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One Thing Missing From President Bush's Speech
By Allan Saxe, WBAP Political Analyst There was only one important thing missing from President Bush's otherwise magnificent speech to the nation recently. The missing item was our unbelievable and unwise dependence on imported oil. It is hard to know whom to criticize first, President Bush or past presidents like President Clinton. The importation of oil into our country and much of the western world has made us very vulnerable. We have always known this, and so does Osama bin Laden and his band of terrorists. His real aim, from his own writings, is to destabilize his native country, Saudi Arabia. He views it as a corrupt regime, propped up by American and western interests. His real target is Saudi Arabia and if he can overthrow the kingdom he will turn it into another Iran or Iraq. Think of the tragedy of that scenario! If you remember the problem of Iran and its takeover by the Ayatollah Khomeini and his allies, Saudi Arabia's revolution will be much worse. Almost forgotten by many is that the Gulf War was fought about oil. The western world needed to protect both Kuwait and primarily Saudi Arabia from Iraq. If Iraq had taken Saudi Arabia and Kuwait much of the world's oil would be in Saddam's hands. So over 500,000 troops were dispatched to protect our way of life and rightly so. If Saudi Arabia can be captured by a terrorist regime in a revolution the entire Arabian Peninsula will be in the hands of extremely unfriendly interests. That alone may force us to go to war to protect our oil supplies or else to place our foreign and even domestic policies in deep jeopardy. Remember before the Iranian revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini was in exile in France. After the Iranian revolution the Ayatollah returned to Iran victorious and triumphant. And for over twenty years now, Iran has nurtured terrorists, and been a troublemaker for much of the western world. Would bin Laden's return to Saudi Arabia be the same! In this light, it is understandable, though very distasteful that the United States in order to stop the Osama terrorist network will take on some very bad allies. As of this writing we are going along with a lifting of sanctions against the Sudan (which has slavery of Christians in the south) cozying up to Syria (home to many terrorist groups), and will not even place Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist bases to go after. Our main priority now is to stop the bin Laden group from destabilizing countries and eventually pick off Saudi Arabia. To paraphrase Churchill during World War II, we will make a pact with the devil to stop bin Laden. During President Bush's magnificent speech to Congress he should have declared a war on imported oil. He should have laid out an emergency plan with government help in every way to turn our economy away from imported oil. It could have been done. Remember we are now spending billions to help the airline industry and will spend billions more fighting terrorism, billions rightfully spent. But why not spend billions subsidizing the transportation industry to adopt more fuel saving vehicles. These days are perfect for a new industry, free of imported oil. We are more united, patriotic than in many years. What an opportunity to lead the nation in a new direction, talked about for decades, but never accomplished. Let us hope that Osama bin Laden
will be stopped soon. And that Saudi Arabia will not be turned into
another Iran. We still have a little time to mobilize the nation toward
a new energy policy. But I fear that we will miss the opportunity.
Listener Comments WBAP, I realize how 'dependent' we are on imported oil for our day-to-day consumption. This has only become worse during the eight years of Clinton/Gore, beholden as they are (were) to the Ecology Extremists and the NIMBYs. Actually, this 'dependence' is a reflection of the international market ~ it is cheaper to buy oil from overseas producers than to explore and produce it domestically. What I have heard no one else express, however, is that the as-yet untapped pools of domestic oil and gas represent a Strategic Reserve, secure where it lies, waiting for us to find it and bring it to market, when we need it. Given a sufficient crisis, market forces would then make it feasible to uncap some existing wells to cover our needs until new production comes on-line. Until such time, we can continue to deplete their resources, for as long as they are willing to let us. I, for one, would be willing to pay a few more cents per gallon of gasoline at present, as a small personal sacrifice, in order to preserve this national asset which would be priceless in a major crisis, perhaps one such as what we now face. In a time of war, the overseas shipping lanes would be vulnerable to interdiction; thus our only secure source for petroleum would be in continental North America. Even if all petroleum-fired internal combustion engines suddenly went away tomorrow, we would still need huge amounts of crude oil just to produce other petrochemical derivatives, for lubricants, plastics, medicines and myriad other products essential to our way of life. To some extent I agree with
Mr. Saxe, although I do not know that President Bush really 'missed'
this issue in his speech. That was not necessarily the place and time
to address it. I do believe that the current situation will highlight
the need to decrease our dependency on foreign oil.
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