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If there’s one word that explains why Enron Corp. failed and why former executives Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, convicted in Houston last month, are facing long stints in prison jumpsuits, it’s this: hubris.

As an energy outfit, it’s bigger than Unocal, Murphy Oil, or Anadarko Petroleum. Over the past six years or so, its budget has nearly quadrupled.

It’s 1,000 pages of rage. One thousand and thirty eight pages, to be exact. And Robert Fisk, one of the best, most courageous Westerners who writes about the ongoing military conflicts in the Middle East, justifies that rage on every page of his magnum opus, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.

Jeff Skilling had a vision for Enron. In February of 2001, he told the company’s employees that Enron, would, within five years, “be the leading company in the world.

Nearly a century ago, while serving as a British liaison officer to the Arab tribes during World War I, T. E. Lawrence developed many of the techniques of modern insurgent warfare.

During his State of the Union address, George W. Bush assured us that, with his leadership, we are going to “make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.”

We know that the Bush administration was flat wrong about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And now, nearly three years after the beginning of the war, it’s also clear that top Bush officials were just as delusional about Iraq’s energy business and how critical the energy sector would be to achieving security and stability in Iraq. Continuing failure with this vital part of the reconstruction is costing the United States — and the Iraqi people — very dearly.

No discussion of cronyism in the Bush administration would be complete without talking about PFIAB, short for the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Hubris put George W. Bush in the White House. That same hubris is bringing him down. And while seeing Bush get his comeuppance may bring some glee to his foes, that hubris is leaving America leaderless, rudderless, politically isolated, economically paralyzed, and militarily decimated.

If Americans are hurting from $3 gasoline, wait till they feel the pain of $4, or even $5, diesel fuel. We’d better get ready, because it’s probably on the way. On Monday, the price of diesel reached an all-time high of $3.21 per gallon, and that may be just the beginning of a long-term rise.

Accidents happen. And in the case of BP, or any other refiner, an accident every few years is perfectly understandable. Two accidents in the span of a couple of months, well, that’s understandable, too.

As the Iraq war becomes ever more futile, the similarities — and more important, the differences — between George W. Bush and Lyndon B. Johnson become more pronounced.

It doesn’t matter if Matthew Simmons is right about Saudi Arabia’s future oil production capability or not. Even if he is wrong, he’s right.

Lee Raymond has repeatedly dismissed the notion of peak oil. Whenever the laconic CEO and chairman of Exxon Mobil gets questioned about future oil production, he’s invariably bullish. Just last month, during an interview with Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, he said flatly, “the world is not running out of oil.”