In any event, nowadays U.S. consumption of Persian Gulf oil totals about $18 billion a year, less than we spend on computer parts from Asia. The price mechanism works: Oil would flow in greater volume from higher-cost sources in the unlikely event of a catastrophic disruption of supplies from the Gulf. Canada, for instance, has 180 billion barrels in oil sands that are producible, judging by a new Shell project, at $15 a barrel.
Yet so ingrained are the false assumptions of energy insecurity that many pundits and politicians continue to insist that the U.S. has been remiss in failing to impose monumental costs on itself in pursuit of 'energy independence.'
This is nothing but the isolationist illusion reclothed, and nonsensical even by the assumptions that such people embrace. If we stopped importing oil, oil wouldn't be any less important to the world economy, the world economy would still be critical to our prosperity, and we'd remain the only country with military power to protect the flow of oil.

Instead, here's the real reason we care about the security of the Gulf: Oil is wealth, and wealth attracts bandits. For the past 60 years we have been committed to the proposition that the world can prosper by peaceful trade, not by nations trying to seize resources by force.

By one count, Americans have spent nearly $1 trillion on this cause since 1973 (and another $1.7 trillion in defense of Israel), an outlay impossible to explain in terms of fuel security. Likewise, the further costs we're courting on behalf of Iraq hugely outweigh the real value of that country's oil to us.

This is where Sept. 11 inescapably changed the picture. Spending another trillion dollars and waiting three more decades for the Middle East to grow up politically suddenly seemed like a bum bet. History occasionally calls on us to do more than twiddle our thumbs. In fact, $87 billion to put a democratic Iraq on its feet might turn out to be one of the better bargains Congress has ever seen--and it has nothing to do with oil.

No, this isn’t Watergate; it’s bigger than that. The version of the story that still fits the facts is in that Bob Novak Sun-Times column from July. Novak wanted to know why Wilson had been chosen to go to Africa. It’s one thing not to be a card-carrying neocon, quite another to be as antipathetic to the administration and the war as this fellow. The White House asked the CIA, the CIA recommended Wilson, and their recommendation was accepted automatically. But what the original leakers told Novak was that it was Mrs Wilson who’d proposed her husband for the job. The Company responded that their counter-proliferation officials came up with Wilson and they only used the wife to contact him.

It doesn’t really matter which version you believe, because the end result’s the same: an agency known to be opposed to war in Iraq sent an employee’s spouse also known to be opposed to war in Iraq on a perfunctory joke mission. And, after eight days sipping tea and meeting government officials in one city of one country, Ambassador Wilson gave a verbal report to the CIA and was horrified to switch on his TV and see Bush going on about what British Intelligence had learned about Saddam and Africa. As I wrote in this space last July:

‘The intel bureaucracy got the Sudanese aspirin factory wrong, failed to spot 9/11 coming, and insisted it was impossible for any American to penetrate bin Laden’s network, only to have Johnnie bin Joss-Stick from hippy-dippy Marin County on a self-discovery jaunt round the region stroll into the cave and be sharing the executive latrine with the A-list jihadi within 20 minutes.

‘So, if you’re the President and the same intelligence bureaucrats who got all the above wrong say the Brits are way off the mark, there’s nothing going on with Saddam and Africa, what do you do? Do you say, “Hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day”? Or do you make the reasonable assumption that, given what you’ve learned about the state of your humint (human intelligence) in the CIA, is it likely they’ve got much of a clue about what’s going on in French Africa? Isn’t this one of those deals where the Brits and the shifty French are more plugged in?’

Only trial and error, otherwise known as muddling through, can work in Iraq. There is no other way. Muddling through is not pretty, but never underestimate America's genius for it. Abraham Lincoln and George Washington never enjoyed the luxury of planning, but they were two of the finest muddlers-through the world has ever known, and they did all right.

Whether Bush will prove a gifted muddler is at present unclear, to say the least. Bush might be a better president if he took fewer risks. But risk-takers must be judged by their results.

The 2004 election could not be better timed. In a year's time, Americans will know lot more about the outcome in Iraq, and Bush will be held to account. With Saddam toppled less than six months ago, however, a rush to judgment today reflects badly not on Bush's vision, but on his critics'. Hindsight, after all, is not 20-20.

According to Amir Taheri, Osama Bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri has just circulated a tape calling for a strategic retreat. 'In a taped message, played in Islamist cells all over the world and broadcast in part by two Arab satellite-TV channels, the Egyptian (believed to be hiding either in Pakistan or in Iran) presents the strategy in three segments.'

1. A campaign to seize power in Muslim countries, especially Pakistan;
   
   
2. Expanded efforts to attack the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan; and
   
   
3. The exploitation of instability in Muslim countries like Indonesia, Yemen and Somalia.