The US must immediately get off this madly careening merry-go-round. Oil in the low $40s per barrel, natural gas at $2.25 per MMBtu, and both in oversupply on world markets make a mockery of the notion that the US must be in the Middle East to secure petroleum supplies. The oil exporting nations, including Middle Eastern exporters, need the world’s largest oil consumer far more than the US needs any of them. War is expensive. Those nations that become further embroiled in Middle East conflict will find their needs for revenue ever more pressing. Oil has always been a fig leaf for the US’s military-industrial-intelligence complex, which lusts for perpetual and lucrative Middle Eastern tension and war. The rest of us have nothing to gain from it and everything to lose.

"Taking the battle to the terrorists will make us safer at home," was one of the rationales offered for intervention by the US in the Middle East. Paris is the latest reminder of its deadly fatuousness; France has been in the Middle East longer than the US. Has the US government’s intervention made us safer? The start of a serious debate about coming home will show that it has made at least some of us wiser.

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