Fueling Terrorism with Foreign Oil

J. Michael Sharman

Former CIA director R. James Woolsey drives a Toyota Prius, a gas-electric hybrid. Its bumper sticker boasts: “Bin Laden hates this car.”[1]

In 2005, Osama bin Laden told his followers that al Qaeda’s operations in Iraq were costing more than $1,000,000 a month.[2]

What’s the connection between  bin Laden’s Iraq expenditures and James Woolsey’s Prius?

Since the 1970s, Islamic extremism and terrorists have been financially fueled by the world's two largest oil exporters, Saudi Arabia and Iran. [3]

And those two countries have a lot of financial  fuel to burn.

Saudi Arabia’s crude oil export revenues were $154 billion in 2006[4], which gave the Saudis a $57.1 billion budget surplus.[5]

Iran’s oil revenue jumped 25 percent in 2005[6], soaring to $55 billion in 2006.[7]

By comparison, the United States had a $390 billion budget deficit in 2006.[8]

Saudi Arabia's support for terror is made mostly through its quasi-official charities.[9] In Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia which have no income tax, they have mandatory, non-voluntary giving called zakat, which is collected by the government, mosques or Islamic centers. Voluntary contributions, or Sadaqah, are given directly to Islamic charities.[10]

In July 2005 Stuart Levey, the Treasury Department’s Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, reminded the Senate that: “[Islamic] charities have funded terrorist organizations and causes that support terrorism and the ideology that fuels the terrorists' agenda, …including for the insurgency in Iraq.”[11]

Twenty percent of the world’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are Islamic. Al-Qaeda workers have infiltrated these NGOs, which allows them to use the charities’ reputations and money to advance al Qaeda’s goals globally.[12]

Washington officials say Iran gives at least $100 million a year to Hezbollah, the radical Shiite Muslim group in Lebanon, which this past year used those funds to buy the rockets it fired into Israel.[13]

Israel may have been the immediate target, but Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said: “The courageous resistance of the Lebanese people and Hezbollah is the manifestation of the rebellious spirit of Muslim and Arab nations against America.”[14]

Our best weapon against Islamic terrorists is to reduce the petrodollars received by them. We can do that by reducing our future need for oil through bio-diesel and hydrogen fuel cell development, but right now we can start domestically producing the oil we can’t do without.

The National Energy Security Act was introduced in Congress back in 2000 to try and reduce the nation's dependency on foreign oil by 50% by the year 2010. Former President Clinton opposed the bill and it was never passed.[15]

In February, 2000 former Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson (who is now the governor of New Mexico and a presidential candidate) admitted: “[T]he federal government was not prepared. We were caught napping. We got complacent.”[16]

In the fall of 2000, Rep. Murkowski (R-Ak.) warned, “By discouraging domestic production, the Clinton-Gore administration has forced us to be more dependent on foreign oil, placing our Nation's security at risk. All we have to do is witness the growing influence of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and the Middle East as a result of our increasing dependence on foreign oil.” [17]

As far back as 1995, Mr. Clinton vetoed a budget bill that would have allowed oil drilling in part of the Alaska Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (“ANWR”).[18] If he hadn’t, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that ANWR could already have been yielding about 30 years-worth of oil imports from Saudi Arabia.[19]

Alaska is a really big state, covering 365,039,104 acres. [20]

Of that huge expanse, the area being discussed for oil and gas exploration within ANWR is 1.5 million acres, but, as The Washington Post reported, because of advances in technology, only 2,000 acres of ANWR will be needed for the actual oil production.[21]

That means ANWR’s oil production area of 2,000 acres is basically the same size as Dulles Airport. [22]

Before we continue forsaking our national security for a Dulles-sized wilderness area, we’d better also start considering a new oil producer that is a whole lot closer than Saudi Arabia and Iran:

The People’s Republic of China just erected its first oil rigs 50 miles off Florida’s coast in Cuba’s territorial waters in the Gulf of Mexico. [23]   

By J. Michael Sharman Click here for bio and archived articles