Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Oil and water wars... and "green weaponry"

Socialist Resistance no44  |  page 17

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

War and ecology Sheila Malone and Inbar Tamari As the workshop on Climate Change and Resource Wars was cancelled due to illness, we tried to include this area in our workshop.

We first defined 'ecology' as being the relationship between people and planetnot some separate 'green' issue.

We discussed current oil and water wars, and the different kinds of wars

invasions by imperial countries for resources and ;energy security'

• 'divide and rule' tactics leading to sectarian conflicts, sometimes civil wars

• internal wars for division of the spoils'

• of resistance by those unwilling to accept invasion and puppet regimes

We talked about the type and level of destruction of people and planet caused by different kinds of wars, e.g. napalm, agent-orange, landmines, carpet-bombing in Vietnam have been paralleled in Iraq by use of white phosphorous, depleted uranium, cluster bombs and 'shock and awe'.

Wars of resistance have also been destructive, aiming to destroy infrastructure to make the country uninhabitable for the invaders.

Ensuring Iraq is a client state, with an-export-led, monocuture economy (90% dependent on oil means -• continued destruction of diversity of native economy

• continuance of ecologically destructive fossil fuel Unhealthy environment for young and old: Lebanon after Israeli bombardment The Pentagon is developing a range of 'green' weaponry which "can kill, but not cause an environmental hazard" - such as more savage as resources deplete

Global warming will accelerate, affecting both East and West. Meanwhile the Pentagon (to be followed soon by the MOD, no doubt) is developing a range of 'green' weaponry, which can kill deepen.

Expect a sort of climate intervention' to replace discredited (since Iraq) 'humanitarian intervention.

We talked about help for the invaded countries, for instance around reconstruction, war repara-