$100 a Barrel?

Political science professor Steven Weber contemplates some questions on everyone's minds (snippet):

....How would the rest of the world view an abrupt exit from Iraq by the U.S.? With great disappointment — maybe not because it's such a terrible idea, but because we pumped up people's expectations about what this war was actually about. We told them we were going to remove a dictator, democratize the country, and then use that experience as leverage to transform the Middle East by example. Well, that's probably not going to happen, although it's not a zero percent probability. The U.S. would lose credibility in the abstract sense if we were to walk away from this commitment, but that's not as compelling an argument as some people think it is. The message that we would be sending in that case, which is credible, is simply that we can undermine the regime of anyone we want to, at any time. Aren't we too dependent on future Iraqi oil supplies to walk away? Iraqi oil would be a good thing to have on the market, but we're critically dependent for now and the foreseeable future on the oil flowing through Saudi Arabia. The real risk in the oil question is Saudi Arabia. Given the recent trajectory of events in Saudi Arabia, we should be more than a little worried. Saudi oil goes off the market, and we're screwed. Screwed. What if tomorrow there were a major terrorist attack on a significant Saudi Arabian oil installation — not housing complexes for engineers, but a real part of the oil infrastructure, like one of their big loading docks? The price of oil would hit $100 per barrel. I believe that at that point we would see the vast majority of the 150,000 American troops in Iraq moved out to protect the oil installations in Saudi Arabia. Our dependence on oil is a key feature of politics in this region and it's likely to be that way for the next 25, 30 years, at a minimum. Unless we do something aggressive to change that....