Christopher Caldwell: Kerry's oil weapon

[AmyStrange]

Christopher Caldwell: Kerry's oil weapon
Fri Jun 11,10:25 PM ET
By Christopher Caldwell

FROM: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ft/20040612/bs_ft/1086940159207&cid=1106&ncid=1935
John Kerry (news - web sites) has just spent two weeks showcasing the national security plan with which he hopes to defeat George W. Bush in November. This plan is built around four "imperatives": to repair alliances, modernise the US military, strengthen intelligence-gathering and "free America from its dangerous dependence on Mideast oil". Recent headlines make this fourth pillar sound far-sighted. Twice in the past month or so, groups linked to al-Qaeda have murdered westerners in Saudi oil facilities. Rebels have carried out two disruptive attacks on Iraqi pipelines. And the price of oil has reached $42 a barrel. Although it has since fallen on the strength of a Saudi promise to increase production, the price of petrol remains more than $2 a gallon in the US, up by roughly one-third this year.

Mr Kerry is yoking America's worst domestic memory (the long petrol queues of the 1973 and 1979 oil crises) to its biggest foreign fear (September 11-style terrorism). The strategy has its risks. When he blames Mr Bush's foreign policy for the insecurity that drives up petrol prices, or when he says "No young American in uniform should ever be held hostage to America's dependence on oil in the Middle East", Mr Kerry - who opposed the Gulf war in 1991 but backed the Iraq (news - web sites) war in 2003 - can sound like a tie-dyed protester in a European square chanting: "No blood for oil". He ignores the structural factors that drive prices higher, including rising demand from China and India, refining bottlenecks in the US and the slowness of foreign suppliers to adapt to US emissions standards.

Yet voters are on Mr Kerry's wavelength. They are beginning to find the non-economic price they pay for oil unacceptably high. And they are unaccountably willing, given that they live in a capitalist system, to blame the economic price on the government. When pollsters at CBS asked "Can the president control gas prices?" 58 per cent responded in the affirmative.


With the fortunes of Saudi Arabia's hardline Wahhabi strain of Islam in general, and of Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) in particular, so tightly linked to oil, Mr Bush has failed to reduce American dependence on it - except to promise drilling in the Alaskan wilderness, which for now is politically unattainable. Mr Kerry, on the other hand, has always been obsessed with oil dependence. The single thing almost every American knows about Mr Kerry - courtesy of the Bush campaign's negative television advertising - is that 10 years ago he proposed a 50-cent-a-gallon petrol tax.

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My take: Kerry won't allow the drilling in the Alaskan preserves . That's one of my favorite things about him,

d

[mhr]

1. He'd Be Right, Drilling In ANWR Will Not Help Our Oil Dependence Problem

There is just too little oil there to make a difference.

[AmyStrange]

2. exactly

but selling that to the undecides is the trick which is why its probably better not to mention it. It's probably a non-item though (in my opinion) because people are learning more about oil production because of the Iraq takeover than they would have otherwised,

d