Posted by
Patrick "Sarge" Murray on Saturday, April 05, 2008 10:00:00 PM
We can always be thankful for prescient senators like Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), but
this latest piece gives us even more reason to give thanks for her leadership. Sen. Hutchison brings up the important point that while we’re dealing with government-sponsored terror in the Middle East, we also must focus some energies on doing the same in South America, especially now that Hugo Chavez is strengthening his ties to the FARC. The Truman Doctrine was only two years old when Chairman Mao took over China. In that short amount of time, we had to switch our foreign policy focus from containing communism is Europe to dealing with it on a worldwide scale. The same must be done with the Bush Doctrine of today. While it has been on balance applied effectively in the Middle East, the key in the future is being flexible enough to be able to apply it elsewhere in the world.
An interesting bit of scientific and geographic insight the Sen. Hutchison shares is the nature of Venezuelan oil. The reason that Saudi oil is so popular is that, in addition to it being very plentiful, it is also some of the easiest oil to refine into gasoline. Not so with the South American stuff, which has a large tar content and even larger sulfur content, and is this more difficult – and expansive – to refine into gas than most oil found elsewhere. Most of the refineries that are set up for this are along the U.S. Gulf Coast, meaning that, as the Senator from the Lone Star State herself points out, “Mr. Chavez needs us more than we need him.”