April 15, 2007
THE OIL CURSE via Gene Brown):
It's the Oil, Stupid (Victor Davis Hanson, 4/12/07, Real Clear Politics)
It is usually silly to offer a single solution to complex problems. But it's hard not to when looking at the serial savagery in Iran and the Arab world.Oil -- the huge profits it provides and the insidious influence it gives those selling it -- explains most of the world's worries over the Middle East. [...]
When nations acquire collective wealth gradually through their own industry, a middle class can arise. But in the Middle East, a few tribal and religious sects with oil are fabulously wealthy; most everyone else is abjectly poor. Illegitimate monarchies and jittery dictatorships -- always in fear of coups, terrorists and revolutions -- depend upon oil-needy foreigners, trading scarce oil and endless petrodollars for export goods and protection.
If the United States could curb its voracious purchases of foreign oil by using conservation, additional petroleum production, nuclear power, alternate fuels, coal gasification and new technologies, the world price might return to below $40 a barrel.
That decline would dry up the oil profits of those in the Middle East who now so desperately use them to ensure that their own problems must also be the world's.
MORE:
-TELEVISION: Addicted to Oil (Thomas L. Friedman, Discovery Channel)
Unless I missed something, the coal-gassification plant hasn't been approved.
IL and TX were in the running.
Posted by: Sandy P at April 15, 2007 10:16 PMYea and none of the LNG facilities, wind farms and geothermal facilities slated for California have been approved - they were and are amidst being shut down by environmentalists...but of course, it's all America's fault.
Posted by: KRS at April 15, 2007 11:36 PMWhen did Hanson join the blame America first gang?
As has been said ad nauseum, raising the price of oil past where our patience ends will result in our exercising some of our other energy options and the sheiks will be left with a big pool of viscous black goo and few customers for it.
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at April 16, 2007 7:00 AM
Since it's partly our fault. Anglo-American policy has long been based on propping up and installing authoritarians to keep the oil flowing. That's why Jim Baker and GHWB kept Saddam in place.
Posted by: oj at April 16, 2007 10:00 AMThey kept Ssddam Hussien in place because they blanched from the chaos of the Endsieg. It was a reasonable course of action, that, to muddle through with the status quo, using dictators to restain the jailhouse from dissolving into chaos.
Never lose sight of the pathological instability inherent in the Mohammadan system. "No compulsion in relligion," the apologists for the "religion of peace" pretend. Yet we know this for a lie. The system unifies religion and the state, which is pure compulsion.
Who could not have forseen it? We had just seen the unleashing of purgative chaos in the Balkans.
Hanson may well wish for an aternative universe in which there is no oil and no Israel. He knows History and he knows war.
Posted by: Lou Gots at April 16, 2007 12:16 PMIt's certainly reasonable to favor oil prices over God given rights, just evil. The evil is made easier to swallow when you dehumanize the victims, as your jailhouse mantra does.
Islam will long outlast Israel and oil.
Posted by: oj at April 16, 2007 1:40 PMLong live Islam. I have no problem with Islam as long Moslems live though the ages without antagonizing us.
Dehumanization? On the contrary, we pray for the liberation of our neighbors groaning inside the spiritual jailhose as we prayed for the liberation of our neighbors suffering through the Communist nightmare.
The dehumanization is to accept the loved Egyptian night for the lesser breeds, as though they deserved no better.
Posted by: Lou Gots at April 16, 2007 5:34 PM
On the contrary. I pray for the succor of the inmates, as I prayed throughout my liftime fot the liberation of the inmates of Communism from that jailhouse.
The dehumanizing position is to abandon our neighbors to endless oppression, as if to say that that the loved Egyptian night is good enough for the lesser breeeds.
Posted by: Lou Gots at April 16, 2007 6:17 PMIslam is humanizing. The comparison to Communism invidious. The invocation of Egypt, a secular regime, is dispositive.
Posted by: oj at April 16, 2007 7:39 PM