VDH on the War within the War

That's Victor Davis Hanson, classicist and military historian for the uninitiated:

The truth is that as long as American petroleum demand, coupled with restrictions on our own energy development, helps drive the world oil price up, we are simply funding psychopaths who otherwise would have no viable economic means of support. Without Saudi petrol money, Wahhabism, the godhead of Islamic fascism, devolves into just another localized lunatic sect. So we talk seriously about new alternative energy, and seriously do nothing — in the vain hope that the price soon collapses or, barring that, we can stop the guy on a motorbike in Damascus or Ramadi from delivering millions in cash satchels from Saudi financiers to al Qaeda killers.

Yet, when the fifth anniversary of this war approaches this September, we are no closer to energy independence than we were in 2001. There is no better proof of this than our continual appeasement of rich sheiks who have ensured that the venom of their own incoherent imams reaches billions.

Finally, there are a number of influential Americans — let us be frank — who want us to forfeit this effort in Iraq. For some prominent Democrats, like a Sen. Kennedy or Sen. Durbin, who compares our wartime military on occasion to Saddam’s Baathists or Nazis, it is an issue of simple partisanship. If Iraq blows up in the face of the United States, and we can still avoid another September 11, then they wager that Bush and his cohorts, in the manner of a wrecked Johnson or Nixon administration, might alone suffer the political consequences. For them, collateral damage to America is worth the risk incurred by their own sleazy rhetoric.

Wonder if Teddy Kennedy will be able to keep it in his pants once American women are required to wear burkas?