Saddam's American Assistants

The opportunity of using US air power to destroy Saddam's armor and his poison and nuclear facilities, without waiting for the slow comedy of "world support," has been squandered. The technical objections that have been voiced are limp. Saddam's tanks are not small bands of Viet Cong hiding in the jungle; they are sitting ducks in the desert, their armor vulnerable to titanium-tipped rockets and their external fuel tanks on the obsolete Soviet models ignitable by incendiary ammunition. Such a strike, we are told, would have offended America's friends. What friends? In international relations, friends are made by success; and the fren-zied wails of academia would have been a fringe benefit.

Instead, US service women are forced to wear long sleeves in the 120øF heat lest they offend Saudi sensibilities, while Saudi princes gamble at the Riviera. For $9 billion in debt cancellation, Bush is buying another 1,000 Egyptian soldiers as window dress-ing that will impress nobody, and more is to be handed out to Jordan's double-dealing pipsqueak. Instead of delivering a quick and resolute air strike, America is now panhandling around the globe to pay for this expensive posturing; and in Helsinki, the American paper tiger met the Soviet church mouse to buy the latter's approval with oil technology and other concessions (sell-ing out the Balts?)--concessions to a third-world country in dis-array where nothing is certain except that it still has the world's mightiest military machine and weapons arsenal.

Make no mistake on whose side time is on: Saddam can take any blockade much longer than US public opinion can withstand the still subtle, but increasingly strong Vietnam-type anti-war propaganda by NPR, CNN, and the other brainwashers who ulti-mately determine US policy.

The idea of American know-how and treasure being used to produce oil in Siberia while forbidding its use in Alaska and in vast stretches along the US coast is preposterous. These unused tens and possibly hundreds of billions of barrels of oil (who knows the amount when even exploration is forbidden?) lie unused and blocked by the Better People from Sierra Club to Greenpeace and Wilderness Society. The paradox has been well formulated by Competitive Enterprise Institute president Fred Smith: "[Bush] is willing to send 50,000 troops to the Middle East, but he won't send a nasty letter to the Sierra Club. What kind of policy is it that is willing to risk American boys but not American beaches?"

Iraq produced 2.8 million barrels per day [Mb/d], of which the US imported less than 0.01 Mb/d, or less than 10 times the amount by which US crude oil production has declined since 1984. If US exploration and production were unleashed from its fetters, Iraqi oil would be as salable in the US as a side of pork in a Baghdad supermarket.

Freeing American oil will take longer than it would take a more resolute president to defeat Iraq; yet neither are permanent solu-tions to provide the energy for transportation by road and rail. For a decade or two, natural gas may be a partial answer. It is more abundant and less polluting, though its use in transportation would require major changes. Such major changes in engine design and fuel distribution are not unknown; a free market handled them pretty well when hay gave way to gasoline.

But looking decades ahead, what is likely to be the ultimate solution? Electric vehicles, clearly. No, not the clumsy, range-limited piles of batteries on wheels, but an electric car using a regular battery only to get onto and off the electrified highway, where it will be powered from subterranean cables via a pick-up coil. For the money now spent on posturing in the desert, an im-pressive start could be made on such a system.

Yes, Saddam is a brute, just like America's latest ally Syria's Assad, with little enough to distinguish these two from the other Arab autocrats. But these enemies of civilization are comparative-ly powerless, or would be if civilization defended itself. The enemy right at your own throat is not Saddam; it is the Sierra Club.