OPINION:
The United States was only yesterday a supplicant at the oil bazaar, counting on the Saudis to be merciful by keeping OPEC a reasonable merchant, but that was then, and the United States is an oil exporter now. No more supplicant. America might even make a credible argument for membership in OPEC. South Dakota is not Saudi Arabia, but the fracking revolution has put America in league with the Arabs again, giving President Obama the opportunity to put aside his instinct for appeasement. For the foreseeable future, appeasement can be relegated to the past.
Both the Saudis and the Iranians are pumping oil furiously while attempting to make agreements to limit the decline in the price of oil. In a recession-prone world economy, an increase in consumption is severely limited. Even in league with the Russian producers, setting up oil cartels is considerably more difficult than it used to be. Even OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporters, was only partially able to control prices in its heyday, and then only for a short time and in a much narrower market.
As American exports grow, and they have already begun to grow, so will the free for all that is the global oil bazaar. Washington no longer need wink at the fact that radical Islamic terrorists obtain much of their financing from the Saudis, some of it indirectly from the fragile government that is the ruling family. The Saudis tremble, if only in their sandals beneath the hems of their robes, at the specter of the mullahs in Tehran carving out a Shia hegemony in the region. Tehran’s ability to reach across the Shia-Sunni divide to sponsor and supply Hamas in Gaza, originally a creature of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, is real and amply demonstrated. President Obama’s strategic intentions in the region, whatever they may be, have driven the Saudis into a tacit alliance with Israel, their sworn and bitter blood enemy of the recent past.
To expect the Obama administration, with its lack of foreign policy experience and consequent lack of foreign-policy success over the past seven years, to show the Saudis why they must put an end to radical Islamic excess probably is not a realistic wish. But such successful persuasion would go a long way toward defusing the radical terrorist sects in the Middle East, now coagulating in the Islamic State, sometimes called ISIS or ISIL.
Despite Mr. Obama’s “gradual campaign” to destroy the Islamic State — “destroy” was the president’s own unequivocal word — the Islamic State continues to be the prime menace to peace and security of the world. The incremental additions to American force used against it, even with moving the fearsome B-52 bombers into closer range in the region, is not enough.
Wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan taught the simple lesson that all war plans are rendered outdated and invalid with the firing of the first shot. Wars are won, in the pithy summation of Nathan Bedford Forrest, by “who gets there first with the most men.” There’s nothing subtle about that, and it’s the lesson taught in every academy where generals and admirals learn that only losers lead from behind.
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