The Golan Heights is one of the most beautiful and interesting places I've ever been. Looking down and to the west, the view is of rolling green orchards and small settlements. Looking up and to the east, the view is of mile-high mountains, bare in the summer, snow capped in the winter, straddling Israel, Lebanon and Syria. Everywhere you look, Lebanon and Syria loom in the dusty distance. On the Heights themselves are endless rocky cattle pastures, vineyards renouned for their Cabernets, minefields marked with discrete bright yellow signs and barbed wire, and the crumbled concrete of long-ago pummeled Syrian military installations.
As a plateau looking down over nations, the Golan feels separate. It is separate but of paramount strategic importance to whoever posesses it. From its 2000 foot height advantage, the Golan is the most logical place from which to lob shells on one's neighbors, as was the case during the famous 6-day war that led to Israel's control of the territory. The quiet and calm of sparse settlement and altitude makes the Golan feel like a tranquil monument, something that any nation would want to call their own.
The Golan is populated by Israeli settlers and Druze. The Druze are a small offshoot of Islam, with secret beliefs and their own holy books. In today's world, part of Druze belief is to pledge loyalty to whatever nation in which they reside. Druze settlements pepper much of Northern Israel. Israeli Druze commonly serve in the army, taking on some of the most dangerous missions. Many Druze are policemen and firefighters, fierce defenders of the nation. On a personal level, they are tough, but warm hosts, offering hospitality along with some of the best hummus and shish taouk on the planet, switching between Hebrew, English and Druze-Arabic without a hassle.
But for the Golani Druze, this loyalty presents a dilemma. Like the Golan itself, they remain separate. The Golan was taken from Syria by Israel during the 6-day war of 1967, where Israel's posessions were substantially increased, from the Sinai, to Jersualem, to the Golan. In 6 days of fighting around their towns and fields, the Golan Druze went from being Syrian to Israeli with no say in the matter. To this day, they shout from hilltops with megaphones to their neighbors across the border to give news of births and marriages to friends and relatives on the other side. While the Druze follow the rules of the nations they call home, many Golan Druze have refused Israeli citizenship. At first thought, it's easy to assume that they do this because they more closely identify with majority-Muslim Syria, but the answer is more complicated.
When we were in the Golan, my wife puzzled over the Druze renunciation of Israeli citizenship. returning to Tel Aviv, she drilled my American ex-pat friend about the Druze. His answer to why they'd renounce citizenship but be peaceable and loyal was simple, but not obvious. Consider the Druze perspective. 40 years ago, your town was in Syria until one day it wasn't. Syria has never been happy about losing the Golan (and your town) to Israel, and demands this piece of land in exchange for peace. It is possible that one day your town might be in Syria again. If you are a Golani Druze, would you want to be known as a loyal subject of the Zionist Enemy? Of course not, you'd be killed. So many of the Druze of the Golan choose to live in limbo. As my friend put it, they have to say "I'll be Israeli, but I won't like it... I'll take free health care and good education, but I won't like it." This is the only safe move for the long term good of them and their families. Really a fascinating predicament.
There is a major lesson for Iraq here. It's only wise to say, "I'll pledge loyalty to the Shi'ite-led government, but I won't like it." Or, "I'll go with to this or that tribal leader's plan for control of the province, but I won't like it." No one in Iraq would be wise to put all their eggs in one basket. What happens when the Americans leave and the power struggle ensues? No one doubts that many groups lay in wait for this moment. Knowing this, no one wants to be labeled a Shi'ite loyalist when the Sunni army generals get their acts together and overthrow the government. No one wants to be loyal to anyone else when anything can happen. Everyone knows that eventually the Americans will leave, and no matter how they leave, even if we magically get the current situation under control, there will be moment where every group who has laid low will emerge to make their moves.
People in Iraq cannot be Iraqi when they have no personal loyalty to the concept, conscieved of by the British in the twenties. People won't work for something that's liable to change or disappear altogether. With the idea of a bloody balkanization in the near-future, no one is going to settle down. This will end, but it will not end well. I just don't see another way.
Friday, July 13, 2007
Monday, July 09, 2007
Burning Dirt
I have a friend who makes his living doing complicated stuff to proteins in a lab in California. As a native Texan he has a way of summing things up in one complete sentence that leaves no room for doubt or dissent. In some cases, as many observers of Texans have noted, this talent could be maddening. In his case, it's usually just what you want to hear.
In college, he was the guy with holes in his socks, drinking cold coffee, still studying molecules at 2 am. Without any moment of consideration, he'd get up and go to a diner 20 miles away, saying, "well, you have to eat, don't you?", or at an earlier hour, maybe on a weekend, he'd put down the books and say, "this will still be here when I'm done partying." During long conversations, when a fact was in dispute, he was the first guy I knew who would say, "let's look it up online." Somehow this guy is always right about things.
During one of those long conversations the subject came around to fossil fuels and their alternatives. This friend put it bluntly, "if you really look at it, everything we do is based on burning dirt." What a great way to put it.
We dig up this variety of dirt that makes big fires and big explosions in order to push pistons and turn turbines. The dirt is made of millions of years of ferns, trees and dinosaurs that layed down their lives to become coal seams and oilfields.
From here, you have to ask, well, what's so great about burning all that dirt? The answer is that it's cheap and it's full of energy... energy that we need to live how we live.
From there, you have to ask, well, why does it have so much energy? The answer is that all those plants and animals relied on energy captured from the sun by the biological genius of photosynthesis. In fact, every source of energy we consume, from the food we eat to the cars we drive to the computers we blog on, is from the sun (except nuclear power, which is based on the decay of heavy metals created exclusively in supernovae).
Even if we used wind power and cow poop to power everything, we'd still be reliant on the sun. This dirt we burn is so appealing because it takes eons of that photosynthesis and packs it into a sludges and rocks that are just packed full of energy.
Of course we know that this convenient source comes problems. All the carbon that it trapped as plants and animals way back when gets released when we burn it, with the undesireable effect of making the sun a little better at adding energy to our planet, thus flooding beachfront property with ice cap and glacier melt. All the smoke from all that burning is no good to breathe, and anyone who lives on top of one of those dirt piles seems to create repressive societies or end up embroiled in increasingly dangerous conflicts. But the stuff is just so damn useful. And that makes it so damn valuable.
So what can we do instead of burning dirt? We can grow stuff, convert its energy to things like ethanol, and burn that. All the carbon that gets released is taken up by other plants that are grown today, making this process "carbon neutral". But we're trying to take a reserve of today's plants and put them against millions of years of plants, just waiting in the ground to be burned.
How many corn fields would it take to get the same amount of energy as a nice big coal field that had millennia of plants turn into dense layers of energy? We're trying to capture plant energy to power our economies within a generation-- something that nature took a long, long time to accomplish. Simply put, this is a hell of a problem. Dirt is everywhere, it's cheap, and some of it's flammable. This is what we've got to compete with when seeking out alternatives.
Pointing out the problems with dirt is as easy as burning the stuff. It's also only half the equation for changing energy policy.
In college, he was the guy with holes in his socks, drinking cold coffee, still studying molecules at 2 am. Without any moment of consideration, he'd get up and go to a diner 20 miles away, saying, "well, you have to eat, don't you?", or at an earlier hour, maybe on a weekend, he'd put down the books and say, "this will still be here when I'm done partying." During long conversations, when a fact was in dispute, he was the first guy I knew who would say, "let's look it up online." Somehow this guy is always right about things.
During one of those long conversations the subject came around to fossil fuels and their alternatives. This friend put it bluntly, "if you really look at it, everything we do is based on burning dirt." What a great way to put it.
We dig up this variety of dirt that makes big fires and big explosions in order to push pistons and turn turbines. The dirt is made of millions of years of ferns, trees and dinosaurs that layed down their lives to become coal seams and oilfields.
From here, you have to ask, well, what's so great about burning all that dirt? The answer is that it's cheap and it's full of energy... energy that we need to live how we live.
From there, you have to ask, well, why does it have so much energy? The answer is that all those plants and animals relied on energy captured from the sun by the biological genius of photosynthesis. In fact, every source of energy we consume, from the food we eat to the cars we drive to the computers we blog on, is from the sun (except nuclear power, which is based on the decay of heavy metals created exclusively in supernovae).
Even if we used wind power and cow poop to power everything, we'd still be reliant on the sun. This dirt we burn is so appealing because it takes eons of that photosynthesis and packs it into a sludges and rocks that are just packed full of energy.
Of course we know that this convenient source comes problems. All the carbon that it trapped as plants and animals way back when gets released when we burn it, with the undesireable effect of making the sun a little better at adding energy to our planet, thus flooding beachfront property with ice cap and glacier melt. All the smoke from all that burning is no good to breathe, and anyone who lives on top of one of those dirt piles seems to create repressive societies or end up embroiled in increasingly dangerous conflicts. But the stuff is just so damn useful. And that makes it so damn valuable.
So what can we do instead of burning dirt? We can grow stuff, convert its energy to things like ethanol, and burn that. All the carbon that gets released is taken up by other plants that are grown today, making this process "carbon neutral". But we're trying to take a reserve of today's plants and put them against millions of years of plants, just waiting in the ground to be burned.
How many corn fields would it take to get the same amount of energy as a nice big coal field that had millennia of plants turn into dense layers of energy? We're trying to capture plant energy to power our economies within a generation-- something that nature took a long, long time to accomplish. Simply put, this is a hell of a problem. Dirt is everywhere, it's cheap, and some of it's flammable. This is what we've got to compete with when seeking out alternatives.
Pointing out the problems with dirt is as easy as burning the stuff. It's also only half the equation for changing energy policy.
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