There’s no safe harbor for gas-guzzling U.S.

Americans casually export $700 billion cash each year, much of it to countries ideologically hostile to democracy and freedom. That money has funded all manner of anti-U.S. activities for decades, and continues to do so. Yet a proposed $6.8 billion purchase of 22 ports, including six on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, has triggered a backlash toward one of the more benign Mideast regimes.

Fortunately, Dubai Ports World on Sunday bought itself a 45-day cooling off period by permitting additional scrutiny of its purchase of London-based Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co., a name sadly evocative of British colonialism. Maybe President Bush can yet overcome sniping from both left and right and get this deal approved. Unfortunately, the demagoguery has already further blackened the U.S. image in the Mideast.

And maybe, just maybe, the deal will finally get the nation to focus on port security. If the safety of American harbors were really a priority, we would not have spent just one-tenth the money addressing the problem that was spent compensating the families of 9/11 victims.

But former CIA Director R. James Woolsey says the underlying problem is U.S. dependence on foreign oil, and the mischief done with the money Americans fork over to quench their beloved gas-guzzlers.

Woolsey was in Spokane on Monday to address the Harvesting Clean Energy conference. A strong backer of biofuels for more than a decade, Woolsey used remarkably harsh language to condemn several Mideast regimes, and the willingness of Americans to keep financing them with petro-dollars.

The U.S., he says, pays for both sides of the “Long War” against international terrorism, on the one hand by supporting our massive military and security efforts, on the other by spending $250 billion for imported oil.

Woolsey says “Islami-Nazis” openly advocate the extermination of Jews, homosexuals, and members of rival Muslim sects. They fund Pakistani schools instilling radically anti-American messages. Their literature is so vicious American Muslims have objected to its circulation in the U.S.

Ethanol and biodiesel can keep billions of oil dollars at home, Woolsey says, and the technology to stop the petro-bleeding already exists. He used his own Toyota Prius as an example.

A hybrid that runs on electricity or gasoline, the Prius already gets 40 to 50 miles per gallon in town. A plug-in model with longer-lasting batteries could extend that mileage to 125 mpg, he says. Substitute ethanol for gasoline, and the car would need only one gallon of imported gasoline to go 500 miles.

And unlike vehicles using hydrogen or fuel cells, a shift to biofuel vehicles would require minimal change to the existing transportation infrastructure, Woolsey says. To wit: “Every family would need an extension cord.”

He notes Brazil has upped the percentage of new cars capable of burning ethanol from 5 percent in 2003 to 75 percent in 2005.

The administration’s focus on further research and development is misguided, Woolsey says. The technology is proven, to the point more groups are coalescing behind biofuels as a way to assure U.S. security, protect the environment, and redirect billions of dollars now going overseas to American farmers.

“We are starting to see the beginnings of a sea-change in Washington,” says Woolsey, who chairs the advisory committee of the Clean Fuels Foundation. Lest anyone think he’s gone soft, he also co-chairs, with former Secretary of State George Shultz, the Committee on the Present Danger.

Woolsey says no non-democratic government or government-owned corporation should be allowed to own strategic assets like a port. If Dubai Ports World wants to take control of six Atlantic and Gulf Coast harbors, he says, those assets should be put under the control of a separate, independent board of directors. DP World, owned by a holding company controlled by Dubai leader Sheik Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, would become a passive investor.

Until Mideast politics change, that’s as far as the U.S. should be willing to go, Woolsey says. “If they want to become democracies and obey the rule of law, that’s cool.”