[We’re still over there.]

I have a problem: I think there should be other ways to fight the War On Terror than through conventional means.

I mean it. Sure, we can go in and drop a bunch of bombs on Iraq. The President can send in a team of highly-skilled specially-trained teams to “take care of business.” Congress could declare war, and bring the entire sphere of American military might to bear on them.

But there’s a better way.

Imagine, if you will, that someone in this country figured it out, and put all of our prodigious scientific minds to work on discovering and/or developing new sources of energy. And I don’t mean the run-of-the-mill standard of Ethanol or nuclear fission. I’m talking about someone coming up with something NEW, something that could be used to power anything and everything in this country and the world. Be it solar, or a new and manageable type of nuclear energy, wind power, thermal harnessing, whatever the answer is, if we were to find that new source of energy–and I know there’s one out there that we haven’t yet figured out how to tap into–then all of that Mideastern oil would be of no consequence to us. Or anyone else.

And people across the globe would stop paying for it.

And the mighty nations of OPEC would sadly and quietly slip back into the sands from whence they came, to fight among themselves as they always have.

It could happen, you know. If only someone in this country would grow a set of you-know-what, and decide to finally make it lucrative to put forth the effort into finding that elusive new energy source, and find the strength of will to do battle with Big Oil.

It’s asking a lot, but it could happen.

I’m accused regularly of being something of a Pollyanna, but that’s all right with me. I’m a tree-hugging liberal, I’ll admit it. But this isn’t that side of me coming up with this idea; this is the pragmatic, analytical side of me, the business side of me, if you will. It comes down to economics. They have oil, and lots of it. They sell the oil for lots of money–lots and LOTS of money. They have more money than they know what to do with, so they decide to fund a little terrorist organization on the side. That terrorist organization, which is so small that they couldn’t blow up a shoebox–let alone a high-rise building–needs that funding in order to do anything outside of their own region. If we stop buying all of that oil, then they don’t have all of that money pouring in any longer, and they have nothing else we need.

But here’s the other side. What do we have that THEY might need? Think about it–I’ll wait.

Food. Or at least the huge capacity to grow food if we wish, and help the farmers maximize their profit so that it becomes profitable and respectable and enviable to be a farmer again.

And suddenly, America has THE commodity that EVERYONE wants.

And then Russia invades us to get our grain.

But that’s a story for another day.