Oil is where the defense industry, the fossil fuel industry and the Bush dynastic regime intersect.
The largest single consumer of oil in the U.S. is our government.
Within the government, by far the largest user of oil are our highly mobile and far flung armed forces.
Taxes and deficit spending pay for our armed forces.
Protecting access to its oil is one of - if not the - principal reasons our armed forces are in the Middle East.
The principal reason Osama bin Laden cites for his violent antagonism toward us is the presence of our armed forces in the Middle East.
Our military is the most expensively equipped, trained and supplied armed force in the history of mankind, adjusting for inflation, per capita, however you want to look at it. It is certainly the most lethal. But the cost of killing a single enemy combatant, never mind the innocent, has never been so high.
Over and above the treasure committed to what passes for a normal 'defense' budget, the actual costs of war in the Middle East are off budget, i.e put on the national credit card ... because conventional strategic logic says we have no choice but to pay for protecting our oil jones, even though we can't afford what that actually costs.
Taxpayers and snowballing debt fund our military at enormous, unquestioned expense to protect not only our Middle Eastern allies, but American oil companies doing business with them.
One sop tossed us by our Middle Eastern allies is their purchase of advanced and very expensive U.S. weaponry. The result is they are all grossly oversupplied with hi tech military gear they are incapable of using.
These are weapons whose development and initial manufacturing costs were paid by U.S. taxpayers. Yet the kickbacks from our oil rich Middle Eastern allies go to the defense industry, not to U.S. taxpayers via the U.S. government.
Though our Middle Eastern allies have plenty of advanced weaponry, they cannot use it, so it is our taxpayer and debt funded armed forces that continue to defend their oil.
The only folks who have won big time since the Bush regime invaded the Middle East are those who benefit from $ 147 a barrel oil and war - whether the war is justified or not. That would be the defense industry, the oil industry and our Middle Eastern allies. And the coffers of the Bush family, of course, heavily invested as they have been in both the defense and oil business. (Since he's a principal heir to the Bush family fortune, has the loser-in-chief recused himself? No?)
We cannot pull the armed forces we can no longer afford out of the Middle East because that would endanger access to its oil.
Our government doesn't have money to fund the only realistic way to get off our oil jones: a crash program in alternative energy. We can't fund it because we have incurred so much debt using deficit spending to give to a defense industry outfitting a military we cannot afford whose principal purpose is defending our access to Middle Eastern oil.
Is this the illogic of a fatal addiction?