The View From 1776

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Willingness of our ‘ally’ Russia, with its UN Security Council veto, cold-bloodedly to let Ukrainians freeze in the middle of winter is a small taste of what Saddam and Al Queda might have done to us if we had continued to rely exclusively on UN sanctions and inspections.

Socialist theory tells us that wars result only from the greed of capitalists lusting for profits from the blood of workers.  Socialist Russia’s power play is just the latest evidence countering such fictions inculcated by secular educators at our liberal universities.

If trade embargoes historically have been considered acts of war, then Russia recently went to war against Ukraine and potentially much of Western Europe, which gets as much as 25 percent of its natural gas from Russia.  To bully Ukraine for its Orange revolution that turned down Moscow’s hand-picked presidential candidate, an increasingly totalitarian and arbitrary Russia cut off natural gas supplies to Ukraine on New Years day.

Imagine the effect in the United States if Saddam were still in power in Baghdad and he had joined forces with Al Queda to curtail our petroleum supply. 

Liberal-progressives continue to comfort themselves with the head-in-the-sand faith that there was no such cooperation.  Facts now coming to light, however, reveal this to be self-deception.

The Wall Street Journal on January 13 reported “.... documents from Saddam’s own regime show that his government trained thousands of Islamic terrorists at camps inside Iraq before the war...” According to the Journal, Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard wrote that “..... from 1999 through 2002, “elite Iraqi military units” trained roughly 8,000 terrorists at three different camps—in Samarra and Ramadi in the Sunni Triangle, as well as at Salman Pak, where American forces in 2003 found the fuselage of an aircraft that might have been used for training. Many of the trainees were drawn from North African terror groups with close ties to al Qaeda, including Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Mr. Hayes writes that he had no fewer than 11 corroborating sources, and yesterday he told us he’d added several more since publication.” Those sources are Iraqi government documents seized after the fall of Baghdad and still being translated.

Had we continued to depend upon the UN and the mythical ‘community of nations’ operating under the equally diaphanous ‘rule of international law,’ Saddam and Al Queda could have pressured neighboring Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to stop shipments, as well as cutting off all Iraqi oil exports to us.  We can be sure that Iran would not have stepped in to help us with their oil.

For background, see Iraq: What Are We Fighting For?.

Liberal-progressives’ facile answer, of course, is to rely on alternative fuels.  But environmentalists among them have effectively foreclosed that route.

Coal, the most abundant and easily obtained source, is a no-no to environmentalists.  Ethanol requires roughly 1.7 gallons to produce one gallon of ethanol; using ethanol increases our use of foreign oil 70 percent per gallon.  Wind-power ‘farms’ require barren desert or leveling all trees for miles around; they are noisy, unsightly, and kill thousands of birds.  Both wind-power and solar energy panels necessitate vast acreage, and the energy produced is much more costly than using petroleum or natural gas.  Our lower-48 supplies of natural gas are running low, and environmentalists again have blocked drilling for oil or natural gas in ANWR, which can supply around a million barrels of oil per day.

Meanwhile, even if we find additional supplies of petroleum, it will do us no good.  Since the 1970s environmentalist have blocked construction of new oil refineries and terminals to import liquified natural gas.  Our oil refineries today run flat-out at capacity round the clock, except for repair and maintenance time, and still can’t supply peak demand.

Liberal-progressives have another facile answer: impose ‘windfall’ taxes on the oil companies.  This is a sure-fire way to get those companies to invest vast sums in finding and producing new petroleum sources?

If liberal-progressives’ demands for immediate pull-out in Iraq don’t allow Al Queda to destroy us, their environmental obstructionism will get the job done.

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