Gwyn Dyer On AGW Geo-Politics: We Should Give The Yankees All The Water They Need

A terrific, if grim, piece by Gwyn Dyer in this week's Embassy Magazine. My favorite bit:

"...the Americans are losing large chunks of agricultural production. They're going to have to evacuate parts of coastline. There are parts where you can't get insurance already.

"So they're going to be moving people around. And they're going to be very short of water. They're already short of water everywhere west of the Mississippi. They have built very large cities in effectively desert. I mean, even now it's really a desert, 40 million people. This is not a good plan.

"And they're going to need the water. And when they get seriously crippled by this, I don't think they're going to take no for an answer from Canada if it doesn't want to sell its water.

"In fact, I would go this far: We need to start selling the Americans water in the near future as soon as they want it and are willing to pay some nominal price for it because you want to put this exchange on a commercial basis before it becomes a strategic issue. And there are ways of doing it that don't harm us.

"But you sell them water now or soon they'll kick the door in. And actually, I would show them where the door is because they'd be right, they'd be within their rights. You cannot let your neighbours go short when you have a surplus. But there are ways of doing this that don't hurt our interests.

Also interesting are the comments re getting access to Canadian climate scientists. Short version: the gov wouldn't let him. He doesn't mention the arctic, however, which strikes me as an oversight. There are huge possibilities for armed conflict up there as the ice melts.

I Like This Poem Because It Mentions Titties

I also thought it might apply to the Georgia/Russia conflict as much as it did to the Soviet invasion of Hungary:

uncle sam shrugs his pretty
pink shoulders you know how
and he twitches a liberal titty
and lisps 'i'm busy right now'

so rah-rah-rah- democracy
let's all be thankful as hell
and bury the statue of liberty
(because it begins to smell)"

But then I went looking for an old piece by Gwyn Dyer, in which he predicted a Russian military Renaissance, and found this one instead, in which he lays a verbal pounding on the Saakashvili regime. His conclusion:

There is no great moral issue here. What Georgia tried to do to South Ossetia is precisely what Russia did to Chechnya, but Georgia wasn't strong enough and South Ossetia had a bigger friend. There is no great strategic issue either: apart from a few pipeline routes, the whole Transcaucasus is of little importance to the rest of the world.

In six months' time, we probably won't even remember this foolish adventure.

A conclusion I think I disagree with. For one thing, Georgia has already called home about half the troops involved in its Iraq deployment, and its hard to see them maintaining their role in that country in the required numbers and with the required enthusiasm. Furthermore, the President's of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, all current or former contributors to the Multinational force in Iraq, issued a statement yesterday in which they asked NATO and the West to do more than "twitch a liberal titty"in response to the Russian invasion. So far they seem to have got little in the way of a concrete reply from Western leaders, and I imagine they're beginning to wonder just what their participation in the Western War Of Terror has bought them lately, and thinking that, going forward, maybe they won't be playing that game so much.

PS. National Post Uber Hawk Jonathon Kay has already thrown in the towel on behalf of the West, referring to Democracy as an "abstraction".