Open Democracy, as is now traditional, has an interesting feature where some of their writers peer into their crystal balls. Contest the predictions, argue with them, make your own. Will the sum total of human idiocy and the tragedies of inhumanity increase this year? Or is the tide about to turn for the better?
Some highlights (most of them none too cheery):
The Iraq Study Group (Baker-Hamilton) report is history and there will be no major United States withdrawal from Iraq. There may be a restriction of US forces to large well-protected bases to limit casualties, with more emphasis on helicopter gunships and strike aircraft for counterinsurgency operations, but that has failed once and will fail again. A complete US rethink of policy in Iraq and the Persian Gulf will have to happen, but it won’t come in 2007.
The slow-burning, confused world rebellion against the declining American imperium will go on, sometimes violent, sometimes by changing alliances and economic struggles. Pretty certainly, there will be more acts of terrorism against western targets, but I feel that the energy of that campaign is starting to run out. A guess is that Osama bin Laden will be killed or captured in the course of the year.
Bush will de facto align the United States with one sect, the Shi’a faction led by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the cleric who is head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, against prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and his sponsor Muqtada al-Sadr – and renew military offensives against the Iraqi Sunni.
These spasmodic gestures to secure “victory” will all fail. The Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians will privately wash their hands of the Bush administration and look the other way as Saudis and others fund and arm the Sunni.
2007 will be a tipping-point for action on climate change. Among the drivers for change will be the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (published in February 2007), further compelling scientific evidence that the Arctic is now irrevocably melting away (ice-free summers by 2040) and a Democrat-controlled United States Congress that will go for emission controls and succeed in dragging even George W Bush along.In the US, the coming together of those who seek “energy independence”, and thus the chance to forget the middle east, with those who want to tackle climate change will provide ever increasing backing for technological innovation.
Most important of all will be the increasing certainty that there is money to be made in climate change now, and much more to be made in the future. Businesses big and small will look for profit in dealing with global warming. Already there is a global venture-capital boom in investment in new green technologies and into companies with some very imaginative ideas that could unexpectedly transform the world. It is always good to remember that in the long term we don’t need to have an energy or greenhouse-gas emission problem. If we captured the energy from 10% of the sunlight falling on just under 1,000th of the earth’s surface we would have more clean energy than we currently consume from fossil fuels. (And the most expensive solar cells already can convert 20% of sunlight so we are not asking the impossible).
Environmental activists won’t all welcome seeing climate change turn into an opportunity for business and for technological innovation. There has always been a streak of “we must be punished for our sins” in the green movement. Those who think saving the planet must involve personal sacrifice (the kind of people who ask “have you signed the no-fly pledge”) or that Gaia must bite back against humans may be disappointed. Even more galling is the likelihood that in some regions of the earth, people will profit from climate change. The Artic may be set for a long-term boom as waterways open up, resources can be reached and huge new fisheries develop.
Such changes in thinking are hard to take in. But take them in we must. With China and India rushing towards western standards of living, we’ll see 2007 turning to industrial-strength solutions for global warming.
2006 saw the further rolling back of European multiculturalism. Though some lament that the multicultural dream is over, its many opponents are relieved that the curtain is finally drawn on the atrocious “drama of multiculturalism”. Will this retreat continue in 2007 and beyond? And is it desirable that this be so?
2006 represented the second boom-time for the internet – and this time we did it our way, as sites which put free user services and free content at the heart what they do gained the attention of big players on the technology market. It was also the year that digital rights entered the public consciousness: Google going into China sparked a debate about censorship on the net that will continue into 2007, and the British government endorsed a new, balanced way of thinking about intellectual-property rights, ready for debates in Europe in 2007.
2007 will be less exuberant. As the dust settles on the events of 2006, challenges to the open way of doing things will become more overt. Court cases over copyright infringement taking place on ferociously popular sites like MySpace and YouTube will decide how radical the user-generated content revolution will be. And in the world of free software, Microsoft will consolidate the position it has gained through its partnership with Novell to push harder against the threat free and open source software poses to its market domination. With all this activity, digital rights issues are sure to stay in the headlines throughout 2007.
Prediction: Microsoft launches its first open attack through the courts against alleged patent infringement in Linux code.
2007 will be a challenging year in the United States, full of promise and risk in equal measure. A judgment was finally rendered in November on the destructive course that the nation took in the last six years, and it is, quite deservedly, a very harsh one. If the new Congress maintains its spine, it will be able to curb the worst excesses of the Bush administration, air its malfeasance in open hearings, and pass some modest social reforms, like a rise in the minimum wage, that the damaged president will be forced to accept – or veto, at his party’s political peril.
Yet you can’t govern the United States from the Congress. And two more years of Bush, even circumscribed as he will be, is a very long time. Here is where the danger and opportunity each reside. Democrats regained some power because they weren’t Republicans, who were and are both a corrupted party and a spent force ideologically, as indeed the Democrats themselves were in 1994, the time of the last electoral shift in Congressional control. How progressives respond to the great conservative crack-up in this lengthy interim period is the most urgent question of the moment, and the early signs are mixed.
In the meantime, it seems apparent, though few predicted it, that a realignment is under way. The south remains on the largely Republican course that Richard Nixon set almost forty years ago, though there are stirrings there, too – how many people know that Democrats are within a few seats of retaking the Texas house of representatives, and won forty-one of forty-two offices in Dallas County? But the mountain states are increasingly embracing Democrats, Republicans in Kansas are switching parties, appalled by the theocratic rule of Senator Sam Brownback, who is likely to carry the flag for the Christian right in the 2008 primaries, and the bellwether state of Ohio repudiated the governing Republicans soundly.
But my prediction is about a different kind of realignment – business, long allied with limited-government, tax-cutting Republicans, knows that the postwar US social contract, where decent pensions and healthcare accompanied employment in many sectors, is badly broken. It also has a strong stake in the success of universal public education. In the coming years, corporations will lead the way in pushing for a stronger government safety-net, and the tax reforms necessary to bring it about.
I am very pessimistic about 2007, quite apart from the weather. The war in Iraq gets worse every day. A massive programme of ethnic cleansing is underway in the mixed areas. Moreover, the violence is spreading – to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran in the east, to Palestine and Lebanon in the west and to southeast Turkey in the north, not to mention the multiplication of al-Qaida cells in Europe.
Indeed all of the worst-case scenarios outlined by those who opposed the war seem to be coming true. Withdrawal of American and British troops, if it happens, will end a significant part of the conflict – the insurgency against the occupation. But it will also mean the collapse of what is left of the state, thus aggravating the conditions that create a sectarian “new war”. Unlike several military commentators, I am doubtful that the war in Afghanistan can be “won”; it is too interconnected to Iraq.
Similar regional “new wars” are brewing in east Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea as well as Sudan and Chad). A decade ago, international agencies could at least provide humanitarian assistance. Now humanitarian space has disappeared. The United Nations and the international community has allowed itself to be hijacked by the “global war on terror” so that all outsiders are increasingly seen as occupiers rather than as protectors.
And, on top of all this, the British government has announced a decision to replace the Trident nuclear submarine and its warheads, entirely it seems for domestic political reasons -to outflank the Conservative opposition. The UK’s commitments under the non-proliferation treaty, the example this sets to would-be nuclear powers, not to mention the cost, are factors that seem to have been ignored. Sooner or later nuclear weapons will be used, whether by states or as a result of the illegal trade in which at least one state, Pakistan, has been engaged. The polonium story has given us a foretaste of what is to come.
I am, of course, in favour of withdrawal from Iraq. As long as we are there, alternative options cannot be discussed. I believe the world needs massive capabilities for human security, to protect and empower people vulnerable to war as well as to the disasters that are likely to be the consequence of climate change. Yet despite agreeing to the concept of the “responsibility to protect”, no country seems ready to make the commitment in terms of money and capabilities required. Instead the British government is intent on maintaining an expensive and anachronistic defence industry producing Typhoon fighter-jets for Saudi Arabia and Trident submarines, which will eat into whatever limited humanitarian capabilities we possess. Expect more tragedies in 2007.
I couldn’t find one prediction that I could disagree with. All well thought out, well expressed and plausible.
It stands out that your writers are far more aware of prospects in Iraq than many Americans and surprisingly interested in US foreign policy in particular. Is it that Mr. Bush’s Iraq war is so bizarre or do Australians generally have an interest in the world view?
Such thinkers and writers are always welcome on my website, TheWeekInCongress.com.
Best New Year wishes.
Well, thanks, Robert, but they’re not our writers nor are they Australian. As the post indicates, the link is to the Open Democracy website and all the quotations are from there.
Whoops.
i wish someone would predict that decision-making techniques would improve- especially in the area of controlling military/munitions of the usa.
while dubya inspired general outrage, he and his cabinet were nothing new in american history. been plenty like him before, and no sign that americans have done anything to prevent more fools/madmen/incompetents (choose one or more) from commanding the grossly bloated american military machine.
sooner or later, human society and or the planet’s ecology is going to be broken if responsible mangement of this army is not achieved. since no one has even suggested something should be done, catastrophe is likely.
indeed, events in the middle east may well be that catastrophe, just getting warmed up.