Victor Davis Hanson: Blood and Oil

It's a two-way addiction, actually, although only one side seems to realize that. Were Middle East oil production to cease today the world economy would certainly take a major hit - especially such oil-dependent areas such as the manufacturing industries and food production in industrialized farms. But the Middle East would go back to sand. Neither will happen in reality because neither side wants to afford it. And so we have an accommodation.

Except. Except that the surplus wealth of the West has fallen into the hands of those who did not earn it, not even in the form of pumping oil out of the ground. Thus far Hanson's piece takes us and I agree with him.

That wealth is, through the mechanism of Islamic charity, in the hands of people whose only trade is violence and whose only message is hatred and conquest. That drive and the need for the wealth that fuels it is the real addiction here, far worse than any oil addiction ascribable to the West. And the oil producers are as stuck with the situation as anyone - their money dries up and the fellows with the guns will be coming for them as well.

Energy independence for the United States will not stop this process, it will merely shift the source of the blackmail money to those same countries to which industrial manufacturing has been shifted. The latter is those countries' route to prosperity just as it was for the West before them. But along with that comes a dependence on oil and the nasty little parasites with turbans and RPG's that go along with it.

It means, essentially, that the problem is likely to be with us for a very long time to come. The best strategy to meet the problem is alternate sources of energy and that, like manufacturing, is likely to be a top-down process starting in the West. But up to now these have been too expensive to compete with oil in the open market. Before the money pumps to the Islamists go dry those alternatives will not only have to compete with oil, they'll have to sweep it from the marketplace, and they'll have to be in the hands of those whose religion does not lead them to fund killers.

It's a huge challenge but not impossible. Were the relations between private industry and populist ecology less sharply partisan, for example, a great deal might be accomplished by pooling their resources to the effort. Faction here is killing us.

And the situation with respect to the Middle East isn't stable either in the long run. A total dependence on an extraction economy that did not use its surplus wealth to create new economic engines is what brought the Spanish empire crashing down, never to rise again. This is a once-in-history opportunity for the Arab world and they're blowing it. And the cultural changes necessary to make them capable of exploiting the opportunity and turning it into more or less permanent prosperity are the same ones we've been debating so hard for the last decade or so - democracy, free markets, entrepreneurialism, empowerment of the individual, emancipation of women - these are being stoutly resisted by their principal beneficiaries. Islam will not build a society capable of doing this - it never has and it is constitutionally too afraid of all of those things to accommodate them. (So, for that matter, was communism.) That is not to say that Islam may not be practiced within such societies - it is today. But it cannot run them. IMHO.

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