Week of June 10- June 16, 2007

'Summer Re-Runs II'

This week we've posted another of our Sunday-format strips from 2005. The topic, once again, is foreign oil and our seeming inability to wean ourselves away from it.

Back in 2004--before the polls were so overwhelmingly negative toward the President and the war in Iraq--Americans were fairly well unified on a surprising issue: the importance of reducing dependence on foreign oil. Back then, even the conservative Hudson Institute reported that a significant majority of Americans were willing to forego low oil prices for reduced dependence on foreign oil.

The reason? A growing sense that the billions and billions we keep sending to the Middle East are being used to fund terrorism. I know, it sounds a little nutty. But, after you read an excerpt from a U.S. News and World Report article from 2003, you may change your position:

"The CIA's Illicit Transactions Group isn't listed in any phone book. There are no entries for it on any news database or Internet site. The ITG is one of those tidy little Washington secrets, a group of unsung heroes whose job is to keep track of smugglers, terrorists, and money launderers. In late 1998, officials from the White House's National Security Council called on the ITG to help them answer a couple of questions: How much money did Osama bin Laden have, and how did he move it around?"

"The queries had a certain urgency. A cadre of bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorists had just destroyed two of America's embassies in East Africa. The NSC was determined to find a way to break the organization's back. Working with the Illicit Transactions Group, the NSC formed a task force to look at al Qaeda's finances. For months, members scoured every piece of data the U.S. intelligence community had on al Qaeda's cash."

" The team soon realized that its most basic assumptions about the source of bin Laden's money--his personal fortune and businesses in Sudan--were wrong. Dead wrong. Al Qaeda, says William Wechsler, the task force director, was "a constant fundraising machine." And where did it raise most of those funds? The evidence was indisputable: Saudi Arabia. America's longtime ally and the world's largest oil producer had somehow become, as a senior Treasury Department official put it, "the epicenter" of terrorist financing."

"This didn't come entirely as a surprise to intelligence specialists. But until the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. officials did painfully little to confront the Saudis not only on financing terror but on backing fundamentalists and jihadists overseas. Over the past 25 years, the desert kingdom has been the single greatest force in spreading Islamic fundamentalism, while its huge, unregulated charities funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to jihad groups and al Qaeda cells around the world."

Since that article was printed four years ago, there's been a growing realization that our addiction to oil and the excesses it affords us is coming at a far greater price than a little disposable income. It may be the most expensive, destructive addiction the world has ever known.