The American Politics Thread

 Such is the overwhelming amount of information on a daily basis that I think people are not rewinding their news tapes to refresh memory......

As President George W. Bush stated in his 2006 State of the Union Address to the nation:  “Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy.  And here we have a serious problem:  America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world” (January 31, 2006).  From the mouth of the nation’s top leader, the U.S. suffers from an addiction.  Most modern machinery runs on oil and its utility is seen in everyday products from plastics to cosmetics, from paint to lubricants, and, most especially, as a source of fuel for the modern combustion engine.  Over time, to feel “normal”, the addict develops an abnormal psychological dependency on the addictive substance and will utilize any means to obtain the drug in spite of cultural or moral restraints.  In the case of oil, this abnormal dependency has led the United States to engage in bribery and corruption to obtain oil, from control of markets to the exclusion of countries from such commerce, from the overthrow of regimes deemed belligerent because of their attempts to take control of their own oil resources to outright murder, assassination, and war.  Indeed, few Americans today doubt that the recent eight-year war on Iraq (2003-2011) was conducted primarily to obtain oil.  And this is why veteran scholar on the politics of oil, Dr. Michael Klare, concludes in his article that:  “the Strait of Hormuz will undoubtedly remain the ground zero of potential global conflict in the months ahead”

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