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DREAMING WAR: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta by Gore Vidal Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, USA, 2002; Clairview Books, UK, 2003 ISBN 1-56025-502-1 (197pp tpb, USA), ISBN 1-902636-41-4 (197pp tpb, UK) Availability: Thunder's Mouth Press, web- site http://www.thundersmouth.com; Clairview Books, www.clairviewbooks.com his latest collection of essays from "dis- sident patriot" American author Gore Vidal follows hot on the heels of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (see review, 10/02). In Dreaming War, he continues those themes with 11 essays spanning the last decade. In the most recent, a lengthy essay dated November 2002, he focuses on the unanswered questions before, during and after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Not that he can answer all those questions, but he does some stern finger- pointing at the Cheney—Bush junta and its push to control Caspian gas and Iraqi oil. Since the publication of this collection, the United States, with backing from its allies the UK, Australia and Poland, has already waged war to "liberate" Iraq—an inevitable action according to Vidal's reading between the lines of recent history. His first essay, from January 2001, is on the theft of the US Presidency in Florida and it sets a prophetic tone for Vidal's takes on the theft of democ- racy, truth and human rights through the domestic and foreign policy landscapes of the US in the last century. To Vidal, the Cheney—Bush cabal is the latest and most cynical group of strategists hell-bent on US empire-building—as we've seen in Afghanistan and now in Iraq—and JUNE — JULY 2003 @ REVIEWS the corporate media have done its bidding in distorting truth and slanting public opinion. Vidal has his own horror stories to tell about hostile journalistic treatment. Vidal (and a few other writers and researchers he quotes, such as Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, whose book we featured in 9/05) suggests an alternative perspective on US motivation for the "War on Terror" and is brave enough to declare that the emperor is wearing no clothes. In the final piece, a recent interview conducted by Mare Cooper, Vidal lashes out at the evil deeds and deceptions of a succession of US gov- ernments and chides the US public for being fooled by this latest massive con. Rivetting! and the electricity grids. The party is just about over. The industrialised world and all that we've become so accustomed to—pri- mary production, manufacturing, service provision—will go through major upheaval. Heinberg (a biodiesel enthusiast) argues that even if a switch to alternative energy sources were implemented today, industrial societies will not have sufficient energy available to satisfy existing or growing demand. We're about to enter a new era— one that must be less energy-consuming, less fast-paced and more sustainable. We should have started managing this transition in the early 1970s, so now it's urgent that we implement ways to cope with the imminent decline of oil resources and develop strate- gies to survive the crisis. In this regard, Heinberg makes many positive suggestions. Unfortunately, the American way—con- sidering the US has consumed so much of its own natural resources—is to secure access by force to the second-best supply of the world's most dwindling resource...in Iraq. THE PARTY'S OVER: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies by Richard Heinberg New Society Publishers, Canada, 2003 ISBN 0-86571-482-7 (279pp tpb) Availability: New Society Publishers, website http://www.newsociety.com ichard Heinberg's book provides a much-needed reality check on where our fossil-fuel-consuming industrialised society is headed—and it's not towards prosperity but collapse. (Readers may recall Richard's article, "A History of Corporate Rule and Popular Protest" in NEXUS 9/06.) Rather than relying on the data from econ- omists, environmentalists and politicians, Heinberg places much more credence on analyses from petroleum geologists includ- ing Colin Campbell (see NEXUS 10/01). The fact is that the peak of global oil extrac- tion will probably be reached between 2006 and 2015, and with it the peak in gross ener- gy production from all sources, heralding an energy-led collapse of the global economy PARTY’S OVER NEXUS = 69 www.nexusmagazine.com