From The New York Times, 10/7/04:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/opinion/07friedman.html
The Battle of the Pump
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Of all the shortsighted policies of President Bush and Vice President
***** Cheney, none have been worse than their opposition to energy
conservation and a gasoline tax.
If we had imposed a new gasoline tax after 9/11, demand would have
been dampened and gas today would probably still be $2 a gallon.
But instead of the extra dollar going to Saudi Arabia - where it ends
up with mullahs who build madrasas that preach intolerance - that
dollar would have gone to our own Treasury to pay down our own deficit
and finance our own schools.
In fact, the Bush energy policy should be called No Mullah Left
Behind.
Our own No Child Left Behind program has not been fully financed
because the tax revenue is not there.
But thanks to the Bush-Cheney energy policy, No Mullah Left Behind has
been fully financed and is now the gift that keeps on giving:
terrorism.
Mr. Bush says we're in "a global war on terrorism.''
That's right.
But that war is rooted in the Arab-Muslim world.
That means there is no war on terrorism that doesn't involve helping
this region onto a more promising path for its huge population of
young people - too many of whom are unemployed or unemployable because
their oil-rich regimes are resistant to change and their religious
leaders are resisting modernity.
A former Kuwaiti information minister, Sad bin Tefla, wrote an article
in a London Arabic daily, Al Sharq Al Awsat, last Sept. 11 entitled
"We Are All Bin Laden.''
He asked why Muslim scholars and clerics had eagerly supported fatwas
condemning Salman Rushdie to death after he wrote a novel deemed
insulting to Islam, "The Satanic Verses,'' but to this day no Muslim
cleric has issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden for murdering
nearly 3,000 innocent civilians, badly damaging Islam.
Building a decent Iraq is necessary to help reverse such trends, but
it is not sufficient.
We need a much more comprehensive approach, particularly if we fail in
Iraq.
The Bush team does not offer one.
It has treated the Arab-Israeli issue with benign neglect, failed to
find any way to communicate with the Arab world and adopted an energy
policy that is supporting the worst Arab oil regimes and the worst
trends.
Phil Verleger, one of the nation's top energy consultants and a
longtime advocate of a gas tax, puts it succinctly:
"U.S. energy policy today is in support of terrorism - not the war on
terrorism."
We need to dramatically cut our consumption of oil and bring the price
back down to $20 a barrel.
Nothing would do more to stimulate reform in the Arab-Muslim world.
Oil regimes do not have to modernize or govern well.
They just buy off their people and their mullahs.
Governments without oil have to reform to create jobs.
People do not change when you tell them they should - they change when
they tell themselves they must.
The Arab-Muslim world is in a must-change human development crisis,
"but oil is like a narcotic that kills a lot of the pain for them and
prevents real change,'' says David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Where is all the innovation in the Arab world today?
In the places with little or no oil:
Bahrain is working on labor reform, just signed a free-trade agreement
with the U.S. and held the first elections in the Arab gulf, allowing
women to run and vote.
Dubai has made itself into a regional service center.
And Jordan has a free-trade agreement with the U.S. and is trying to
transform itself into a knowledge economy.
Who is paralyzed or rolling back reforms?
Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran, all now awash in oil money.
When did Jordan begin privatizing and deregulating its economy and
upgrading its education system?
In 1989 - after oil prices had slumped and the Arab oil states cut off
Jordan's subsidies.
In 1999, before Jordan signed its U.S. free-trade accord, its exports
to America totaled $13 million.
This year, Jordan will export over $1 billion worth of goods to the
U.S.
In the wake of King Abdullah II's reforms, Jordan's economy is growing
at an annual rate of over 7 percent, the government is installing
computers and broadband Internet links in every school, and it will
soon require anyone who wants to study Islamic law and become a mosque
preacher to first get a B.A. in something else, so mosque leaders
won't just come from those who can't do anything else.
"We had to go through a crisis to accept the need for reform," says
Jordan's planning minister, Bassem Awadallah.
We have the power right now to stimulate similar trends across the
Arab world.
It's the best way to fight a global war on terrorism.
If only we had a president and vice president tough enough to fight
this war.
________________________________________________________
That's life in the Bush Oil Administration.
Harry
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