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By Root 735 0

a growing international competition for raw materials, primarily between China and India, but involving other nations as well. This competition includes oil, iron ore, and other minerals. The China-India rivalry is important, because it affects world commodity prices and it has political ramifications. For example, China has been reluctant to press Sudan’s government to allow foreign peace keepers into the Darfur region, where the Sudanese government has conducted a genocidal ethnic war against local tribes, in part because Sudan is an increasingly important source of oil for China. This competition also reveals a dependency in terms of China, in particular, sustaining its economic growth. which can become useful in developing opportunity analysis. Oil and natural gas are also important economic intelligence issues for several reasons. The most obvious is their effect on the domestic economy.

In addition, the high international energy prices of the last several years are important factors in the re-emergence of a more powerful Russia and in the less compelling power of problematic states like Venezuela and Iran. There is also another nexus to terrorism, as the Saudi oil fields are both a target for terrorists as a means of disrupting western economies, one of al Qaeda’s stated goals and an economic opportunity, should they succeed in taking over the Saudi kingdom.

HEALTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Health and environmental issues are relatively new to the intelligence agenda. They have sometimes been treated as one issue but are now more often treated separately. The health issue gained increasing prominence because of the AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) pandemic and smaller outbreaks of deadly diseases such as the ebola virus and SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in East Asia. The intelligence task with respect to health is largely one of tracking patterns of infection, but a large gap exists between intelligence and policy. Take AIDS as an example. The causes, means of infection, and results of AIDS are well known. Although the disease strikes people worldwide, some areas, notably eastern and central Africa, have extremely high concentrations of AIDS cases. The intelligence community’s ability to track rates of infection and mortality has little effect on any useful international policy. Many of the African governments that face the highest rates of AIDS infection have chosen, for a variety of reasons, to ignore or even to deny their health crisis. The same had been true of the government of China, although it now admits the seriousness of the AIDS problem. In the case of Africa, local culture is a major factor in the spread of AIDS: toleration of polygamous relationships; low literacy rates, thus making even minimal efforts at education about prevention more difficult; and minimal use of prophylactics. Nor is it clear what these nations or the international community should be doing in the absence of any cure for the disease. Outsiders’ attempts to change the cultural factors that facilitate the spread of AIDS would not only be difficult to make but also would probably be resisted as interference.

A major issue surrounding health-related crises is tracking official foreign government statements against other intelligence to determine both the extent of the health problem and the openness of the government involved. This has been a point of contention with China over SARS. For the United States, two issues are involved. One is the duty to warn, as in terrorism, that is, to alert U.S. citizens and others about potential health risks overseas. The other is an insight into the behavior of another government. Tracking an issue of this sort is a combination of covert intelligence (such as SIGINT between foreign officials) and open sources (such as reports by travelers, hospital admissions, larger than normal requests for drugs, and so on).

Again, there is a nexus to terrorism. Outbreaks of certain diseases (such as anthrax, smallpox) must be studied to determine if they are natural occurrences or terrorist