Iraqqing my brain ...

Its been a very depressing week. The Iraq situation seems to have a hit new low, what with the holy site in Samarrah blown up, and that followed by sectarian violence. All that many of us feared are looking like more than possible, more like inevitable ..
When I am in despair like this, I turn to, as do many others, Juan Cole the ME expert. Here's a link to an interview he gave to the Metro Times. and some excerpts from it ...

1. On the issue of American dependence on Oil:

Cole: Most people don't understand the structure of the world energy market, or the petroleum market in particular. Some 83 million barrels a day or so — it fluctuates — of petroleum are produced in the world. The United States consumes about 20 million barrels a day, about a fourth of the total — although it has only about 6 percent of the population. It produces, I believe, 5 1/2 itself — uses all that and imports the rest of the 20. Two-thirds of the proven petroleum reserves in the world are in the Persian Gulf region. If you don't have the Persian Gulf production — Kuwait and Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia — then you really would have to think about walking to work.

2. On the mainstream media:

There’s a lot of criticism of the media, but the way the media is used is the objectionable thing. I think it is outrageous that Fox Cable News is allowed to run that operation the way it runs it. It is a highly ideological, explicitly ideological operation, and it is polluting the information environment. You have anchors who attack guests for simply stating the facts; you’ve got anchors who show an attitude to spin stories in a particular way. Frankly, I think in the 1960s the FCC would have closed it down. It’s an index of how corrupt our governmental institutions have become, that the FCC lets this go on. Of course, part of the argument for the FCC regulating these things was that broadcasting was through the air and it’s therefore public and the public has an interest. Now that you’ve gone to cable for so much of it, there is an argument that the public doesn’t really have a right to regulate it, that the cable companies may provide us with whatever they want to provide us with, and that we have no choice in the matter. I think that the information environment in the United States is polluted, and I think it’s very difficult to find out from the mainstream media what’s really happening in the world.

On the response in the Muslim world to the Danish cartoon/caricatures:

If you look at this as a matter of religious people demanding that people not say things, then, of course, one's first instinct is to side with the caricaturists. And, certainly, as a general principle, people should be free to express themselves on religious issues.But if one looked upon it as a matter of racism, I think the American public could understand it better. If someone did a caricature of Martin Luther King as Steppin' Fetchit, do you really think that would pass without remark, that the cartoonist, that the editor, that the newspaper would face no public reprisals whatsoever?

Actually these caricatures were racist.

Worst-case scenario in Iraq:

Cole: There is a problem, and I don't think people have any idea how much of a tightrope we're walking in the Gulf region. If Iraq did go to a conventional civil war; if it drew Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey into it; if you have generalized guerrilla war among countries; and if they started hitting pipelines the way they're hitting pipelines in Iraq, you could really send the world into another Great Depression.

MT: We were going to ask you about the worst-case scenario.

Cole: That's the worst-case scenario. The three of us standing in a breadline.