CityStates: Commentary on an Urban World

A Sustainable Civilization?

In his book Macro History, Lee Daniel Snyder describes civilization as a

 Culture-System…in a continuous process of 1) preserving…the integrity of its shared behavior patterns, against internal disintegration…and 2) adapting its structures to changing historical circumstances (p. 50).

The crisis of climate change is a result of historical and contemporary global civilizational arrangements that enable some broadly-shared behaviour patterns (e.g., a culture of industrialized mass consumption) that are quite incapable of being sustained indefinitely. Our “culture-system” cannot both preserve such behaviours and survive; nor can it “adapt its structures” to the “changing historical circumstances” of climate change without meaningfully disrupting these “shared behaviour patterns.”

How, then, can our “Culture-System” be made more sustainable? Will the transition to a post-carbon society be achieved through more sustainable city-building, or will it need to involve a reappraisal of the nature of our civilization?

I suggest that if our efforts to “colonize the future” are to be viable, they must, following Guy & Marvin (1999) be much more modest in their claims for the sustainable city (p. 272). While the prescriptions for the sustainable city are indeed important and essential components of a sustainable future, they do not, in and of themselves, comprise the ingredients of a sustainable civilization.

In his forward to the book Natural Advantage of Nations Alan Atkisson sets out his principles for a sustainable civilization, including the complete redevelopment of our energy systems, building technologies and agriculture as well as the preservation of the world's remaining species and ecosystems in the context of long-lasting international peace. Yet we can see that these principles, while admirable, are not in themselves the ingredients for a successful civilization. Indeed, given the revolutionary nature of these prescriptions, an already successful civilization – one with sufficiently sustainable social, political and economic structures – would be a prerequisite for carrying them out.

Derrick Jensen, in his massive two-volume book Endgame (2006) holds that civilizations cannot, in fact, be sustainable -- or, indeed, redeemed. Every aspect of what we refer to as civilization is in his view merely a form of violence and domination and therefore must be “brought down” by whatever means necessary before it destroys the global biosphere and with it, humanity.

In his classic 1961 book The City in History, Lewis Mumford acknowledged these violent “unbuilding” tendencies inherent in metropolitan civilization, but stressed that the will to dominate, control and exterminate that originally came with the institution of kingship and forms of political hierarchy have always coexisted with life-affirming reciprocal relationships, spiritual aspirations, arts and learning. These contradictions are expressed in the web of our social, religious, economic, cultural, political and, yes, spatial arrangements.

Therefore, any vision for a sustainable civilization must address this contradiction directly, and not be confined solely to spatial planning and technological considerations. For, while spatial patterns can impose constraints on these arrangements, they are not synonymous with them.

As I pointed out in a previous post, too often the prescriptions for sustainable cities are overly technical and instrumental, and essentially divorce the city from the currents of civilization, thus making impossible the articulation of alternate political arrangements. If we are to have truly sustainable cities and a habitable future, these currents and arrangements must be more vigorously contemplated, articulated and pursued. 

In Snyder’s (1999) definition of civilization we may discover a useful model: that of a resilient civilization “adapt[ing] its structures to changing historical circumstances” (p. 50) – provided that such structures are not comprised merely of mortar and stone. 

Michael Dudley

(This posting is adapted from a paper given at the 39th conference of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, Kalamazoo Michigan, June 4th 2009).

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The Long 9/11: The Economic Crisis and the Fate of the New World Trade Center

As the foreclosure crisis and subsequent economic meltdown have devastated America's cities, it is perhaps unsurprising that observers are evoking the 9/11 attacks to try to describe what they are seeing.

Recently, Tom Engelhardt likened the impact of the economic crisis on New York to a dirty bomb or a "second 9/11", taking the reader on a tour of what remains of his once-vibrant New York neighborhood:

"Broadway in daylight now seems increasingly like an archeological dig in the making. Those storefronts with their fading decals ("Zagat rated") and their old signs look, for all the world, like teeth knocked out of a mouth. In a city in which a section of Broadway was once known as the Great White Way for its profligate use of electricity, and everything normally is aglow at any hour, these dead commercial spaces feel like so many tiny black holes. Get on the wrong set of streets -- Broadway's hardly the worst -- and New York can easily seem like a creeping vision of Hell, not as fire but as darkness slowly snuffing out the blaze of life."

Similarly, the use of the term "ground zero" in regards to the mortgage crisis has become so commonplace that any number of U.S. cities lay claim to the title. Orange County has earned the name because of its onetime concentration of subprime lenders, but Dayton Ohio, Cleveland and Orlando are all apparently "ground zero" for the present crisis, with waves of abandoned houses and displaced residents.  

Now it has been announced that the latest casualty of the economic crisis is the actual Ground Zero itself: a Port Authority study has concluded that the remaining two towers on the former World Trade Center site will not be rebuilt for years, perhaps decades. 

At first glance, this might appear ironic -- that a crisis being described using the rhetoric of 9/11 would in turn derail the rebuilding of the very site that gave rise to the rhetoric itself. It might, that is, if one views these events as distinct. They are not.

The destruction of the World Trade Center was exploited relentlessly by the Bush administration and its partisans in the media and Wall Street to promote a radical and rapacious campaign of aggressive foreign wars and the looting of domestic wealth. Any opposition, dissent or questioning of these policies was labelled as treasonous, even akin to terrorism; for all these policies could be justified with reference to the mourned crater in lower Manhattan. 

Now, between the costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, domestic tax cuts and exotic, unregulated forms of financial thuggery, the American economy has been shattered. The debris -- scattered across the nation in hundreds of communities -- includes abandoned homes, homeless families, shuttered businesses and halted construction projects. 

Among them, the new World Trade Center. 

The Bush Administration and those who blindly supported them in everything they did must now bear part of the responsibility for the perhaps fatal harm done to this site, this symbol they so fervently exploited in their ruthless campaign to reshape the country and the world. 

Bush may or may not have been able to prevent the destruction of the original World Trade Center. But his policies since may well have made its full reconstruction impossible.    

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Israel's "Urban Warfare"

In 1989, the sight of thousands of East German civilians tearing down what had been a militarily-reinforced wall was hailed as the dawn of a new era, a resounding confirmation of the triumph of democracy and a delegitimation of communist ideology.

Flash forward to 2008: 1.4 million Gazans, long confined to an inhumanly small plot of land 360 sq kms. large and subject to a ruthless Israeli blockade, blast away at the wall between themselves and Egypt. But instead of seeing this as another testament to the strength of the human spirit in the face of repression, most of the political establishment in the West has been going into contortions affirming the reasonableness of Israeli and American policy towards Gaza, while at the same time wondering how all of this will affect Israel and the "peace process."

While even as mainstream a news source as the New York Times concedes that what Israel is doing to the Gazans qualifies as "collective punishment," (which is illegal under international law) there is still the tilt towards journalistic "balance" that places equal blame with Hamas -- both for firing rockets into Israel and for refusing to acknowledge Israel's "right to exist."

The seemingly unmovable assumption of Israeli rectitude in their treatment of Gaza is such that it is taken as conventional wisdom that the blockade is merely to "pressure" Hamas to stop launching rockets and to acknowledge Israel's right to exist. And in any case, what other nation would supply electricity and heat to its enemies?

These points are asinine on all counts. In the first place, the Gaza Strip is not a sovereign country at war with Israel. Israel -- in spite of its so-called 2005 "withdrawal" from Gaza -- continues to exert complete control over the territory, thereby qualifying for all practical purposes as Gaza's occupier. As such it is legally bound to provide basic services for the territory. Denying energy to the territory's residents is by definition collective punishment.

Secondly, the proposition that Palestinians should "recognize" Israel's "right to exist" is hardly unproblematic. As Saree Makdisi points out,

the formal diplomatic language of "recognition" is traditionally used by one state with respect to another state. It is literally meaningless for a non-state to "recognize" a state. Moreover, in diplomacy, such recognition is supposed to be mutual. In order to earn its own recognition, Israel would have to simultaneously recognize the state of Palestine. This it steadfastly refuses to do (and for some reason, there are no high-minded newspaper editorials demanding that it do so).

Second, which Israel, precisely, are the Palestinians being asked to "recognize?" Israel has stubbornly refused to declare its own borders. So, territorially speaking, "Israel" is an open-ended concept. Are the Palestinians to recognize the Israel that ends at the lines proposed by the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan? Or the one that extends to the 1949 Armistice Line (the de facto border that resulted from the 1948 war)? Or does Israel include the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which it has occupied in violation of international law for 40 years — and which maps in its school textbooks show as part of "Israel"?

In essence, Israel -- and by extension its allies the United States, Britain and Canada -- are asking the impossible. What's even more irrational is that these demands and the privations that accompany them are also expected to result in the cessation of rocket attacks. Again a moment's thought will reveal how ludicrous this is. Demanding that 1.4 million civilians put a stop to terrorist attacks over which they cannot possibly have any control is akin to asking that Detroit taxpayers put an end to all the murders in the city or face blockade and cessation of heat and electricity.

Israel is no stranger to conducting "urban warfare." It wreaked extensive damage to urban areas in Lebanon in 2006 and has been relentlessly bulldozing Palestinian homes. But they are taking this concept to its most basic: by destroying sanitation facilities and then denying energy, Israel is engaging in nothing less than "Infrastructure warfare, " or

...the wanton destruction of the basic platforms of human survival. The bombing of the electric power plant has thrust the world’s most densely populated area into darkness; cutting off the vital flow of energy to hospitals, assistance centers, and the pumping stations which provide the city’s water. At the same time, Israel has bombed large sections of the main roads, government buildings, water lines and bridges.

The result, again according to Saree Makdisi is that Gaza is dying:

Gaza is not only out of food. Because of Israel's siege, the water system is faltering, the sewage system has broken down and is discharging raw waste into streets and the sea, the power supply is intermittent at best, hospitals lack heat and spare parts, and dozens of life-saving medicines are no longer available.

Gazans cannot on their own stop terrorist attacks or "recognize" Israel. The blockade is therefore irrational and cruel beyond defensibility. But even on its own terms it cannot achieve what its supporters suppose it will: Far from alienating Gazans from Hamas, it will only reinforce their loyalty, and ensure another generation of Palestinians grows up hating Israel. And Israel's reputation -- already thin internationally -- can only unravel further the longer Gazans' suffering continues.

Were any other nation behind these actions, western intelligentsia would surely recognize this infrastructure warfare for what it is; yet because it is being waged by Israel, the result for most is only cognitive dissonance. As a result, it is literally unthinkable that Israel is in contravention of international law.

For Gaza's sake as well as Israel's, the walls must come down, the water purified, the heat resumed, the light restored.

photo: excauboi [flickr]

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Rethinking Kunstler's Iraq Connection

Urban journalist James Howard Kunstler has long maintained that the American presence in Iraq and the fate of suburbia are linked:

"We're involved in Iraq because we don't want to begin thinking about modifying our behavior at home. We are desperate to preserve our access to Middle East oil because that is the only way we can keep running our society the way we're used to running it. Mostly, we don't want to face the tragic misinvestments we've made in the infrastructure of happy motoring, and we don't want to face the inconvenient truth that there really isn't any combination of alt.fuels that will permit us to keep running all the cars the way we like to run them. Either we keep getting the oil or say goodbye to the American Dream Version 2.K."

Personally I have struggled with this connection -- or rather, the way Kunstler expresses it, because it ends up suggesting that the war was actually necessary to maintain our oil-intensive economy, and that if we want to keep driving everywhere, we'd better get used to the idea of American troops in Iraq. Of course, Kunstler is correct to a point: it is well-established that the American military has been acting largely as an oil-protection force, and that the Pentagon expenditures on this task ranges between $46 billion and $113 billion per year in 2003 dollars.

These numbers however, only tell half the story. Instead of saying that the Iraq war is "blood for oil," perhaps what we should be asking is, oil for whom? Who is benefitting financially from the war?

Critics have been pointing out for some time that the war is fattening the coffers of American and British oil companies, particularly through the use of "production sharing agreements", or PSAs:

" The development model being promoted in Iraq, and supported by key figures in the Oil Ministry, is based on contracts known as production sharing agreements (PSAs), which have existed in the oil industry since the late 1960s. Oil experts agree that their purpose is largely political: technically they keep legal ownership of oil reserves in state hands (3), while practically delivering oil companies the same results as the concession agreements they replaced. Running to hundreds of pages of complex legal and financial language and generally subject to commercial confidentiality provisions, PSAs are effectively immune from public scrutiny and lock governments into economic terms that cannot be altered for decades.

In Iraq’s case, these contracts could be signed while the government is new and weak, the security situation dire, and the country still under military occupation. As such the terms are likely to be highly unfavourable, but could persist for up to 40 years. Furthermore, PSAs generally exempt foreign oil companies from any new laws that might affect their profits. And the contracts often stipulate that disputes are heard not in the country’s own courts but in international investment tribunals, which make their decisions on commercial grounds and do not consider the national interest or other national laws. Iraq could be surrendering its democracy as soon as it achieves it."

This much is fairly self-explanatory. However, the other main beneficiary which is less well-understood, according to Michael Klare, is the Pentagon itself. The U.S. war machine is an intense gas-guzzler:

"[F]oreign wars, sad to say, account for but a small fraction of the Pentagon's total petroleum consumption. Possessing the world's largest fleet of modern aircraft, helicopters, ships, tanks, armored vehicles, and support systems -- virtually all powered by oil -- the Department of Defense (DoD) is, in fact, the world's leading consumer of petroleum. It can be difficult to obtain precise details on the DoD's daily oil hit, but an April 2007 report by a defense contractor, LMI Government Consulting, suggests that the Pentagon might consume as much as 340,000 barrels (14 million gallons) every day. This is greater than the total national consumption of Sweden or Switzerland."

This massive oil use, Klare suggests, is such that rising oil prices and pending shortages may compel the Pentagon to wage wars simply to ensure access to the oil it needs to wage wars. Klare's is a particularly disturbing scenario when we consider that the Bush administration is moving ever closer to war with Iran, despite long-standing warnings that such a war would triple the price of oil, which would make long-distance commuting increasingly impossible and would drive the price of consumer goods beyond the reach of all but the wealthy. But then this is nothing new: Bush & co. have long been working against the interests of the middle class, which between debt overload and the housing bubble, has eroded significantly under their watch.

Taken together, what seems to becoming clearer is that, while the "war on terror" is working quite well for certain vested interests in the government, military and corporate spheres, it appears to have little to do with keeping the engine of suburbia running smoothly. This is only of minimal concern here: yes, the Pentagon is underwriting the oil economy, which keeps our society humming along.

But the proposition that "suburban nation" specifically required an invasion of Iraq doesn't to my mind hold water. What the war in Iraq is about is ensuring that oil remain expensive to fatten oil companies' bank accounts, and that the Pentagon has access to endless supplies of it.

In this light, the American consumer could even be seen as the Pentagon's competitor for middle eastern oil, in which case $100.00 for a barrel of oil then makes a great deal of strategic sense for an imperial superpower.

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Gated Communities: Ours and Theirs

Ostensibly in the wake of a series of increasingly horrific car bombs -- and despite protests from Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri Maliki -- comes a new response from the U.S. army: they intend to build a series of walls to divide Sunni and Shia neighbourhoods from one another. As reported in the Guardian:

"US soldiers are building a three-mile wall to separate one of Baghdad's Sunni enclaves from surrounding Shia neighbourhoods, it emerged today. The move is part of a contentious security plan that has fuelled fears of the Iraqi capital's Balkanisation. When the barrier is finished, the minority Sunni community of Adamiya, on the eastern side of the River Tigris, will be completely gated. Traffic control points manned by Iraqi soldiers will provide the only access, the US military said."

This "new" strategy is disturbing to say the least. It combines the oldest of military measures (walling cities) with high-tech bioscans to control populations. It failed miserably in the Vietnam War under the name of "strategic hamlets" and will surely do little more than make life miserable for Sunnis and Shias alike.

For a sharp take on this issue, I recommend having a look at Chris Floyd's piece Ghetto Blaster over at the website Empire Burlesque, who finds particular and brutal irony in how the splicing up of Baghdad is being reported in the media -- as just another "gated community":

"The [Washington Post's] story is breathtaking in the open acceptance of this brutal and highly illegal new plan -- not only on the part of U.S. military officers, but also by the paper itself, which simply adopts the Pentagon's Orwellian tag of 'gated communities' and uses it throughout the piece, without quotes. The phrase is used over and over, repeatedly invoking the peaceful image of a prosperous American suburb, with its wide lawns, well-tended houses and gently rolling streets nestled safely and securely behind tasteful brick walls. This alternate reality -- or surreality, rather -- has already infected the troops being ordered to carry out this war crime: 'They've been doing it in Florida, and the old people seem to like it,' joked the platoon's leader, Sgt. 1st Class Charles Schmitt, 37.'"

While the war may go on interminably, this development marks something like perfect closure for the Iraq War -- a moment when the geopolitics of oil has reached its logical conclusion.

All the misery, bloodshed and mass death in Iraq has always been for oil: this is obvious enough to anyone who cares to know it. Iraq was in the Bush Administration's sights from the moment they reached office, and now the lucrative "production sharing agreements" imposed on Iraq will both impoverish that country while at the same time ensuring that American and British oil companies will have plentiful supplies for some time. Locking up Iraqis within their own cities is just one more form of control to keep the oil flowing.

And it will, not incidentally, make it possible for those of us in the West with money and time enough to continue to isolate ourselves in remote, oil-sucking gated communities of our own.

(image credits: "Kjirsten" photostream)

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Isfahan: Goodbye to "Half the World"?

It was once said that to see the Iranian city of Isfahan was "to see half the world." One of the world's richest historical centres, it is home to the spectacular Meidan Emam, a World Heritage site. It also happens to be the site of one of Iran's most important nuclear processing facilities, and surely high on a list of potential targets for American and Israeli war planners. A glimpse at what we stand to lose.

Among the world's most magnificent cities is Iran's Isfahan -- known as the cultural capital of the Islamic world. For centuries it has been renowned for its architecture, in particular Meidan Emam, which is now a United Nations World Heritage site (pictured above):

"Built by Shah Abbas I the Great at the beginning of the 17th century, and bordered on all sides by monumental buildings linked by a series of two-storeyed arcades, the site is known for the Royal Mosque, the Mosque of Sheykh Lotfollah, the magnificent Portico of Qaysariyyeh and the 15th-century Timurid palace. They are an impressive testimony to the level of social and cultural life in Persia during the Safavid era."

Not only did Shah Abbas I build this site, he also oversaw the elaborate planning of the city itself, the results of which were so magnificent that visitors claimed that to see Isfahan was to "see half the world." Isfahan in the 17th Century was considered landmark achievement in urban planning :

"The city's most splendid time began in 1598 when Shah Abbas the Great (1587-1629) decided to make it his capital and rebuilt it into one of the largest cities of the world...Gradually, royal urban planners under Shah Abbas created the new heart of the city to the south of the old city centre named Naghsh-e-Jahan square, an open space between the older Seljukid city centre and the river. The considerable size of the square is about 1700 feet in length and 520 feet in width...The royal planners sketched out a plan that would run from the new city centre to the old square including the complicated networks of bazaars, porticoes and many caravanserais which were built during the reign of Shah Abbas. Around the new square, Shah Abbas created the noted six-storey palace named Ali-Qapu which dominates the eastern side of the new square. On the east of the square was built the Sheikh Lotfollah mosque and in the north of the square was the entrance to the Royal bazaar, the Qaysariyah. Also, the new Friday Mosque was created in the south of the square, one of the masterpieces of world architecture. The new square was used for holding festivals, markets and games of polo. Today, the original goal posts are still in the place. The square was completely surrounded by more than two hundred handicrafts shops on the ground floor and the second floor had been allocated for travellers and periodic ceremonial uses."

While many of these features were destroyed when the city was sacked in 1722, much of its glory still remains.

For the time being at least. It may soon suffer attack again.

Despite all rational arguments that military action against Iran is immoral and the sheerest of follies, the United States and Israel are openly drawing up plans for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities which appear to be well advanced and may well include the use of nuclear weapons. If you know where to look, you can even find websites with satellite imagery of Iran's nuclear facilities -- those sites which would most likely be targeted with nuclear "bunker busting" explosives.

And if you look you will learn that, among those sites that will be potentially targeted by the Israelis or the Americans is a nuclear enrichment facility at Isfahan.

Isfahan is one of Iran's most important nuclear sites, not only for its uranium enrichment, but also for its university at which the country's nuclear scientists and technicians are trained. The enrichment facility is several kilometers away from the city, which would certainly put the city in danger from the massive nuclear fallout that would result from an attack, and the university itself is in the city proper, so extensive destruction within the city could be expected. All of which would be officially regretted of course.

Such an attack would obviously kill many thousands of Iranians, but it would also destroy or at the very least lethally irradiate one of the world's most important historical cities. Yet such an attack is completely unwarranted. It assumes that Iran's nuclear capabilities include weaponry -- in spite of repeated authoritative findings that this is not the case. As former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter puts it,

"[Iran is] alleged to have a nuclear weapons program. And yet the International Atomic Energy Agency, the inspectors who have had full access to the sites in Iran, have come out and said, 'Well, we can’t say that there isn’t a secret program that we don’t know about. What we can say, as a direct result of our investigations, there is no data whatsoever to sustain the Bush administration's claims that there is a nuclear weapons program.' And yet, the Bush administration once again is putting the onus on Iran, saying, 'It’s not up to the inspectors to find the nuclear weapons program. It’s up to the Iranians to prove that one doesn’t exist.' Why do we go down this path? Because you can’t prove a negative. There’s nothing Iran can do that will satisfy the Bush administration..."

Or Israel. Both countries however seem determined to end Iran's nuclear programs, and diplomacy does not seem to be an option for them. But the destruction cannot and will not be limited to the targeted sites. It will mean unspeakable calamity for Iran's cities and citizens. And it may well degenerate into a regional -- perhaps even global -- war.

Only the first of the terrible losses to humanity will be the magnificent city of Isfahan. And in destroying it -- and everything that follows -- we may indeed lose "half the world."

(photo: Toyohara [flickr.com])

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The Fate of Dubai

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released a major new study revealing the impacts of climate change -- which the oil industry is so eager to debunk that they have offered cash bonuses to scientists to counter it. Clearly the oil industry is afraid -- and they should be. According to the IPCC:

"Current models suggest global warming of 1.9 to 4.6 degrees would lead to a “virtually complete” elimination of the Greenland ice sheet and a rise in sea levels of about 7 metres, if sustained for millennia...Sea levels will probably rise from between 0.28 metres and 0.43 metres, although there is a chance the increase will be larger if Greenland and Antarctic ice discharges continue to grow."

As drastic as these projections sound, it's important to recognize that they are already being realized. Last year, India claimed the dubious distinction of being the first nation to lose an island to climate change:

"The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true. As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities."

Indonesia, as an archipelago of islands, may be particularly hard-hit. It's expected to lose two thousand islands by 2030 if present trends continue.

Given these dire warnings and the substantive science behind them, it is all the more inexplicable that cities are not only still building in vulnerable coastal areas, but in some cases are taunting the future by actually building out into the ocean.

This past month both the National Geographic and Wired Magazine have looked at the bizarro futurism of United Arab Emirates city of Dubai -- a city that has grown so rapidly and spectacularly that it is being heralded as the City of the Future. Among the most startling of these developments is the the Palm Jumeirah -- a palm-shaped artificial island anchored by a Trump Hotel . Created through a massive filling of the shoreline in the Strait of Hormuz, it is the largest artificial island ever attempted.

This development has proved so popular and profitable that it is going to be surpassed by the proposed Palm Deira which

"will cover 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) in length and 8.5 kilometers (5.3 miles) in width and have an area of 80 square kilometers (861 million square feet). It will consist of residential property, marinas, shopping malls, sports facilities, and clubs. The residential area will be located on the fronds and will contain 8,000 two-storey town houses."

As may be seen from the image above much of the construction on these sandbars appears to be taken up with western-style McMansions; except that each has a beach in their backyards. If the climate scientists are correct, however, all of this may well become submerged. The irony of course is that the very oil economy that makes Dubai wealthy enough to build out into the ocean is the very same force that may make it a spectacular ocean bottom wonderland for awe-struck divers to explore someday.

But there may even be a worse fate in store: It may become a battleground:

"The United Arab Emirates is situated at the center of an oil-dependent world. This tiny state forms the promontory that juts out into the famed Strait of Hormuz through which 40 percent of the world’s oil passes every day. Across the narrow strait sits Iran, the next victim on the list of “axis of evil” nations. Any attack on Iran will require that military forces quickly deploy to Dubai to forestall the closing of the strait and the subsequent devastation that would cost to world oil supplies and financial markets."

As a sign of just how irony never rings just twice, there is every reason to expect Dubai to become the epicentre of the threatened American/Israeli attack on Iran. The much heralded "city of the future" may in fact have none -- if the world cannot put the brakes on the machinations of the military-petroleum complex that is simultaneously grasping to control the world's resources while at the same time blocking any real attempt to recognize and address the environmental consequences of the petroleum era.

In a very real sense, the fate of all of us is bound to the fate of Dubai. It is, indeed, the city of the future.

(Images: calajava [flickr])

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Iraq's Libraries: From Cradle to Grave

In the days following the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Iraq National Library and Archive was burned and looted. What was lost forever can scarcely be imagined, but only estimated. Yet it was not just the National Library that was torched: the Central al-Awqaf Library, the House of Wisdom, the Iraqi Academy of Sciences and dozens of other libraries across Iraq -- all suffered terrible losses:

"All of the 45,000 books, including Ottoman manuscripts and a collection of rare medical texts, were burnt [and] the US military bears responsibility for the destruction of another 1,744 manuscripts. These had been removed before the fire and placed under armed guard at the Qadiriyya Mosque complex. Operating under a policy to shoot armed Iraqis on sight, US forces killed the guard on April 13. The al-Awqaf staff returned these manuscripts to the library, now unguarded because of the American 'rules of engagement.' These manuscripts were either looted or incinerated...the entire collection of 175,00 books sand manuscripts at the library of the University of Baghdad’s College of Arts was reduced to ashes...The whole principal library of the University of Basra [was] incinerated."

Since 2003 the staff of the National Library have struggled to rebuild the collection, but with Iraq now immersed in civil war the Library's director is shutting its doors, as they can longer endure the dangers to the building and its staff, some of whom have been murdered. According to Jeffrey B. Spurr, (Islamic and Middle East Specialist, Architecture & Fine Arts Library, at Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum):

"[the] institution had been bombed thrice in three weeks, and subjected to sniper fire, including directly into his own office. Another young librarian was recently murdered, and the building had been shelled several times in the few days previous to the closing (by which I assume he meant mortar fire).

[Library Director] Dr. Eskander has been a model of progressive action, has increased his staff substantially, and has striven very hard to gain them training on several fronts, and otherwise restore functioning to an institution that was twice set on fire during the initial period of American occupation. Prompted by a question from me concerning how he was managing to keep such a large staff coming to work under such perilous circumstances, he informed me last spring that he was dedicating 30% of his budget to bussing them all back and forth each day, although three of his drivers had been murdered in the process.

However necessary, this was financially untenable as a long-term accommodation to the exigencies of the times. As we all know, the situation has only grown worse since then, and the repeated direct attacks on his institution made it a place he could no longer ask his staff to serve. The forces of intolerance are thriving, and those institutions and persons representing a progressive and hopeful future for Iraq are under assault and in retreat."

Humanity can ill-afford such losses. The fires of Iraq's libraries must cause us to doubt the durability of the project of civilization. Even as libraries may be able to help preserve wisdom, liberties and the social bonds of community, they can only endure so long in their absence. The tragedy of Iraq -- the cradle of civilization -- is ours as well.

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Blowback

U.S. Senator Rick Santorum made headlines a couple weeks ago for his absurd use of a Lord of the Rings metaphor to justify the U.S. occupation of Iraq: that because American forces are there, the "Eye of Mordor" is focused away from America.

Never mind that the analogy is hopeless on its own terms (who are the Hobbits supposed to represent?) what is fascinating and telling about this whole premise is that he is playing off the assumption -- repeatedly uttered by Bush and now Canada's Conservative government -- that fighting "them" over "there" means that we "won't have to fight them here."

This sense of entitled isolation is exceedingly heartless, for it presumes that it's acceptable for violence and mayhem to reign somewhere else. But it is also irrational in the extreme to believe that a determined terrorist is going to "be drawn away" from America just because of the violence in Iraq. What -- they're going to forget about the country responsible for the carnage there in the first place?

To remind us that the cities of the west and the east are more connected than politicians would like us to believe, Paula Levine from the Banff Centre for the Arts has created a website called Shadows from Another Place which, with the aid of flash animation and GPS asks,

what if international gestures, such as acts of terrorism or war, were like boomerangs that returned to sites of origin with an impact equal to the one enacted? What is would such actions look like if they were in other backyards or our own?

A compelling question that will hopefully generate empathy for what has been unleashed on Iraq. (But for the grace of God...)

Yet, in a more immediate and fundamental way, the conflicts arising from the "war on terror" are already "boomeranging" back to take their toll on American cities -- and not because of terrorists seeking vengeance. Instead, this blowback derives directly from all that is required to fuel the global war machine, and what this is costing American society.

The National Priorities Project runs a website which keeps a second-by-second tally of the costs of the Iraq war -- a stunning total that is then compared to how these monies could have been used in American communities to cover the costs of public health, education and public housing. The ongoing needs of America's cities are going unaddressed -- to say nothing of the ones in crisis.

Over a year ago we saw the disaster that befell New Orleans when Hurrican Katrina and subsequent flooding overwhelmed levies -- protective structures rendered ineffective by budget cuts. The levies were to be upgraded through the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA. Yet as Mark Burch writing in Editor and Publisher describes,

after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The [Army Corps of Engineers] never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the [new Orleans] Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

As traumatic and enduring as this calamity of misplaced public spending has proven to be, there may be more to come. A new report on the state of U.S. electrical grid states that the North American energy grid is inadequate to the task required of it, and that considerable effort is needed to upgrade electric production capacity. The blackout of 2003 was supposed to be a "wake up call"; yet as Jason Leopold reports,

Congress called for spending of up to $100 billion to reduce severe transmission bottlenecks and increase capacity so the transmission lines could carry additional electricity from power plants to homes and businesses. But the money that would have funded a reliable power grid was spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since the 2003 blackout, neither the Bush administration nor federal energy regulators appointed by the president have developed a comprehensive plan to handle, at the very least, the annual increase in demand. As a result, blackouts will likely become more frequent in areas like New York and New England, NERC said in its report...In fact, severe power shortages and rolling blackouts will now become a daily occurrence around the country over the next few years.

The prospect of rolling, regular blackouts should make the residents of New Orleans -- where full electric services still have not been restored to all areas -- feel less alone in their predicament. The general uninhabitablity of New Orleans has also led to the diaspora of so many of that city's black population to the rest of the country -- another unintended consequence, a form of blowback, from which New Orleans may never recover.

Which leads directly to an even more disturbing form of blowback: the prospect of internal and racially motivated violence. While war-supporting politicians make so much of their concern with preventing so-called Islamofascists from attacking our cities, the very war machine that they have unleashed to that end may be delivering blowback to American cities from a very unexpected direction. The New York Times is reporting that to meet shortfalls in recruiting, thousands of neo-nazis and skinheads are being allowed into the ranks of the military; what's even more worrisome is that these groups are welcoming the opportunity to engage in combat experiences in Iraq so that they can be better equipped for the urban "race war" to come. One such neo-nazi is quoted in the article as stating:

'Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman's war...it will be house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and 'cleansed.' '

This is despicable, sick and monstrous. Yet it may be just the inevitable result of a morally bankrupt policy leading directly to the ruination of a society: America begins to assume the appearance of a beast consuming itelf.

Not that Bush & co. are known for their erudition, but they would be well advised to learn from the fate of Croesus. Legend has it that in 550 BC, Croesus, King of Lydia inquired of the Oracle at Delphi about his prospects for defeating the Persians in the war he was planning. The Oracle replied that if he attacked Persia, "Croesus will destroy a great empire." The invasion was a disaster for the Lydians and the empire he destroyed was, of course, his own.

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Sleepwalking into Disaster in the Middle East

(Note: The news media have been fairly subdued on the matter, but it appears that major military preparations are being made by the U.S. and NATO to attack Iran by the end of October. Two recent postings at Global Research.ca (here and here) attest to the extent of preparations on the part of both the U.S. and Iran for this war. As a member of NATO, Canada is also involved -- again, not that you'd know from reading our newspapers.

Back in April I wrote on this issue, and am re-posting most of it below, as the issues are the same yet more urgent. As well, the readership of this site is considerably larger than it was when this was posted so many of you may have missed it at the time.

As I stress below, if this war does indeed take place, it will have a devastating impact on the global economy -- particularly through oil scarcity and skyrocketing oil prices. Of far greater concern, of course, is that if nuclear reactors are bombed or if nuclear weapons are used, it will mean death on a scale we dare not imagine).

An airstrike on Iran would not be limited to remote sites: many of its nuclear facilities are in urban areas, including Tehran, with a population of over 12 million people. As well, because the strategic thinking behind the strike includes the intention to eliminate persons with expert knowledge in the field of nuclear fission, universities will be logical targets. As a result, the number of civilian deaths in populated areas would probably be huge. A report from the Oxford Research Group by Paul Rogers states that

"Civilian deaths would be in the many hundreds at least, particularly with the requirement to target technical support for the Iranian nuclear and missile infrastructure, with many of the factories being located in urban areas. If the war evolved into a wider conflict, primarily to pre-empt or counter Iranian responses, then casualties would eventually be much higher."

The human costs of bombing Iran as set out by Matthew Rothschild in the pages of the Progressive Magazine are "astronomical":

“'The number of deaths could exceed a million, and the number of people with increased cancer risks could exceed 10 million,' according to a backgrounder by the Union of Concerned Scientists from May 2005. The National Academy of Sciences studied these earth-penetrating nuclear weapons last year. They could 'kill up to a million people or more if used in heavily populated areas,' concluded the report, which was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Physicians for Social Responsibility examined the risks of a more advanced buster-bunker weapon, and it eerily tabulated the toll from an attack on the underground nuclear facility in Esfahan, Iran. 'Three million people would be killed by radiation within two weeks of the explosion, and 35 million people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, would be exposed to increased levels of cancer-causing radiation,' according to a summary of that study in the backgrounder by the Union of Concerned Scientists."

The Center for Non Proliferation Studies also conducted an evaluation of what the consequences of a pre-emptive attack would be, and found that, among other things, the likely results would include "an immediate Iranian missile counterattack on Israel and U.S. bases in the Gulf... [Iranian missiles] have a 1,300km range, a 700kg payload, and is capable of reaching Israeli cities and bases..."

In addition to the vast and tragic potential for military and terrorist violence that would ensue, the United States (and indeed the entire industrialized world) should also take heed of the almost immediate effects such a war would have on our petroleum-based economy. As documented on the site, Another Day in the Empire,

"within 'minutes of any attack, Iran’s air and sea forces could threaten oil shipments in the Persian Gulf as well as the Gulf of Oman. Iran controls the northern coast of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which oil tankers must navigate, and could sink ships, mine sea routes or bomb oil platforms,' according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies report. Closing the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran turning off its oil spigot, would create immediate havoc in the world economy, so closely tied to petroleum. 'Oil prices on the international markets would shoot up to $400 a barrel if an attack were to be carried out on Iran, a senior Revolutionary Guards commander warned' last September, according to Iran Focus. Billionaire globalist and neolib investor, George Soros, was a bit more modest, telling CNN Money last month that 'Iran is on a collision course and I have a difficulty seeing how such a collision can be avoided' and this collision might jack oil prices up to $262 per barrel."

Oil at between $200-$440 a barrel? It may be hard to imagine; yet it is equally difficult to conceive of how this particular conflict could possibly avoid putting asunder all assumptions about our international order.

For the past three years, as Baghdad was looted and Fallujah razed, most of us in the West have mostly carried on as before, working, shopping, driving and watching the tube.

Not this time. We will all end up paying for this conflict -- many with our health, livelihoods and even our lives.

This will be especially so in the middle east, where utter ruin will be found in hundreds of bombed sites; and across Asia, where vast clouds of intensely radioactive sand will spread across the landscape:

"Firing...bunker busters in Iran, or anywhere else for that matter, will vaporize hundreds of thousands of tons of earth, water and rock and send this radioactive soup downwind to kill and sicken whole populations. Those immediately downwind will die quickly, in hours or days. Those further downwind will take longer. The global incidences of cancers and disease will again rise markedly. The land downwind will remain contaminated and unusable for generations. If there were deep shelters, it has been postulated by the designers that the bunker busters would not penetrate deeply enough to affect them. I imagine that would initiate the attack theory of sending one nuke after another into the same hole. Picture the intensity of the radioactive disaster that would perpetrate on the area."

Over and over we are reading that the costs of ignoring a nuclear Iran are too high; yet the probable costs of addressing this issue militarily -- to human life, to cities, to the environment -- are virtually inconceivable.

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