February 04, 2006

Blackmail of the U.S. by the Islamofascists via Oil? It’s Not Gonna Happen

In the post right before this one, I noted:

Ahmadinejad wants to convince the world that, due to his control over a significant part of the world's oil supply, that position of affairs has already been reached -- Iran can use its oil to blackmail the world right now -- the world is already unable (so Ahmadinejad wants us to believe) to prevent Iran from forcing other nations to do its bidding.

Could this work? Could Ahmadinejad be right?

He's not right. First, the Arab nations want the money that they get from the U.S. They want those petrodollars. They have no intention of actually cutting off the only source of income to their otherwise bankrupt economies.

Second, the opposition of the U.S. Libs to war for oil, depends on the supply of oil not actually being threatened. If oil to the U.S. were cut off or severely restricted, all the Libs who are currently shouting, "No war for oil," would immediately start yelling, "War for oil!" so they could drive their S.U.V.'s.

Third of all, the Islamofascists do not actually have us in a situation with no options -- "over a barrel" so to speak. Within a few years we could have a domestic oil shale industry running that would make the U.S. energy independent. From the U.S. Department of Energy, April, 2005:

Gasoline via oil shale becomes financially viable at a price of $40 - $60 per barrel. Knowing all this should be enough to keep the Islamofascists from even trying to blackmail us. But if Iran gets the atomic bomb, they will use that for additional leverage. Iran must not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons.

Islamofascists Make A Possibly Fatal Misstep - Threatening the MSM on Which They Depend

The nonsense this past week about Islam telling the West that the West can no longer have free speech, is of a piece with an observation I made recently about Iran:

Ahmadinejad wants to convince the world that, due to his control over a significant part of the world's oil supply, that position of affairs has already been reached -- Iran can use its oil to blackmail the world right now -- the world is already unable (so Ahmadinejad wants us to believe) to prevent Iran from forcing other nations to do its bidding.

The surrender of Gaza by Israel to the Palestinians has no doubt encouraged this. Fundamentalist Islamists are so encouraged that they feel the time is right to declare themselves our masters.

It is likely that they also realize that with the tremendous gains of freedom in the Middle East, time may be running out for them to make such a declaration. From Mark Steyn (on 12-5-05):

Meanwhile, Iraq's experiment in Arab liberty has had ripple effects beyond its borders, pushing the Syrians most of the way out of Lebanon, and in Syria itself significantly weakening Baby Assad's regime. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who's spent years as a beleaguered democracy advocate in Egypt, told the Washington Post's Jim Hoagland the other day that, although he'd opposed the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, he had to admit it had "unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon's 1798 expedition did. Elections in Iraq force the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only to fight against us. Look, neither Napoleon nor President Bush could impregnate the region with political change. But they were able to be the midwives."

The tide is turning against Islamic fundamentalism in the heart of the Mid-East; Islamists realize this may be their last chance to seek to blackmail the West via oil to do its bidding.

But the demands of the Islamofascists were met by a massive reprinting of the cartoons in many European publications, and the broadcasting of them on TV.

The greatest significance of this is that radical Islamists have made a potentially fatal misstep: they have threatened the very mainstream media on which they depend. Surely every reporter in the free world has just realized that his livelihood is threatened and that the fundamental Islamists would like to tape over his mouth.