Pulling the Plug on Oil

In his latest blog entry, "The Crazy Middle East", Victor Davis Hanson offers, among other things, a summary of displacements, oppressions, and occupations of people far worse than that of the Palestinians. His conclusion? The media has created and has elevated the crisis over and beyond much worse. His reasons? Oil. Fear. Anti-semitism.

But I think he misses something. And its strange that he would, since he has spent so much time writing about it. In other words, its the elites' hatred of the West. After all, it was a western democracy--the only western-like country in the Middle East--that drove the aboriginal benighted bedouins of the dunes from their unproductive lands and tents to set up a western liberal democracy, a western free market, all driven by the greedy, self-interest of western individualism with all its excesses, usually corporate.

Whatever good will and sympathy the Holocaust might have engendered for the Jews, Israel's war-making and continued ruthless defense disturbs our liberal idealists who are already disturbed with the untethered self-interest and voracious appetite of western economic engine. For a world-view that honors and holds the noble savage of any continent overrun by the West's insatiable imperialism, the displaced Palestinian is the Middle East's American Indian.

Which brings me to Hanson's (to me at least) more valuable proposal: pull the value of oil out from under the Middle East by setting free our American ingenuity and development of our energy options.

Oil, father of us all

In the end, all reasoning and calculation comes down to oil, not energy independence just a lessening of our need to import by about 5 million barrels or so on the world market. Let Brazil export duty-free ethanol; drill in Anwar and off our coasts; build 20 or so nuclear reactors to replace natural gas and power batteries at night of small commuter cars; up the fleet average gas mileage; develop oil tar and oil shale; use alternative energies—and do all that inclusively rather than in an either/or strategy, and we can collapse the world price, and with it the strategic importance of this dangerous, dysfunctional, and ultimately irrelevant part of the world.

Without oil and nukes, the Arab and Iranian Middle East has no hold on the world, no more than does Paraguay or the Ivory Coast or Bulgaria or Laos. We wish them well, but find Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, the House of Saud, Hamas, Khadafy, and all the rest, well, all too retro-7th-century for our tastes.

It is a solution that is kith and kin with Reagan's so-called "Star Wars Defense" which, if only in speaking about it, the West spent the gimping Soviet Union into oblivion.

My vote for 2008 goes to the first presidential candidate who proposes such a plan. There is stuff for both liberal and conservative to value and endorse.