T. Boone Pickens on CNBC saying he expects we’ll see $125 per barrel oil real soon, and that regardless, the fundamentals are in place to keep oil at $100 at least, for good:

You’ve got 85 million barrels of oil available every day, and that’s it. Demand’s going up. As long as that demand continues to go up, with an 85 million cap on supply, the price has to go up - because the price eventually has to kill demand.

We, of course, are in a situation where price won’t kill demand. If you live in Ephrata and work in downtown Lancaster (or worse, Philadelphia) - you don’t just stop commuting to your job, or making the sales calls. Wal-Mart’s warehouse on wheels can’t just stop rolling.

Why is there, then, so much opposition to the idea that this is why we built that $740 million embassy in Iraq? If you listen to Pickens it’s clear he doesn’t think he’s delivering any breaking news here - he has known, for quite some time, that rising demand plus relatively static supply means higher prices; don’t you think those in the halls of power have known this as well?

So when the likes of John McCain talk about 100 or 1,000 years in Iraq, it strikes me that he’s talking about “security” in a more complex fashion than we give him credit for. He’s talking economic security - energy security. Without a U.S. presence on the ground in Iraq, what happens to Iraqi oil? What if it were nationalized - and sold, perhaps, to China or India instead of us? A great percentage of the world’s oil is nationalized, owned by nations that don’t like us very much. Given our utter dependence on their product - that’s a recipe for energy, economic and ultimately domestic instability if there ever was one. Of course we had to act; of course we have to be in Iraq for 100 years, or 1,000. Because if not - think of the consequences. And that has nothing to do with terrorism, nothing at all.