Re: <nettime> Iraq: The Way Forward

[Michael H Goldhaber <mgoldh@well.com>]

Felix may well be right that cars lead to a reduction of communal  
life, and  Venice (Italy)  seems to an outsider to be a wonderful  
place. But:
a) I hope we don't wait until the US is rebuilt car-free to pull out  
of Iraq;
b) Venice is in fact becoming de-populated, with its natives moving  
to the car-unfree mainland;
c) it is a complete mistake to think that Americans' access to oil  
depends on having troops in Iraq  ?or anywhere in the middle east for  
that matter.

On this last point, when Iran threw out the Shah and held the  
American embassy staff hostage, it continued to sell oil on the   
world market, like any other OPEC country. American petroleum  
companies and oil-field service companies such as Halliburton may  
have lost profits, but that hardly affected the supply of oil in the  
US. As it is, the invasion of Iraq has certainly not increased US oil  
supplies or lowered prices, but in fact done the opposite. The war is  
conceivably a war for oil-company profits (which have gone way up  
since it started) but not a war for oil itself.


Best,
Michael

On Jan 10, 2007, at 6:18 PM, Benjamin Geer wrote:

>  A comparison of car-centric Los Angeles with car-free Venice runs throughout
>  the book.
>
> The author's web site provides a brief summary of the book:
>
> http://www.carfree.com/
>
> I don't know whether the time is ripe for this idea in the US, but maybe
> September 11 and the Iraq war could be used to concentrate Americans' minds
> on an idea that would enable them to rebuild their communities while reducing
> their dependence on oil (and thus reducing their military presence in the
> Middle East).


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net