Should We Leave The Persian Gulf?

I tend to be hot and cold on the works of Thomas Friedman – he sometimes makes good points, but they’re rarely the revelations he portrays them to be. His latest column in the New York Times “What’s Our Sputnik?” though got me thinking.

In it Friedman questions America’s deep involvement in the Middle East – he argues that the money we are spending on anti-terrorism could be better spent in developing alternative sources of energy that would make us less dependent on the Mid East, meaning we could lessen our engagement with the region, which would in turn – he argues – would make us less a target for terrorists based, funded or inspired by sources in the region.

There is a certain logic to his argument, but it made me think of something else. In his column, Friedman notes that our two largest foreign suppliers of oil are Canada and Mexico. What he doesn’t say is that most estimates are by the middle of this new decade we find ourselves in the nations of Africa will surpass the countries of the Persian Gulf as suppliers of oil to America. So in my mind that begs the question: why should the United States keep dedicating so many of our resources to a region that in just five years will be a third-rate source of oil for us? China is talking about opening a naval base in the Persian Gulf; France is establishing one in the region as well. Maybe then it’s time to let some of the world’s other major oil importers share the burden of keeping stability in that part of the world?

Just a thought.

Now recognized, the deligate from Caprica

I’m sorry that I missed this one on St. Patrick’s Day – the United Nations is accustomed to having visitors from around the world, but on Tuesday they had guests from farther away, much, much farther – namely the planet Caprica.

Yes, the UN invited the principles of the television sci-fi program Battlestar Galactica to a forum that included discussions of human rights and the ethics of war. [Just in case you haven’t been watching BSG the show is the story of humanity’s last remnants, fleeing across the stars to escape a genocidal nuclear war that destroyed their home and most of the human race.]

Of course some of the comments I read on the stories about the BSG event slammed the United Nations for inviting actors and TV writers to speak about weighty issues like war crimes, saying it was another example of how the organization is a waste of time. But I think the UN deserves a lot of praise for holding this forum since it helps to shake the (American) image of the UN as just a collection of diplomats and policy-wonks collected in a fancy building on the East River and uses pop culture to bring their important work to a much wider audience (this forum was the second in the UN’s new Creative Community Outreach Initiative, the cast of Law and Order was on hand for the first).

Battlestar was an excellent choice for the Initiative, it is a show that has shaken the notion of sci-fi as ‘kid’s stuff’ and used their story of humanity’s plight as a way to tackle head-on such weighty issues as freedom of religion, reproductive choice and even the ethics of suicide bombing. Take for example the character played by actress Mary McDonnell, a.k.a. President Laura Rosyln – one of Battlestar’s heroines. She was a sympathetic character, a school teacher who unexpectedly became president, yet she was also someone who ordered the summary execution of prisoners, forged an alliance with a known terrorist and attempted to rig her own re-election. They were actions, McDonnell argued that should be considered when viewing this world’s autocratic leaders. “People who are taking these actions — that are unacceptable — are sometimes in positions where they don't see the solution,” she said at the forum, presenting a much more nuanced worldview than the black-or-white, good-or-evil one popular during the past eight years.

Her co-star, actor Edward James Olmos (Admiral William Adama in Battlestar) took the UN to task for their use of the term ‘race’ in key documents like their Universal Declaration of Human Rights (he argued there is only one ‘race’, the human race, other racial terms are artificial ones that just promote division among people) and questioned why UN troops haven’t been dispatched to provide security in Mexico – which the United States has identified alongside Pakistan as the two most endangered countries in the world.

Not bad arguments, I’d say, from ‘just some actors from a sci-fi show’…

Many Mexicans see oil as last frontier against US invasion

If you think that $4 for a gallon of gas is bad, it could get even worse.

Mexico is the third-largest source of oil for the United States. But Mexico's oil industry is in trouble. Its existing oil fields are drying up, its infrastructure (things like pipelines) is crumbling and the state-run oil monopoly, Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex as its more commonly known) doesn't have the money to explore for new oil fields or to repair its facilities.

The obvious answer would be to encourage foreign investment in the oil industry, a step that President Felipe Calderon wants to take. It’s a step being met with outrage by many Mexicans who see it as nothing less than Mexico surrendering its national sovereignty.

"Calderon is a right-winger who is going to take away our way of life," said one protestor in Mexico City. "It's the same as strangling us because foreign oil companies are exploiters who will enslave us." Opposition members of parliament have staged a two-week long sit-in to protest the move, while TV ads have compared Calderon to Hitler.

Mexico took back control of its oil industry from American and European companies more than 70 years ago when those companies refused to pay union wages to oil workers. And for many Mexicans, who feel that the United States stole a sizable chunk of their country (places you may have heard of like California, Nevada, and much of the rest of the American Southwest) in the Mexican-American war in 1848, the idea of American companies again investing in their oil industry is tantamount to surrendering the sovereignty of their nation.

But at the same time Pemex cannot rebuild the oil industry on its own. For now President Calderon and the parliament are locked in a standoff. Meanwhile, oil experts warn that if nothing is done, Mexico could lose its status as a major oil exporter within the next five years.