Fight terror: drill in America. (Scan).(U.S. oil imports from Middle East)(Brief Article)

Not long ago, a British newspaper published an account of Osama bin Laden's upbringing. Numerous details illustrate the wealth that has rained down on Saudi Arabia's leading families--like the trip to Sweden made by young bin Laden on a private jet carrying a Rolls-Royce in its cargo bay. The ultimate source of all this disposable income, of course, is oil, American petrodollars in particular. (In years past, even the Bush family got tangled up in oil deals with several members of the bin Laden clan.)

America needs oil, Middle Easterners have it in abundance. So we pay dearly--and in the process have allowed untold funds to be recycled into organizations that spawn horrific violence. This has happened not only with the Saudis but also with other petroleum-rich nations like Libya, Iran, and Iraq--a regular rogue's gallery. Groups like al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas, as well as tyrants like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qadaffi, and Ruhollah Khomeini would have remained impotent actors in funny uniforms and robes absent the oil money that poured into their coffers courtesy of our reliance on imported petroleum.

Oil has been the mother's milk of Middle Eastern terror.

While militant Islam provides the instruction book for today's most virulent forms of anti-Americanism, the power source for this potent xenophobia is our own preference for foreign crude--freely chosen over the alternative of more aggressively developing domestic energy sources.

Consider these numbers:

About 8 billion barrels of oil are imported each year by nations that do not produce enough to cover their own needs. By far the biggest importer is the U.S.--which buys nearly 4 billion barrels--a little less than half the total purchases.

The main beneficiaries of this American failure to provide for our own energy needs are the Middle Eastern nations which put up for sale 6 billion barrels of oil each year. These sales bring those societies-all of them undemocratic and at least latently hostile to the U.S.--roughly $150 billion annually in cold cash.