Which was the point I was originally trying to make before you so cleverly sidetracked the argument and replaced it with one more to your liking.

Sure, it ain't just a bunch of ignorant raghead Islamofascists that put us in this spot, there's also a lot of very smart cookies in both government and business circles in the Middle East's bureaucracies and royal families that have put together the oil cartels and manipulated oil markets, directed the nationalization of their own oil assets, and managed them for maximum profitability all at our expense. And they've provided Western oil companies just enough in the way of kickbacks to get us to collaborate in putting it all together for them.

If we weren't dependent on Middle Eastern oil for our very survival the oil producers wouldn't have us by the short hairs, the jihadists wouldn't have any back door funding, and we wouldn't have been committed to supporting sleazebags like the Saudis, the Shah, and our old ally Saddam.

What, did you think I was blaming Western oil executives for 9/11? Or do you still think that just because someone's a businessman he has to be American, and genetically incapable of doing us harm?

True, the Saudis and other oil interests in the Middle East have nothing to gain by having us collapse economically, they can't bleed us dry if we're dead. But they have everything to gain by keeping us dependent on their oil indefinitely, and as long as we are, our hands are tied militarily and politically in the Middle East. They will always have a veto power over our actions and we have no choice but to kiss their royal asses. And you know what? They're ain't one commie among them.

What we do have is a bunch of unintended consequences. Our proxies and pals made a lot of enemies and let their domestic situations fester into breeding grounds of anti-Western fanaticism and hatred. THEY are the ones flying airliners into our office buildings.

We got into this mess all by ourselves, not because the rest of the world is a bunch of sweethearts, but because we did nothing to manage our addiction to petroleum so we would not be dependent on one geographical source we could intimidate militariily. It was more profitable in the short term to exploit that enormous pool of sweet crude so near the surface and so easily controllable by our military and diplomatic might that we burned all our oil in V-8s and let our mass transit and rail infrastructure deteriorate. Instead of conservation, alternative energy sources, and keeping our cityscapes compact and manageable and otherwise implementing a long term energy policy (yes, including coal and nuclear), we relied instead on dividing and conquering the Middle East militarily and politically, backing local satraps like the Shah and the Saudi Royals, and otherwise playing the Great Game.

In other words, we got here by following the path of least resistance: the path that was most profitable in the short term. Al-Quaeda is not the disease, they're just the first symptom we noticed.