(This column is by U.S. Senator Conrad Burns, Republican of Montana, who is a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. His column first appeared in The Washington Times on April 8, 2002 and is in the public domain. No republication restrictions.)

Don't Buy Rogue Oil
By Conrad Burns

The Bush administration is finally calling a snake a snake. Iran, Iraq and Syria were the target of some blistering rhetoric last week by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who accused the three of "inspiring a culture of political murder and suicide bombing." That was a long overdue assessment of three rogue nations more eager to genuflect to jihad than to a genuine Middle East peace.

Iran is smuggling guns and terrorists through to fuel Yasser Arafat's intifada. Iraq, which plotted to assassinate former President Bush in 1993, and has refused entry to weapons inspectors since 1998, is paying Palestinian families to provide suicide bombers. Syria smuggles 100,000 barrels of Iraqi oil per day. The jury is still out on Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. imports 60% of its oil, and remains dangerously reliant on oil from rogue nations, countries the State Department lists as "state sponsors" of terrorism. The truth is that oil and terrorism are as much entangled as radical Islam and terror. If bastardized religion is terrorism's inspiration, oil revenue is its succor.

Which presents the question that ought to frame any debate on a new national energy policy: Why are we importing oil from countries that export terrorism?

It's a question my colleague Frank Murkowski has addressed. Before the Easter recess, Sen. Murkowski (R., Ala.) offered an amendment to the Senate energy bill proposing a ban on all Iraqi oil imports until Saddam Hussein allows U.N. inspectors back. The energy bill and the Murkowski amendment are due for debate when the Senate reconvenes this week. I hope the discussion moves well beyond the grandstanding of the green lobby and to consideration of how best to attain American energy self-reliance.

As former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke pointed out recently, our biggest failure in the last 25 years was an inability to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Since 1973, U.S. imports from the Persian Gulf have more than trebled, domestic production of crude oil has nearly halved, while our consumption has remained relatively static at 19 million barrels per day. The very month Islamist terrorists attacked New York and Washington, the U.S. set an 11-year record by buying 1.16 million barrels a day from Iraq.

Last year, the U.S. bought over $4 billion in oil from Iraq through the U.N. oil-for-food program. But the process of purchasing Iraqi oil is not transparent, and that's exactly where the mischief begins. The oil does not pass directly from seller to buyer, but through shady middlemen who are able to give fat kickbacks to Saddam.

Pulling Iraqi oil out of the U.S. market would force Baghdad to slash prices -- subject to U.N. approval -- to try and unload the sudden oversupply. The U.S. is the world's largest consumer of crude; no other nation can consume a million additional barrels per day. Lacking the marketing horsepower of other oil nations, Iraq would scramble -- a process of months -- to find new markets. In the end, it would maybe resell only some of what the U.S. currently buys, and at a much lower price.

We cannot continue to jeopardize our security through dependence on rogue oil, or ignore the glaring reality that the U.S. is financing global terrorism as a result of a flawed domestic energy policy.

Oil revenues play a part in the Palestinian intifada. Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said last month that his country would pay $25,000 in cash to the family of every Palestinian suicide bomber -- an increase on the previous $10,000 terror stipend. Iraq, with its ravaged economy and $200 million in U.N. medicine idle in its warehouses, also pays $1,000 each to wounded Palestinians. Two years ago, Iraq attempted -- and failed -- to allocate nearly $1 billion of its oil-for-food funds for aid to the Palestinians.

Congress should shut off the spigot of terrorists' oil and shut down rogue regimes profiting from us by backing the Murkowski amendment. It can also remedy the imbalance between Dallas and Dubai by opening up Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- the equivalent of 55 years of Iraqi oil imports. A study conducted in 1998 by the U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are 10 billion barrels of recoverable oil in a 2,000-acre area that looks like the surface of the moon.

Technology made the 20th century the American century, and energy drove that progress. Now, the lack of domestic energy and the consequences of buying it from jihad cartels may be the undoing of those titanic achievements and the ruin of American security.

(end Burns text)

(Senator Conrad Burns (Republican-Montana) is a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.)