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The per-barrel price of crude oil last week broke the $50 barrier - highlighting, among other things, one more front on which the Bush administration has failed to prosecute effectively the war on terror.

The immediate cause of the price spike was said to be unrest in the oil fields of Nigeria, seventh-largest supplier to the world and fifth-largest to the United States. But the deeper cause of the long-term trend toward higher-priced oil prices is rising global demand for the product. Among the elements of that demand is America's ever-increasing reliance on imported oil. Terrorism and oil have an intimate connection.

Petro-dollars funneled through Saudi Arabia, for example, provided funding for the rise of al-Qaida. Less directly, but no less important, U.S. thirst for oil is a key source of Islamist hatred of the West. To maintain supplies, the United States has long allied itself with unsavory regimes unable or unwilling to use their oil-export revenues to build broad-based economies and expand prosperity beyond the ruling elite. This breeds resentment, which sometimes takes lethal form.

Oil also appears to have played a role in tempting the Bush administration into its disastrous decision to shift attention from Afghanistan, which has no oil, to Iraq, which has plenty of the stuff. Iraqi oil revenues, or so it was asserted until grim reality intervened, would pay for military operations to oust Saddam Hussein and for post-Saddam national reconstruction.

Nigeria, though not in the Middle East, fits the general mold of unstable nation-states rich in oil resources but little else. Attempts at democracy have been fitful in Nigeria's 44 years as an independent country. It is riven by ethnic conflicts among tribes and by religious conflict between Christians and Muslims.

Neither a truce between government forces and the rebel militia - who are demanding that oil money be spread more widely among the impoverished inhabitants of the oil-producing Niger Delta - nor an outright government military victory is likely to bring permanent stability.

U.S. failure to come up with a coherent energy policy did not begin with George W. Bush. A more astute administration, however, would recognize that 9/11 was a call not only to arms but also for the United States to begin breaking the chains of its terrorism-generating oil addiction.