GM offers big price cut on Chevy Volt

[wercal]

55. Gasoline

Hey, I'm ex Army too, and I understand the sentiment with gasoline.

I actually believe the future lies with natural gas, and not electrics.

But, I also believe the dynamics of gasoline are slowly changing. Canada and the US are producing more oil than ever....our biggest foreign supplier has always been Mexico, and it still provides a huge amount of our oil. Other nations are making huge finds of oil....and the Saudis are exhausting their supply of incredibly shallow and easy to get at oil.

At some point, our presence in the Mideast is less about oil, and more about keeping the Suez open and our commitments to protecting Israel. I read a fascinating book called The High Cost of Peace, by a man named Bodansky. He is Israeli, and the book is on its face an anti-Clinton book, which concentrates on his efforts to broker a mid-east peace...from a right wing Israeli perspective. But along the way, in an almost incidental manner, he describes the events in the region prior to 9-11. He describes how Hussein and his son Uday became allied with Assad and his son (the guy who is in charge now)...and even performed joint military operations in the west part of Iraq to simulate an attack on Israel. And in general, there seemed to be a competition at the time to be the first to annihilate Israel, and become a non-secular 'savior' of the region...and a unifier of the region, which would eradicate colonial era boundary lines. Well, the Iranians stepped up their efforts with Hamas, and non government entities in Egypt wanted in on the act. Suddenly there was a race to see who could hit Israel first.

Then 9-11 happened. You may remember a video from that evening. It was a video of Palestinians around a campfire, shouting and firing in the air....then Arafat comes out of somewhere and tries to calm everyone down. What Arafat knew was that 9-11 was serious, and most of the world would unite with us, and the US would have a free pass to do extraordinary things in the region. And we did. And the byproduct of the Iraq and Afghan wars has been a continuous fleet presence in the Gulf, and essentially a 'superbase' in the region. And even today, many of the troops that left Iraq are now positioned in Jordan. So, for 12 years now, the US has had a huge presence in the region....but it may not particularly be about oil. It may be about protecting Israel (for better or worse).

I think we could go all-electric vehicle tomorrow, and we would still keep forces in the Mideast, for a very long time.