The US invasion of Iraq and the quick destruction of the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi Baath party has not only awed the world but shocked it into thinking more deeply about the sources of violent conflict and the pathways to a new order of law and justice. The continuing violence and chaos in the region and its impact on our own country have only intensified this questioning. What, indeed, are the fundamental sources and patterns of the conflicts in which we are embroiled? How can we make sense of them in a way that promotes effective response? How do we deal with the fear, suffering, and mistrust that is coursing through our own society in response to these events?

These conflicts are not merely about religion, culture, or immediate power interests. When I sift through the myriad factors at work in the conflicts around Al Quaeda, Iran, Iraq, other Arab countries, and the Palestinian-Israeli struggle, I keep coming back to three intertwined factors: oil, governance, and militarism. To put it more sharply, these conflicts erupt at the intersection of ecological exploitation, patriarchal governance, and radical changes in military technology and policy.

It is easy to dismiss the claim that the US has gone into Iraq to control the oil fields, not merely for itself, but for global business. After all, the US does not need Iraq's oil, it merely needs a stable flow of oil - lots of it. Moving deeper, however, the conflict is indeed about oil. It is about access to fossil fuel, whether in Iraq, Alaska, Iran, or Venezuela. Oil is the symbol of our fossil fuel dependence and the way of life - based on the internal combustion engine and electricity - that it makes possible. Without it, the American way of life, indeed the industrial way of life, could not exist in its present form. The automobile, which for most people is the quintessential symbol of American freedom (why do car lots have the biggest flags?), is the prime expression of this dependence. It shapes our profligate land use, our family life, and the way we work. In that sense, the cheap and pure oil of the Middle East is the foundation for the way America lives, and with it the aspirations of most of the world. It is no coincidence that an administration led by two oil millionaires from Texas has led the US into this open contest to stabilize Middle Eastern oil fields, not necessarily through direct control but by imposing a general social order that makes possible a market economy with oil at its center. But that need for general social order leads us to the second factor - patriarchy.

Patriarchy is a model of social order based on the rule of a father over his family. Its quintessential expression was the monarchies of Europe that the American republic rejected. But in their search for oil, Western democracies have depended on and supported Middle Eastern patriarchs and monarchs. Rather than extending democracy into these societies, we have subverted its growth. It is these patriarchal monarchies, especially that of Saudi Arabia, that have promoted the rise of militantly patriarchal and anti-democratic radical groups. Our greed for oil has supported the conditions for terrorism. The US-led invasion of Afghanistan toppled a regime that was a vicious caricature of this patriarchal system, but the US-British invasion of Iraq destroyed a secular dictatorship in which women could have greater equality, albeit an equal suffering without citizenship for anyone. The outcome may well be to rob them of what little freedom they had. That is the quandary American foreign policy faces now.

A course of military action that began with a reaction to the terrorism of September 11 has now mutated into a grandiose effort to democratize these patriarchal societies as well as to secure their oil for the industrialized countries. At the same time, this American effort has been led by people whose supporters advocate a return to paternalism and patriarchy in family life, in the prerogatives and power of corporate chiefs, the curtailment of women's reproductive rights, and the exaltation of guns, violent sports, capital punishment, and the silencing of dissent. Their first response to crises is the use of force rather than reasoned, collaborative strategies. American policy begins to mirror the domestic violence rooted so deeply in myths of patriarchal privilege and power. This brings us to the third factor - militarism.

The Iraqi experience makes it clear that the US has overwhelming global military supremacy. It spends half of the world's military expenditures, with a superiority in technology and sheer organization that no other nation even attempts to equal. Thus, we have reached a point where there is a single organization of violence that can function either as an unrestrained empire or as a global policeman. It can serve to apply globally legitimate law or simply impose the material interests of the militarily powerful. The question is how to make this world policeman accountable and according to what rule of law. How can it be re-formed into an instrument accountable to a global community of nations? In thinking about this, we need to take account of the difference between the sheer existence of these military means and "militarism," which is the commitment to military solutions pre-emptively and paramountly in dealing with conflicts. Militarism is the idolization of military means, the placing of military perspectives, operations, and preparations at the center of our life. Given the radical changes in military technology and in America's role in world affairs, do we now need to rethink the meaning of militarism? Here we confront a couple of questions that close the circle among ecology, gender, and war.

The first thing we have to do is take account of the drastic change in military technology revealed in the US action in Iraq. Is this change one which facilitates the move from warfare to global police work? Or, in giving the US such enormous military advantage, does it simply reinforce an imperial imposition of one nation's interests? Does the very change in warfare impose certain restraints on the use of military force or does it simply unleash it in even more destructive ways? Militarism always corrupts republics, but is it possible to use military force in the twenty-first century as one element in the promotion of republican democracies? Since the military campaign in Iraq has been led by two of the world's leading democracies (the British monarch has become a sitcom, let's hope American democracy has not), does this mean that we are beginning to see the eclipse of democracy in these countries (the militarism effect) or does it mean that we are beginning to see the end of patriarchal monarchies and the dictatorships they spawn in the Middle East?

Second, we see the way that the technological change in warfare has made it possible for women to join men in practically any aspect of the conflict. Women and men are equally capable of operating sophisticated machinery and pushing buttons on computers. Thus, the claim that gender, or for that matter sex, predisposes one to aggressive violence or to nurturing persuasion begins to erode. Testosterone is not immediately connected to warfare. Thus, advancing gender arguments is not enough to contest our predilection to violence or to militarism. The predilection to violence once associated with patriarchs is now attached also to women through the changes in military technology. What does this imply for feminist analysis and for women's lives generally?

Third, those of us who speak the language of eco-feminism have long claimed that there is a connection between the way we construct gender relations and the way we humans relate to the earth. Patriarchy is a system of domination based on appeals to supposed biological necessity, just as the exploitation of the earth is based on an appeal to a "natural" human superiority to nature. As male is over female, the argument runs, so humans, in the clothing of patriarchy, are over the earth, our nurturing mother. Thus, in the Middle East we have a range of patriarchal monarchies (or dictatorships) exploiting the earth's energy for their own benefit, with the industrial democracies the end users. It is these end users who both corrupt and are corrupted by the monarchs and dictators in order to sustain their ecologically precarious life. This interconnected system of patriarchy, exploitation, and militarism lies at the heart of the explosive turmoil in the Middle East, a turmoil in which the whole world, and especially the US and the UK, is implicated.

It is clear that eco-feminist analyses support arguments for ecological sustainability over against addiction to oil and profligate energy use. However, what is not clear is whether the kind of democratic government implied by feminist values can lead to ecological sustainability. Are democracies any more eco-sensitive than monarchies, especially "enlightened" ones? One has only to look at the US auto and truck market to see how ecology fares in "free" markets and democracies. The question is, how can the claims of ecological sustainability shape not only the means and ends of war but also of democratic policy-making and constitutional order? Here is where eco-feminist perspectives are crucial, for one can argue that Americans are undergoing a re-patriarchicalization of their collective life. The transfer of power from government to corporations controlled by white males (almost exclusively) meeting in private is one sign of this. The glorification of brute strength, as with the rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger in California's celebrity politics, is another. These trends suggest a deep link between ecological injustice and the current erosion of democratic constitutional values.

As our military involvement in the Middle East continues to wound our political life and general welfare, it is important to grasp the way these events and policies are interconnected at very deep levels. We need to have a view of the whole tapestry as well as the individual threads. Perhaps we can then take the next step on the journey to a world in which women and men can work in genuine partnership for ecological sustainability and greater social justice.

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