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Links: FR Index of his articles: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson
His website: http://victorhanson.com/
NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp
New Link! http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/
The left did say by the A.N.S.W.E.R. crowd from the beginning this 'war' was blood for oil. Interesting thing, they did not give a rats behind when Saddam slaughtered innocent blood marketing his oil under the UN table. Looks like there is a 'war' within a 'war'.
It makes me wonder: if I were being slowly lowered into a vat of boiling oil, would I lift my feet?
Oil is everthing in the world today. Of course it's blood for oil. Without oil wealth these countries could not threaten us.
Yes, but oil is only a part of it. The basic cause is the Information Age, resulting from unprecedented advances in communication, transportation, and education throughout the world, all directly resulting from Western Civilization, with its liberality, liberty, benevolence, universal inclusiveness, and freedom of inquiry, speach, and belief.
This has raised the aspirations of people everywhere, resulting in an increased worldwide demand for oil and other resources. The aspirations of some are healthy, those of others pathological.
It has also revealed, to those who would destroy it, the weaknesses of Western Civilization, which is fundamentally responsible for the Information Age, notably the strain of decadence that is the Western Left, which renders the Western nations weakened and vulnerable, threatens to destroy Western Civilization from within, and makes the Western nations and their people increasingly vulnerable to predators who would destroy them from without.
It is ironic that the greatest accomplishments of Western Civilization should become the greatest threats to it. Behind it all is the age-old dual nature of mankind--good versus evil.
presume this's happening in lebanon. if true, how is it being allowed to continue? wasn't this supposed to be prohibited under settlemnet at end of crap/fighting last summer!!??
God gave this great country of ours the resources (oil) to not have to worry about this global threat from megalomaniacs.
It is the enemies within (MSM,DNC) that have so far succeeded in handicapping our ability to supply our own oil.
Clear and insightful...as usual.
It occurs to me that the conflict is not between the modern world and the backwards middle east. The conflict is between the abrupt modernization of the Arabs and their religious leaders who have not had the required time to "reform" Islam to the twenty first century.
The religious leaders then accuse the modern world of corrupting their faith.
The final solution will be for the Muslim religious leaders to update their religion.
bump
As usual, VDH has a pretty good handle on the topic.
I'm not sure though that even if energy independence could be achieved for the U.S. it would then serve to impoverish our enemies. They're going to sell their oil, and they're going to be wealthy from it. Who they sell it to won't make much difference.
So why not burn up theirs first? Save our reserves for when theirs runs out. OK, I'm mostly kidding about that, but not completely kidding.
Hanson finally writes as if he is addressing ordinary people...well, sort of.
At least he's not as wordy and obscure as he's almost always been.
Still, he's given to pedantics... but he's among the few to shake off the myopia that appears to plague the realization that we are fully engaged in World War 111...and are actually underwriting it.
and that only our enemy knows it...so far.
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.