No More Middle Eastern Oil! Give Us That Venezuelan Crude

Diana Moon is "beginning to wonder whether the whole issue of Middle East oil isn't a total red herring." Indeed it is. It really doesn't matter where we import our oil from - it only matters that we import oil. If we were totally self-sufficient, we could be a little less concerned about crises in the Middle East. But since we import oil, we do need to be concerned about the world supply. Even if we imported all of our oil from non-Mid-East sources, Mid-East supply shocks would hurt us just the same - it's a global market. Choosing not to import oil from the Mid-East, for other than market reasons, would be a bad idea - it would put us in a poor bargaining position with other suppliers, like Hugo C. So yes, it's a red-herring.

And what trail is the red-herring throwing us off of? The real reason we are doomed to seemingly perpetual strategic error in the Middle East is, of course, our relationship with Israel, pure and simple. Now that the cold war is over you'd think we could simply pledge to send a fleet of B-52's over any country that attacks Israel and that should pretty much take care of our obligations. But it's never that simple, is it?