[Mb-civic] Mullahs Love U.S. Oil Policy

[Michael Butler]

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    Mullahs Love U.S. Oil Policy
    By Thomas L. Friedman
    The New York Times

     Friday 08 October 2004

     Of all the shortsighted policies of President Bush and Vice President
Dick Cheney, none has 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.

     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 titled "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 offers none. It has treated the
Arab-Israel 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 United States 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
United States 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 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.

  

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