How to get Dems to answer: Do you support oil hegemony foreign policy?

[yurbud]

Foreign policy strategists in both parties have talked about the importance of controlling the oil in the Middle East and Central Asia as the world's supply begins to decline, though elected officials rarely do.

The problem with this policy is that we pay with our tax dollars, soldiers' lives, and will have to live with generations of hatred from the people in other countries we harm with this policy. The only ones who profit are the oil companies, and secondarily, military and other contractors.

I would like to hear my congressmen and senators address this directly and say whether they support the policy, and strip it bare of the embarassing and condescending bullshit about terrorism, WMD, and democracy.

I have been a consistent doubter of John Kerry here, but remarkably, he addressed this pretty clearly last week at the Council on Foreign Relations:

Real Security in a Post-9/11 World: Remarks by Senator John Kerry

December 8, 2005
New York, New York

And ultimately, that means we must liberate ourselves from (sic\and) the Middle East itself from the tyranny of dependence on petroleum, which has frustrated every impulse towards modernization in the region, while giving its regimes the resources to avoid choices and hold on to power.

We have to understand that the hostility to America and to our values that feeds the jihadist threat is the product of many decades of repressed debate within the Middle East. We’ve become the convenient excuse for the failures of rulers, and a convenient target for the frustrations of the ruled. And frankly, we’ve made that possible by signaling Arab regimes that we don’t much care what they do so long as they keep pumping the oil and keep the price low. That attitude has to end, not only end, it must be reversed.

Energy independence is not a pie-in-the-sky concept. It’s not just a dream. It’s a domestic priority for our country, obviously, but is much more. It is essential to our national security, because our reliance on their oil limits our ability to move them towards the needed reforms and actually props up decaying and sometimes corrupt regimes, including those that support terrorist groups.

Any long-term strategy for winning the war on terror therefore must include a much more determined effort to reduce our dependence on petroleum. So many opportunities, stunning opportunities, stare us in the face. But none, not even in this recent energy bill, have been seized with the urgency that our security demands.

These efforts also have to be international in nature, linked to the rapid emergence of new technologies, in order to ensure that economies like China and India don’t just replace us as the enabler of Middle East autocrats...

http://www.cfr.org/publication/9390/