An AP news story found on CNN this morning:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Global warming poses a "serious threat to America's national security" and the U.S. likely will be dragged into fights over water and other shortages, top retired military leaders warn in a new report.
The report says that in the next 30 to 40 years there will be wars over water, increased hunger instability from worsening disease and rising sea levels and global warming-induced refugees. "The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide and the growth of terrorism," the 35-page report predicts.
"Climate change exacerbates already unstable situations," former U.S. Army chief of staff Gordon Sullivan told Associated Press Radio. "Everybody needs to start paying attention to what's going on. I don't think this is a particularly hard sell in the Pentagon. ... We're paying attention to what those security implications are."
Gen. Anthony "Tony" Zinni, President Bush's former Middle East envoy, says in the report: "It's not hard to make the connection between climate change and instability, or climate change and terrorism."
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So, our military acknowledges Climate Change as not only a reality, but a threat to be reckoned with? My only concern here is that our leaders will finally acknowledge Climate Change as a reality but then use it as an excuse for more war-making and an even larger military budget.
We’ll successfully have gotten rid of the Commies as a boogeyman, and Terrorists are losing their fear-factor, so now we’ll have to wage war on Climate Change as our newest boogeyman.
If that’s the case, I’m wondering who we’ll have to bomb and keep bombing until we’re successful in the war against the climate and if those who object will be called obstructionists and Climate Sympathizers?
2 comments:
That's my worry, too, Dan. I think the predictions of war are reasonable, but I also worry about the "militarization of thought" to every aspect of our lives. We can only tackle poverty by declaring war on it. We can only tackle the scurge of illegal drugs by a "war on drugs." We can only address terrorism by an ill-defined "war on terror" (a war on an emotion?) or "war on terrorism" (war on a particularly evil form of violence?), which is supposed to be a war on terrorists (people) and becomes a smokescreen for wars which have nothing to do with terrorism until the war starts! Now, apparently, we can only address catastrophic climate change by declaring war on its poverty-stricken victims.
Chances are the wars we'll "get dragged into" will be the same sort of wars we've been fighting all along.
Ralph Peters wrote this in 1997: "There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing."
I don't think he believed for a moment that this is how the wars he foresaw would be billed. No administration can tell America that we're going to war for the sake of our economy and to protect investments abroad.
So we don't oppose Chavez because he's a socialist who threatens to nationalize foreign-owned property; we oppose him because he's "authoritarian" and "dangerous" . . . or we pretend not to care about him and simply support opposition groups and plots, hoping to replace him covertly rather than openly.
I suspect the "water wars" the Pentagon forsees will be fought on much the same terms. Especially as water becomes more scarce and countries that have privatized their water supplies find that they can no longer compete with the developed world to buy back the water they need to survive, we will face a whole new round of wars of every description being fought to protect investments abroad.
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