Of course oil will be used as a weapon

Secretary Rice provided a great example this week of the use of American power and influence. Andrew Kramer has an article in today's NY Times, Czechs See Oil Flow Fall and Suspect Russian Ire on Missile System

MOSCOW — Three days after the Czech Republic signed an agreement with the United States to host a tracking radar for an antiballistic missile system that Russia vehemently opposes, the authorities in Prague said the flow of Russian oil to their country was beginning to dwindle.

President George W. Bush deems the new Russian President a "smart man".  He does seem "true to his word"...

In one of his first foreign policy tests since becoming Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev said this week that Russia intended to retaliate. "We are extremely upset by this situation," Mr. Medvedev said at a news conference in Japan, where he was attending a Group of 8 summit meeting.

"We will not be hysterical about this, but we will think of retaliatory steps," he said.

Are you ready for a REAL Oil War?

So, not only are WE safer thanks to the captaincy of the US Ship of State, now the Czechs are about to enjoy this foreign policy competence.  Unlike our tradition of speaking softly and carrying a big stick, the new Russian President, admired by George W. Bush as a "smart man", was pretty transparent about the immediate Russian response to "missile shields" on it's borders.

Having two oilmen in the White House has been such a blessing, little did we know oil at $19 a barrel in 2000 made us vulnerable, but at the Osama Bin Laden prescribed $144 we would be so much safer from attack.

In a statement on Friday, Czech officials declined to link the reduced supply to the deal signed Tuesday in Prague. Still, though the flow of oil can vary for technical reasons, it was clear that the Czechs suspected a connection and intended to ask the Russians to explain the decline.

Capitalism sure was working fine and dandy, in the week that Abu Dhabi purchased major title to the Chrysler Building in New York City, and Raycom gained a new client in Eastern Europe, a minor glitch occurred in the oil spigot.

In a week where Iran celebrated the 8th and 10th of July with small and medium range fireworks, Russia felt a little insulted...

Russia maintains that the missiles meant to shoot down other missiles pose a threat to its own nuclear deterrence. The Bush administration says they are intended instead to counter a threat from Iran, which launched nine missiles on Wednesday.

So Dubya says "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter", a fine sendoff moment to the leadership of the other industrial powers, instill confidence in future Raycom clients I am sure.

In the deal, the Czech Republic agreed to have the United States place a tracking radar on Czech territory. That radar would be linked to interceptor missiles elsewhere; the United States is in talks with Poland and Lithuania to host those.

A bit more of the article, policy decisions in Russia apparently don't take weeks, months or years to occur.

Shipments to Czech oil refineries through the Druzhba pipeline, which ties Siberian fields to the Czech Republic, are declining, the Czech Ministry of Industry and Trade said. It did not say by how much.

It said in a statement that it was "trying to find out what is the cause via the Czech Embassy in Moscow." The Czech Republic has oil reserves to cover 95 days of demand, it said.

A Czech Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Zuzana Opletalova, declined in a telephone interview to link the reduced oil supply to accepting the antimissile radar. "We don’t want to say if this is related," Ms. Opletalova said, adding that the ministry hoped for clarification on Monday.

Written questions sent to Russia’s pipeline operator, Transneft, were not answered after working hours on Friday.

Vladimir Putin was in charge of the KGB back during the US clandestine operations in Afghanistan, I'm thinking "Charlie Wilson's War" is now in his DVD library.

In any case, the Czech Republic is far less vulnerable than Ukraine, which was severely hurt two years ago by a cut in Russian natural gas. In the 1990s the Czechs built, at great expense, a transnational oil pipeline from the West to open an alternative to Russian oil and reduce their vulnerability. This pipeline from Germany taps Western European networks supplied from the Middle East and the North Sea.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade said this supply route could fully compensate for even a total Russian shutoff.

The Russian leadership, emboldened by new wealth, is seen by critics as intent on restoring lost spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. Russia is the world’s largest energy exporting nation, if oil and natural gas are counted together. Many Eastern European nations are wholly dependent on Russia for fuel.

It isn't that Russia hasn't used oil as leverage in the past.

This dependence has stirred some fears of a spreading politicization of energy, at a time of soaring prices, akin to the 1973 Arab oil embargo of the United States.

Russian officials have consistently denied exploiting energy as an instrument of foreign policy. The Russian prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, said Friday that Russia would "comply with all our commitments to our foreign partners now, in the midterm and in the long term," the Interfax news agency reported.

"We will behave responsibly, as usual," he said.

In January 2006, Gazprom, Russia’s gas company, cut gas supplies to Ukraine for three days, about a year after the protests known as the Orange Revolution ushered in a pro-Western government. The cutoff was ostensibly over a pricing dispute.

Later in 2006, after Lithuanian authorities sold an important oil refinery to a non-Russian company, the Russian pipeline operator closed the pipe to that refinery, blaming technical problems.

The American public is fully aware, I presume, that Venezuela and Iran have a mutual agreement regarding any kind of attack, to shut off the oil spigot.  Keeping Japan from the rubber tree plantations and embargoing oil made sense in war strategy decades ago, do you know what kind of mileage a Navy jet gets?  

Our armed forces are petro reliant, and the world knows it.
The world is MUCH safer with two oilmen in the White House, that is for sure.