With time constraints and too much material to narrow-down and compile into short blog posts, I have yet to share with you the many intriguing lectures my foreign policy/international studies professor has given. However, with recent developments in the attempted Times Square ‘terrorist attack’ and the BP oil spill, I thought sharing this small excerpt from Michael Mandelbaum’s book The Ideas that Conquered the World would be most appropriate and interesting.
Excerpt from chapter 7 – “Dragon’s Lair.”
“The terrible events of September 11, 2001 evoked memories of another deadly assault on the United States sixty years earlier: The Japanese attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. In the magnitude of their historical impact the two events differed dramatically. The first was part of the bloodiest and most destructive war in human history, the outcome of which reordered the world and altered America’s place in it. The consequences of the second were far more modest, but did bear some resemblance to those of the first: The American public rallied in support of a foreign war–this one in Afghanistan.
There is another instructive parallel between December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001. Both attacks shocked the United States and the world, yet forewarnings were abundant in each case. The United States was sharply at odds with Japan over Japanese policies in Asia, and Tokyo had made plain that it regarded the oil embargo that Washington had imposed earlier that year, in response to the continuing Japanese occupation of China, as a severe provocation.
Similarly, the terrorist group responsible for the September 11 attacks, Al Qaeda, had claimed responsibility for three previous attacks on Americans outside the United States: against American soldiers in Somalia in October 1993; against American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998; and against the USS Cole, an American naval vessel anchored outside Aden, the capital of Yemen, on October 12, 2000.
The attacks of September 11 should not have shocked the world as they did for yet another reason. The personnel, the resources, and the motivation for them all came from a part of the world well recognized as the source of the greatest post-Cold War threats to the world’s core: the largely Muslim part of Eurasia stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.
On early European maps, unexplored parts of the world thought to be dangerous were marked by the Latin warning “Cave, hic dragones“–Beware, here are dragons. At the outset of twenty-first century, the region deserving of that phrase was the Middle East. But unlike the European mariners of centuries before, the countries of the core knew precisely what dangers lurked there, though they could not easily avoid them.”
[Into the next section, "Oil"]
“…For part of the modern period the Western core had controlled much of the region, through imperial rule or mandates established by international bodies such as the League of Nations. Borders were often drawn arbitrarily, laying the basis for the familiar kind of post-Cold War instability in which dissatisfied minorities chafe at the political arrangements with which they have been saddled. But the Middle East was different from the rest of the periphery in one immensely consequential way. What made it important was its oil….
During the Cold War, oil gave the countries of the Middle East a measure of independence from and indeed leverage against the United States and the Soviet Union, despite the intervention of both superpower s in the political and military affairs of the region. It gave Middle Eastern rulers the means to appease or repress discontented groups without having to rely on the generosity of the core powers, and it made the Middle East more significant to the core tha nany other region in the world’s periphery, so significant that the core powers were prepared to go to war to protect their interests there.
The signifance of oil was very much a feature of the modern age. It owed its value to the industrial revolution… Oil came to be known as “black gold” and like gold it was a kind of universal currency…Oil was also known as “the blood of the earth,” and it was almost as vital to the arteries of industrial economies as is blood to the human body. A better comparison of this kind, however, was with oxygen, something just as important but externally supplied. Oil, like oxygen, could be cut off, imposing the economic equivalent of suffocation. Economic strangulation, the withholding of supplies of oil from the Persian Gulf region, was the great strategic danger to the Western liberal core during the Cold War; it remained a danger, although a less acute one, after the Cold War’s end.
The West faced two associated dangers: that these reserves would come under the control of people who would place unacceptable conditions on their continued flow to the West, thereby subjecting the West to blackmail, and that those who controlled the oil would accumulate great wealth from its sale that would underwrite political and military power that they would turn against the West itself.”
Very, very interesting book. I’ll try to share another interesting excerpt soon. Makes you think though, doesn’t it?
