This seems on target to me: THE STRATFOR WEEKLY 30 April 2003 by Dr. George Friedman A Time of Testing Summary The end of the campaign in Iraq has moved the United States into a new period, in which its ensuing strategy is not fully defined. The process of definition will entail a period of probing into a series of critical nations, in an attempt both to shape their behavior and evaluate the levels of their compliance. During this time -- which will last many months -- it will appear that the United States is engaged in a gratuitous irritation of countries in the region. In fact, Washington will be probing these states to shape and understand the dynamics within each country -- and then will define its own strategy. Analysis With the end of the Iraq campaign, things have become complicated for the United States. This is not because the campaign was militarily trying, nor because the occupation of Iraq is proving an insuperable problem. Rather, the U.S. administration built the probability of postwar complexity into its original strategy. The Iraq campaign was designed to redefine the regional psychology and to create new strategic opportunities for the United States. A new psychology certainly is emerging, but redefining regional sensibilities does not proceed with mathematical precision. Since strategic opportunities are intimately connected with this psychological redefinition, follow-on operations will take time to emerge. As in all wars, the conclusion of a major campaign frequently creates a sense that leaders and commanders are not altogether certain about what comes next. After the North African or Solomons campaigns in World War II, the United States had to define the follow-on operations. This required clarity as to the ultimate politico-military goal, an assessment of enemy capabilities and intentions, the generation of plans and the deployment of appropriate forces. It therefore appeared to the untrained eye to be a period of indecision, discord and uncertainty. That view wasn't unreasonable, but it was unjust. The consequences of the campaign had to be carefully evaluated before the rest of the war could be prosecuted. The goal of this war is the defeat of al Qaeda and any possible successor organization. The U.S. strategy is one of indirection: Rather than simply assault al Qaeda directly -- a very difficult task -- Washington seeks to force nations in which al Qaeda operates to take effective steps against the network, even if that creates substantial political problems for the governments of these countries. For the United States to achieve this, these countries have to be more afraid of the consequences of not suppressing al Qaeda and its sympathizers than they are of the consequences of suppressing them. The Iraq campaign did two things. First, it reinforced the perception of the extraordinary political power of the United States, and it drove home the fact that the United States was prepared to use that power and could not be restrained by diplomatic means. Second, the U.S. military occupation of Iraq has created an inescapable military reality. U.S. military power wasn't an abstract; it could be seen with binoculars from Syrian or Iranian border posts. In a region where the United States was known for its indecisive or inconclusive use of military power, the past month has been a period in which the countries bordering Iraq -- and outside the region -- including allies and enemies of the United States, have had to re-evaluate their understandings of how the world works. Syria is an excellent example. Historically, Syria has regarded itself as fairly well-insulated from U.S. power. Damascus operated on the knowledge that, in the end, it neither needed much nor had much to fear from the United States. In the closing days of the war, Syria behaved in its traditional manner, then suddenly was brought face to face with the fact that defiance of the United States could become catastrophic. Washington had demonstrated both the will and the capacity to act decisively, a fact that Damascus did not absorb instantly. The learning curve was steep, but at least some dimensions of the Syrian leadership's behavior -- certainly its rhetoric -- shifted. But rhetoric is not reality. Everyone in the region is re- evaluating their understanding of U.S. capabilities and intentions. Once they have a firm understanding of that, they will craft their own strategies and responses. Then Washington will have to evaluate the new strategies and behaviors and craft a response. All of this sounds much neater and more process-based than it actually is or will appear to be. Nevertheless, that is what is going on. At this moment, the United States is waiting to see how others will behave. Four countries are of particular interest to Washington: * The U.S. administration has regarded Saudi Arabia as a major source of funding and support for al Qaeda. That funding did not come from the Saudi government but from individuals, many of them influential. The United States viewed Riyadh as unwilling to act decisively or to deal with the problem comprehensively. One of the issues was the presence of U.S. forces in the kingdom after the 1991 Persian Gulf War: The Saudi argument was that the troops' presence fed anti-American sentiment, making it much harder for authorities to control al Qaeda support. Following the Iraq campaign, U.S. defense officials announced that most of their forces would withdraw from Saudi Arabia. The U.S. view is that now that the prime irritant has been removed, Riyadh will be in a better position to act decisively against al Qaeda. The United States will be evaluating Saudi behavior in the aftermath of the withdrawal. * Iran is in many ways the origin of modern, assertive radical Islam, combining republican institutions with strict interpretation of Islamic law. The current government has been around for only about a quarter of a century, and it is governing a complex society. Iran has been an empire and has survived many empires over thousands of years. Iranian society knows how to bend to the inevitable, but it also understands that the inevitable is an enormously complex concept. Tehran has signaled that it is prepared to cooperate with Washington. There is little doubt that Iranian clerics and leaders have enormous influence over Iraqi Shiites and that they -- if they chose -- could create chaos in parts of Iraq. They haven't done so, and the United States, for its part, has included Shiite supporters of Iran in the new governmental structures that are being created. At the same time, there are two fundamental issues that divide the United States and Iran. One is the Iranian nuclear weapons program, which Washington wants stopped and which Tehran both denies it has and refuses to end. A second issue is the degree of transparency Iran will provide to U.S. intelligence on its handling of al Qaeda. It is not a matter of Iranian willingness to control al Qaeda operations; it is a matter of U.S. confidence in Iranian actions and Tehran's concern that too much conciliation on this score will return Iran to the conditions that existed prior to Khomeini's revolution. This, coupled with internal politics, limits Iran's cooperation. Officials in Washington will have to decide whether Iran's cooperation meets U.S. needs. * Syria was the first to confront U.S. power in the waning days of the Iraq war. We expect that part of the Syrian decision- making process had to do with a genuine failure to understand how the war was going, and part of it had to do with signaling the United States to back off -- this in addition to several private business transactions between Syrian officials and Iraqis leaving the country. The Syrian government very quickly understood the reality and adjusted. Syria's fundamental concern is retaining control of Lebanon, which it claims both by its perceived historical right and as a critical economic prize. For Damascus, the Palestinians, Israelis and al Qaeda are meaningless compared to Lebanon. The United States already has sent hints that it wants to re-examine the status of Lebanon, particularly if Damascus is unable to assure Washington that Lebanon will not be used as a base of operations for radical Islamists. The United States will have to judge Syrian actions -- but of all of the countries in the region, for all its complexities, Syria has the simplest interests and is most likely to comply. * Pakistan is not in the Iraqi theater of operations. It represents a theater in its own right, along with Afghanistan. It is also the single most critical country in the U.S. war on al Qaeda. Al Qaeda continues to operate in Pakistan, along with a host of other radical Islamist groups. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf certainly is trying to cooperate with the United States, but his ability to do so to the extent that the United States wants and still survive is questionable. Nevertheless, from the U.S. point of view, the war on al Qaeda will not be over until the Pakistani problem is settled. Pressure now is being placed on Pakistan, in the wake of Iraq, to increase its cooperation. Washington will have to decide how hard to push and when to let go. The point of this exercise is simply to understand the roots of the current strategic diffusion. In each of these countries, decisions are being made and policies are being developed that take into account the new politico-military reality that the United States has created. At the same time, these countries are trying to define and protect their own fundamental national and political interests. These four countries -- and others not discussed -- all are unclear themselves as to what their policies will be. In part, this is because they are not completely certain how far the United States is prepared to go with its war. The United States, therefore, is now in the process of asserting pressure in all directions. There are two reasons for this. First, the U.S. administration wants to establish the persistence of U.S. policy -- to assert that Iraq was not an isolated incident. Second, it wants to shape the decision-making processes in these countries. Therefore, there is ongoing, low-grade friction between the United States and countries in the region. There appears to be something gratuitous in American behavior, but that isn't the case. The pressure has a clearly defined purpose: to elicit changes that Washington regards as fundamental to its national interest. The next crisis will occur if and when a country -- probably one of the above-mentioned four -- puts itself in a position where it either resists U.S. pressure or is incapable for internal political reasons to submit to it. For example, Iran simply might not be prepared to allow the United States to oversee its nuclear program, or Pakistan might be unable to increase operations against al Qaeda. When the U.S. administration reaches a point (sometime several months down the line) when it has found the limits of what it can achieve with low-level friction, it will make its next strategic decision over which country will be the next target -- first, of massive politico-military threat, and if that fails, of direct military intervention. We can expect, therefore, a period of low- level irritation that will look like relative quiescence -- as opposed to all-out war -- in American operations, but in fact it will be a period of probing and analysis. Out of that will grow the decisions that will shape the next stage. In a sense, the United States is in the same position now that it faced in January 2002, after Taliban forces retreated from Afghan cities. The campaign was complete, and the issue was what the next step would be. The focus on Iraq really did not come into full force until that summer. This may take longer, since it is altogether possible that Washington can achieve its ends without a military campaign in most or all of these cases. The period of probing could be extended, but it will not be permanent. The United States will proceed with various further operations, largely without noticeable capitulation on all substantial issues by these four and other countries. In other words, there are innings left to be played.
Good article. We know who our enemies are, and we need to position ourselves to hit them when they emerge. This is simple conditioning. Hopefully we can teach the fanatic Islamists to behave by 2009, when a weaker US President may take office.
Our intelligence agencies know who our real enemies are, this administration doesn't have the guts to take out Saudi Arabia though.
All I care about is that not one friggin tax dollar of mine goes to rebuild Iraq. They have the oil, lets sell it.
Really? Is this why we are pulling our troops out of Saudi Arabia and embarking on a program to produce automobiles powered by hydrogen/electric engines? It would seem to me that without oil revenue, the Saudi Royals will end up with their heads detached from their bodies. A very clear message has been sent to Saudi Arabia, despite what your conspiricy theory sources are telling you.
Interesting article about that. I know, biased source, but: http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2003/19/ma_375_01.html Hydrogen's Dirty Secret President Bush promises that fuel-cell cars will be free of pollution. But if he has his way, the cars of tomorrow will run on hydrogen made from fossil fuels. When President Bush unveiled his plans for a hydrogen-powered car in his State of the Union address in January, he proposed $1.2 billion in spending to develop a revolutionary automobile that will be "pollution-free." The new vehicle, he declared, will rely on "a simple chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen" to power a car "producing only water, not exhaust fumes." Within 20 years, the president vowed, fuel-cell cars will "make our air significantly cleaner, and our country much less dependent on foreign sources of oil." By launching an ambitious program to develop what he calls the "Freedom Car," Bush seemed determined to realize the kind of future that hydrogen-car supporters have envisioned for years. Using existing technology, hydrogen can be easily and cleanly extracted from water. Electricity generated by solar panels and wind turbines is used to split the water's hydrogen atoms from its oxygen atoms. The hydrogen is then recombined with oxygen in fuel cells, where it releases electrons that drive an electric motor in a car. What Bush didn't reveal in his nationwide address, however, is that his administration has been working quietly to ensure that the system used to produce hydrogen will be as fossil fuel-dependent -- and potentially as dirty -- as the one that fuels today's SUVs. According to the administration's National Hydrogen Energy Roadmap, drafted last year in concert with the energy industry, up to 90 percent of all hydrogen will be refined from oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels -- in a process using energy generated by burning oil, coal, and natural gas. The remaining 10 percent will be cracked from water using nuclear energy. Such a system, experts say, would effectively eliminate most of the benefits offered by hydrogen. Although the fuel-cell cars themselves may emit nothing but water vapor, the process of producing the fuel cells from hydrocarbons will continue America's dependence on fossil fuels and leave behind carbon dioxide, the primary cause of global warming. Mike Nicklas, chair of the American Solar Energy Society, was one of 224 energy experts invited by the Department of Energy to develop the government's Roadmap last spring. The sessions, environmentalists quickly discovered, were dominated by representatives from the oil, coal, and nuclear industries. "All the emphasis was on how the process would benefit traditional energy industries," recalls Nicklas, who sat on a committee chaired by an executive from ChevronTexaco. "The whole meeting had been staged to get a particular result, which was a plan to extract hydrogen from fossil fuels and not from renewables." The plan does not call for a single ounce of hydrogen to come from power generated by the sun or the wind, concluding that such technologies "need further development for hydrogen production to be more cost competitive." But instead of investing in developing those sources, the budget that Bush submitted to Congress pays scant attention to renewable methods of producing hydrogen. More than half of all hydrogen funding is earmarked for automakers and the energy industry. Under the president's plan, more than $22 million of hydrogen research for 2004 will be devoted to coal, nuclear power, and natural gas, compared with $17 million for renewable sources. Overall funding for renewable research and energy conservation, meanwhile, will be slashed by more than $86 million. "Cutting R&D for renewable sources and replacing them with fossil and nuclear doesn't make for a sustainable approach," says Jason Mark, director of the clean vehicles program for the Union of Concerned Scientists. The oil and chemical industries already produce 9 million tons of hydrogen each year, most of it from natural gas, and transport it through hundreds of miles of pipelines to fuel the space shuttle and to remove sulfur from petroleum refineries. The administration's plan lays the groundwork to expand that infrastructure -- guaranteeing that oil and gas companies will profit from any transition to hydrogen. Lauren Segal, general manager of hydrogen development for BP, puts it succinctly: "We view hydrogen as a way to really grow our natural-gas business." To protect its fuel franchise, the energy industry has moved swiftly in recent years to shape government policy toward hydrogen. In 1999, oil companies and automakers began attending the meetings of an obscure group called the National Hydrogen Association. Founded in 1989 by scientists from government labs and universities, the association was a haven for many of the small companies -- fuel-cell designers, electrolyzer makers -- that were dabbling in hydrogen power. The group promoted the use of hydrogen but was careful not to take any position on who would make the fuel or how. All that changed once the energy industry got involved. "All of a sudden Shell joined our board, and then the interest grew very quickly," says Karen Miller, the association's vice president. "Our chair last year was from BP; this year our chair is from ChevronTexaco." The companies quickly began to use the association as a platform to lobby for more federal funding for research, and to push the government to emphasize fossil fuels in the national energy plan for hydrogen. Along with the big automakers, energy companies also formed a consortium called the International Hydrogen Infrastructure Group to monitor federal officials charged with developing fuel cells. "Basically," says Neil Rossmeissl, a hydrogen standards expert at the Department of Energy, "what they do is look over our shoulder at doe to make sure we are doing what they think is the right thing." As hydrogen gained momentum, the oil companies rushed to buy up interests in technology companies developing ways to refine and store the new fuel. Texaco has invested $82 million in a firm called Energy Conversion Devices, and Shell now owns half of Hydrogen Source. BP, Chevron-Texaco, ExxonMobil, Ford, and General Electric have also locked up the services of many of America's top energy scientists, devoting more than $270 million to hydrogen research at MIT, Princeton, and Stanford. Such funding will help ensure that oil and gas producers continue to profit even if automakers manage to put millions of fuel-cell cars on the road. "The major energy companies have several hundred billions of dollars, at the least, invested in their businesses, and there is a real interest in keeping and utilizing that infrastructure in the future," says Frank Ingriselli, former president of Texaco Technology Ventures. "And these companies certainly have the balance sheets and wherewithal to make it happen." The stakes in the current battle over hydrogen are high. Devoting the bulk of federal research funding to making hydrogen from fossil fuels rather than water will enable oil and gas companies to provide lower-priced hydrogen. That, in turn, means that pipelines built to transport hydrogen will stretch to, say, a BP gas field in Canada, rather than an independent wind farm in North Dakota. Even if the rest of the world switches to hydrogen manufactured from water, says Nicklas, "Americans may end up dependent on fossil fuels for generations." The administration's plans to manufacture hydrogen from fossil fuels could also contribute to global warming by leaving behind carbon dioxide. Oil and coal companies insist they will be able to "sequester" the carbon permanently by pumping it deep into the ocean or underground. But the doe calls such approaches "very high risk," and no one knows how much that would cost, how much other environmental disruption that might cause, or whether that would actually work. "Which path we take will have a huge effect one way or the other on the total amount of carbon pumped into the atmosphere over the next century," says James MacKenzie, a physicist with the World Resources Institute. Even if industry manages to safely contain the carbon left behind, the Bush administration's plan to extract hydrogen from fossil fuels will wind up wasting energy. John Heywood, director of MIT's Sloan Automotive Lab, says a system that extracts hydrogen from oil and natural gas and stores it in fuel cells would actually be no more energy efficient than America's present gasoline- based system. "If the hydrogen does not come from renewable sources," Heywood says, "then it is simply not worth doing, environmentally or economically."
You know, whenever you throw out another of your "Fox News" lines, I feel like calling you a dirty Lefty. Maybe we should both quit. Anyway, how the hell do you know that Saudi Arabia isn't listening? The freaking Iraq War has been over a month. Did you expect immediate results? Re: Mother Jones article. That is an interesting article, but VERY incomplete. The author said we would still use fossil fuels, but how much? Will we use significantly less oil and gas, or slightly less? The author talks about pollution, but how much less pollution will there be if the cars are only emitting water vapor? Without these questions answered, how can we judge whether hydrogen produced by fossil fuels is a step in the right direction. If creating hydrogen from fossil fuels is a step in the evolution of eliminating fossil fuels, and both our demand for fossil fuels and the resulting pollution are significantly decreased, then why complain? Baby steps are ok in this process, as long as we keep moving in the right direction. Also, Big Oil must invest in this new technology because one day, because their product WILL be replaced. They have a duty to their shareholders to maintain the value of their stock, and investing in this new technology in responsible. Just because Big Oil is involved in this project doesn't mean their participation threatens the movement away from the internal combustion engine. ExxonMobil and Texaco may end up leading the way in hydrogen and fuel cell technology world wide, making their stock even more valuable than it is today.
I wonder what they have to say about North Korea. A recent Forbes article on Rummy's North Korea Connection was pretty damaging to the Clinton and Bush admin. Light water nuclear reactors can still produce weapons grade plutonium after refinement- just like the ones in Iran-, and they recently started construction in N. Korea.
I would tend to agree with this statement. I don't think the reason is due to family ties, though; more likely it is because the State department has developed such a close relationship with the Royal Family over the past 12 years that they have essentially declared them off limits for tough talk/action. I suspect that after the troops move, though, that relationship will change. It has to. They eventually have to be confronted as well. If Iran is the center of Shiite fanaticism, then Saudi is the center of Sunni madness.
On the fuel cell topic, it is realistic to start with what someone has. Once fuel cells are the norm, the demand for renewable hydrogen sources will be increased if the reformers are robust enough. I've always heard ethanol would be the gateway chemical for a true hydrogen economy. Ethanol can be made from a variety of renewable sources such as corn, wheat straw, and biomass in muncipal solid waste (experimentally).
On the Saudis (and us), this certainly doesn't look good for anyone involved - the Saudis, the Clinton admin, or the Bush admin: US Officials Knew of Ties Between Terror, Charities http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/simpsoncharities.PDF Short version: US intelligence agencies knew as far back as 1996 that Saudi-government charities (and Saudi govt officials) operating in the US and abroad had ties to terrorist organizations, and neither administration did anything about it until after 9/11... Interesting stuff.
When the government is in the business of emphasizing intelligence to get support for something then they're probably de-emphasizing other intelligence to maintain support for other things. It's all pretty sick really.
Thank you for completely disregarding my post, lol. The premise that 90% of all hydrogen will come from fossil fuels is irrelevant to my questions.
