But What if She's Wrong? (Part I)

Pied Cow and the Pied Cow Blog
Senior Foreign Policy Analyst confer at
a recent gala event given by the Onan
Institute in Washington (file photo).

My pal Adam over at Politics is the Opium of  the Intellectuals keeps a timely chronicle about his concern that the U.S. is going to mix it up with Iran in the somewhat-near future, another war yet again legitimized by our intrepid Fourth Estate.

With the able assistance of the Pied Cow Senior Foreign Policy Analyst, however, the Pied Cow Blog has taken a differing view, i.e., that the most powerful constituencies in American at-best-nominal democracy, namely, the petroleum industry, the leadership of the capital markets, and the military, oppose such an armed conflict because they have too much to lose in the foreseeable circumstance that things will go badly; and as a result war with Iran is unlikely to occur at any time soon.

Adam raises good points, however, and I thought it would be interesting to explore what I consider to be the less likely possibility, i.e., an attack against Iran. Put in another way, 'What if, perish the thought, the Pied Cow Blog Senior Foreign Policy Analyst is wrong?'

While it's not necessarily meaningful to compare past occurrences with the present to predict future events, I do note a curious parallel between now and, say, 1913.

Most popular history books about World War I are unfortunate digests of the tribulations of trench warfare in Western Europe. These histories are generally unsatisfying because they deal with the specific events as opposed to the reasons why the events transpired in the first place. Emblematic of this type of history is The First World War by the sycophant John Keegan.

There are some recent (and revisionist) histories, however, that I've found much more satisfying. Two examples are F.W. Engdahl's A Century of War and Sean McMeekin's The Russian Origins of the First World War. [Perhaps grist for the Pied Cow Book Club mill.]

These histories are far preferable because they explore the political and economic interests of the belligerents, that is, they provide analysis that gives a far more credible explanation of the events than do the more, shall we say, bourgeois treatments of the subject matter.

But now for our comparison.

At the turn of the 20th Century, the Ottoman Empire was in decline, the Ottoman Empire then consisting of modern-day Turkey, the Levant, most of the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt and the Sudan. Click here for a useful pop-up map, ca. 1914.

It was at this time that European national governments began in earnest the transition from fueling their fleets with coal to the lighter and more highly combustible petroleum. Further, the automobile was making its mass-production debut, and its need for abundant petroleum only added to the perception that oil was an imperative for a modern industrial society. Thus a dependable source for meeting that demand was obviously necessary.

The Ottoman Empire's decline meant, of course, that it was vulnerable to the intrusions of European powers who wanted the big prize that the region had to offer: oil, in seemingly boundless quantities.

European powers quickly realized that controlling oil supplies didn't mean merely an entitlement to the profits earned from selling the stuff on the open market; it also meant having a veto power over their economic competitors who equally desired large amounts of petroleum for their own economies. In essence, then, control over oil supplies carried with it the power to control the world's political structure.

[To be continued tomorrow in Part II.]


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