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Worth posting: this map of American military activity in the broader Middle East (via Informed Comment).

You can pick at various details of the map, and its accompanying text, and Professor Cole does. All the same, it still raises (or should raise) a lot of good questions about just what we think we’re doing.

I’m guessing that the dispatch of US forces to Australia, announced this week during President Obama’s Pacific tour, is not going to be a major topic on any of the so-called “Sunday shows.” I also acknowledge that I wouldn’t really know, since I don’t watch these shows or even get the significance they are assigned; all seems rather archaic to me. Still, I feel safe in guessing that Newt Gingrich or the “Supercommittee” will be much more-discussed topics, with “Marines to Oz” given minimal attention if any.

So I’ll fix this oversight, because I think it is an oversight and that it deserves a lot more discussion, along with all the related issues it touches.

As the BBC reports, essentially

Australia has agreed to host a full US Marine task force in the coming years, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has announced at a news conference with US President Barack Obama in Canberra.

She said about 250 US Marines would arrive next year, eventually being built up to 2,500 personnel.

The deployment is being seen as a move to counter China’s growing influence.

And, boy, is this just confounding, disappointing, dismal news for a bunch of reasons. (more…)

A few more notes on the now-postponed Keystone XL pipeline.

First, I love our neighbors to the north dearly, and would in fact like to go live among them. Nothing against Canada. But I do not love the international oil industry, and I certainly don’t love the revolting corner of it occupied with boiling tar sands into petroleum plus vast amounts of carbon pollution even before the resulting petroleum is burned. Oil is a bad choice of fuel source for a lot of reasons; oil from tar sands is even worse.

Which gets to a second point about this “ethical oil” concept that Canada, or at least its oil industry flacks, like to go tooting about. Canada is a peaceful, friendly democracy, unlike so many of the world’s other petrostates. So America should source as much of our energy from the Canucks as possible, they argue, given that we’ll presumably be sourcing it from repressive and/or anti-American regimes, otherwise. There are two problems with this.

One, of course, is that it presents a false choice, in a couple of ways. There’s the fact that oil supply and demand are, obviously, a global market; just as Canada threatens to send its oil to China if we don’t approve the Keystone pipeline, the “unethical” oil of other petrostates will be purchased by other economies if it isn’t purchased by us. It’s still in some sense nice to be able to say “well, at least it isn’t our money going to prop up a medieval theocracy, e.g.,” but if the end result of oil bought and sold is going to be about the same either way, the actual utility is minimal even from an “ethical” perspective. (more…)