The War on Blitzkrieg

Noted historian, conservative Democrat, Victor Davis Hanson, argues for energy independence in this well written piece. The problem with our War on "Terror" (I'm going to start calling WWII, "The War on Blitzkrieg") is we let Saudi Arabia and to a lesser degree, Pakistan, off the hook, because they are our "allies." The US needs to do more in not only cracking down on foriegn fighters in Iraq, but Saudi funded propoganda that permeats American Islamic mosques and so-called Islamic civil rights organizations. Foriegn governments should not be allowed to disseminate propoganda in our country.

In our petroleum-paranoid world, ``No blood for oil'' was the common smear against removing oil-rich Saddam Hussein. Yet after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the global price skyrocketed. The shady deals of French and Russian oil consortia and the rot of the U.N. oil-for-food program were at last exposed. And Iraq's oil industry was, for the first time, under democratic control.
No matter. The conspiracy-minded still alleged that America always uses its military power to secure corporate petroleum -- as if there were oil in Grenada, Panama, Mogadishu, Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo or Afghanistan....

Greedy autocrats in these Middle Eastern nations then masked their new stranglehold on the lucrative industry by perennially citing the past sins of Western oil companies and their governments. The Arab ``street'' still saw little of the profits but heard much about how their poverty was supposedly the result of Westerners.
Terrorists like Osama bin Laden soon found ways to shake down petro-rich illegitimate governments. Such regimes gave money and help to Islamist radicals, who in turn blamed Middle East misery on the ``crusaders'' who once created but now supposedly kept ``stealing'' the wealth of the Arab people. In the Orwellian world of petro-logic, sheikdoms and juntas that gouge 90 percent profits on each barrel pumped from the desert somehow have convinced their people that they still are daily victims of beer-bellied and twanged Texans.....

And without oil thirst, the world might shun a country like Saudi Arabia for the brutal practice of Shariah law, religious intolerance and subsidies for global anti-Semitic and anti-Western propaganda....Free-market libertarians reply that our oil is simply a commodity like anything else -- oblivious that current enemies of the United States are parasites and cannot even craft the weapons they use against us without a Middle East awash in petrodollars. Some environmentalists prove just as clueless. Even as Russian and African polluters frantically pump without American-style regulations, these well-meaning activists argue that we should not drill in a responsible fashion in small areas in Alaska and off our coasts to feed our own appetite.
If the left would push nuclear power and more drilling, and the right would push more mandatory efficiency standards and alternative fuels, the United States could cut its imports and collapse the world price.....Mercury News