Global warming. Changing rainfall patterns. Could there be a connection?

Water is not the only resource being fought over in the Sudan. This is China’s war for oil. China underwrites our greed-fuelled lifestyle, meanwhile we are exporting car culture to China.

Oil pipelines, pumping stations, well-heads, and other key infrastructure became targets for the rebels from the South, who wanted a share in the country’s new mineral wealth, much of which was on lands they had long occupied. John Garang, leader of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), declared these installations to be legitimate targets of war. For a time, the oil companies fled from the conflict, but in the 1990s they began to return. Chinese and Indian companies were particularly aggressive, doing much of their drilling behind perimeters of bermed earth guarded by troops to protect against rebel attacks. It was a Chinese pipeline to the Red Sea that first brought Sudanese oil to the international market.

-http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0819-26.htm

See also:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7503428.stm

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/mar2008/gb20080314_430126.htm

the official (and persistent) unemployment rate of Saudi males is 13 percent, and many independent experts believe that the rate may be as high as 25 percent. The substantial investment over many years undertaken by the Saudi overnment has not yielded satisfactory returns. The Saudi results are similar to the results in affluent Gulf nations. Statistics indicate that graduates are often not capable of integrating successfully into national economies. Leaders must question the relevance of the educational experiences they are providing.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/newsfull.php?newid=82940

I’m not saying that the political leaders are not threatened themselves by Islamic fundamentalists, but for the moment it’s probably quite convenient to blame Western infidels.

While I will agree in principle that the West is generally resource wasteful, I would like to know how our taking the bus would change the dynamic in an area where two groups are fighting each other over local water rights? Our consumption of petroleum isn’t making their water table scarcer or providing them incentive to overpopulate the local area. You will then have to explain why such conflicts occurred in the days before petroleum development, as they often did throughout the Middle East and along the entirety of the Sahara, not to mention the really brutal affairs in Mexico and Central America during the reign of the Aztec, Maya, Toltec, etc, which conflicts also resulted in ritual human sacrifice and cannibalism.

God, religion, faith, spirituality — whichever face of the prism we are looking at — runs like a vertical pillar through all the levels of our lives. Our international policies are fixed largely around this war on terror. Our most volatile domestic political issues — regulating our sex lives, abortion, birth control, homosexuality, separation of church and state — are rooted in our religious views. Our social circles, our family structures, our individual lives, our world views, how we live and die, our health and happiness — are organized around our spiritual views, or lack thereof. All this, without a serious attempt to find out what religion really is. That’s why we need to examine God, faith and religion.

http://www.alternet.org/story/111076/we%27re_witnessing_the_return_of_religion_as_a_principle_cause_of_warfare/

Darfur, a barren, mountainous land just below the Sahara in western Sudan, is the world\’s worst man-made disaster. In four years, according to the U.N., fighting has killed more than 200,000 people and made refugees of 2.5 million more. The conflict is typically characterized as genocide, waged by the Arab Janjaweed and their backers in the Sudanese government, against Darfur\’s black Africans. But what is often overlooked is that the roots of the conflict may have more to do with ecology than ethnicity. To live on the poor and arid soil of the Sahel–just south of the Sahara–is to be mired in an eternal fight for water, food and shelter. The few pockets of good land have been the focus of intermittent conflict for decades between nomads (who tend to be Arabs) and settled farmers (who are both Arab and African). That competition is intensifying. The Sahara is advancing steadily south, smothering soil with sand. Rainfall has been declining in the region for the past half-century, according to the National Center for Atmospheric Research. In Darfur there are too many people in a hot, poor, shrinking land, and it\’s not hard to start a fight in a place like that.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1615171,00.html

The article also says that climate change will increase the likelihood of conflicts over water and food.

I’m not saying at all that the nations instigating war are low on resources—they just want them. Name me one war that didn’t have to do with acquiring land, water, or some other resource that was purely about religion. Make no mistake, “WANT” is an overwhelming urge. Today it comes under the rubric “National Security.”

I agree with Maher to this extent: societies and nations do divide, subtly at first, on the basis of religion. When there is no war going on, these are merely “divisions” or “differences.” When violence flares, though, for whatever reason, those religious boundaries are natural places to draw the real life battle lines.

The way I see it, then, is that cravings for resources often motivate war, but preexisting religious differences often draw the battle lines.