pentagon peace symbolWhile most of the media’s attention has been sucked up by Tiger Woods’ travails, the health-care reform debate, and the various wranglings at Copenhagen (including Jim Inhofe’s embarrassing himself and America by spouting asinine things that only a mainstream corporate American news outlet could report without mocking, as if they deserved serious and respectful consideration), the Pentagon has stated what anyone with a brain should know by now — that global climate change is a clear and present danger:

For the past several years, Pentagon security analysts have looked anew at climate change, as if they were facing a potential enemy army or naval fleet. Global warming is now shaping their future military missions and nowhere more so than in places like Egypt, which is so dependent on its unique resource – fresh water.

Former CentCom Commander and retired U.S. Gen. Anthony Zinni, who co-wrote a groundbreaking report on the link between global warming and conflict in 2007, said that Egypt is on his list of “top ten” global climate hotspots.

“The Nile is Egypt and Egypt is the Nile. Historically, for millennia, they have defined their national interests around that, they’ve even said it would be a ‘causus beli,’ a reason for war, if the upstream resources were somehow controlled, dammed, polluted or whatever,” said Zinni.

But that is exactly what is happening. Even as the Nile Delta is covered in rising seas, the Nile itself is ‘shrinking’ – with thirsty upstream neighbors like Ethiopia damming the Nile, in four places at last count, to improve its own water supply.

Meanwhile, Sudan is selling some 30 million acres of commercial land to China, which will require, according to Hamza, at least 180 billion cubic meters of water to irrigate, for the export of crops back to China.

Where will the water come from? Where else? “It’s going to be a fight within the family, I think. But a big fight, if Ethiopia continues to dam, and Sudan continues to sell land,” Zinni warned.

How seriously does DoD take global climate change: As NPR reported the other day, this seriously:

Global warming is now officially considered a threat to U.S. national security.

For the first time, Pentagon planners in 2010 will include climate change among the security threats identified in the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Congress-mandated report that updates Pentagon priorities every four years.

[...]

Among the scenarios that concern security planners is the melting of the massive Himalayan ice mass. In theory, the rivers fed by the Himalayan glaciers would flood at first, then dry up once the glaciers retreat. That would endanger tens of millions of people in lowland Bangladesh.

Retired Air Marshal A.K. Singh, a former commander in India’s air force, foresees mass migrations across national borders, with militaries soon becoming involved.

“It will initially be people fighting for food and shelter,” Singh says. “When the migration starts, every state would want to stop the migrations from happening. Eventually, it would have to become a military conflict. Which other means do you have to resolve your border issues?”

The fact that the Pentagon is acknowledging reality apparently scares the folks at the far-right corporatist Heritage Foundation, so much so that they sent out one of their people to provide the “fair and balanced” viewpoint of Big Oil and Coal to NPR’s audience:

“We suck at predicting wars, and we’re not very good at predicting peace,” says James Carafano, a retired Army officer and former West Point instructor who now directs foreign policy and national security studies at the Heritage Foundation. “These are huge, giant, complex systems, and people who take a linear approach to these things and say, ‘Oh, well, if this happens, then we’ll have to worry about that’ — that’s not how reality works out.”

Nice spewing of FUD there, Mr. Carafano. But of course, as you know — and as the rest of the NPR piece points out repeatedly — the Pentagon’s mission is to prepare for threats of all kinds, likely or not, and to be ready for the worst-case scenario.