----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Pollak" <mpollak at panix.com>
> What, if anything, has strategic value?
A strategic necessity is anything which, if seized by an enemy under a plausible scenario, could cause you to lose a war you would otherwise win.
Since the US has no plausible enemies that threaten it in this way, it has no strategic necessities. It has only strategic conveniences. Those are defined as things which are nice to have but not worth sacrificing for.
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Ah, but for the neocon variation on Realist IR, the states system itself is constitutive of the permanent possibilities of enemies. Indeed for Realists, wars are a permanent condition of possibility for zoon politikon. [Clausewitz knew his Kant]. So it follows that every commodity has a permanent possibility for being of strategic value, even if we historicize commodification, resources, necessity etc.
The preemptive/paranoia paradigm has a performative dimension we can't afford to neglect; it fetishizes the dream of total control and tries, however incompetantly, to act upon that dream. Right now the dream of the control of oil is partly constitutive of what the Bushies imagine they want. The other thing they want is continuously constructing/imposing Islamic quietism. They dread the idea that religion may become the methamphetamine of the masses in the ME, especially given the Islamic 'community/ies' -contradictions and all- understandable procilvities to see the current conflict in non-Westphalian terms.
When smaller countries which might plausibly go to war with each other are considered vis a vis each other, lots of things can be considered of strategic value between them. They don't concern us. ===================================================
Who is 'us'? To a state that has spent trillions of dollars on weapons, surveillance technologies and the like and has WASP fantasies of omnipotence shadowing the current social structure of accumulation, what wars don't concern 'us'? the DoD and State dept. follow every conflict a lot more closely than we do or the media does. They've got bigger budgets that enables them to do so. It's that simple
Vis a vis the US, for most countries the war would be too short and the outcome to predetermined for oil to matter. The only country I can think of who could plausibly imagine oil as a strategic interest vis a vis the US is the one Ulhas mentioned: China. One can imagine a scenario -- a conventional war over Taiwan -- where control of oil might tip the balance. They are right to worry. (Personally this would seem to me to dictate cultivating a strong alliance with Russia.)
But as Doug points out, even if exercised, this would be a job for the US navy and air force (where we are presently uncontested because China can presently project neither over long distances). Oil tankers are easy to track, and they all have to pass through narrow -- aka "strategic" -- straits on the way to China.
Michael
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This skips an enormous range of policy options for projecting possible forms of future control over China's ecological needs, ussuming the unity of China as an analytical construct for the purposes of doing critical political economy. Methinks the problems of methodolgical nationalism vis a vis the restructuring of accumulation and dealing with ecosystem services are going to get worse in the years ahead. The US would allow ships to be sunk or bombed because they knew with Laplacean precision that the oil [or whatever resource] was going to a 'Chinese' firm or an 'American' MNC?
"The state and civil society are nothing but the contingent manifestations of underlying techniques of power that condition and instrumentalize them in the art of government. Within this view, the state as we have come to know it -as the source of identity and locus of authority within the social body- is a juridico-political fiction that long ago ceased to correspond to the realities of power in modern societies, and whose only function since has been to conceal and legitimize those realities. The state concept is thus but a temporary expression of a ubiquitous will to govern." [Jens Bartleson "The Critique of the State"]
The moment Dubya and his clan declared war on non-state agents was the day the Westphalian paradigm of strategy/control/value came to the end of its rope. For they implicitly acknowledged that non-state agents, groups, whatehaveyou could wage a [sustainable, if quasi-random] war against a state. The intra-state and interstate contradictions are too complex to manage 'as a whole' because to affirm a war on terror is to affirm that all bets are off on the monopolization of organized violence by states. In such a world, deconstructing paranoia and its possibilities for self-fulfilling prophecies will be far more difficult than what Terry Southern imagined......
Happy to be wrong,
Ian