By THOMAS L.
FRIEDMAN
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Of all the shortsighted policies
of President Bush and Vice President
Dick 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.
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