The Fatal Bargain: Oil and Blood in a Burning World

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http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Fatal-Bargain-Oil-and-by-Chris-Floyd-Corruption_ISI_Islam_Oil-Demand-Supply-140718-951.html



The Fatal Bargain: Oil and Blood in a Burning World
By Chris Floyd
OpEdNews Op Eds 7/18/2014 at 19:13:27

Israel's disproportionate and increasingly pernicious role in American politics and policies is well-known. But Washington's decades-long collusion of corruption with the repressive, retrograde regime of Saudi Arabia has, if anything, been even more disastrous for the world.

Historians of the next millennium will look back on the fatal bargain that humanity has made with fossil fuels as one of the great wrong turnings in the history of homo sapiens. By the end of this century it will have burned or drowned vast portions of the planet and plunged billions of people into ruin and suffering. The benefits that arose from our oil-based civilization cannot be denied -- yes, I too am glad that an ambulance can get me quickly to the hospital or fly me across the ocean to see my children -- but the cost of these benefits has been immense, and there is far worse to come in the years ahead ... not least for those same beloved children.

One of the most deleterious effects of fossil-fuelled civilization has been the prominence that geographical happenstance has given to Saudi Arabia. Its vast reserves of oil has meant that governments of every stripe have overlooked its horrendous oppression and its global propagation of one of the most narrow and ignorant perversions of Islam. This is particularly striking given the fact that for the past 30 years, "Islamic extremism" has been the chief bugbear and bloody shirt waved by Western powers seeking to maintain and extend their dominance of world affairs. All of these powers -- Washington especially -- have always known that the greatest backing, financing and arming of "Islamic extremism" have come from the elite of Saudi Arabia ... the same elite that the Western powers have cravenly courted, decade after decade.

Without oil, Saudi Arabia would be one of the world's pariah states, where women are oppressed to a degree unseen in any other nation, where clerics wearing 17th-century blinkers behead people for the crime of falling in love with the "wrong" person, where the political freedom of ordinary people is stifled on a level nearly commensurate with that of North Korea. But Saudi Arabia does have oil. And so its oppression, misogyny, brutality and tyranny is not only excused by the West's great champions of democracy; it is honored, celebrated and sustained with arms deals and diplomatic support -- and, of course, the trillions of dollars that have flowed to the kingdom from every corner gas station in America for decades.