I'm sorry but you're basing this thread on what the British intelligence service reported to its handlers. Not on documents released from our own U.S. Gov't. Not that I put it out of the realm of what the Nixon administration might have considered.

An inside note; there was no "oil shortage" in any of the previous shortages. Talk to any merchant marine working tankers at the time and they will tell you that the ships were ordered to sit of shore fully laden until the owners got the price they wanted for the oil.

Should we just take? No! Not the American way to my thinking. We don't need foreign oil if we would just turn to electric vehicles that can be recharged from the plant or from solar panels in the skin of the car. The other industries that actually use oil in the process could refine it from all of the tire dumps that have been building for years along with domestic production.

What's really scary? I went to a conference not too long ago where an economist claimed that conservation hurt productivity and the economy. The only one that gets hurt by conservation is the oil industry. If they would invest in research for alternative sources they could transition quite easily. Lord knows that the execs from Enron were not bankrupt. If just some of the money that they siphoned off had been dedicated to such research we could probably give the middle east the finger and say "have done with ya".