Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
parts of Africa and the Middle East. Most proxy conflicts of the Cold War
also concerned the control of resources, such as oil in Indonesia and miner-
als in the Congo. Religious and ethnic conflicts are usually also compounded
by differences, real and perceived, in access to resources such as water, land,
education and employment.
Limited resources and the still rapidly growing global population are also
factors that underlie the global war on terror. More recently, the US and her
allies have repeatedly denied that control of Iraq's vast oil resources is even a
minor consideration for occupation of that country. This denial is untena-
ble. The alternative explanations for the 2003 invasion of Iraq are insuffi-
cient to explain the magnitude of human life and materials that the US and
her allies have invested in the war and occupation. Numerous despots, some
of them US allies, have both histories and futures of gruesome human rights
abuses, far larger in scale than that of Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Weapons of
mass destruction are possessed by many nations, but most are members of,
or allies with, the coalition of the willing that invaded Iraq. On the other
hand, the Western addiction to cheap oil is undeniable, while the increasing
instability in Saudi Arabia, fanned by Al Qaeda, provides a powerful motive
to reduce Western dependency on Saudi oil.
It is conceivable that the US has a genuine desire to foster democracy
within Iraq, because a democratic Iraq may be perceived as enabling greater
long-term access by the US to Middle Eastern oil. This could also lead to
more independence from Saudi oil. Unfortunately, the allied strategy to
foster such a democracy in Iraq over such a short period is likely to fail.
Struggle between and within species - including humans - will always
occur. Peace, therefore, will always be fragile. Human ingenuity has dramat-
ically increased global human carrying capacity, by means such as agricul-
ture, refrigerators, transport, trade and credit systems. Cooperation and
competition have both been instrumental in this struggle. However, the
larger size of cake that humanity can now collectively extract from the global
environment has not eliminated disputes over how it should be divided. The
human population has also increased, as have human expectations, along
with the means of powerful populations to appropriate resources from less
powerful groups. And, even if the human population was stable in size, such
disputes would continue, though perhaps with less menace than the near
future seems to harbour.
