb), Iraq’s proven reserves rank second at 113 Gb. Furthermore, the US Energy Department estimates that Iraq has as much as 220 Gb in undiscovered reserves that would bring the Iraqi total to the equivalent of 98 years of current US annual oil imports. A senior analyst at the Petroleum Finance Company in Washington, DC, has recently said in 2001 that, “the international oil industry regards Iraq as one of the ultimate prizes on offer in the world today”, and it will be the new “Klondike” of the 21st century. Of the 70-odd discovered fields where oil is easy to access, so far only 15 have been developed.

Therefore, given these realities, perhaps it’s easy to just simply chalk this war up to a particularly bellicose US administration who is simply extending its 70-year history of petropolitical intervention in the region. However, upon closer inspection of the dynamics of oil politics over the last few years it becomes apparent that a more specific and complex set of oil supply conditions has resulted in the decision to attack Iraq at this particular time. Seeing the sequence of events, coupled with the Bush administration rhetoric at the time, we could start by questioning by asking whether the 9/11 attacks had anything to do with this US ambition to reconstruct the Iraqi oil regime. It is a fact that out of the 19 suicide bombers, 15 were Saudi, and for whatever unknown reason, the Saudis were not particularly cooperative with the US administration’s investigations. Perhaps this raised the question in the US of whether Saudi Arabia, its largest supplier of oil, would in practice continue to be a reliable ally.

Is there any evidence that these political developments might actually impinge on the Saudi supply of cheap oil to the United States? Lets start by looking at all the recent developments affecting the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia in a chronological timeline as this may further shed some light to this question. Over the last 70 years, the US and Saudi Arabia have shared an intimate relationship first established by the Roosevelt administration and the Saudi royal family. This provided privileged access to oil for the US in return for military protection for the Saudi’s. In particular, since the oil embargoes of the 1970s, the United States boosted its sales of highly sophisticated military armaments to the Saudis. After the first Gulf War, the United States further extended its network of military bases and arms provision from Saudi Arabia to include Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar in order to secure regional oil control. Up until today, Saudi oil supply is centrally important to the United States with Aramco, the Saudi national oil company, providing some 16.8% of total crude imports to the US.

It is often said that it would be impossible for Saudi Arabia to use oil as a political weapon as that income it generates enables it (primarily sustained by oil rents) to maintain social stability through the financing of its extensive patronage and public welfare systems. Indeed, the Saudis have always maintained their side of the bargain by stepping up their production of what Jhaveri in his paper on petroimperialism called “political oil” in order to deal with turbulence in supply from events like the Venezuelan oil strikes of late 2002. He further states that, “Saudi Arabia is, after all, a “swing producer” being the only country in the world with the excess production capacity to achieve this role at any given time.” Even though this role in maintaining supply balance and prices provides them with lucrative profits, they still have to absorb considerable losses. Jhaveri further asserts that for Saudi Arabia, “retaining this power to sustain elevated prices and prevent market volatility is of uppermost importance because dependable oil profit is the basis of its stability as a domestic and regional political power.”

Even though Saudi Arabi’s market share substantially grew for a brief period after the oil shocks of the 1970s, its centrality was significantly undermined by changes in the global oil production system. Ever since the 1970s, Saudi Arabia has not been one of the primary beneficiaries of the ever increasing global demand in oil, as it was the smaller producers in OPEC along with the non-OPEC producers from the North Sea as they offered better oil extraction technology and terms. It was these producers who flooded the oil market that created the 1986 oil crash and it was then that the Gulf producers lost the market battle from which they have yet to fully recover so between 1988 and 1996, the Gulf region took up only one-third of the incremental growth demand. The irony is that these new and more expensive non-OPEC operators were only able to exist because of the elevated prices that OPEC maintained. Faced with declining revenues, Saudi Arabia has since sought to move downstream in the commodity chain to secure the growing Asian markets (in the same way the Venezuelans did in North America) but this strategy proved to be only minimally successful. What this demonstrates is that Saudi Arabia, as the key producer within OPEC, does not possess the necessary power to rig prices. In sum, the Saudi state has been struggling to uphold its revenue base for fulfilling domestic functions. Lacking the capital with which to develop new oil facilities, The Saudi government, as with the other Gulf States, have turned to private investors to develop their natural gas reserves which hold much more promise. Ultimately, what this shows is that the Saudis cannot afford to privatize oil due to its nationally strategic role in their economy.

When things financially worsened in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War, there were significant negative repercussions for their relationship with the United States. Saudi Arabia was left in a state of deficit after having to pay for both the war costs and further arms purchases from the US. As a way to overcome this problem, the Saudis started to diversify their network of global and regional political-economic alliances, the most notable new alliance was with its neighbor, Iran, which did not go down well in Washington.In addition to that, after the debilitating stroke of King Fahd in 1995, Crown Prince Abdullah took over as the new regent Saudi Arabia and one of the first things he did was to reduce US arms purchases and thereby reducing their reliance on its protection. Moreover, Prince Abdullah has since stood out as a new political voice in the Middle East that was openly critical of the then US sanctions against Iraq and an advocate of the Palestinian cause. He has also attempted to build a base of support for the introduction of democratic reforms in the country while reining in some of the conservative clergy, which made him is a progressive voice on many counts. After 9/11, this tension between the Saudi’s and the United States intensified. Shockwaves went through Saudi Arabia when a classified Pentagon briefing was leaked describing it as “the kernel of evil” backing Islamic terrorism. In turn, Prince Abdullah himself flew to the United States in 2003 to caution Bush that unless he reduced his support for Israel, oil sales and military cooperation could be in jeopardy.

These new strategies were a response to the growing domestic turbulence in Saudi Arabia as a result of the precarious nature of the state’s oil revenue base from the 1980s onwards. Saudi Arabia is a government that retains its legitimating power through close alliances with the Muwahhidun[2] (Wahhabists) and it is oil money that has helped consolidate these ties. They originally emerged during the era of British colonial expansion with the goal of transforming and re-moralising the community, however, they later worked hand-in-hand with the Saudi state. The Muwahhidun then came to oppose the ruling dynasty, after the 1970s down turn, calling it corrupt and self-serving, and their relationship with them became more disjunctive. The cause of this disjunctive turn requires, as Robert Vitalis emphasizes, an examination of material encounters “on the ground”. Such a study could help us understand how the persistence of a significant US military presence on Saudi soil after the end of the first Gulf war has led to deep resentment and the fuelling of Islamic fundamentalisms. In fact, this was a primary motive behind bin Laden’s declaration of a Jihad against America, and the reason why so many Saudis were among those carrying out the 9/11 attacks. Rather than pursuing a careful analysis of these disjunctive processes, the US media instead is saturated with perversely orientalist readings on how the House of Saud is breaking down because of a dysfunctional royal family, or circulates hard-line denunciations of the Saudi kingdom’s austere flavour of Islam, namely Wahhabism. Inevitably, the Saudis are speculating they may be next in line after Iraq.

In brief, it has been increasingly difficult for the Saudi government to maintain a simple relationship of allegiance with the United States due to the changes in the global oil market as well as its own domestic political instabilities. From the mid- 1990s, the response by the Saudi leadership has resulted in the emergence of a new power nexus in the region that began to limit the capacity for US regional dominance. It was clear that this was likely to lead to negative consequences for the US as Saudi Arabia was not just a major oil supplier but it continued to play a significant role as swing producer that had a substantial influence on global oil prices. When seen in this light, it was fairly obvious that the US was under pressure to determine a way of undermining the power of the Saudi government in the oil market was intensifying for at the same time, this tension was further being exacerbated by the US’ ever-voracious appetite for oil which only could only be met through further imports. This tension intensified when, after the Asian financial crisis in 1998, OPEC tried to bring prices back up by cutting production. This, however, led the United States in 2000 to turn be even heavy-handed in its attempts to pressure OPEC to increase production. It had to undergo the humiliation of lobbying OPEC in a fashion seldom seen in the 40-year history of the oil cartel. This led to a staccato of furious demands within the United States for breaking up OPEC, a few even demanded the arrest of OPEC ministers for price fixing. As a result, the United States dropped its objections to easing UN limits on the funds Iraq could use once Baghdad had agreed to release more oil. Around this time, the Council on Foreign Relations and the James Baker III Institute for Public Policy concluded from several studies that showed the growing role of Iraq as a new kind of swing producer and this posed difficulties for the US administration. When the Venezuelan oil strikes took place in December 2002, Iraq (along with several other nations) had helped compensate by increasing production by 140,000 b/d.

Looking at this tangled conjunction of anxieties Gulf oil presented to the US, the restoration of control of Iraqi oil could not come soon enough, and hence the war on Iraq. The plan was simply to privatize the Iraqi Oil Industry that would create a new oil order that harks back to the glory days of the time when oil majors ruled the trade. This would sever the enormous power of the governing elites from the profits of state oil. Furthermore, this move would counter OPEC’s centrality and eventually result in a supply of reasonably priced oil for both the United States and the global market. Iraq would become a frontier bonanza boom for the majors where oil is very cheap to extract. However, it is highly doubtful that the Iraqi people would accept the privatisation of the oil sector forced onto them even if it was part of a package of democracy and prosperity, and indeed they haven’t. Without political stability, the oil majors would not invest irrespective of their desperation for access to such a cheap source of oil and so far they haven’t managed to get in. This has caused the US to stay on far longer than it intended to in Iraq.

It may be contrary conventional interpretations, but the war did not appear to have been an imperial manoeuvre in the sense that the US government or private corporations obtained any direct immediate gains from the Iraqi oil wealth for their own aggrandizement. Yahya Sadowski pointed out that the Bush administration did not have any strong ties to the oil supermajors, of which only one is American (Exxon). While it may be true that many potentially lucrative contracts were handed out in closed-door sessions to US oil engineering and servicing companies such as Bechtel and Halliburton (in some cases even before the war began), these were not the long-term deals that the oil majors are waiting for. Michael Watts in a paper he wrote in 1994, “Oil as money: The devil’s excrement and the spectacle of black gold” that petroimperialism is one of the eight natures of oil and here we see a form of it that is true to the intentions of post-Cold War geo-economics aimed at chaos management by implementing privatization structures. The US’s rather short-sighted dreamworld continues to be fixed in the abundant oil bedrock of the Gulf region, so you could argue that they had no choice but to use such imperial strategems. Therefore, it would not be unfair to say that America was the architect of its own violent embroilment with Islamic “terrorists” caused by their ever growing need to control the petropolitical order.

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[1] By eco-liquidity, I mean the dual and fluid circulation of oil both as an asset to be interchanged with money, as well as creating physical power, that collectively furnish capitalism with its dynamic energy.

[2] The term "Wahhabi" (Wahhābīya) was first used by opponents of ibn Abdul Wahhab. It is considered derogatory by the people it is used to describe, who prefer to be called "unitarians" or Muwahiddun.

Is Islamic Fundamentalism A Product Of ‘Blowback’?

Is Islamic Fundamentalism the Problem?

On the morning of September 11 2001 the world awoke to the news of simultaneous attacks in the United States, now referred to as the 9/11 attacks, and the ugly face of Islamic extremism. The attacks caused the deaths of 3062 innocent victims of various nationalities, from Japanese to American. The United Nations Security Council immediately condemned the attacks as “a threat to international peace and security” in its Resolution 1368 dated September 12, 2001. Despite the condemnation, further attacks were made in the following five years in Bali, London and Madrid to name a few, all committed by terrorist cells loosely connected to Al-Qaeda, an Islamic extremist group which operates as a network comprising of both a multinational, stateless arm and a fundamentalist Sunni movement calling for global jihad. What was the cause of this antagonism towards the west? Was it a product of ‘blowback’ towards the West’s foreign policies? First of all, what is Islamic Fundementalism?

American historian Ira Lapidus calls Islamic fundamentalism "an umbrella designation for a very wide variety of movements, some intolerant and exclusivist, some pluralistic; some favourable to science, some anti-scientific; some primarily devotional and some primarily political; some democratic, some authoritarian; some pacific, some violent." Lapidus differentiates between mainstream Islamists and Fundamentalists, saying a fundamentalist is "a political individual" in search of a "more original Islam," while the Islamist is pursuing a political agenda.

However, the term Islamic fundamentalism has often been criticized. A leading historian of Islam, Bernard Lewis, said that:

“The use of this term is established and must be accepted, but it remains unfortunate and can be misleading. "Fundamentalist" is a Christian term. It seems to have come into use in the early years of this century, and denotes certain Protestant churches and organizations, more particularly those that maintain the literal divine origin and inerrancy of the Bible. In this they oppose the liberal and modernist theologians, who tend to a more critical, historical view of Scripture. Among Muslim theologians there is as yet no such liberal or modernist approach to the Qur'an, and all Muslims, in their attitude to the text of the Qur'an, are in principle at least fundamentalists. Where the so-called Muslim fundamentalists differ from other Muslims and indeed from Christian fundamentalists is in their scholasticism and their legalism. They base themselves not only on the Qur'an, but also on the Traditions of the Prophet, and on the corpus of transmitted theological and legal learning.”

John Esposito, professor of International Affairs and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University Washington D.C. , also attacked the term for its association "with political activism, extremism, fanaticism, terrorism, and anti-Americanism," saying "I prefer to speak of Islamic revivalism and Islamic activism." Saying that, at least one Muslim academic has defended the use of the phrase, Sadik J. al-Azm, a Syrian philosopher. After surveying the doctrines of the new Islamic movements, al-Azm found that they are:

"an immediate return to Islamic ‘basics' and ‘fundamentals.' .... It seems to me quite reasonable that calling these Islamic movements ‘Fundamentalist' (and in the strong sense of the term) is adequate, accurate, and correct."

Saying that, perhaps it is still inaccurate to associate Islamic fundamentalism with terrorism ergo seeing it as the result, or blowback, of any one nations’ international policies since the fundamentals of Islam, as with all major world religions, are that of peace, brotherhood, love and equality and not of hate and intolerance. In his essay entitled “Extremism: Causes and Cures”, Muhammad Tahir ul-Qadri the founder of Minhaj ul Qur, an International organisation whose stated aim is the establishment of unity and understanding between communities wrote that Islam:

“…does not allow aggression, oppression and barbarism in any case. Therefore any terrorist act what so ever, is against the basic precepts of Islam. In spite of the explicit teachings of Islam, most of its concepts and dictates are misunderstood and misinterpreted in the Muslim world in general and the western world in particular, due to which a distorted picture of Islam is appearing in the minds of the people. The situation becomes even more grave (sic) when the people, ignorant of the Islamic tenets, fall prey to these misinterpreted concepts. This is detrimental to the ideological identity of Islam and causes countless social problems for the Muslims living in the West.”

However, it would be fair to state that a minority of these fundamentalists are extreme in their outlook, rhetoric and methods to extent that they view acts of terrorism as an acceptable means to push forward their agendas. They are however, not representative of the entire community as a whole, neither moderates nor fundamentalist. For example, using Lapidus’ definition that an Islamic Fundamentalist is "a political individual" in search of a "more original Islam”, one would have to count the Mawlawi Order as a fundamentalist sect and it would be erroneous to associate the order with Islamic Extremism as they attempt to find the “Original Islam” through dance. They are also known as the Whirling Dervishes due to their famous practice of whirling as a form of dhikr (remembrance of God). So the question is not whether Islamic Fundamentalism is a product of ‘blowback’ but rather if terrorism spawned from Islamic Extremism is a ‘blowback’ to policies put in place by the West, the answer is yes it is, but it is only part of the reason.

The Underlying Causes for Extremism and the Terrorism it Creates

During the fourth Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) it was declared that it would requires a comprehensive approach by the international community and “should duly take into account the root causes” in order to the fight terrorism. The underlying causes are not simple but numerous and are combined in complex ways leading up to violent action such as chronic conflicts in the case of the problems in the Middle East, specifically the Israeli-Palestinian problem. This represents a convergence of opinion on what are the causes of terrorism, Islamic Extremism in particular. How ever, this convergence in opinion does not reflect in action, as most counter-terrorism efforts do not address the underlying causes an example of which would be America’s “War on Terror” in Iraq where the US unilaterally decided to invade a sovereign state on the premise that by doing so it would subdue Islamic Extremism by denying them access to potential “Weapons of Mass Destruction”.

Regardless off the opinion of its causes, there is a curiously lack of information as to the causes of the 9/11 and subsequent attacks, as the terrorists have not did not voice any specific reasons why they attacked or even what their demands were after successful attacks. The search for root causes was simply unsuccessful with the exception of Osama bin Laden’s audio-video tapes. This information vacuum has made it ever more difficult to identify the underlying causes of their attacks that we have to make assumptions on what the underlying causes of are. Nonetheless, these causes seem strong enough to enable terrorist group leaders to recruit people into their networks and motivate them to give up their lives in the case of suicidal attacks, such as 9/11 attacks. Otherwise, why would privileged young men of Arab descent plot to kill themselves while causing the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians?

In February 1999, Osama bin Laden responded to an interview by John Miller of Esquire and during the interview he said that the Americans accused the Palestinians of being terrorists yet at the same time killed children in protecting Israel. He also said this has forced him to use similar means. Post 9/11, in a statement he released on al-Jazeera TV on December 27, 2001 he further condemned American support for Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, as seen. In November 13, 2002, in an audio tape that was recovered by the media he reportedly condemned the United States for their Israeli-Palestinian policy, and said that events such as 9/11, the operations on Germans in Tunisia, the explosion of the French tanker in Yemen, on the French in Karachi, the operations against US Marines in Failaka, Kuwait and on Australians and Britons during the Bali Bombings and the hostage taking in Moscow were the response of Muslims to defend their religion. He warned that citizens of US allies would also be targets. Steve Smith, however, asserts that Osama bin Laden is using the plight of Palestinians as an ex post facto justification for the attacks and his targets have been the conservative rulers of the Middle East including his home state, Saudi Arabia, and the United States for its support of the Saudi regime. Smith further argues that:

“..the reasons for the attacks were twofold; one was to show the world that the United States is vulnerable to attack, and the other was to produce a radicalization of Muslim opinion.”

The Osama bin Laden’s tapes have more or less corroborated some of the suggested underlying causes of Islamic Extremism. Amongst the numerous causes suggested, American foreign policy, especially its policy on the Israel-Palestine issue, the war in Iraq and its continued occupation, and the US’ military presence in Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, the US-led anti-terrorism campaign, or “War on Terror”, is said to have provoked much of the anti-Americanist sentiment in the Islamic world, as it provides the extremists with further proof that the actual war is on Islam itself. Conversely, some argue that extremists harbour a blind hatred towards modernity and view the United States as a symbol of modernisation, thus a source of their suffering. It’s in this papers opinion that this would be over-simplifying the matter.

Poverty has often been cited as being the root cause of terrorism but this is one of the most heavily contested potential causes as many point at the fact that Osama bin Laden is a multimillionaire, and the 9/11 hijackers were far from being members of the dispossessed. They were middle class, and in some cases upper class, were well educated, spoke English and came from Egypt and the wealthy Persian Gulf states. This is a puzzle as even though most terrorists are recruited from the poor and deprived there have been many who came from the wealthier and educated. So rather than poverty per se, the widening gap between the haves and have-nots partly due to globalization may have fuelled a greater sense of inequality. Under the advent of globalization, some benefited greatly, whilst others have suffered more. The latter have felt left out and disenfranchised. Perhaps 9/11 hijackers participation in that atrocity; can be explained by them feeling a sense of responsibility towards the have-nots. Ironically, it is because of globalization that terrorists have access to resources, communication and information, which was out of their reach in previous decades. So perhaps poverty is not the sole cause for terrorism, but it is one of the causes. Grievances based on poverty suffered by themselves or suffering seen in others has definitely led some to be recruited into terrorist groups.

With poverty comes lack of access to education and this can been seen as a cofactor in making young people more susceptible to being initiated into terrorist groups. Terrorist organisations such as Al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiya frequently offer opportunities for low cost education through the mosques and madrassas that they have influence in and this provides them with an ample supply of young, willing recruits that are fully indoctrinated in their beliefs. In regards to poverty and lack of education, efforts have to be made to reduce this sense of inequality by providing more opportunities for education and by providing a decent standard of living through a new Marshall Plan.

Religion, religious extremism or fanaticism particularly Islamic has often been cited as one of the underlying causes. Osama bin Laden’s a quote from one of the audiotapes attested to him seems to qualify this statement;

“we pray to God to aid us that His religion might triumph and we pursue the jihad unto death so as to merit His mercy”.

In a public survey conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations entitled, “Worldviews 2008”, 42% of Americans polled responded that Islamic fundamentalism is a critical threat to US vital interests. It can be said that religious extremism is an important mean for terrorist organizations to justify their actions and to motivate their attacks; Islam has often been labelled as the religion of terrorists as a result Osama’s actions leading to the 9/11 attacks and Hamas’ practice of suicide bombing. Furthermore the misappropriation of “jihad” has led many to take further suicidal actions. “Jihad” is Arabic for what can be variously translated as "struggle" or "effort," or "to strive," "to exert," "to fight," depending on the context. In the West, the word is generally understood to mean "holy war," and the terms are given, inaccurately, exclusively military connotations. The Quran does call for "jihad" as a military struggle on behalf of Islam but the Quran also refers to “jihad” as an internal, individual, spiritual struggle toward self-improvement, moral cleansing and intellectual effort. Thus making sure your well read or exercising regularly also qualifies as a “jihad”. In essence, the word has been misappropriated by Osama and his ilk to further their own narrow worldview and to justify their organisations actions.

Professor Mehmet Bayrakdar, Dean of the Department of Islamic Philosophy, Faculty of Religion, Ankara University in Turkey said that it has become customary for the western media to label any violence or terror as “Islamic terrorism” regardless of whether its perpetrators are Muslim or not which represents prejudiced Islamophobia. As mentioned earlier in this essay, Bayrakdar argues that the word Islam itself means peace and the word Muslim is he who practices peace by believing in as-Salam, the Being who is the source of peace and concord and who assures a peaceful existence to all beings. Bayrakdar explains that terrorists “..misuse Islamic concepts” and one should “..distinguish between extremists and moderates among Muslims and refrain from naively labelling Islam a terrorist religion.” Moreover, it seems 9/11 has brought the infamous theory of the clash of civilizations back to public discourse, absent since 1996 when Huntington wrote the famous piece. The 9/11 attacks, however, was not due to inter-civilization confrontation as argued by many. Yamazaki Masakazu, for example, argued that it does not represent a clash of civilizations because there is a variety of Islam in the world. NATO, which is deemed to be a part of Western civilization, sided with Muslims in Kosovo rather than Serbia is a Christian culture.

Incompetent and undemocratic governments do not always cause terrorism. As distasteful a human being as Saddam was, under his regime, Iraq was never the hotbed of terrorism that it was perceived to be. It was only after the collapse of his government and during the ensuing post-war chaos did it become what it is today. It is in an atmosphere of failed or weak governance that can terrorist organisations can take root. When a sense of injustice and inequality, be it poverty, access to politics, resources or other grievances, cannot be resolved through proper channels of governance, people may be more prone to seek violent resolutions out of desperation, and this includes terrorism. Furthermore the quality of the environment itself can also be deemed as a root cause for terrorism. Environmental stresses – especially shortages of cropland and fresh water – that have crippled farming in the countryside and forced immense numbers of people into squalid urban slums which makes them easy fodder for fanatics.

Conclusion

Although it is difficult to identify the underlying causes of violent terrorism, it has to be seen as a representation of desperation over some grievance that has not been addressed and could not be resolved by other peaceful means. After the 9/11 attacks, what we have witnessed is a rise in more organized and massive terrorists’ attacks by people willing to sacrifice their own lives. This presupposes more organized principles than the emotions of hatred, jealousy, isolation and a sense of deprivation. One can almost extract a common thread of a sense of injustice and inequality of those who are not on the good side of poverty, governance, globalization, governance, conflicts etc. They must have reached such a level of desperation that it compelled them to believe that resorting to violence was the only way to find a resolution. Leaders of terrorist groups have been able to exploit this sense of injustice and inequality among people, especially young people, to recruit and to motivate them to conduct terrorist attacks. However, the leaders may have their own targets and goals to achieve.

All this may sound like the revolutionaries of the French Revolution who took up arms for their cause, but it is different due to the global scope and multitudes of underlying causes. In the French Revolution the group aimed at killing their king and replacing a corrupt and unjust government with one more intoned with the people. However, the assassination of a president or the destruction of a nation would not calm their grievances and all the other causes of terrorism in the 21st Century. Islamic Extremism and the terrorism is a blowback, it is a reaction to the environment that these people are forced to live in and cope with. It is a reaction to what they perceive as intolerance to them and their way of living compounded by the feeling of disenfranchisement from the rest of the world caused by being left behind in poverty whilst the rest profits from being more interconnected. This rage, is being channelled by unscrupulous individuals to further their own political, economical and social goals through acts of violence and terror. Acts of war and aggression would no more solve this problem as it is akin to trying to put out a fire by throwing wood at it. In order to resolve this problem, we would have to quell sense of injustice and inequality by somehow diminishing the gap between the rich and poor, reducing poverty and increasing access to education in the problem areas of the undeveloped world for by doing that you would have successfully removed from organisations such as Al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyaa’s access to new recruits. Terrorism and Extremism is a reaction, and people react only if they feel they have been acted on.

Sources:

1. Akiko Fukushima, “Understanding and Addressing The Underlying Causes of International Terrorism.” National Institute for Research Advancement, York University, Canada.

2. John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 8.

3. Sadik J. al-Azm, "Islamic Fundamentalism Reconsidered: A Critical Outline of Problems, Ideas and Approaches," South Asia Bulletin, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 1 and 2 (1993), pp. 95-7.

4. Minhaj ul Qur Website, http://www.minhaj.org/org/index.php?contents=text&tid=427&lang=en

5. Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and German Marshall Fund of the United States, Worldviews 2008, The report is available at http://www.worldviews.org/index.html

6. Nicole Gnesotto, “Terrorism and Enlargement: A Clash of Dynamics,” Institute for Security Studies Newsletter, No.3/4, September 2002.

7. http://foi.Missouri.edu/terrorbkgd/rootcauses.html

8. “Identifying Root Causes of Terrorism: Our Efforts Paying Off,” New Straits Times, September 24, 2002.

9. John Miller, “Saudi Born Militant Osama bin Laden al-Qaida,” Esquire, February 1999, Volume 131, Issue 2.

10. “Text of the Tape Broadcast on al-Jazeera,” The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, November 13, 2002.

11. Steve Smith, “Why Was the Attack Ordered,” in Ken Booth and Tim Dunne eds., Unanswered Questions in Worlds in Collision, Palgrave, 2002, p.54.

12. Gwynne Dyer, “Islamic Fundamentalists Fear of Modernization is real motivation,” The Japan Times, October 6, 2001.

13. Statement of Azyumardi Azra at a Conference on Dialogue of Civilization at United Nations University, September 20, 2002.

14. Mehmet Bayrakdar, “Islam as a Religion and World-view of Peace and Dialogue,” Speech at a Conference on Dialogue of Civilization: Post 9/11 and Islam, held at United Nations University, September 20, 2002.

15. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilization?” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993.

Has the Kyoto Protocol Failed?

Everyone knows that Kyoto was a failure. Right? The Independent even ran a story last October titled "Scientists Say Kyoto Protocol Is 'Outdated Failure”. A bold assertion it may be, however as we will see in this essay it may be a bit too early to make such claims. When the ink dried on the climate treaty negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, on December 11, 1997, it’s fair to say that many expected the agreement would prove to be a watershed moment in the international effort to address global warming — as a result of the treaty, many hoped, global emissions of greenhouse gases would stop their inexorable climb upward and eventually reverse direction.

Unfortunately this was not to be. Ever since 1997, rather than decreasing or even just simply stabilizing, global emissions from fossil fuels have increased by 28 percent: from 22,849 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year to 29,320 million metric tons. An “outdated failure,” right? Well, yes, if you accept the premise that Kyoto’s goal was to reduce global emissions. Actually, it wasn’t.

The Protocol’s Framework

By the end of 1992, much of the world community, including the United States, had adopted the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to "stabiliz[e] ... greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” The framework did not create any binding emissions reductions for the signatories; it simply committed them to a set of general principles. The establishment of specific emissions targets was left to a subsequent agreement: the Kyoto Protocol.

The Kyoto Protocols Specifics

While the UNFCCC's some what estimable target of avoiding unwanted, dangerous climate change was also the ultimate objective of the Kyoto Protocol, the specifics of its goals was far more modest in comparison. Its goal was to reduce the collective emissions of greenhouse gases from participating industrialized countries by 5.2 percent relative to 1990. So there are two important things to note:

1. The emissions reduction goal was limited to the industrialized or Annex B countries, not the entire world.

2. Even though each country received a specific percentage reduction of greenhouse gases as their target, these goals were not binding in the literal sense as each signatory country could use a variety of trading mechanisms to get credit for emission reductions, in a sense “trade” their quotas from other countries as ultimately the goal was that, the industrialized nations would reduce their emissions collectively by 5.2 percent.

Currently, 38 Annex B countries including the 15 from the European Union (which together account for 64 percent of 1990 global emissions) who have ratified the Protocol (see table attached), as have 150 developing nations (which have no binding emissions commitments under Kyoto).

It is important to note that while the United States was on Kyoto's original list of Annex B countries, it does not however reside on the current list, as the U.S. Senate never ratified the treaty. As a matter of fact, in an astounding show of bipartisanship, five months prior to signing Kyoto the American Senate passed, 95–0, a nonbinding ‘Sense of the Senate’ resolution that rejects any international climate treaty which did not include binding targets for developing nations. This decision reverberates still in America with the IEA’s [International Energy Agency] report which states that 97 percent of growth in greenhouse gas emissions between now and 2050 will come from the developing world, a copious chunk of which would most definitely originate from China and India.

So How Did Those Annex B Ratifiers Do Since Kyoto?

The graphic below depicts the percentage in emissions relative to 1990 for the following countries and groups of countries (from left to right):

1. Annex B ratifiers: The industrialized countries that ratified Kyoto and are thus legally committed to making cuts
2. EU-15: European Union
3. EIT: Economies in Transition (essentially the former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries)
4. Non-EIT: All the Annex B ratifiers without the EIT and EU nations
5. United States of America
6. China
7. World

As it turns out, not only are Kyoto's Annex B countries keeping up with their quotas, they are in fact exceeding their commitments made in Kyoto. By 2007, their collective emissions in total were about 17 percent below the 1990 base year emissions.

It has to be said however; the lion’s share of this decrease was not the direct result of any new low-carbon technology or specific emissions policy, but it was mostly due to the fall of the Soviet Union. With the Soviet Union's dissolution came a precipitous economic collapse, from which the nations of the former Communist bloc have yet to fully recover. By 2007, the emissions of nations with transitioning economies (EIT) was in fact at about 37 percent below their 1990 levels but with normalization of their economies on the horizon, it is thought by some that the former Soviet bloc may even double their emissions in the coming ten to twenty years.

At the very least the rest of the Annex B countries are not doing badly. Collectively, their emissions are at only about two percent above 1990 levels — a considerably smaller percentage increase than that of the United States or China. The fifteen member states of the European Union also appear to be on a course to meet their Kyoto target: by 2007, one year before the five-year Kyoto clock began, the EU-15 countries’ emissions were estimated to be about four percent below the 1990 baseline.

Mixed Results

As you can see, the facts suggest it’s a little early and a little misleading to declare Kyoto a failure. In all likelihood when 2012 rolls around, what will be found is that overall the Annex B countries would have cut emissions by more than the intended 5.2 percent. Although this will be due in large part to the Soviet Union's break-up, the treaty did not include any requirements for adjustments for economic eventualities. And even so, it is most likely that will the EU will be able to cut its emissions by five percent or more independent of the Soviet Union. Here again the current economic downturn will most likely help create this figure.

So far from being a failure, the Kyoto Protocol looks like it will meet its very limited goals. But all that said and done, Kyoto still cannot be counted as a massive success either. The global outlook is still hovering between bad and bleak. In spite of the treaty, global emissions from fossil fuel use have increased by almost 37 percent since 1990. There are two factors that have undoubtedly contributed to this:

1. The enormous increase in emissions from China. Its emissions have increased by a whopping 153 percent since 1990, and China is now arguably the largest emitter. The failure to place binding emissions targets on developing economies like China was a fundamental flaw in Kyoto and one that must be rectified in the next round of negotiations (coming up in December).
2. The failure of the United States to ratify Kyoto. In contrast to the European Union, the United States — the world's largest economy and the largest emitter over the period since Kyoto was signed — saw a 17 percent increase in its emissions since 1990. The treaty was seriously crippled by the U.S. decision not to ratify.

The Indo-Sino-American Quarrel

Now, some Americans may argue against national climate legislation and international treaties by pointing at Kyoto’s “failure,” but I find such an argument a little ironic — and a lot tautological — when one of the factors that undermined Kyoto was the “failure” of the United States to ratify the treaty in the first place. If one were to read the climate-change news in recent weeks, one might wonder who won the last election in the United States. Aside from adopting several of former President Bush’s key positions in the International Climate Change negotiations, President Obama’s administration have gone against its election promises by rejecting the Kyoto Protocol thus ensuring that it will expire in 2012. Even when asked about reports that he has decided not to attend the Copenhagen Summit this December, he simply demurred the question. Due to this and more, Yvo de Boer, a senior United Nations climate negotiator, concluded that it simply would be “unrealistic” to expect the conference to produce a new, comprehensive and internationally accepted climate treaty. This also be said to describe the once-fond hopes for passage of an American climate legislation by the end Obama’s first term let alone by the end of the year.

America’s actual history with Kyoto complicates the story on the international side. Thus it is not as simple as some greens would like to portray it to be today. As mentioned earlier, it was a rare moment of bipartisan consensus on policy in 1997 when the Senate voted unanimously against its basic tenets of the Kyoto Protocol, and the Clinton-Gore administration never even submitted it for ratification. Even then, a little-known state legislator from Illinois named Barack Obama, voted to condemn Kyoto and prohibit the state from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. The treaty’s fundamental perceived flaws was that it was costly, very ambitious and its targets for the United States were deemed to dear while it allowed emissions from the developing world to continue to rise unchecked.

Less than a year into Obama’s first term, it seems plausible that no climate bill will pass before 2013 at the earliest, and that the Kyoto Protocol will expire in 2012 without a comprehensive successor agreement to take its place. Having promised to lead the Copenhagen negotiations to a successful conclusion, Obama now finds himself in a bind: As he is unable to get a bill through Congress, it can be alluded that he would not want to repeat Gore’s mistake by letting the Europeans pressure him into signing a treaty the Senate won’t ratify while sanctioning unrestricted emissions from the developing world, especially India and China. Since treaties require the support of two-thirds of the Senate, ratification will be more difficult than passage of domestic legislation. So the Administration’s draft implementing agreement submitted to the UN in May specified that emissions reductions would be subject to “conformity with domestic law.” In other words, whatever is agreed to here doesn’t mean a thing if the Senate doesn’t agree. As Jonathan Pershing, a top State Department negotiator remarked at the recent climate negotiators’ meeting in Bangkok. “We are not going to be part of an agreement we cannot meet.”

Indeed today, despite Kyoto’s ratification, China has become the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases so the China-India problem remains unsolved as well. Obama clearly is not blind to the serious political, economic, and environmental problems with any treaty that reaffirms Kyoto’s sanction of unrestricted emissions from these two countries and the rest of the developing world. Climate advocates have long argued that the key to overcoming developing world resistance to emissions limits is American leadership; if they went first, China and India would follow. Sceptics note that what America would gain in credibility it may lose in leverage needed to force a deal in Copenhagen. In any case, Congress’s inaction—and its continued concern about trade competitiveness questions—has forced Obama, in effect, to take the Bush position: No new treaty without developing world participation. As NPR, a privately and publicly funded non-profit media organization in the United States, recently reported, Kyoto will be allowed to expire after 2012. “The United States never ratified the agreement because it doesn't require any action from the developing world, including China, the world’s largest emitter. The Bush administration considered that a fatal flaw. And so does the Obama White House.”

This is the crux of the argument: The crucial feature of the deal that Gore struck in Kyoto was its exemption of the developing world from emissions reduction obligations. Without that concession, the developing world would never have accepted the treaty—but with it, the treaty was almost worthless (particularly since, as a political matter, that provision precluded American participation). This was the fatal flaw of Kyoto—and, having established that exemption, it will be doubly hard to persuade developing nations to undo it.

It seems that Obama intends to be subtle with these issues by reaching bilateral agreements with China and India. However, critics have pointed out that by doing so this could potentially undermine the multilateral architecture of the prospective Copenhagen treaty. Conversely, recent reports appear to show that no bilateral agreements will be forthcoming suggesting that a deal by Copenhagen is unlikely. Both China and India are under enormous international pressure to accept emissions limits while at the same time under even greater domestic pressure to maintain a strong rate of economic growth. So far, both countries have firmly resisted calls for binding emissions caps, although President Hu Jintao has said that China will reduce its emissions relative to economic growth—that is, the greenhouse-gas “intensity” of the Chinese economy, not total emissions—by a “notable” margin by 2020 and both China and India have promised to seek alternate methods of power generation in order to reduce their emissions.

Sources
1. UNFCCC, Kyoto Protocol, http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/items/2830.php
2. International Energy Agency, “CO2 Emissions from Fuel Combustion” http://www.iea.org/co2highlights/
3. Patrick J. Michaels, 26 September 2007; “Lessons of Kyoto”, CATO Institute.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8725
4. UNFCCC , “Kyoto Protocol -Status of Ratification”, http://unfccc.int/essential_background/convention/status_of_ratification/items/2631.php
5. UNFCCC, “Kyoto Protocol – Targets”, http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/items/3145.php
6. 25 July 1995; “U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 105th Congress - 1st Session On the Resolution (s.res.98 )”, http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=105&session=1&vote=00205
7. Richard Harris, 16 October 2009; “Future Unlikely For Kyoto Climate Treaty”, www.npr.org
8. David Adam, 15 September 2009; “US planning to weaken Copenhagen climate deal, Europe warns”, The Guardian
9. Giles Whittell, 24 October 2009;”President Obama won’t talk climate change in Copenhagen”, The Times
10. Giles Whittell, 27 October 2009; “President Obama 'still undecided' about attending Copenhagen climate conference”, The Times
11. Ken Dilanian, 18 July 2008; “Obama shifts stance on environmental issues”, USATODAY
12. 18 November 2008; “President-Elect Obama's Address to the Global Climate Summit”, http://www.climatevision.gov/statements/statements_111808.html
13. Leonard Doyle, 20 November 2008; “Obama brings US in from the cold”, The Independent
14. May 29, 2009; “U.S. Submission on Copenhagen Agreed Outcome”, Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs
15. Suzanne Goldenberg and Jonathan Watts, 14 October 2009; “US aims for bilateral climate change deals with China and India”, The Guardian
16. 29 October 2009; U.S.-China Climate Pact Isn't on Table, Envoy Says, The Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125677216535814493.html?mod=fox_australian