One of the most naive, most irritating slogans of the left is “No blood for oil!” It’s a small phrase but it contains a world of ignorance, based on tired Marist theories about how the United States is really run.
     First, we have to look some facts very squarely in the face.

1.      The U.S. economy cannot run without oil. Period. The alternative is economic recession or worse. In other words, people lose their houses, their jobs and starve.

2.      If we voted an omnibus energy bill today... authorizing and developing clean coal, nuclear, fusion, wind, solar, hydro, tidal, natural gas, hydrogen and biomass alternative energy sources, it would still be years before any of them are able to generate a useful percentage of the energy needed for the grid or for transportation. For some of these technologies it will be decades before they are really practical.

3.      Precious and scarce natural resources cause wars. Men have fought over gold and other minerals. They have fought over farmland and for access to clean water. Japan launched its war with the United States and the Allies in 1941 for access to Indonesian and Southeast Asian oil.

4.      If you are going to source most of a vitally strategic economic material from overseas, you have to be prepared to fight for it.

    The sovereignty of Kuwait was an important issue when Iraq invaded that country in 1991, but the more important issue for the United States was whether we were prepared to let a vicious dictator like Saddam Hussein control the oil in the Persian Gulf region.

     Did American men and women die for oil? Yes they did, and in so doing they ensured that old folks in the northeast would have fuel oil in the coming winter and that millions of American families would live securely in an economy undisrupted by oil shortages or price gouging by Saddam. This was warfare in the direct national security interest of the United States. No blood for oil? No better reason!
     Today the United States maintains, if not the largest, the most effective, deadly and technologically advanced military establishment in the history of the world. One of the reasons we have to is because our supply of oil is located underneath some of the flakiest countries in the world.
     We need a powerful and expensive army, in part, because a country like Iran or terror organizations like Al Qaeda and Hezbullah can physically threaten the oil supply. We need a powerful navy and air force to support that army and to protect oil supply lines and choke points like the Straits of Hormuz.

     Part of the exorbitant cost of foreign oil is in the taxes we pay to maintain the military to protect that very oil.
     We should also add into that sum the incalculable cost of losing our best young men and women in wartime and the tragedy of other young bodies mutilated and torn by war.
     It is unavoidable that we must import some of our oil. It is entirely avoidable that we import so much that we have to assume the role of policeman for the world’s oil regions. We have enough oil on the Alaskan north slope, in shale deposits in the west, in the outer continental shelf, to satisfy most of our domestic requirements until, acting with national resolve, we bring those promising but-as-yet unfulfilled alternative energy sources “on line,” as part of a permanent mix that is 100 percent domestic.

     Energy independence means using all the possibilities... with the development of oil and natural gas here in the United States buying time for wind, solar, hydrogen, clean coal, nuclear and all the other alternative technologies. It means we will stop exporting about $700 billion more than we take in from oil producing countries.
     It means no American blood for oil.