By Robert Scheer

What’s it got to do with the price of gas? Would some reporter with access to the Republican presidential candidate please ask John McCain why he wants to continue President Bush’s Mideast policy when it has proved so ruinous for American taxpayers? Because McCain is determined to ignore our economic meltdown and shift the debate to foreign policy, shouldn’t he have to explain why an open-ended military presence in the Mideast will make us economically and militarily more secure when the opposite is clearly the case?

Let’s not waste too much time on the military side of the equation. The argument that troops on the ground have made us militarily more secure is absurd on its face. American resources and lives have been squandered in an inane effort that McCain aptly criticized before becoming a presidential candidate. As a Senate watchdog, he distinguished himself by sharply denouncing one defense contractor boondoggle after another in cases involving hundreds of billions for modern weapons that had nothing to do with fighting cave-based terrorists. But as a presidential candidate, McCain now unabashedly apologizes for every twist of the downwind spiral of the Bush administration foreign policy, from wasteful weapons to inhuman torture.

McCain’s strategy is clearly that of distracting attention from the calamitous economy by sounding the demagogue’s alarm about enemies at the gate. This week, McCain again blasted Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on the grounds that he underestimated the threat from Iran while ignoring the vast increase in Iran’s power—an increase actually resulting from Bush eliminating Iran’s only effective enemy, Saddam Hussein. The other winners in this folly have been the oil kingdoms that Hussein periodically threatened, led by the Saudi royal family. Seizing upon the opportunity presented by the 9/11 attacks, Bush knocked off not the Saudis, who had produced Osama bin Laden and 15 of his hijacker minions, but rather the royal family’s sworn enemy in Iraq, who had absolutely nothing do with 9/11.

And how did the Saudis thank us? Just check the price of oil, which has increased more than sixfold since 9/11. On Friday, Bush went to dine at Saudi King Abdullah’s bizarrely opulent horse farm and pleaded for an increase in oil production, but to no avail. Bush received the same rebuff in April 2005, when oil was selling for $54 a barrel. On Tuesday, it sold for $129, and the price rise is a good measure of Saudi gratitude for the Bush family’s unwavering support over past decades. Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, couldn’t have been more condescending when he turned down Bush’s request with the observation that “presidents and kings have every right, every privilege, to comment or ask or say whatever they want.” He added at a press conference, “How much does Saudi Arabia need to do to satisfy people who are questioning our oil practices and policies?”

Enough to get the price back down to where it was when we saved your sorry oil-well excuse for a country, you ingrate, Bush might have retorted. But our bold leader was too polite for anything like that. “He didn’t punch any tables or shout at anybody,” said Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal. “I think he was satisfied.” Why? Instead of pointing out that the Saudis could easily open their spigots in gratitude for our keeping them in power, the president threatened the Saudi king not with an invasion but with a U.S. recession. “My point to His Majesty,” Bush warned in an interview with The New York Times before encountering the great man himself, “is going to be, when consumers have less purchasing power because of high prices of gasoline—in other words, when it affects their families, it could cause this economy to slow down. If the economy slows down, there will be less barrels of oil purchased.”

He’ll show them—we’ll have a recession, our families will suffer and, boy, will the Saudis be sorry. A regular Teddy Roosevelt. There is no better measure of the failure of Bush’s foreign policy than that, five years after we conquered the second-most important pool of oil in the world, the American taxpayers who paid for this grand imperial adventure are rewarded with skyrocketing prices at the pump.

At least when Bush first hyped his Iraq invasion plan, he had Paul Wolfowitz telling Congress that Iraqi oil would more than pay for it all. Not so McCain, who is so charged with imperial hubris that he is willing to commit to a 100-year lease on Iraq without expecting a penny in oil revenue in return.

Robert Scheer’s new book, ”The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America,” will be released
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080520_paying_for_war_at_the_pump/

awesome read

YES IT WAS

More lies? Incredible.... All the GOP bashing won't hide this fact...

DEMS will just raise EVERYTHING.

Some people never learn.

LMAO YOU are right....SOME people never learn

Barack Hussein Obama, Mr. I refuse to wear an american flag on my lapel, Mr. I refuse to put my hand on my heart during the national anthem, Mr. I abstained from voting over 100 times as a junior senator, Mr. anti second amendment will fix everything. watch and learn people.

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
Abraham Lincoln

There is no politician running who has americas best interests at heart. Anybody who believe otherwise is infact a fool

It as simple as supply and demand along with the fear of the known fact that the whole world needs a lot of oil. They have it, you and everybody else uses it. The war has very little to do with the price of oil.....

Both sides have been complicit, neither side can keep their hands off the economy, when it's obvious that government intervention into any market causes prices to rise and quality to fall.

Just take a gander at our health care industry or our educational system.

"You really think some foriegn Army is going to come in here and overthrow America's system? Not Hardly, if the Republic dies, it will be from wounds that are self inflicted." Jesse Ventura.

This war is a sore subject with many, me included.

Gas? Yeah, it is a terrible and useful tool for all kinds of people. We the American public are in effect paying for terroism through the back door by our selfish use of this by product.

We have become a nation of wasteful people. Taking advantage of a good thing til we turn it into a bad thing. Isn't that the way of the people though? We get something new..love it...take advantage of it...then hate it.
The price of gas is expensive because we have such a high demand? Well, yeah, in a way. First off we have absolutely full tanks in our refineries. They are so full, they will need to clear them out soon. They are running out of space to store it. I am speaking of gas, not oil.

Now the deal is; we are sending diesel to other countries. Third world. Where they are the biggest consumers of diesel. We are the biggest users of gasoline. The oil in deisel form is more lucrative to the oil companies than gas. So, they send it out instead of blend it for our use.

Did you know we Americans....are in effect paying for wars against ourselves? The amounts being sent out is somewhere around 400,000,000,000. We pay that to have our gas. It is a fact that it surely does fund terroism. We are paying those that hate us to try and kill us. Then complain that our government isn't doing enough. Folks, we are as responsible as they are. We are paying for this gas. We are over using. We waste.

The clear and obvious way out of this is to force new ennovations for cleaner, less expensive and cheaper power. Lose the SUV'S, the big trucks, the play things that absolutely waste fuel and not just that, but the boats and wave runners that put filth and poison by way of fuel and oil in our water systems.(lakes)

It is estimated that if we continue this path that we will run out of gas in four years. That is; at the consumption we are in right now.

The nxt time we have an American attack....did we pay for it, by proxy?

Kat

I forgot; America has around a 25% interest in the worlds fuel supply. China a little more. The the middle east holds the rest.
Yet, we are the biggest users of all.

The US is the 3rd largest producer of crude oil in the world.

1-Saudi Arabia, 10.72 million barrels a day
2-Russia, 9.67
3-USA, 8.37
next is Iran which produces about half of what we do-4.12 million barrels a day.
5th is China

Okay???

I was reporting what my son told me, and the news. My son is a technician or technologist for a large oil company here.

He is the one that told me about the storage and diesel and gas thing. And the shares or holdings or wharever of the US compared to China and the middle east.
The rest came from the National news.

Thanks,
Kat

He was probably talking about proven reserves Kat. Whereby he is totally correct!
This might explain your earlier thread about running out in 4 yrs. The US has not opened up any new wells in almost 20 yrs, and will, without doing so, undoubtedly run out soon.

I bet he was talking about proven reserves...