Tuesday, 30th August 2005
Belly up and the bobbies
Remember how you told me, Ms. Epistemological, to be careful, because if it all goes tits up, it’ll be a nightmare?
It’s a nightmare.
Hopefully that is a contraction of it and was.
Yesterday afternoon saw me in the police station reporting the harassment I have been experiencing these last few weeks. I went after discovering that coffee had been thrown over my washing and because he told me he wasn’t going to stop harassing me until I moved. I also went because he spat at me, kicked my front door, wouldn’t leave me alone, kept coming round my house demanding to speak to me, sent abusive emails and behaved menacingly towards me on the street.
I haven’t got time for this shit.
I start school in a couple of weeks and all I care about is getting through these next three years with the best grades as possible. And my cats. I really care about my cats which is why the motor oil all over Nimbus and the shit rubbed all over Naima went on that report too.
As I said a couple of entries ago, I’m not interested in drama. The police are though, it is their job to deal with it, and so when an irrelevant piece of existence kept trying to force his way into some kind of relevancy in my life, I knew there was only one thing to do - pass that shit over to the police.
So I did and they completely shocked me with their concern. He has already done enough for a case of harassment to be brought against him and so we left it with one more incident and then I am to call 999 and they will come and arrest him.
I really hope I don’t have to make that call.
But I will. If he forces me, I won’t hesitate to make that call.
When I got home today, there were 3 messages from the police on my voicemail from two different PCs. They were calling to check I am okay and that nothing more has happened. I am truly shocked. I truly thought they did nothing in these kind of situations. But I stand corrected - my local bobbies rule!
Sunday, 28th August 2005
Iraq, war, oil and burping.
I signed up to do a “bridging course” for school. I did so for many reasons ranging from worries that I might be too thick to get a degree to wanting to meet other mature students. It’s for one week and begins on September 12th. Needless to say, I’m excited.
I was sent a large pile of reading material about a month ago to prepare myself for the essay I will have to write on the course: “How should we explain the US-UK attack on Iraq in 2003?” It arrived the same day someone told me he didn’t believe that the US and the UK were at war with Iraq. I laughed.
I’ve since read most of the material and it has struck me how necessary this war is for the US and for Bush. I realise now that he had no choice but to go to war and that Blair had no choice but to support him.
If, as this information supposes, we should discredit the notions of “liberating” the Iraqi’s from a tyrant, commandeering WMD, combating Islamic terrorism and so on and so forth, as the primary motivations of the war, we are really only left with one reason standing - oil. And yep, we yawn, we all know the war is really about oil, but did you ever really think about how necessary oil is? About how it is directly linked to wealth, technology, power and development? About how our lifestyles are dependent upon an abundant access to it? And that goes double for the US where a reliance on ridiculously cheap oil is almost seen as a cultural “right” for most people.
The US’ own oil production doesn’t even begin to cover it’s usage and so the US finds itself in a precarious position of dependence on a foreign element. Currently that foreign element is, for the most part, Saudi Arabia and dependence on a country that doesn’t like your foreign policy with say, oh, Israel, is not a position that the US wants to be in. It wants cheap oil and the ability to make it’s own decisions without having to weight or temper them in directions it might not choose. Saudi Arabia has the worlds largest proven oil reserves; after that comes Iraq.
(As an aside, oil is also why Hugo Chavez is so hated by the US government. Venezuela has the #1 oil reserves in the world outside of the middle east and he is not pro-US by a long shot. He’s using the profits of Venezuela’s oil to improve the barrio’s of his country and neither the US nor the rich of that country thank him for that.)
And so, if you think about it, he had no choice. As a President he has to secure his countries position in the world and when your position is that of global supremacy, you have to make bigger and more destructive decisions to maintain that place. As much as I despise the dishonesty and the method, I can’t fault his reasoning. (If indeed it is his reasoning.) What kind of president would he be if he didn’t fight to maintain his position of power in the world? As much as I would like to say that we should all be willing to give up some of our power to find a balance more equitable for all, I know that is a fantasy and one not even achievable in most of our private lives, let alone in the political forum. The fact of the matter is that if it wasn’t the US and the UK it would be someone else and as presidents and prime ministers, part of the job is to ensure their countries, at the very least, maintain their position on the world stage and, at best, better their positions and wealth as much as possible.
When Bush has Iraq under his control and therefore a pipeline to it’s oil wealth, the American public can stop grumbling and moaning about the price of oil. I wonder how many of them realise that he is fighting so they can drive 50 thousand miles for $3.50? I also wonder how many current anti-war American’s would still be anti-war if Bush had been honest about the motivations of his war? I’m not sure how many of them realise that the current rise in oil prices just puts them on a par with Europe.
I’m an innate idealist and so I would like to opine that the US and the UK could have gotten their oil without all the bloodshed, without the dishonesty, without the war, but age has slipped rings of realism around me and so I wonder if they really could? War has always been the way and I’m no longer sure that is ever going to change. There have always been those of us who chose the path of opposition to bloodshed and those that see it as a necessity to power. I feel as though, as in literature, there are a few, finite themes to us as a species and that we are doomed to repeat them indefinitely, until our destruction. That we are, as a species, one big, long burp - an animal with history repeating.