Victor Davis Hanson: The Waiting Game. Do we really need further convincing of the threat we face?

If they want to kill us, why don't they do the next best thing and hurt us by cutting off the resource that they control

1) It would be an act of war & would be treated as such.

2) We'd be hurt, but we'd speed up work on alternatives. The US has large coal reserves & we don't touch them, cuz using oil is cheaper & cleaner.

3) Other resources in the world (think Canadian tar sands) would also be pushed into the world market.

4) Their population would starve, as most of their economies are oil based. Uprisings are more common when a population is starving & resources are needed to quell that sort of thing.

5) Bad mouthing the House of Saud is a popular pastime, but they increase production in a "West" friendly manner.

Iranian war games demonstrated Iranian consideration of the strategy you just raised. They will do it on their own schedule & when they do, game on! A decapitation strike will be among our first responses. Could be they're waiting for Chinese and/or Russian commitments. Meanwhile, using non-state actors is working to make the US as isolated as possible.

BTW, much of the early territorial wrangling in WWII involved securing energy resources. At the end of that war, Japan had been reduced to using most of its pine trees to keep its birds in the air. Kamikazes didn't have enough fuel to make it back "home" anyway. Germany had also resorted to using alternative fuels.

Excellent replies. And mine.

1. An act of war. So? 911 was an act of war. What would be different?

2. We need to speed up work on alternatives anyway, so that we can stop sending money to those who want to kill us.

3. Would this be bad?

4. As I said, they don't need our money. They can sell oil to China and get dollars and use them to buy food on the world market. But if they were in danger of starving I doubt they'd risk bringing the famine on by trying to kill us which would prevent us from buying their oil.

5. Sorry I don't understand this one or how it answers why they don't try to hurt us by cutting off the oil flow.

Thanks!

Does it make sense we give money to those who want to kill us? Does it make sense that those who want to kill us keep sending us oil, instead of cutting us off? I get the feeling we are better friends than we are being allowed to see. In high school guys would have fake fights just to get the student body stirred up. I wonder if nations have fake fights, sacrificing what they consider to be acceptable losses in terms of citizens, soldiers, assets, to profit elsewhere in some way.

Somehow, a drunk Mel Gibson's words are a 2 week media frenzy; a killer in Seattle who says "I did it because I hate Jews" or a killer in San Francisco who called himself a terrorist, do not get any more than the merest documentation in mass media, then are dropped from the news cycle forever.

You can get ratings with Mel Gibson's words. And you can't serve the liberal agenda and beat up on Bush by lingering on domestic al-Qaedans.

The media is no longer about "informing". Instead, it is all about "influencing". Or getting rating points...so you can "influence" even more.

But you knew that...

I'm just asking, why are we funding those who want to kill us? Is there a better answer than the conspiracy theory?

Try "Because we don't have much choice in the matter -- the liberal enviros having blocked off access to our own sources of oil and efficient alternative energy sources (coal), while demanding a complex diet of boutique fuels that tax our limited refining and distribution capacity."

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