With gasoline and home heating-oil prices continuing to shoot skyward, U.S. President Bill Clinton decided late last week to flood the market with federally stockpiled oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The SPR holds 582 million barrels of unrefined crude oil, a stock large enough to replace 37 percent of oil imports for 90 days. Clinton's right: It's time to pump that oil into the marketplace. The main objection is that the reserve should remain untouched in case of an embargo or other supply disruption. Tapping the reserve, Republicans argue, would compromise our national security by making us more vulnerable to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in general and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in particular.
Nonsense. First, let's quit worrying about an embargo. The 1973 embargo -- the seminal event that still haunts American energy policy -- failed to keep a single drop of OPEC oil out of U.S. ports. That's because once OPEC puts oil into the world market, it can't control what happens to it. All that happened in 1973 was a somewhat costly reshuffling of supply lines.
Nor should we be unduly worried about what an oil shortage might mean for our military during some future crisis. In 1995, Joshua Gotbaum, then an assistant secretary for economic security at the Department of Defense, testified before the Senate that the military could fight two major regional wars simultaneously while using only one-eighth of America's current domestic oil production.