The only reasonable assertion in this entire bricolage of oil and strategic importance is that, cet par, madmen in places with oil are more dangerous that madmen in places without it, for the simple reason that oil (or any other high value extractable) provides lots of money to realize mad plans. But the question here is not How do you control the oil? The question is, How do you fix the problem of madmen who are bad for their both their own citizens and their neighbors, and which all of us thus have a collective interest in removing? Or more specifically, how can the Westphalian principles of international interaction be modified to allow us to fix that problem without making the international situation qualitatively worse -- more volatile, more dangerous, more productive of mutual suspicion and conflict, more armed, and more productive of the skillsets and ideologies that brush wars spin off into the terrorism business.
And lastly but not leastly, less just. A reformed UN would need not only a new security council that reflected the modern world. It would need to return to its original vision where the General Assembly made the laws and the Security Council executed them. Law by security council resolution is law by executive decree. It is tyrannical. And it is rule by big and powerful countries over the small and weak.
In a UN context, the Westphalian principles in effect give every country a veto over action against it. The only way one can conceive of small countries being willing to give that up in principle -- and if they are not willing, the system cannot be legitimate -- is if they write the laws that the security council enforces.
That is the whole point of the executive/legislative split that lies at the basis of modern political theory. Without it, there can be no modern legitimacy. Laws are only valid if we all pass them with the understanding that they apply to all of us equally. Execution is by nature a particularization; by nature it cannot be an act of the general will. But it is only legitimate when it executes valid laws. Which the executive by nature cannot pass.
With a UN ever so slightly but profoundly modified to return to its original vision (if not to its original reality), it is easy enough to imagine a solution to the madman problem. It would be a world in which there were procedures and conventions of which every government was well aware and had had a hand in making. So that every regime would know long before time what actions were beyond the pale and would invite disrepute and sanctions. In that sort of world it would make sense to talk about ultimate procedures for intervention as a means of strengthening the system. But before such a system is set up, such interventions simply weaken the old international regime without creating a better one to take its place. They necessarily cause an increase in all the things our international regime originally evolved to fix..
By their nature as legitimate rules they would have general application. They would apply equally to madmen who took power in the middle east or outer Slavonia. So solving the madman problem has nothing to do with oil. Oil is simply a means of clouding men's minds with panic in order to make such a solution impossible.
Creating a real solution to human rights problems starts with the assumption that we have enough time to do things right. Which is not only true, it is the first premise of a sane approach to the world's problems. We should get a move on because fixing the problems of war and peace and poverty and injustice are goods in themselves and shames to us all. But we in the US shouldn't feel frantic because we're facing a ticking bomb, because we're not. If we can live with 40,000 auto fatalities every year as the price of civilization (down from 50,000 20 years ago), we can live with the threat of terrorism while we work steadily to get things right. We should take both seriously as threats to our health. But neither is a threat to our civilization.