However, one might argue that the crumbling of the $ had little to do with Vietraq. The enormity of the sums dumped into the desert sands is staggering, yes, but my distinct impression is that it utterly pales in comparison to what the Bushies have been doing on the home front.

Of course, one might then point out that the war in Vietraq was likely a vital part of the scare-people-into-voting-for-us strategy very obviously employed in 2002, 2004 and 2006.

Ultimately, my own WAG would be "very little." Demand was (and to some extent still is) exploding (see India, China, SUV) and supply couldn't keep up even if Iran and Iraq were pumping at the fastest rate physically possible. Something Has To Give, and of all the major powers of the world today, the US is structurally the most vulnerable to oil price shocks, I think.

So the war in Vietraq and Bush's Ponzi-economics may or may not have been proximate causes (and certainly played a role in the devaluation of the $), but ultimately, the pain would hit the US anyway. Maybe Bush has fast-forwarded the process by a couple of years, maybe he has increased the pain by a couple of tens of percent. But ultimately, my bottle of beer says "Peak Oil is a rock-meet-hard-place scenario, and any country that insists on suburbanisation and SUVs is gonna find itself between the two."

In part, this stems from a view that Bush is a symptom, not the disease. The fundamental structural weaknesses I talk about go back at least to Nixon, and until and unless they are excised from your body politic, you'll be able to choose not between a party that governs From The People, By The People, Of the People and one that does not, but between one that does not and one that does not and gloats about it.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.