Now Everybody Agrees: It's All About Oil

Bush's Tuesday night claim that "America is addicted to oil" was perhaps the speech's most memorable line. Notwithstanding its catchiness, the rhetoric of energy independence has been a staple of Presidential Addresses since Nixon. Bush is simply participating in a venerable American tradition: telling uneasy voters that, if not for the black gold, the U.S. could more or less avoid the whole messy Middle Eastern region. Such arguments play well with both parties, because they suggest that the U.S. itself isn't the real motivator behind these entanglements -- they are simply the result of international pressures beyond American control. We didn't really want two wars with Iraq or military bases in Saudi and Qatar -- these facts were thrust upon us by oil and geopolitics.

But this is all too easy, because such claims invert the real causal chain. It's the American logic of security, the need to eliminate all domestic threats and to minimize risk, that perpetuates our aggressive stance in the region since 9/11. We're witnessing domestic politics playing out on the global stage, rather than the other way around. It might be a bit surprising to see Bush speak about oil addiction, given his insistence that we aren't in Iraq for oil. But, on another level, it's quite consistent. The Administration has always maintained that the war on terror is purely a response to global instability, and that it wishes for nothing more than American forces to return home. Both these arguments, from oil and from terrorism, allow us to avoid the difficult question of whether our domestic politics -- the lack of meaningful ideas, the need to transform everything into a security question, the recourse to the language of fear -- is itself constitutive of the crises we see abroad. Unless we confront these domestic realities, energy independence won't alter American power or protect us from future wars of choice.