This is Gwynne Dyer's latest column.
 Gwynne Dyer is a historian and columnist.

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Not the Noughties
Gwynne Dyer
Tuesday, December 29th 2009


 Decades don't usually have the courtesy to begin and end on the
 right year. The social and cultural revolution that Western
 countries think of when they talk of the "Sixties" only got
 underway in 1962-63, and didn't end until the Middle East war
 and oil embargo of 1973-74. But this one has been quite neat:
 the "Noughties" began with the Islamist terrorist attacks on the
 United States in 2001, and they ended with a global financial
 melt-down in the past year.

 The "Noughties" is just a recent journalistic invention to make
 it easier to write end-of-the-decade articles like this. The

 ...

 Never mind the terrorism. About half a billion people died
 during the past decade, and fewer than fifty thousand of them
 were victims of terrorism - say, one in every ten thousand
 deaths. At least forty thousand of those fifty thousand victims
 of terrorism lived in India, Pakistan or Iraq, and fewer than
 four thousand lived in the West. You can hardly make that a
 defining quality of the decade.

 The terrorist threat to the West was minor, but the West's
 hugely disproportionate and ill-considered response was a key
 factor in the great shift that defines the decade. The "War on
 Terror,"
 ...
 so. But it also accelerated the rise of Asia and the relative
 decline of the West.

 ...

 this year, for the first time, China built more cars than the
 United States. That acceleration is in large part a consequence
 of the huge diversion of Western attention and resources that
 was caused by the "War on Terror."

 Prestige is a quality that cannot be measured or quantified,
 but a reputation for competence in the use of power is a great
 asset in international affairs.

 ...


 United States. Unwinnable wars fought for the wrong reasons
 always hurt a great power's reputation, and wars fought amidst
 needless tax cuts, burgeoning deficits and financial anarchy are
 even more damaging if the country's power depends heavily on a
 global financial empire.

 The United States spent the past decade cutting its own throat
 financially, ending with the near-death experience of the
 2008-2009 financial meltdown. The Europeans made all the same
 mistakes, only more timidly, and the Japanese sat the decade out
 on the sidelines, mired in a seemingly endless recession. The

 ...

 In Europe, North America and Japan, energy consumption is
 growing slowly or not at all, and it is relatively cheap and
 easy to reduce dependence on imported oil. Just the fuel
 efficiency standards already mandated by the Obama
 administration could reduce American oil imports by half by
 2020. Whereas Chinese and Indian dependence on imported oil is
 soaring. So is their use of coal.

 ...

 That's unfortunate, because for purely geographical reasons
 these countries are far more vulnerable to high temperatures
 than the older industrial nations. At even two degrees C (3.6
 degrees F) higher average global temperature, they face floods,
 droughts and storms on a massive scale, probably accompanied by
 a steep fall in food production. That sort of thing could abort
 even the Chinese and Indian economic miracles.

 ...

 * Gwynne Dyer is a London-based journalist whose articles are
 published in 45 countries.

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 Now, could the global warming denial actually be a means of
 attempting to bring down the Chinese and Indian economic
 development? The commentary above could indicate that.

 And he does make sense about the war on terror and the damage it
 did to America. Early on during the war on terror old line
 conservative Pat Buchannan said, perpetual war destroys
 democracies.

 Most of the time I disagree with Buchanan, but once in a while
 he gets it right.

 And he's right about terrorism. We have done more to hurt
 ourselves on terror than Bin Laden did. Ok, Bush did it, we
 didn't, but close enough.



BOB KLAHN bob.klahn{at}sev.org   http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn

... Get off the nuclear weapon ... now ...
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