Barack Obama has finally become a wartime president. Unfortunately, the enemy happens to be an oil com pany.

Talk about missed opportunities: In Tuesday's Oval Office speech, the president could have addressed a genuine national-security imperative -- specifically, the need to stop showering billions of US petrodollars on America's enemies: Iran, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia . . . Instead, he talked about oil economics -- and got it all wrong.

Obama started channeling George "Bring It On" Bush last week, promising some presidential butt-kicking in response to the BP spill. Likening the accident to 9/11, he said it was "assaulting our shores and our citizens."

Then, on Tuesday, he laid out his "battle plan": "We will fight the spill with everything we've got, for as long as it takes" -- on the beaches, the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets . . .

The commander-in-chief authorized 17,000 National Guard troops to deploy and ordered the secretary of the Navy himself, Ray Mabus, to draft a coastal "restoration" plan. "BP will pay for the impact this spill has had on the region," Obama vowed.

If only he showed half as much martial enthusiasm for our actual enemies . . .

Obama had the perfect chance Tuesday to talk about oil's national-security implications -- and for a moment, it seemed he might: "We consume 20 percent of the world's oil, but have less than 2 percent of the world's oil reserves," the president noted. "Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil."

But he couldn't bring himself to say that the countries collecting much of that money happen to be our enemies -- and they're using our oil cash against us.

After all, there's nothing wrong with buying $1 billion a day worth of oil from friends. In April, we sent a total of $6.3 billion a day to various nations for goods and services -- and the world sent us some $5 billion for our stuff in return. This is called "trade."

What makes our foreign-oil purchases worrisome is that some of the sellers use their profits to fund terrorism, jihadi-training madrassas and (in the case of Iran) nukes.

In March, we bought 5 million barrels a day from OPEC countries -- about $387 million worth (at this week's $76-per-barrel price). Persian Gulf countries relieved us of $137 million a day; Saudi Arabia and Venezuela got about $84 million daily apiece.

That's just from Americans. All told, OPEC collected more than half a trillion dollars last year from oil sales. Iran alone sold $73 billion worth of oil in 2008, the US Energy Information Administration reports.

Bottom line? That means billions available to fund the mischief of folks like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Saudi princes and their Islamist emissaries.

But Obama didn't mention any of that. Instead, the prez talked of crude as a "finite resource" and how we've long known that "the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered"; he bemoaned America's "failure to act" with requisite "urgency" and the energy industry's supposedly miserly R&D investments compared to high tech.

It's nonsense, and Obama knows it: America doesn't act with "urgency," because oil is readily available -- whether produced at home or abroad. Should energy sources dry up or demand (say, from China) grows, prices will rise accordingly, enticing investment in new kinds of power supplies.

Fact is, Obama is claiming economic reasons for shifting to "clean energy" when his real goal -- though he didn't say so outright Tuesday -- is to wean Americans off fossil fuels, because he believes they cause global warming.

That, of course, is debatable. But there is a clear and pressing national-security case for kicking the foreign-oil habit. And if Obama were truly ready to play commander-in-chief, he'd have said so.