By Will Cade

About 6 months after 9/11, before Iraq was even on the horizon, I went to Washington D.C. for a political exercise with other high-school students from across the country. We were divided into groups of 24 and then assigned positions within the U.S. military and government, starting with the president and working down the most important posts. I ended up with a worthless position, Ambassador to the UN in fact, while the lucky ones ended up being President or Secretary of Defense.

Each group was then given the same national crisis and a 48 hour period in which to develop a national strategy. The crisis ended up being an international oil-shortage, beginning with soaring prices at the stations and protests in the streets, followed by the threat of the transportation system crumbling, eventually ending with the industrialized world starving because the food couldn’t get from the farmers to the groceries.

We were given a dossier on possible solutions within the international political climate of the time. Then the exercise took place in “real-time” with political upheavals and shifting alliances, just to spice things up a bit.

My group thought of either drilling oil reserves in Alaska or building pipelines all over the place. I ended up proposing the idea to build one from Azerbaijan through Georgia (the country not the state) into the Black Sea, where there would be fewer restrictions on transportation. Granted, Russia wasn’t exactly peachy keen when western powers meddled with its ex-soviet satellite states, but I was pretty sure they wouldn’t go to war over it. And hell, we needed the oil.

Our advisor, a Harvard graduate, liked my idea, but thought it was a bit risky tempting Russia into war and assuming they would back down. But what did he know? It took him three tries just to get into Harvard. And before my father, all of the men in my family were either preachers or soldiers, so between God and the U.S. military, I thought we’d be well taken care of, at least in this exercise.

Once the allotted time was over, each President chose one aid from the group and went before opposing groups to defend their plan. Our President ended up choosing me, and together we stood before God and our fellow Americans. At one point, someone asked, “And how will Russia respond to this?”

In the best political manoeuvre of my life, I responded, “Due to the theoretical nature of this exercise, that information is unavailable,” and everyone nodded their head in agreement, slightly impressed with my adept bullshitting ability.

If international politics were only a game, I think I could win, in a very George Bush kind of way. As I look back on how the American government has acted between then and now, though, I can’t tell whether it is a game or not, but I am surprised at how much real life and this exercise have mimicked one another.

Even though history didn’t follow my plan perfectly (being that the U.S. invaded Iraq instead of building a pipeline through Georgia) many aspects of my little game strikingly resemble current affairs, especially the recent protests from the rising price of oil.

For the past week, a large minority of Spanish truck drivers have been protesting about high fuel prices. Many protesting truckers, who the Police have tried to stop, have attempted to converge on Madrid and have also prevented other truckers with normal runs from reaching the city. The missed deliveries - intentional and not - have caused food prices to soar, factories to slow almost to a halt, and gas stations to run out of fuel, both in Madrid and throughout Spain.

Monday three major associations representing the truckers called off the strike to prevent further damage to the transportation sector, while maintaining that the government must deal with this problem at its core. In regards to Spain, that refers to laws and agreements between the Spanish government, the drivers, and the associations which deal between the two. But is the that the real problem?[1]

Some say we’re not even running out of oil, it’s only oil speculators that create this sense of crisis on the oil markets to drive the price up. Others say we’ll run out soon, so we best seek out alternative energy sources. And then others say this is all liberal mumbo-jumbo that old hippies have made up, like the scientifically backed threat of Global Warming, just to scare good God-loving Americans. Even those wanting change sometimes say that the technology doesn’t exist, and even if it did, how could the world revamp its transportation systems and energy practices on such a massive scale?

Conservative or liberal, most everyone agrees that the industrialized world has become incredibly dependent on oil and that it will take a crisis of some sort to break it from its habit. If it receives the proper motivation, though, I believe the technology and logistics will take care of itself. After all, at the start of WWII, aviation technology consisted of a few adrenalin junky gear heads stumbling around in the sky shooting at each other, yet in under a decade jet fighters were engaging in spiraling dog fights almost at the speed of sound. I just hope this time a monetary squeeze will be enough motivation to change, so another War in Iraq (or worse still) won’t become necessary.