Absolutely right.
“Fight the problem, not the natural resources that are occasionally in the same neighborhood.”
Here is where we disagree. Oil is not an “occasional” resource. On this stage of human development its, essentially, the blood life. Oil gives all that radicals you mention money to exercise their fantasies. Without money from oil they would remain insignificant and local problem. With the money they can and do export their problems to the whole world.
As much as Europeans pride themselves to be so enlightened, they would give no rats end, for example, to Palestinians if they were not afraid of another oil embargo crisis (the same as they absolutely cynically don’t care about Darfur, Rwanda and all other suffering in the world - bloviating without actions I discount). Even in its current military condition, Britain would blockade Iran (with our help of course) if they did not afraid to shut down a large chunk of oil supply coming from Iran.
So, I don’t see why your point should contradict his. To me, its an evil synergy of Islamism and oily appeasement: one amplifies an effect from another.
Please reconcile your point with each of the following:
Richard Reid
U.K. Train Bombings
Spain Train Bombings
Bali Night Club
Egypt's Tourist Murders
Theo Van Gogh
Danish Cartoons & aftermath
Kashmir
The Taliban
Southern Thailand
Somalia on any given day
Chechnya
Kosovo
“At the same time, vast oil profits do little to help — and probably much to harm — Middle Eastern countries. Unlike in places where economic achievement is the result of savvy business leaders, a hardworking labor force and a literate public, tribal hierarchies in the Middle East simply metamorphosed into billion-dollar nations by virtue of sitting atop crude oil.
One result is a big inferiority complex in the Middle East...
Another result is unstable societies...”
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So many tremendous statements in this article!
The First Law of Petropolitics
Thomas L. Friedman
When I heard the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declare that the Holocaust was a “myth,” I couldn’t help asking myself: “I wonder if the president of Iran would be talking this way if the priceof oil were $20 a barrel today rather than $60 a barrel.” When I heard Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez telling British Prime Minister Tony Blair to “go right to hell” and telling his supporters that the U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas “can go to hell,” too, I couldn’t help saying to myself, “I wonder if the president of Venezuela would be saying all these things if the price of oil today were $20 a barrel rather than $60 a barrel, and his country had to make a living by empowering its own entrepreneurs, not just drilling wells.”
Snip