Buchanan indicated that it was a light drag, as well. I beg to differ. We got into the situation he described next by borrowing money for that war from the people he said we owe.
Saudi, Israel, and the other OPEC member countries benefit from us interfering in the region, and our kids come home with PTSD and (possibly) chemical/biological tainting.
Brushing off crushing debt seems easy for most of those people.
There is one underlying problem that could help right the ship, that is for oil to drop in price. It wont happen because the greedy producers have gotten use to the huge profits. So they will kill the golden goose, the US may well go under and if we do the world goes with us. Oil will worthless.
A significant part of that problem is the sorry state of our dollar, IMO.
You are correct. The traders in the OPEC countries have fashioned hedging contracts in the futures markets. Since they are forced to trade in U.S. dollars under pain of punishment from U.S. weaponry (witness Iraq), they have cleverly gotten around the depreciation of the petrocurrency by bidding up the oil futures price.
It has been clear to me for at least a couple of decades that Zionist-founded Hollywood has convinced the U.S. population that Muslim Arabs, Persians, Indonesians, etc., are as stupid as they are. This is not true anymore, if it ever was. There is probably not a population left on the planet outside of sub-Saharan Africa which is as clueless as the typical dumbed-down American as seen being asked "man in the street" questions by Jay Leno.