An oil-fuelled war in Iraq won’t be as clean and casualty-free as the White House believes, and could push a volatile Middle East into an even worse abyss, says prominent military and political analyst Gwynne Dyer.

And since it’s “poppycock” that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons, “the question one has to ask is, why now?” Dyer said during a speech in Calgary last week.

“The United States would never dream of attacking him if he did have nuclear weapons – look how they responded when North Korea went public,” he said. “So, this is an operation seen by most of America’s friends and allies, as well as its enemies, as one that has been carried out for motives other than the announced ones.”

Those motives, Dyer said, have to do with both security of oil reserves and price – and hinge on the increasing chance of a destabilization of the strongest U.S. ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, by a powerful Islamist current.

Gwynne Dyer

Dyer summed up what he believes may be the U.S. line of thinking: “Why don’t we take out an insurance policy? We’ll knock off Saddam Hussein and put our own guy in Iraq, potentially the second-largest exporter in the region. This would be a handy reserve in case something happens in Saudi Arabia.

“And once we get the oilfield fires out – and you just know Saddam has mined every oilhead, look at what he did in Kuwait – we can open the taps wide, flood the market, beat OPEC to the ground and get the price down.”

He added dryly: “I don’t see Alberta following this war with much enthusiasm.”

Iraq won’t be the same story as earlier U.S. interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghan- istan, Dyer noted, and driving Saddam out of Kuwait in 1991 in an open desert with superior firepower can’t compare with fighting in the streets of Baghdad, a city of seven million people.

And the optics of both the armies of Israel and the United States jointly attacking an Arab country might be just what Al-Qaeda is looking for to galvanize millions to topple the governments in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and even Egypt.

Dyer spoke to audiences in Edmonton and Calgary last week as part of a speaker’s series sponsored by the Alliance for Capitalizing on Change (www.capitalizingonchange.org), an Alberta-based cultural think-tank and research consortium. The event’s main sponsor was Alberta Sustainable Resource Development.

The London-based journalist and historian outlined his view of globalization as well as current events, including the Kyoto Accord.

He said while many feel the U.S. is a cultural steamroller, ironing out local differences and distinctions around the world, he resists the simple view that cultures are separate and discreet identities.

Earth, he adds, is becoming a far more integrated planet.

“It’s not a global Americanization, but a global modernization,” Dyer said. “Americans today are not the Americans of 200 years ago, either. George Washington would flee screaming from contemporary Americans – he wouldn’t recognize them as his people.”

Instead, global cultures are maturing from the peasant societies of 1,000 years ago to industrial and post-industrial societies with local variations. “And it isn’t because one has forced it down the throats of everybody else. What is going on is both more profound and inexorable than American cultural imperialism,” Dyer said.

“However, the perception that it is has a lot to do with why the twin towers came down last September.” On the issue of Kyoto, Dyer said the international accord on greenhouse gas emission reduction needs to be accepted simply as a template for future international pacts, and doesn’t merit the “faux-desperate” reaction it has incited among many detractors.

“There are not many people out there naive enough to imagine that the Kyoto treaty as negotiated, even if it still had American participation, would by itself reverse any large global climate-change process,” he told about 150 people at the luncheon in Calgary.

Until the international Law of the Sea was drafted in the early 1980s, followed by the Montreal Protocol on the ozone layer at the end of that decade, the global community didn’t have any international treaties with binding obligations outside political or economic pacts, Dyer said.

Kyoto “is ground-breaking stuff,” he added. Numbers – and American involvement – matter less to Kyoto negotiators than hammering out a precedent for future agreements to be negotiated when there is greater political will for implementation.

“Nobody is really panicking in Alberta about the cost of Kyoto . . . the oil companies are already way ahead of the curve,” Dyer asserted. “It’s political position-taking in the hope that there will be some more horse-trading later – you get a little bit out of Ottawa in return for your ultimate assent.”