The Great War of 2007: A Retrospective

A retrospective of the Great War of 2007-2011, and how it might have been avoided has been written by Niall Ferguson. Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. His quasi-fictional historical accounting speaks to some of the errors made in the world's failure in preempting Iran in 1979. He postulates that events since then have been an effort to rectify that mistake. In addition he provides in a fashion that, as an historian, one might provide a student of World History in a classroom. Quite interesting... and unsettling.

Here is an excerpt:

With every passing year after the turn of the century, the instability of the Gulf region grew. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the combustible ingredients for a conflict - far bigger in its scale and scope than the wars of 1991 or 2003 - were in place.

The first underlying cause of the war was the increase in the region's relative importance as a source of petroleum. On the one hand, the rest of the world's oil reserves were being rapidly exhausted. On the other, the breakneck growth of the Asian economies had caused a huge surge in global demand for energy. It is hard to believe today, but for most of the 1990s the price of oil had averaged less than $20 a barrel.

A second precondition of war was demographic. While European fertility had fallen below the natural replacement rate in the 1970s, the decline in the Islamic world had been much slower. By the late 1990s the fertility rate in the eight Muslim countries to the south and east of the European Union was two and half times higher than the European figure...

This tendency was especially pronounced in Iran, where the social conservatism of the 1979 Revolution - which had lowered the age of marriage and prohibited contraception - combined with the high mortality of the Iran-Iraq War and the subsequent baby boom to produce, by the first decade of the new century, a quite extraordinary surplus of young men. More than two fifths of the population of Iran in 1995 had been aged 14 or younger. This was the generation that was ready to fight in 2007.
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He goes on further to make some unsettling comparison from the past pointing to some of the cultural changes in Europe and the amount of leadership change in the Middle Eastern region....

So history repeated itself. As in the 1930s, an anti-Semitic demagogue broke his country's treaty obligations and armed for war. Having first tried appeasement, offering the Iranians economic incentives to desist, the West appealed to international agencies - the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Security Council. Thanks to China's veto, however, the UN produced nothing but empty resolutions and ineffectual sanctions, like the exclusion of Iran from the 2006 World Cup finals.

Only one man might have stiffened President Bush's resolve in the crisis: not Tony Blair, he had wrecked his domestic credibility over Iraq and was in any case on the point of retirement - Ariel Sharon. Yet he had been struck down by a stroke as the Iranian crisis came to a head. With Israel leaderless, Ahmadinejad had a free hand. More...

Prof. Ferguson weaves together a very thought provoking piece and puts forth a premise that pre-emptive action may indeed have been a policy that missed it's mark by 25 years. It is an interesting read, and touches upon the shifting geo-politcal balances in a world which remains a slave to massive energy consumption.