It’s 9/11, so above the fold on today’s Post-Dispatch was this headline: “Talent keeps focus on terror”, and I was prepared to scoff. Certainly it was sickening that day eight years ago to watch people leap to their deaths and to endlessly watch video of the planes plowing into the World Trade Center. But then, within a year, Jim Talent was backing President Cheney’s Bush’s invasion of Iraq, where who knows how many tens of thousands of innocent people have died, including, so far, more than 4,000 American military personnel. All this in an attack not just on the wrong enemy but an attack that recruited for al Qaida, cost us trillions in treasure that could have covered our health care problems, and didn’t even produce for us the additional oil Cheney was gleefully rubbing his hands over when he manipulated CIA data.

That’s the kind of scoffing I was prepared to do. But oops. The article wasn’t about the attack and its aftermath. Perhaps Talent, and more than likely the P-D, realize that the U.S. response to 9/11 has been such a disaster that we’d best not revisit that. No, Jim Talent is currently working to prevent an attack with a biological weapon such as a virus, bacteria, or disease causing toxin. Think, for example, of “a pickup truck blowing anthrax around the perimeter of Fourth of July celebrations in St. Louis.”

I’m not scoffing at the need to prepare for such an attack. Talent has been working with former Democratic senator Bob Graham (FL) to promote legislation aimed at doing that. The bill is sponsored by Joe Lieberman (Turncoat, Conn.), but even Lieberman can have the occasional worthwhile idea. Nothing perspicacious, mind you, just the obvious.

If we were to move beyond the obvious, we would notice that the best way to stop terrorists is to remove their causus belli. And Greg Palast, in Armed Madhouse, gives us guidance on doing that by laying out the motives for bin Laden’s jihad, starting with a quotation from bL himself:

The presence of the U.S.A. Crusader military forces on land, sea and air in the states of the Islamic Gulf is the greatest danger threatening the largest oil reserve in the world.

Threatening Islamic oil reserves. Osama even launches a sophisticated tirade against the suppression of oil production by U.S. operators in the Gulf. The wealthy engineer knows the petroleum biz, that’s for sure.

If you want to know what motivates Osama, follow his path. Long before Al-Qaida destroyed the World Trade Center, Osama, after removing, with U.S. help, the Soviets from Afghanistan, set up operations in Sudan, where oil men expected to find the next big gusher. Osama’s next target was not The Great Satan America but The Little Satan: Iran. In Osama’s view, Iranians are “Shia dogs and lackeys”, who hold, infuriatingly, OPEC’s third largest oil reserves. Osama was especially affronted by Iran’s rising influence in Afghanistan at the time, thereby blocking his ability to link up with fundamentalist militants in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan who were fundamentally coveting control of the Caspian nations’ oil wealth. Osama expressed his displeasure with Iran’s incursion on his turf by ordering the slaughter of the entire Iranian diplomatic mission to Afghanistan. After eliminating his Shia Iranian competitors in Afghanistan, Osama financed the Wahabi-influenced Taliban. Notably, Osama had no objection to the Taliban signing pipeline deals with U.S. oil firms.

In other words, if you follow Osama’s movements and read what the man says, you realize he has been less coy than Bush about this true program: Get the oil. The steps are: First, remove the Soviets from the Caspian oil fields and pipeline routes; second, remove the man he called an evil “socialist,” Saddam Hussein, from the second largest OPEC reserve: third, keep the Shia “dogs” who control the third largest reserve from expanding their influence outside Persia; fourth, remove U.S. troops from the Land of the Holy Places (and largest oil reserve), Saudi Arabia; then fifth and last, overthrow the House of Saud and re-create a new Caliphate stretching from Sudan to Kazakhstan, every province an oil state, a Petroleum Kingdom of God, presumably under His blessed servant and contractor Osama.

(pp. 12-13)

Laying aside the temptation to stay in the Middle East just to spite the greedy little bugger, we’d do better to build enough windmills and solar panels to blanket Missouri in a pile a hundred feet high. Yesterday.

But I’ll lay you any odds you’d like that Jim Talent opposes the ACES energy legislation. So  much for fighting terrorism.