It's Not About Al Qaeda, It's Not About Genocide, It's Not About Mushroom Clouds. It's About the Oil.

Rep. John Porter (R-NV) warns us that if the U.S. leaves Iraq, we will see gasoline prices rise to $9/gallon:

The Nevada Republican, who returned Tuesday from his fourth trip to Iraq, met with U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, Iraqi Deputy President Tariq al-Hashimi and Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh.

"To a person, they said there would be genocide, gas prices in the U.S. would rise to eight or nine dollars a gallon, al-Qaida would continue its expansion, and Iran would take over that portion of the world if we leave," Porter said Wednesday in a phone interview from Las Vegas.

Apparently all those other scary scenarios are not scary enough:

Well, apparently all those "gut feelings" about an al-Qaeda attack, the confiscation of Breck and leaky ice packs at airports across America, and now the new mushroom-cloud banter regarding Iran hasn't scared the public enough into supporting a long-term troop presence in Iraq. Maybe that's because the American public finally turned off Fox News long enough to learn that Iraq doesn't really have anything to do with "Old Original al-Qaeda," (that's a Philly joke) or that Iran is a different country.

That's OK, because in the Pentagon equivalent of a V-8 commercial, our political and military leaders have smacked their collective selves on the forehead to recall the one thing that would actually frighten even the hardiest U.S. citizen.

And that would be the truly unthinkable: $9-a-gallon gasoline.

I wonder if any of these fearmongers on the right stop to think that, if the U.S. were really winning the war, they wouldn't need to be coming up with all these scary scenarios to convince Americans that they should support "The Surge." But that would require critical thinking skills. If Gen. Petraeus and the U.S. ambassador and Iraq's made-in-America government say that "The Surge" is working, then by gum it's working -- even when a GAO draft report says that Iraq has failed to meet 15 of the 18 benchmarks set by Congress to measure political and military progress. Even when Petraeus and the White House cannot get their stories straight about which one is writing the report on "The Surge" that Petraeus is supposed to be presenting to Congress in September. Even when top military officials in Iraq are divided on what the report's conclusions should be, and have to tell the Pentagon to make it clear they are not in agreement, so they will not be held responsible when Pres. Bush's decisions do not reflect their recommendations.