TomFriedman2008: Friedman for President blog

The Energy Wall

2006-12-02T21:34:00.000-08:00

December 1, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Energy Wall
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The problem of Iraq looks like such a mess that it’s hard to figure out not only where we are but what to do next — if we decide to just leave. Whenever I find myself trying to think through a big problem in the Middle East like this, I start small and refer back to the core Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It can tell you a lot.

I believe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to the big “clash of civilizations” now under way between the Muslim world and the West what the Spanish Civil War was to World War II. It’s Off Broadway to Broadway.

The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, was the theater where Great European powers tested out many weapons and tactics that were later deployed on a larger scale in World War II. Similarly, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the small theater where many weapons and tactics get tested out first and then go global. So if you study the evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Off Broadway, you can learn a lot about how the larger war now playing out on Broadway, in Iraq and Afghanistan, might proceed.

For instance, airplane hijacking was perfected in the Israeli-Palestinian context, as a weapon of terrorism, and then was globalized. Suicide bombing was perfected there, and then was globalized. The Oslo peace process, which David Makovsky, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, calls an “attempt by Israel to empower a Palestinian partner with whom to negotiate,” was first tried there and then, in a different way, moved to the big stage with the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. These were a U.S. effort to create Arab and Afghan partners to push a progressive, democratic agenda in the Muslim world.

Unfortunately, Oslo failed Off Broadway, and now Iraq and even Afghanistan seem to be failing on Broadway. So what do we do next? Again, start by looking at what happened in the Israeli-Palestinian theater.

Israel decided to just build a wall.

As a result of the Palestinian intifada of 2000-2004. Israel concluded that partnership at that time was impossible with the Palestinians, whose leaders were too divided and dysfunctional to prevent suicide bombing. So Israel erected a wall, unilaterally pulled out of Gaza and basically said to the Palestinians, “We’ll continue to engage you, but only from a position of strength, only after we’re insulated from the daily threat of suicide bombings or the burden of occupying Gaza.”

What would be the equivalent for the West and the Muslim world? Also build a wall? Some people want to do that by vetoing Turkey’s entry into the European Union, which would be a huge, huge mistake. But how do we insulate ourselves from the madness of the Middle East — if Iraq and Afghanistan can’t be made to work — without giving up on reform there, which is still badly needed?

Build a virtual wall. End our oil addiction.

We need to end our dependence on this part of the world for energy, because it is debilitating for us and for them. It is terrible for us, because addicts never tell the truth to their pushers. We are the oil addicts and they are the oil pushers. The only way we can be brutally honest with them is if we undertake the necessary conservation measures, investments in renewable fuels and a gasoline tax hike that could make us energy independent.

I do not want my girls to live a world where the difference between a good day and bad day is whether Moktada al-Sadr lets Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, meet with the U.S. president or whether certain Arab regimes alter what their textbooks say about non-Muslims. I wish them all well, but I don’t want them impacting my life and I don’t want to be roiling theirs, and the only reason we are so intertwined now is O-I-L.

Not only would ending our oil addiction protect us from the worst in the Arab-Muslim world, it would help us support the best. These regimes will never reform as long as they enjoy windfall oil profits, which allow them to maintain closed societies with archaic education systems and protected industries that can’t compete globally. The small Persian Gulf state of Bahrain just held its second free election, in which women could vote and run. Bahrain is also the first Arab gulf state to start running out of oil. No accident.

Everyone asks what is our “Plan B” for Iraq. Answer: It’s get out as soon as we can, with the least damage possible, just as Israel got out of Gaza. And then build a wall — not a physical wall, but a wall of energy independence that will enable us to continue to engage honestly with the most progressive Arabs and Muslims on a reform agenda, but without being hostage to the most malevolent.

Ten Months or Ten Years

2006-11-29T20:35:00.000-08:00

November 29, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Ten Months or Ten Years
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Here is the central truth about Iraq today: This country is so broken it can’t even have a proper civil war.

There are so many people killing so many other people for so many different reasons — religion, crime, politics — that all the proposals for how to settle this problem seem laughable. It was possible to settle Bosnia’s civil war by turning the country into a loose federation, because the main parties to that conflict were reasonably coherent, with leaders who could cut a deal and deliver their faction.

But Iraq is in so many little pieces now, divided among warlords, foreign terrorists, gangs, militias, parties, the police and the army, that nobody seems able to deliver anybody. Iraq has entered a stage beyond civil war — it’s gone from breaking apart to breaking down. This is not the Arab Yugoslavia anymore. It’s Hobbes’s jungle.

Given this, we need to face our real choices in Iraq, which are: 10 months or 10 years. Either we just get out of Iraq in a phased withdrawal over 10 months, and try to stabilize it some other way, or we accept the fact that the only way it will not be a failed state is if we start over and rebuild it from the ground up, which would take 10 years. This would require reinvading Iraq, with at least 150,000 more troops, crushing the Sunni and Shiite militias, controlling borders, and building Iraq’s institutions and political culture from scratch.

Anyone who tells you that we can just train a few more Iraqi troops and police officers and then slip out in two or three years is either lying or a fool. The minute we would leave, Iraq would collapse. There is nothing we can do by the end of the Bush presidency that would produce a self-sustaining stable Iraq — and “self-sustaining” is the key metric.

In his must-read new book about the impact of culture on politics and economic development, “The Central Liberal Truth,” Lawrence Harrison notes that some cultures are “progress-prone” and others are “progress- resistant.” In the Arab-Muslim world today the progress-resistant cultural forces seem to be just too strong, especially in Iraq, which is why it is so hard to establish durable democratic institutions in that soil, he says.

“Some may hark back to our successful imposition of democracy on West Germany and Japan after World War II,” adds Mr. Harrison. “But the people on whom democracy was imposed in those two countries were highly literate and entrepreneurial members of unified, institutionalized societies with strong traditions of association — what we refer to today as ‘social capital.’ Iraq was social capital-poor to start with and it now verges on bankruptcy.”

On Feb. 12, 2003, before the war, I wrote a column offering what I called my “pottery store” rule for Iraq: “You break it, you own it.” It was not an argument against the war, but rather a cautionary note about the need to do it with allies, because transforming Iraq would be such a huge undertaking. (Colin Powell later picked up on this and used the phrase to try to get President Bush to act with more caution, but Mr. Bush did not heed Mr. Powell’s advice.)

But my Pottery Barn rule was wrong, because Iraq was already pretty broken before we got there — broken, it seems, by 1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Baathist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions. It was held together only by Saddam’s iron fist. Had we properly occupied the country, and begun political therapy, it is possible an American iron fist could have held Iraq together long enough to put it on a new course. But instead we created a vacuum by not deploying enough troops.

That vacuum was filled by murderous Sunni Baathists and Al Qaeda types, who butchered Iraqi Shiites until they finally wouldn’t take it any longer and started butchering back, which brought us to where we are today. The Sunni Muslim world should hang its head in shame for the barbarism it has tolerated and tacitly supported by the Sunnis of Iraq, whose violence, from the start, has had only one goal: America must fail in its effort to bring progressive politics or democracy to this region. America must fail — no matter how many Iraqis have to be killed, America must fail.

This has left us with two impossible choices. If we’re not ready to do what is necessary to crush the dark forces in Iraq and properly rebuild it, then we need to leave — because to just keep stumbling along as we have been makes no sense. It will only mean throwing more good lives after good lives into a deeper and deeper hole filled with more and more broken pieces.

A Partner for Mr. Hu

2006-11-22T17:42:00.000-08:00

November 22, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
A Partner for Mr. Hu
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Memo From: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

To: President Hu Jintao of China.

Dear President Hu: I am sure you thought that your first letter from me would be about trade and human rights. Those issues still animate my party. But I’m convinced that we have a better chance of making progress on them if we can first build a partnership to address the urgent issues of energy and climate change, which affect us both.

President Hu, President Bush promised the world when he spurned the Kyoto Protocols that he would offer an alternative. He never did. So I will. I want to propose a “New Shanghai Communiqué.” The 1972 Shanghai Communiqué forged an understanding between China and the U.S. to defuse the most destabilizing issue of that day: the struggle over Taiwan. The New Shanghai Communiqué would defuse the most destabilizing issue of our day: the world’s unsustainable appetite for energy.

What should a New Shanghai Communiqué include? First, China has committed to a 20 percent reduction in energy consumption for every 1 percent of G.D.P. growth by 2010 — a courageous commitment that Mr. Bush has also failed to make. I will see you and raise you. I am going to propose that the U.S. as a whole match the 4 percent annual improvement in energy efficiency already undertaken by California. That would mean at least a 25 percent improvement by 2012.

China has also just imposed a national renewable energy requirement, setting a target of generating 10 percent of its energy from renewables — wind, hydro, solar power and biofuels — by 2020. I will see you and raise you again. I want to require our power grid operators to purchase 20 percent of their energy from environmentally sound renewables by 2020.

President Hu, if we can hit these targets we would put our countries — the two largest emitters of carbon dioxide — on a much more sustainable growth path and set an example that would change the world. We would create less dependence on despotic oil states, encourage everyone to be energy efficient and climate friendly, and create more room in the energy market for big emerging economies, like China, to grow without competing head-on with America for oil and gas. Instead of fighting over a shrinking pie of fossil fuels, let’s create a huge new energy pie — from renewables and efficiency savings.

Second, I want to lead an effort to help China invest in factories devoted to clean power technologies — green cars, solar panels, wind turbines — in some of our states, like Ohio, most hurt by globalization. Green energy is going to be the growth industry of the 21st century. We have some great technologies. You have $1 trillion in reserves because of your trade surplus with us. Nothing would improve China’s standing in America more than using its reserves, as Japan did, to create good U.S. jobs and profits for Chinese companies — all while advancing the clean power industry.

Third, I propose we send over a “Green Corps” of U.S. engineers to travel across China and demonstrate something many Chinese officials do not understand: being green is profitable. Too many of your local officials think green is a luxury you can’t afford. You will never break out of your cycle of environmental degradation until those officials understand that pollution is wasted energy and wasted money. Our best companies, like G.E. and DuPont, consistently find that operating “green” costs much less than they anticipate and saves much more.

President Hu, we both know that the millions of cars now choking your streets are only the beginning. Your biggest concern is the 800 million Chinese living in the countryside, who need transportation to better their lives but who can’t afford even the cheapest car. Every year they buy more than 30 million motorcycles and farm vehicles, which have the advantage of being cheap but which use the most rudimentary, polluting motors — blackening your skies.

We need to bring our U.S. engineers, who know how to clean up small engines, together with your manufacturers, who know how to mass produce them cheaply, to forge companies that will not only clean up the air in developing countries but make money for both of us. If that happens, President Hu, China has the potential not just to have a “Green Olympics” in 2008, but to offer the developing world a whole new model of sustainable growth.

President Hu, over 40 years ago your country tried to make a Great Leap Forward alone — to change China. This time, let us make a Great Green Leap Forward together — and change the world.

Best wishes, Nancy.

Not Since Nixon—Friedman in China, Sells Tom’s World

2006-11-15T18:13:00.000-08:00

Not Since Nixon—Friedman in China,
Sells Tom’s World
Times Columnist Exports Adage, Aphorism, Metaphor: Opening Big Book Market. Mr. Ham—Hold the Mao! Explains Much to Beijing: ‘The World. Is. Flat.’

The New York Observer
By: Tom Scocca
Date: 11/20/2006
Page: 1

BEIJING—I had just begun haggling for a silk comforter at the Yuexiu Market on Chaoyangmen Street when I got a phone call saying that New York Times Op-Ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman was on his way to a bookstore nearby. I wrapped up the deal, disadvantageously, and grabbed a cab.

You can learn a lot wandering around a foreign country in the first person. Mr. Friedman does it all the time. He looks around and talks to somebody and learns something important. Now I was the one in a cab in a foreign country. Conversations with cab drivers are the sort of things that lead Mr. Friedman to larger truths about globalization and the world we live in today.

This was Nov. 12. I had asked the driver to go to Yuexiu Market, and he had gone to Yaxiu Market. I’d even writaten out “Yuexiu” in Chinese characters. So I told the cabbie, “No, this is Yaxiu; I want to go to Yuexiu, on Chaoyangmen.” For me, this was a fairly in-depth cabbie exchange.

The bookstore was the Bookworm, a foreigner-run place that offers Wi-Fi and crostini, on the upper floor of a building near Workers’ Stadium. The side room had been set up for a lecture, with rows of chairs, and every chair was taken—either by a person or by a bag or coat in lieu of a person. There was a television in the main room and another in the back room, for overflow spectators.

Mr. Friedman was not there. It was 10 minutes after 5 p.m. A Bookworm staffer, looking slightly dazed, explained that the talk was not scheduled till 7:30. The roomful of people had showed up more than two hours early.

Two hours was enough time to go get dinner. Outside, murk had fallen on the city. It has been a strangely clear and bright fall in Beijing, which is usually choked with thick, impenetrable pollution, like Industrial Revolution–era London. The normal tailpipe smell of the air had been replaced by crisp breezes. But there had been a golden tinge in the air all afternoon, and toward sundown, the gold had deepened to the old familiar mud-and-cement color.

What to eat, while waiting for a globalization lecture? There was a Pakistani-Xinjiang restaurant up the street, on the top floor of yet another multi-level market. A subcontinental dance-music cover of “Eye of the Tiger” played on the sound system.

By the time I got back to the Bookworm, there were two or three dozen people lined up outside at the foot of the stairs, and employees were announcing that no one else could come up. “I feel like this is a rock concert,” one of them said. “I want it to be a rock concert, actually.”

The crowd did not disperse. Some were carrying copies of Thomas Friedman books. The staffers guarding the stairs asked for a look at a book. “Does it have a picture, so we know who not to bar?” one asked.

The lack of a Thomas Friedman lecture seemed possibly more informative than the lecture itself would be. But I got in, because I write for a newspaper. Writing for a newspaper means you get a somewhat different set of experiences than other people get.

The bookstore was packed and steaming. All the rooms, the lecture room and the TV rooms, were full of people. It was so crowded that most people didn’t see Mr. Friedman come in—a small, roundish figure escorted by the Bookworm’s owner, a woman much taller than him. He wore black trousers and a dark sweater with a zipper at the neck.

With a smile, Mr. Friedman perched on a tall stool. He had the genial assurance of a children’s television host. “If you get a small enough room, you can feel really important,” he told the audience.

His talk, he said, would be an update on his thinking about his latest book, The World Is Flat, which he said is now out in its 2.0 version. His new thoughts will be incorporated into a 3.0 version. “The whole subject is alive,” he said.

Mr. Friedman explained how he had come to write the book. It had begun in 2004, he said, with a planned documentary project, part of The Times’ involvement with the Discovery Channel, in which he was going to go to call centers around the world and report on the people who “spend their days imitating Americans.” Then outsourcing became an issue in the American Presidential campaign, and he decided to focus on Bangalore, India, and report on the “other side of outsourcing.” After 11 days of interviews, he ended up being told that the global economic playing field was being leveled—which, in a much-recounted eureka moment, he concluded meant that he should write a book called The World Is Flat.

Losing the call-centers story seemed like a shame. But Mr. Friedman’s mind moves forcefully from the specific to the general; the general makes for best-sellers. Perhaps someone else can still do the call centers.

Mr. Friedman moved on to the subject of what he called “Ten Days That Flattened the World.” He was speaking without notes, playing on names and numbers, repeating his points. The first world-flattening day was 11/9, he said. Not 9/11. No, 11/9 was, by “Kabbalistic accident,” the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Someone moved around, breaking his train of thought. He went back to 11/9 and 9/11. A young woman came in, carrying shopping bags, distracting him again. “Everybody settled?” Mr. Friedman asked. “Anybody want to stand up and say something?” 11/9. A cell phone rang.

The awkwardness passed, and Mr. Friedman settled back into his timeline of global techno-unification and leveling: Microsoft Windows, the Netscape I.P.O., the fiber-optic infrastructure buildout. The “workflow revolution.” Mr. Friedman speaks with his hands and arms, sometimes his whole body. He pantomimed an old-fashioned worker hand-carrying a piece of paper from one place to another. He pulled and stretched imaginary objects in the air, as if he were in one of those notebook-computer commercials like Jay-Z or Shaun “The Flying Tomato” Wright. He typed on an invisible keyboard. He extended his index fingers, then brought the tips together, touching: interoperability.

The language was flourishy to match: “Beijing, Bangalore and Bethesda” … “from Canton, Ohio, to Canton, China.” Metaphors flourished themselves into trouble. “What these steroids do is turbocharge all these new forms of collaboration,” Mr. Friedman said. Also: “Mother Nature always bats last.”

“Whatever can be done will be done,” Mr. Friedman said. “Will it be done by you or to you?” He repeated the question. By you or to you?

He told a story about going to Hungary and being driven around. His driver had asked him—“Mister Tom, Mister Tom”—to refer friends to him, if they visited Hungary. The driver, Mr. Friedman said, had given him the U.R.L. of his Web site: a hired Hungarian driver with his own Internet presence. Imagine!

More metaphor: Mr. Friedman compared the C.E.O.’s who understand the scope of the ongoing transformation to the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They know the secret. “None of our political leaders were talkin’ about it,” Mr. Friedman said. Mr. Friedman was with the pods.

“The world. Is. Flat,” he said.

In the question-and-answer period, he was asked about the midterm elections. The 2008 election, he said, is “going to be about China.” What about Hillary vs. Obama? “I think Obama is a really, really serious candidate, and if you asked me to bet today, I’d bet he’d be the Democratic nominee.” Mr. Friedman talked about the liabilities that Al Gore and John Kerry had brought, and the baggage that Hillary Clinton has. “We’re looking for a uniter, not a divider,” he said.

“But I don’t do domestic politics,” he said.

A tall young man in a Brandeis T-shirt raised the issue of Mr. Friedman’s personal wealth, and whether that might shape his views of globalization. “If George Soros were here, giving a speech from the far left, would you have asked him that question?” Mr. Friedman asked.

“Um, sure,” the questioner said.

But Mr. Friedman had set off, defending himself from his unseen enemies. He stands accused, he said, of being “a prophet of globalization” or “the Panglossian avatar of globalization.” Not so. “I didn’t do this,” Mr. Friedman said. “I didn’t start this. I just wrote about it.”

On it went, prosecution and defense, in one man. He has been called a “spokesman for global capitalism.” A “shill.”

“It’s stupid,” Mr. Friedman said.

His foes have their facts and figures, criticizing him for not weighing the costs of globalization. “Thank you very much for those statistics,” Mr. Friedman said, apostrophically. “They’re all from my book.”

There is, in fact, a Friedmanian dialectic. It only appears to go: thesis—antithesis—thesis! Thomas Friedman appreciates the dark side.

Earlier, for instance, the subject of the environment had come up. Mr. Friedman had said that he thought he knew how his next column, the Nov. 15 column, would begin. He would talk about being in Beijing, he said. Every time he comes here, he said, “people here speak with greater ease, and breathe with greater difficulty.” He described landing that day at the Beijing airport and hearing the stewardess announce that the weather outside was “clear.”

“And you could not see the terminal,” Mr. Friedman said. The crowd laughed knowingly. Old Beijing joke. But couldn’t you?

And the next day dawned crystalline and brilliant, without a trace of smog. That night, the sky over Beijing was strewn with stars.

Bring in the Green Cat

2006-11-15T18:11:00.000-08:00

November 15, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Bring in the Green Cat
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Chongming, China

I’ve been a regular visitor to China since 1990, and here’s what strikes me most: Each year that I’ve come here, China’s people seem to speak with greater ease and breathe with greater difficulty.

Yes, you can now have amazingly frank talks with officials and journalists here. But when I walked out of my room the morning after I arrived in Shanghai, the air was so smoky — from the burning of farm fields after the harvest — that for a moment I honestly thought my hotel was on fire.

And that’s why, for the first time, it’s starting to feel to me like China is reaching its environmental limits. If it doesn’t radically change to greener, more sustainable modes of design, transport, production and power generation, the Chinese miracle is going to turn into an eco-nightmare.

For some three decades now, China’s economy has grown at around 10 percent per year, based on low-cost labor and little regard for the waste it pumps into its rivers and the air. When a country grows that fast, year after year, it can start to think that the laws of nature don’t apply to it.

Guess again. China has been doing the environmental equivalent of jumping from an airplane and thinking that it’s flying, argued Rob Watson, an expert on China’s environment who heads the green building services firm EcoTech International. “After you jump out of a plane, for about five miles you can actually feel like you’re flying,” he added. But then reality hits. “It’s not the fall that kills you — it’s the sudden stop at the end, and China may be approaching that sudden stop. ... When you stress a system to a certain point, it just stops working.”

China’s top leaders understand the crisis. But their response is complicated by so many Chinese flooding from the countryside to cities. In their view, political stability depends on finding those people jobs, and jobs depend on growth, and growth depends on China continuing to be the low-cost producer of everything — environment be damned.

But China can’t do what the West did: grow now, clean up later. Because the unprecedented pace and scale of its growth are going to make later too late. The China Daily reported this week that at least 24 million acres of cultivated land in China — one-tenth of the country’s total arable land — is now polluted, posing a “grave threat” to China’s food safety. More than half its rivers are also polluted, which is why less than 9 percent of “drinkable water” met government standards for bacteria in 243 rural supply stations recently tested. Many wells have excessive nitrates that can cause diabetes or kidney damage. No wonder some high-tech workers are starting to avoid China, because they don’t want to live in a dirty cloud.

Chinese officials fear that if they move to U.S.-level green production and environmental cleanup, “China will not be such a low-cost producer anymore, and that will affect jobs,” noted Dan Rosen, an expert on China’s economy and head of China Strategic Advisory. But what they are missing is that going green is not just a problem, but an opportunity. Pollution represents waste and inefficiency. Green companies are always more efficient, adds Mr. Watson, and China has a chance to become a major innovator of low-cost green solutions. When U.S. companies went green, they consistently overestimated the costs and underestimated the savings.

The other day, I sailed with Mr. Rosen from Shanghai up the Yangtze Delta to Chongming Island, the world’s largest alluvial island. There, Shanghai is trying to expand, by building the first eco-metropolis in China, based on eco-tourism, farming, wind and solar power. When you see the parklands created there, or when you stand in the protected wetlands and watch the water buffalo lounging in the mud, while peasants collect crabs, you can almost believe that China can change course.

But then, off in the distance, you see this massive bridge that is about to connect Chongming to central Shanghai, and you wonder what will happen to all the green plans here when all the overloaded trucks and consumers start rushing in. If Chongming is just a green ornament attached to Shanghai, it will never survive. If it is a model for a whole new kind of development, it, and China, have a chance.

Deng Xiaoping once famously said of China’s economy: “Black cat, white cat, all that matters is that it catches mice” — i.e., forget about communist ideology, all that matters is that China grows. Not anymore, said Mr. Rosen. “Now the cat better be green, otherwise it is going to die before it catches the mouse.”

Make History, Arnold!

2006-10-20T20:56:00.000-07:00

October 20, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Make History, Arnold!
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Governors don’t often get a chance to make big-time history, but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California has that opportunity now — if he’s ready to get off the fence. With one move, Governor Schwarzenegger could make California America’s hub for developing “green” clean-power technologies — which are going to be the growth industry of the 21st century — and do something that President Bush has only paid lip service to: really help to end America’s oil addiction.

Do it, Arnold. C’mon, just do it.

Here’s the basic story: This Nov. 7, Californians will be asked to vote yes or no on Proposition 87, a ballot initiative that would impose a higher extraction fee on oil pumped in California. (Up to now, oil companies in California have paid a very low extraction fee compared with those in other states — a rip-off they want to keep.)

The new funds raised by Prop 87, explained The San Francisco Chronicle, “would be used to finance research and development of alternative fuels in universities; education campaigns; and subsidies to consumers who buy vehicles that use alternative fuels and businesses that produce and distribute alternative fuels. ... Oil companies would be taxed between 1.5 percent and 6 percent on oil production depending on the price of oil per barrel. The tax would end by 2017 or when the tax generates $4 billion, whichever occurs first.”

Passage of Prop 87 would be huge. To begin with, it would be the perfect complement to the carbon reduction law that Arnold just signed. That law requires California to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Prop 87, for its part, sets a goal of a 25 percent reduction in oil consumption in California in 10 years. Today, California consumes about 16 billion gallons of gasoline a year, so a 25 percent reduction, if realized, would put California well on its way to meeting its new carbon emissions goal.

But Prop 87, by also raising a $4 billion energy fund, and devoting most of it to nurturing new fuels and more fuel-efficient vehicles and buildings, would enable California to consistently enhance those companies, communities and schools now pioneering alternative energies. As anyone who has followed the alternative energy movement knows, one of its greatest weaknesses has been that Washington has constantly started and stopped subsidies for things like solar and wind power — so technologies have been innovated here but then turned into marketable products overseas.

By combining renewable-energy targets and a $4 billion fund to consistently support the start-up of companies to reach those targets in a free-market way, California would set a compelling example for other states — and maybe even for Washington.

The reason that Mr. Bush’s call a year ago to end our oil addiction has been a total flop has to do with a struggle in his administration between foolish market worshipers led by Dick Cheney — who insist markets will take care of everything — and wiser, nuanced policy makers who understand that government’s job is to set broad goals and standards, and then let the market reach them.

The best example of that is the 1999 Texas Renewable Portfolio Standard — a state law signed by whom? Gov. George W. Bush! The law required Texas electricity companies to buy a set amount of renewable power by 2009. This stimulated the Texas utilities marketplace to erect huge wind farms. Today, Texas is a real leader in wind energy and has sharply driven down the cost through innovation.

President Bush, meet Governor Bush.

Naturally, oil companies like Exxon Mobil — which just paid its outgoing chairman, Lee Raymond, $400,000,000 in his final year — are financing misleading ads to try to fool Californians into rejecting Prop 87. Polls show it’s too close to call. And that brings us back to Arnold. He’s on the fence. Even though he’ll be re-elected in a landslide, he’s not come out for Prop 87 — because he’s against higher taxes, in principle. But he hasn’t come out against it either. If he, and wife, Maria, openly support it, Prop 87 passes. It’s that simple.

Bill Clinton said it best: “California is being given an opportunity ... to do something remarkable to save the planet, improve our national security and create the next generation of good jobs for the American people. That’s what Prop 87 represents.”

And Governor Schwarzenegger can determine whether or not that opportunity is seized. C’mon, Arnold, just do it. No one will remember you for sparing Exxon from a tax hike. And no one will forget you for spurring America to realize the dream of a clean, independent energy economy.

Barney and Baghdad

2006-10-20T20:53:00.000-07:00

October 18, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Barney and Baghdad
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

In the competition for the biggest “October surprise” of the 2006 election cycle, it might seem hard to top North Korea’s nuclear test. But I’d suggest that in time we’ll come to see the events unfolding — or rather, unraveling — in Iraq today as the real October surprise, because what we’re seeing there seems like the jihadist equivalent of the Tet offensive.

For those of you too young to remember, the Tet offensive was the series of attacks undertaken by the Vietcong and North Vietnamese armies between Jan. 30, 1968 — the start of the Lunar New Year — and June 1969. Although the Vietcong and Hanoi were badly mauled during Tet, they delivered, through the media, such a psychological blow to U.S. hopes of “winning” in Vietnam that Tet is widely credited with eroding support for President Johnson and driving him to withdraw as a candidate for re-election.

Total U.S. troop deaths in Iraq this month have reached at least 53, putting October on a path to be the third deadliest month of the entire war for the U.S. military. Iraqis are being killed at a rate of 100 per day now. The country has descended into such a Hobbesian state that even Saddam called on Iraqis from his prison cell to stop killing each other. He told insurgents, “Remember you are God’s soldiers and, therefore, you must show genuine forgiveness and put aside revenge over the spilled blood of your sons and brothers.” When Saddam is urging calm, you know things have hit a new low.

The violence in Iraq is not as coordinated as in Vietnam. You have small gangs of Sunnis and Shiites killing each other in sectarian clashes, Baathists and jihadists attacking U.S. and Iraqi forces in more organized efforts, Sunnis fighting with Kurds over turf in northern Iraq, and, on top of it all, rampant crime. Therefore, it’s hard to identify a specific military order to step up the violence in Iraq, as in Tet.

But while there may be no single hand coordinating the upsurge in violence in Iraq, enough people seem to be deliberately stoking the fires there before our election that the parallel with Tet is not inappropriate. The jihadists want to sow so much havoc that Bush supporters will be defeated in the midterms and the president will face a revolt from his own party, as well as from Democrats, if he does not begin a pullout from Iraq.

The jihadists follow our politics much more closely than people realize. A friend at the Pentagon just sent me a post by the “Global Islamic Media Front” carried by the jihadist Web site Ana al-Muslim on Aug. 11. It begins: “The people of jihad need to carry out a media war that is parallel to the military war and exert all possible efforts to wage it successfully. This is because we can observe the effect that the media have on nations to make them either support or reject an issue.”

It then explains that for jihadist videos of attacks on Americans to have the biggest impact, “Some persons will be needed who are proficient in the use of computer graphics including Photoshop, 3D Studio Max, or other programs that the people of jihad will need to design ... video clips about the operations.”

Finally, the Web site suggests that jihadists flood e-mail and video of their operations to “chat rooms,” “television channels,” and to “famous U.S. authors who have public e-mail addresses ... such as Friedman, Chomsky, Fukuyama, Huntington and others.” This is the first time I’ve ever been on the same mailing list with Noam Chomsky.

It would be depressing to see the jihadists influence our politics with a Tet-like media/war frenzy. But there are only two reasons now for the U.S. to remain in Iraq: because it thinks that staying will make things better or that leaving will make things drastically worse. Alas, it is increasingly hard to see how our presence is making things better. Iraq, under our nose, is breaking apart into so many little pieces that no political solution seems to be in the offing, because no Iraqi leader can deliver his faction anymore — and there does not seem to be an Iraqi center capable of coming together. While leaving would no doubt exacerbate the civil war, staying in Iraq indefinitely to prevent even more Shiites and Sunnis from killing one another is not going to fly with the U.S. public much longer.

Bob Woodward quoted President Bush as saying that he will not leave Iraq, even if the only ones still supporting him are his wife, Laura, and his dog Barney.

If the jihadist Tet offensive continues gaining momentum, Mr. Bush may be left with just Barney.

The Energy Mandate

2006-10-20T20:52:00.000-07:00

October 13, 2006
The Energy Mandate
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

James Carville, the legendary Clinton campaign adviser who coined the slogan, ''It's the economy, stupid,'' knows a gut issue when he sees one. So when Mr. Carville contacted me the other day to tell me about the newest gut issue his polling was turning up for candidates in the 2006 elections, I was all ears.

''Energy independence,'' he said. ''It's now the No. 1 national security issue. It's become kind of a joke with us, because no matter how we ask the question, that's what comes up.''

So, for instance, the Democracy Corps, a Democratic strategy group spearheaded by Mr. Carville and the former Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg, asked the following question in an Aug. 27 survey of likely voters: ''Which of the following would you say should be the two most important national security priorities for the administration and Congress over the next few years?''

Coming in No. 1, with 42 percent, was ''reducing dependence on foreign oil.'' Coming in a distant second at 26 percent was ''combating terrorism.'' Coming in third at 25 percent was ''the war in Iraq,'' and tied at 21 percent were ''securing our ports, nuclear plants and chemical factories'' and ''addressing dangerous countries like Iran and North Korea.'' ''Strengthening America's military'' drew 12 percent. Mr. Carville also noted that because their polls are of ''likely voters,'' they have a slight Republican bias -- i.e., they aren't just polling a bunch of liberal greens.

"When we lay out different plans for how to deal with Iraq, any plan that also includes energy independence tops any other plan that doesn't,'' said Mr. Greenberg, who added that people are not expressing this view because they are worried about price, but because they are starting to understand that our oil dependence is fueling a host of really bad national security problems. ''There is frustration that leaders have not taken it up,'' he added. ''There is a sense that the public is ahead of the leaders, and there is actually a sense of relief when anyone talks about [energy independence] with any seriousness.''

Mr. Greenberg said he started noticing this during this year's re-election campaign by Ed Rendell, the governor of Pennsylvania. When his Republican challenger, Lynn Swann, first jumped into the race, public polls showed the two candidates in a dead heat. Governor Rendell eventually pulled far ahead in the polls, though, and among the key issues that helped to separate him, said Mr. Greenberg, was the governor's stressing of alternative energy, and his ''PennSecurity Fuels Initiative'' to lessen dependence on foreign oil and grow the state's clean energy market.

What this means for Democratic Party candidates, argues Mr. Carville, is that it's no longer enough to have ''energy security'' as part of a 12-step plan for American renewal. No, it needs to become a defining issue of what Democrats are all about.

It should ''not be part of an expanding litany, but rather a contracting narrative,'' explained Mr. Carville. ''It can't just be that we are for a woman's right to choose, and education and energy independence. This is the thing we need to get done above and beyond everything else.'' People should associate ''energy security'' with Democrats the way they associate ''tax cuts'' with Republicans, he argued. ''This is not something to add to the stew -- this is the stock.''
The best way for a party that is often viewed as weak on national security to overcome that deficit is to be for energy independence, he noted. Indeed, nothing would be more potent for Democrats now than to capture energy security and all the issues that surround it -- from improving our trade deficit by not importing more oil to improving the climate to improving U.S. competitiveness by making us leaders in alternative fuels.

So does this mean the public would accept a gasoline or B.T.U. tax? No, said Mr. Greenberg. The public wants government to impose much higher auto mileage standards on Detroit and much more stringent energy codes on buildings and appliances. People want a tough regulatory response, à la California.

Remember, Mr. Carville and Mr. Greenberg are professional campaign advisers. They get paid to get people elected -- not to offer feel-good nostrums. So when they tell you that their polling and focus groups around the country show that ''reducing dependence on foreign oil'' is voters' top national security priority, you know that this issue has finally arrived. The party that captures it most credibly will be rewarded.

Hello? Anybody listening?

The Bus Is Waiting

2006-10-11T21:58:00.000-07:00

October 11, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Bus Is Waiting
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
As eras go, the post-cold war has been a pretty good one. The collapse of communism, the spread of free-market democracies and the general reign of stability bought and paid for by U.S. power all combined to create a world in which China and India have been able to rise peacefully, America has prospered, and Europe has become whole and free. Yes, there’s been 9/11, Bosnia, the rise of the petro-dictators and African wars — which are hardly trivial. But all in all, compared with the vast repression and nuclear standoff that characterized the cold war, the post-cold-war era has been much better for a lot of humanity.

Too bad it’s probably over.

Yes, one day historians may argue that the post-cold war started on 11/9 and ended on 10/9.

The Berlin Wall fell on 11/9 — Nov. 9, 1989, which ushered in the post-cold-war world. The apparent North Korean nuclear test went up on Oct. 9, 2006, which, may have ushered out the post-cold-war world and ushered in a much more problematic era — the post-post-cold-war world.

This post-post-cold-war era will be defined by three new features — if things continue as they are. First is a nuclear Asia, triggered by North Korea’s flaunting of its nuclear weapons. How long will Japan, Taiwan and South Korea remain nonnuclear with Kim Jong-il brandishing his bomb? Second is a nuclear Middle East. Iran is almost certain to follow North Korea’s lead, and once the Shiite Persians in Iran have the bomb, how long will it be before the Sunni Arabs in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, even Syria have one too? Third is a disintegrating Iraq in the heart of the Arab world, with its destabilizing impact on oil prices and terrorism.

Together these will add up to a much more dangerous and volatile post-post-cold-war world — unless ...

Unless, what? Unless China and Russia get their act together and understand that the post-post-cold-war world is a much bigger threat to their prosperity than a post-cold-war world in which U.S. power is pre-eminent. You read me right — the post-cold-war world can be preserved only if Russia and China get over their ambivalence about U.S. power and if the Bush team gets over its ambivalence about Iran and North Korea.

How so? The U.S. is sanctioned out when it comes to Iran and North Korea. We don’t have any more unilateral sanctions with which to pressure either regime to halt its nuclear adventure. The only countries that could have an impact on North Korea and Iran are China and Russia.

If China told North Korea that unless it dismantled its nuclear program and put its facilities under U.N. inspection, Beijing would cut off its energy and food, Kim Jong-il would relent. He is not suicidal. Anything less than such an explicit Chinese threat will mean a nuclear North Korea and eventually a nuclear Asia — which will certainly not be good for China’s growth prospects.

And if China and Russia told Iran that they would join in the toughest possible U.N. economic sanctions on Tehran if it persisted in its nuclear program, the ayatollahs would also back down. Because then the Europeans would have the spine to join in sanctions and Tehran would face a united front.

To be sure, both moves would be greatly helped by a declaration from the Bush team that it had overcome its infighting and decided to pursue changes in behavior instead of changes in regimes in North Korea and Iran, and would be prepared to give explicit security guarantees to both if they verifiably ended their nuclear programs. When an administration can’t make up its mind between regime change and change of behavior, it gets neither. And that is what the Bush team has gotten.

So, thanks to North Korea’s nuclear test, we’ve come to a moment of truth. Yes, we have to make up our minds, but so, too, must Moscow and Beijing. They constantly advocate “multilateral” solutions. Well, will they sign up for the kind of biting multilateral sanctions that would work vis-à-vis Iran and North Korea and make “unilateral” U.S. military options unnecessary? If Russia and China want to see the post-cold-war world continue, they can’t be free riders anymore — opposing both U.S. unilateralism and effective multilateralism that requires them to do something hard. They’ve got to start paying a price to preserve this world.

If they do, this relatively benign post-cold-war world might continue. If they don’t, if they keep trying to be free riders on our bus, we’ll all stall — because America can’t keep this bus moving alone any longer, especially when the road gets this dangerous.

The bus stops here.

Big Ideas and No Boundaries

2006-10-08T21:40:00.000-07:00

October 6, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Big Ideas and No Boundaries
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

My rabbi told this joke on Yom Kippur: At the front of the lunch line at a parochial school was a bowl of apples with a sign that read: “Take only one. God is watching.” At the end of the lunch line, after the entrees, was a bowl of cookies, where a student had put up a sign: “Take all you want. God is watching the apples.”

Somehow that joke reminds me of the debate about free trade in America today. Right now, with the Republicans in charge, free trade is secure. Yet, while everyone is watching the front of the line, out back in the country, an erosion of support for free trade is under way. The “Doha” trade talks have stalled, because of opposition by U.S. farmers, and the White House’s “fast-track” authority to negotiate free trade agreements expires soon. With protectionist-leaning Democrats likely to take the House or Senate, any new free-trade accords will probably be stalled.

I hope Democrats won’t go this route. I’ve always believed in free trade, accompanied by better pension and health care safety nets. But I’m not a free trader anymore. I’m now a radical free trader. Why? Because in this new era of globalization, so many people now have the communication and innovation tools to compete, connect and collaborate from anywhere. As a result, business rule No. 1 today is: Whatever can be done will be done by someone, somewhere. The only question is whether it will be done by you or to you. In such a world, the way our society flourishes is by being as educated, open and flexible as possible, so more of our people can do whatever can be done first. It matters that Google was invented here.

“That society which has the least resistance to the uninterrupted flow of ideas, diversity, concepts and competitive signals wins,” says Nandan Nilekani, C.E.O. of the Indian tech giant Infosys. “And the society that has the efficiencies to translate whatever can be done quickly — from idea to market — also wins.”

The old left thinks free trade is something that benefits only multinationals. In fact, it is now critical for small businesses and individuals, who can now act multinationally. They are the ones who create good jobs.

Last week, I was in Nebraska, where I met Doug Palmer. He and his partner, Pat Boeshart, make insulated concrete forms for buildings. The traditional way to insulate concrete with foam is to make the foam and then truck it around the country to building sites to be attached to concrete. Mr. Palmer’s company, Lite-Form, found a Korean machine that, when combined with devices added by his firm, can make the foam and concrete together on site, saving big dollars in trucking. Today, Mr. Palmer’s South Sioux City company imports these machines from Korea, attaches its devices and exports them to Kuwait. His company has an Arabic brochure that tells Kuwaitis how to use the device. The brochure was produced by a local ad agency owned by the Winnebago Indian tribe of Nebraska. The agency was started by the tribe’s economic development corporation. Midwest Indians publishing Arabic brochures for Nebraskans importing from Koreans for customers in Kuwait ...

“Protectionism scares me,” said Mr. Palmer, who has 28 employees. “If we put up a moat and keep doing what we’re doing, thinking we’re the smartest in the world, we’re going to die. We have to have that flexibility to barter and trade.”

A few days later, in Silicon Valley, I met Arijit Sengupta, a young Indian-American educated at Stanford, whose company, “BeyondCore,” developed a software algorithm able to detect and reduce errors in outsourced back-office work. When I met Mr. Sengupta, he handed me a card with his logo, which, he explained, was designed by a graphic artist he found online in Romania. His database and Web server are freeware, and he has outsourced his marketing, sales support and patent filings to Indian firms. When I asked, “Where’s your office?” he held up his BlackBerry, which takes calls forwarded from numbers in India, Boston and Palo Alto. He and his seven workers already have one Fortune 500 client.

“When I started this company I never had to think about geography,” he said. “All I had to think about was: Where was the best resource to get something done. ... What you need are the big ideas. That is the tough thing to come up with.”

The way you keep good jobs in this country is not by building big walls, but by attracting people with big ideas — and then giving them the freedom to do whatever can be done with anyone, anywhere, anytime.

If I Had One Wish

2006-10-04T19:40:00.000-07:00

October 4, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
If I Had One Wish
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

There are now so many books out on the Bush policy in Iraq with variations of the word “fiasco” in the title or the text that bookstores are surely going to have to be redesigned to create shelf space for this war: “Welcome to Barnes & Noble: We have fiction and nonfiction on the main floor, poetry and mystery in the corner, children’s books upstairs and the ‘Bush Fiasco’ section across the entire basement.”
And the war isn’t even over yet.

If there is a theme common to all these books it is the word “incompetence.” Reading Bob Woodward’s “State of Denial,” about the completely dysfunctional manner in which the Bush national security team has conducted the Iraq war — the president reportedly had to order Don Rumsfeld to return Condi Rice’s phone calls — leaves you disgusted.

Which brings me to this November’s elections. New York Times columnists are not allowed to endorse candidates, but I checked the rulebook the other day, and there’s no rule against rooting for a general outcome. So here is my fervent wish: For the sake of the country, I really hope the Republicans lose the House and the Senate to the Democrats — by one seat in each chamber.

It is so important that the Republicans lose, because if the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice team can get away with the grotesque incompetence they have exhibited in Iraq — a war that was not preordained to fail, but was never given a proper chance to succeed — it makes this country look like a banana republic.

If on the morning after the election these people come out smirking that their efforts to scare the public into voting again for their candidates worked, and therefore they can just stay the present course in Iraq — which is not working — it will send a terrible message about our democracy. It will tell us that the country is so divided, and so many districts gerrymandered in favor of Republicans, that performance does not matter any longer. Unless you are caught sending e-mail to a Congressional page soliciting sex, your seat is safe.

If we have any chance of salvaging Iraq and solving some of our real problems at home, it will only be as a result of some electoral shock treatment delivered to a Republican Party that has failed to demand even the most minimal competence and planning from its leaders.

But the reason I want the Democrats to win by only one seat in both the House and the Senate is because I want them to have such a slim margin that they will have to govern from the center — to look for bipartisan fixes to the country’s major issues, which is the only way they can be addressed.

“We’re not just in a ‘state of denial’ about Iraq,” remarked Michael Mandelbaum, the author of

“The Case for Goliath.” We’re also in a state of denial about the deficit, health care, energy and Social Security.”

Maybe the deficit can wait. But there is something immoral about kicking Iraq down the road for someone else to deal with it. Because the burden of Iraq falls — unfairly and harshly — on one small segment of our population: U.S. military troops and their families.

Yes, Mr. Bush’s original vision of a unified democratic Iraq was compelling and important. But it’s not happening. It’s become the “second choice” of too many Iraqis. Too many Kurds just want their own state; too many Shiites just want their own pro-Iranian zone in the south; too many Sunnis want the old order. Real democracy is too many Iraqis’ second choice. If that doesn’t change, we can’t go on having our first-choice kids dying for Iraqis’ second choice. Our top military people know things aren’t working. But they also know the Bush team won’t order a Plan B, because it would be construed as an admission of failure and used in domestic politics. So we are staying a failing course.

You know how they say that after a while people start to look like their pets? Well, we’re starting to look like Iraq — a bunch of warring political tribes incapable of acting in common for the greater good.

So here’s hoping the Republicans lose the House and the Senate and realize that if they don’t start acting responsibly they’ll suffer an even worse defeat in ’08. And here’s hoping the Democrats win by just enough to love being back in power, but by such a slim margin they know that if they don’t produce something by ’08, they’ll get defeated again.

Without restoring a legislative center that can tackle hard issues and demand sacrifices, we’re just going to keep kicking problems down the road — from Iraq to Social Security — until the road reaches a cliff and we plunge over the side.

Islam and the Pope

2006-09-30T01:48:00.000-07:00

September 29, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Islam and the Pope
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
We need to stop insulting Islam. It’s enough already.

No, that doesn’t mean the pope should apologize. The pope was actually treating Islam with dignity. He was treating the faith and its community as adults who could be challenged and engaged. That is a sign of respect.

What is insulting is the politically correct, kid-gloves view of how to deal with Muslims that is taking root in the West today. It goes like this: “Hushhh! Don’t say anything about Islam! Don’t you understand? If you say anything critical or questioning about Muslims, they’ll burn down your house. Hushhh! Just let them be. Don’t rile them. They are not capable of a civil, rational dialogue about problems in their faith community.”

Now that is insulting. It’s an attitude full of contempt and self-censorship, but that is the attitude of Western elites today, and it’s helping to foster the slow-motion clash of civilizations that Sam Huntington predicted. Because Western masses don’t buy it. They see violence exploding from Muslim communities and they find it frightening, and they don’t think their leaders are talking honestly about it. So many now just want to build a wall against Islam. It will be terrible if Turkey is blocked from entering the European Union, but that’s where we’re heading, and the only thing that will halt it is honest dialogue.

But it is not the dialogue the pope mentioned — one between Islam and Christianity. That’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. What is needed first is an honest dialogue between Muslims and Muslims.

As someone who has lived in the Muslim world, enjoyed the friendship of many Muslims there and seen the compassionate side of Islam in action, I have to admit I am confused as to what Islam stands for today.

Why? On the first day of Ramadan last year a Sunni Muslim suicide bomber blew up a Shiite mosque in Hilla, Iraq, in the middle of a memorial service, killing 25 worshipers. This year on the first day of Ramadan, a Sunni suicide bomber in Baghdad killed 35 people who were lining up in a Shiite neighborhood to buy fuel. The same day, the severed heads of nine murdered Iraqi police officers and soldiers were found north of Baghdad.

I don’t get it. How can Muslims blow up other Muslims on their most holy day of the year — in mosques! — and there is barely a peep of protest in the Muslim world, let alone a million Muslim march? Yet Danish cartoons or a papal speech lead to violent protests. If Muslims butchering Muslims — in Sudan, Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and Jordan — produces little communal reaction, while cartoons and papal remarks produce mass protests, what does Islam stand for today? It is not an insult to ask that question.

Muslims might say: “Well, what about Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo or Palestine? Let’s talk about all your violent behavior.” To which I would say: “Let’s talk about it! But you’ll have to get in line behind us, because we’re constantly talking about where we’ve gone wrong.” We can’t have a meaningful dialogue if we, too, are not self-critical, but neither can Muslims.

Part of the problem in getting answers is that Islam has no hierarchy. There is no Muslim pope defining the faith. There are centers of Muslim learning, in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but their credibility with the masses is uneven because they’re often seen as tools of regimes. So those Muslim preachers with authenticity tend to be the street preachers — firebrands, who gain legitimacy by spewing hatred at both their own regimes and the Western powers that support them.

As a result, there is a huge body of disenfranchised Sunni Muslims, who are neither violent fundamentalists nor wannabe secularists. They are people who’d like to see a marriage between Islam and modernity. But right now there is little free space in the Sunni Muslim world — between the firebrand preachers and the “official” ones — for that synthesis to be discussed and defined.

I had hoped Iraq would be that space. Whenever people asked me how I’d know if we’d won in Iraq, I said: when Salman Rushdie could give a lecture in Baghdad. I’m all for a respectful dialogue between Islam and the West, but first there needs to be a respectful, free dialogue between Muslims and Muslims. What matters is not what Muslims tell us they stand for. What matters is what they tell themselves, in their own languages, and how they treat their own.

Without a real war of ideas within Islam to sort that out — a war that progressives win — I fear we are drifting at best toward a wall between civilizations and at worst toward a real clash.

Paul Krugman is on vacation.

Fill ’Er Up With Dictators

2006-09-28T01:38:00.000-07:00

September 27, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Fill ’Er Up With Dictators
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Are you having fun yet?

What’s a matter? No sense of humor? You didn’t enjoy watching Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez addressing the U.N. General Assembly and saying of President Bush: “The devil came here yesterday, right here. It smells of sulfur still today.” Many U.N. delegates roared with laughter.

Oh well then, you must have enjoyed watching Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad breezing through New York City, lecturing everyone from the U.N. to the Council on Foreign Relations on the evils of American power and how the Holocaust was just a myth.

C’mon then, you had to at least have gotten a chuckle out of China’s U.N. ambassador, Wang Guangya, trying to block a U.N. resolution calling for the deployment of peacekeeping troops to Sudan to halt the genocide in Darfur. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that the China National Petroleum Corporation owns 40 percent of the Sudan consortium that pumps over 300,000 barrels of oil a day from Sudanese wells.

No? You’re not having fun? Well, you’d better start seeing the humor in all this, because what all these stories have in common is today’s most infectious geopolitical disease: petro-authoritarianism.

Yes, we thought that the fall of the Berlin Wall was going to unleash an unstoppable wave of free markets and free people, and it did for about a decade, when oil prices were low. But as oil has moved to $60 to $70 a barrel, it has fostered a counterwave — a wave of authoritarian leaders who are not only able to ensconce themselves in power because of huge oil profits but also to use their oil wealth to poison the global system — to get it to look the other way at genocide, or ignore an Iranian leader who says from one side of his mouth that the Holocaust is a myth and from the other that Iran would never dream of developing nuclear weapons, or to indulge a buffoon like Chávez, who uses Venezuela’s oil riches to try to sway democratic elections in Latin America and promote an economic populism that will eventually lead his country into a ditch.

For a lot of reasons — some cyclical, some technical and some having to do with the emergence of alternative fuels and conservation — the price of crude oil has fallen lately to around $60 a barrel. Yes, in the long run, we want the global price of oil to go down. But we don’t want the price of gasoline to go down in America just when $3 a gallon has started to stimulate large investments in alternative energies. That is exactly what OPEC wants — let the price fall for a while, kill the alternatives, and then bring it up again.

For now, we still need to make sure, either with a gasoline tax or a tariff on imported oil, that we keep the price at the pump at $3 or more — to stimulate various alternative energy programs, more conservation and a structural shift by car buyers and makers to more fuel-efficient vehicles.

“If Bush were the leader he claims to be, he would impose an import fee right now to keep gasoline prices high, and reduce the tax rate on Social Security for low-income workers, so they would get an offsetting increase in income,” argued Philip Verleger Jr., the veteran energy economist.

That is how we can permanently break our oil addiction, and OPEC, and free ourselves from having to listen to these petro-authoritarians, who are all so smug — not because they are educating their people or building competitive modern economies, but because they happen to sit on oil.

According to Bloomberg.com, in 2005 Iran earned $44.6 billion from crude oil exports, its main source of income. In the same year, the mullahs spent $25 billion on subsidies to buy off the population. Bring the price of oil down to $30 and guess what happens: All of Iran’s income goes to subsidies. That would put a terrible strain on Ahmadinejad, who would have to reach out to the world for investment. Trust me, at $30 a barrel, the Holocaust isn’t a myth anymore.

But right now, Chávez, Ahmadinejad and all their petrolist pals think we are weak and will never bite the bullet. They have our number. They know that Mr. Bush is a phony — that he always presents himself as this guy ready to make the “tough” calls, but in reality he has not asked his party, the Congress, the people, or U.S. industry to do one single hard thing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

Mr. Bush prattles on about spreading democracy and freedom, but history will actually remember the Bush years as the moment when petro-authoritarianism — not freedom and democracy — spread like a wildfire and he did nothing serious to stop it.

Anyone, Anything, Anywhere

2006-09-25T23:05:00.000-07:00

September 22, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Anyone, Anything, Anywhere
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Montevideo, Uruguay

The New Yorker once ran a cartoon by Peter Steiner of two dogs, with one sitting at a computer keyboard saying to the other, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

Nobody also knows you’re Uruguay.

A tiny country of three million people, wedged between Brazil and Argentina, Uruguay has come from nowhere to partner with India’s biggest technology company, Tata Consultancy Services, to create in just four years one of the largest outsourcing operations in Latin America.

Yes, when Tata’s Indian employees in Mumbai are asleep, its 650 Uruguayan engineers and programmers now pick up the work and help run the computers and backroom operations for the likes of American Express, Procter & Gamble and some major U.S. banks — all from Montevideo.

How did this happen? One of the most interesting features of this era of globalization is how any entrepreneur — with the right imagination, Internet bandwidth and a small amount of capital — can assemble a global company by matching workers and customers from anywhere to do anything for anyone. Maybe the most important rule in today’s increasingly flat world is this: Whatever can be done, will be done — because so many people now have access to the tools of innovation and connectivity. The only question is: Will it be done by you or to you?

Gabriel Rozman decided it was going to be done by him. A retired partner from Ernst & Young who was raised in Uruguay, he hatched the idea of partnering with Tata to make Montevideo a global outsourcing hub. He did not have a single client or employee when he approached Tata. He had just two things: a gut instinct that Uruguay’s quality education system had produced plenty of good, low-cost engineers and a gut desire to do something good for Uruguay — the country that gave his Hungarian parents sanctuary from Hitler.

Four years later, TCS Iberoamerica can’t hire workers fast enough. When I visited its head office, people were working on computers in hallways and stairwells. (Mr. Rozman also oversees 1,300 employees in Brazil and 1,200 in Chile.) It turns out that many multinationals like the idea of spreading out their risks and not having all their outsourcing done from India — especially after one big U.S. bank nearly had to shut down last year when a flood in Mumbai paralyzed its India data center the same day a hurricane paralyzed its Florida operation. And there is no risk of nuclear war with Pakistan here.

“When I first approached this big U.S. bank to outsource some of its services to Montevideo, instead of India,” recalled Mr. Rozman, “the guy I was speaking with said, ‘I don’t even know where Montevideo is.’ So I said to him, ‘That’s the point!’ ”

Another factor, added Mr. Rozman, was that multinationals that were depending on Indian firms alone to run their backrooms 24 hours a day were getting the third team for eight hours, since the best Indian engineers didn’t want to work the late-night shift — the heart of America’s day. By creating an outsourcing center in Montevideo, Tata could offer its clients its best Indian engineers during India’s day (America’s night) and its best Uruguayan engineers during America’s day (India’s night).

Most employees here are Uruguayans, but there are also lots of Indians sent over by Tata. It produces both a culture shock — Montevideo doesn’t even have an Indian restaurant — and a cultural cacophony.

The firm runs on strict Tata principles, as if it were in Mumbai, so to see Uruguayans pretending to be Indians serving Americans is quite a scene. Said Rosina Marmion, 27, an Uruguayan manager, “Our customers expect us to behave like Indians — to react the same way.”

Also, Latin culture, unlike Indian, is very nonhierarchical. “The Indians were not used to someone who says ‘no,’ ” explained Ricardo Zengin, 34, a systems analyst. But eventually, “they understand that you are not saying it to challenge their authority but because you think it can be done better another way. ... In Latin culture, everything involves a discussion.”

Uruguayans tell a joke about themselves that goes: If you get diagnosed with a terminal illness, move to Uruguay immediately because everything happens 20 years later here.

In outsourcing, though, Uruguay has leapt ahead of its neighbors by being the first to understand what could be done — that in today’s world having an Indian company led by a Hungarian-Uruguayan servicing American banks with Montevidean engineers managed by Indian technologists who have learned to eat Uruguayan veggie is just the new normal.

Dumb as We Wanna Be

2006-09-25T23:03:00.000-07:00

September 20, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Dumb as We Wanna Be
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
São Paulo, Brazil

I asked Dr. José Goldemberg, secretary for the environment for São Paulo State and a pioneer of Brazil’s ethanol industry, the obvious question: Is the fact that the U.S. has imposed a 54-cents-a-gallon tariff to prevent Americans from importing sugar ethanol from Brazil “just stupid or really stupid.”

Thanks to pressure from Midwest farmers and agribusinesses, who want to protect the U.S. corn ethanol industry from competition from Brazilian sugar ethanol, we have imposed a stiff tariff to keep it out. We do this even though Brazilian sugar ethanol provides eight times the energy of the fossil fuel used to make it, while American corn ethanol provides only 1.3 times the energy of the fossil fuel used to make it. We do this even though sugar ethanol reduces greenhouses gases more than corn ethanol. And we do this even though sugar cane ethanol can easily be grown in poor tropical countries in Africa or the Caribbean, and could actually help alleviate their poverty.

Yes, you read all this right. We tax imported sugar ethanol, which could finance our poor friends, but we don’t tax imported crude oil, which definitely finances our rich enemies. We’d rather power anti-Americans with our energy purchases than promote antipoverty.

“It’s really stupid,” answered Dr. Goldemberg.

If I seem upset about this, I am. Development and environmental experts have long searched for environmentally sustainable ways to alleviate rural poverty — especially for people who live in places like Brazil, where there is a constant temptation to log the Amazon. Sure, ecotourism and rain forest soap are nice, but they never really scale. As a result, rural people in Brazil are always tempted go back to logging or farming sensitive areas.

Ethanol from sugar cane could be a scalable, sustainable alternative — if we are smart and get rid of silly tariffs, and if Brazil is smart and starts thinking right now about how to expand its sugar cane biofuel industry without harming the environment.

The good news is that sugar cane doesn’t require irrigation and can’t grow in much of the Amazon, because it is too wet. So if the Brazilian sugar industry does realize its plan to grow from 15 million to 25 million acres over the next few years, it need not threaten the Amazon.

However, sugar cane farms are located mostly in south-central Brazil, around São Paulo, and along the northeast coast, on land that was carved out of drier areas of the Atlantic rain forest, which has more different species of plants and animals per acre than the Amazon. Less than 7 percent of the total Atlantic rain forest remains — thanks to sugar, coffee, orange plantations and cattle grazing.

I flew in a helicopter over the region near São Paulo, and what I saw was not pretty: mansions being carved from forested hillsides near the city, rivers that have silted because of logging right down to the banks, and wide swaths of forest that have been cleared and will never return.

“It makes you weep,” said Gustavo Fonseca, my traveling companion, a Brazilian and the executive vice president of Conservation International. “What I see here is a totally human dominated system in which most of the biodiversity is gone.”

As demand for sugar ethanol rises — and that is a good thing for Brazil and the developing world, said Fonseca, “we have to make sure that the expansion is done in a planned way.”

Over the past five years, the Amazon has lost 7,700 square miles a year, most of it for cattle grazing, soybean farming and palm oil. A similar expansion for sugar ethanol could destroy the cerrado, the Brazilian savannah, another incredibly species-rich area, and the best place in Brazil to grow more sugar.

A proposal is floating around the Brazilian government for a major expansion of the sugar industry, far beyond even the industry’s plans. No wonder environmental activists are holding a conference in Germany this fall about the impact of biofuels. I could see some groups one day calling for an ethanol boycott — à la genetically modified foods — if they feel biofuels are raping the environment.

We have the tools to resolve these conflicts. We can map the lands that need protection for their biodiversity or the environmental benefits they provide rural communities. But sugar farmers, governments and environmentalists need to sit down early — like now — to identify those lands and commit the money needed to protect them. Otherwise, we will have a fight over every acre, and sugar ethanol will never realize its potential. That would be really, really stupid.

The Energy Harvest

2006-09-25T23:00:00.000-07:00

September 15, 2006
The Energy Harvest
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Any time that OPEC got a little too overzealous in pushing up oil prices back in the 1970's, the legendary Saudi oil minister Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani was fond of telling his colleagues: Remember, the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones.

What he meant was that the Stone Age ended because people invented alternative tools. The oil age is also not going to end because we run out of oil. It will end because the price of oil goes so high that people invent alternatives. Mr. Yamani was warning his colleagues not to get too greedy and stimulate those alternatives.

Too late -- oil at $70 a barrel has done just that. One of the most promising of those alternatives is ethanol, an alcohol fuel made from corn, sugar cane or any biomass. I came to Brazil to try to better grasp what is real and what is not in the ethanol story, because no country has done more to pioneer sugar ethanol than Brazil.

My impression, after talking to a range of Brazilian experts, is that not only is ethanol for real, but we have not even begun to tap its full potential. With just a few technological breakthroughs, Brazil really could be the Saudi Arabia of sugar and we could actually achieve that energy dream of getting ''barrels from bushels.''

Since the 1970's oil shocks, Brazil has, with lots of trial and error, made ethanol part of its daily life. It hits you the minute you drive into a gas station in São Paulo, where you need two things: a credit card and a calculator. In rough numbers, sugar ethanol now sells here at a little over $2 a gallon and gasoline at a little more than $4 a gallon. Because sugar ethanol gets only about 70 percent of the mileage of gasoline, drivers here do the math each day and figure out if ethanol is at least 30 percent less than the price of gasoline. If it is, many will fill 'er up with sugar cane.

Brazilians have that luxury because there are 34,000 gas stations here that offer both gasoline and ethanol (compared with around 700 in the U.S.) and because 70 percent of new cars sold here can run on either gasoline or sugar ethanol. As a result, Brazil has replaced about 40 percent of its gasoline consumption with sugar ethanol.

I visited the Cosan sugar mill northwest of São Paulo, Brazil's largest, where you fly in over an ocean of green sugar cane. The cane is harvested onto big lorries and trucked to the Cosan distillery. There, the juice is extracted and converted to either crystal sugar or ethanol. The remaining cane waste -- called bagasse -- is used to fuel huge steam boilers that produce enough electricity to both power the refining process and leave a surplus to be sold back to the grid.

It's important to understand this process to appreciate just how ''much more energy we could get from sugar cane'' with just a few more breakthroughs, explained Plinio Mario Nastari, one of Brazil's top ethanol consults.

Think of each stalk of sugar cane as containing three sources of energy. First, the juice extracted from the cane is already giving us ethanol and sugar. Second, the bagasse is already heating very low-technology, low-pressure boilers, giving us electricity. But if Brazil's refiners converted to new high-pressure boilers, you could get three times as much electricity.

Finally, when the cane is harvested the tops and leaves are often just left in the field. But this biomass is rich in cellulose, the carbohydrate that makes up the walls of plant cells. If the sugar locked away in cellulose also could be unlocked -- cheaply and easily by a chemical process -- this biomass could also produce tons of sugar ethanol. There is now a race on to find that process.

A breakthrough is expected within five years, and when that happens it will be possible to extract ''more than double'' the amount of ethanol from each sugar stalk, said José Luiz Oliverio, a senior V.P. at Dedini, the Brazilian industrial giant, which has a pilot cellulosic ethanol project.

I asked Brazilian experts what they'd do if they were the U.S. president. The consensus answer: Require U.S. oil companies to provide ethanol fuel pumps at all their gas stations, require U.S. auto companies to make all their new cars flex-fuel and improve mileage standards, and get rid of the crazy 54-cent tariff we've imposed on imported sugar ethanol (to protect our farmers). And then let the market work.

Demand for ethanol would soar. This would push us faster down the innovation curve, so we'd solve the cellulosic ethanol problem quicker, and that would strengthen the democrats in our hemisphere and weaken the petrocrats in the Middle East. If only we were as smart as Brazil

Land for NATO

2006-09-13T19:21:00.000-07:00

New York Times
September 13, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Land for NATO
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Listening to the post-Lebanon-war debate in Israel leaves me wanting to say just one thing to Israelis: Get a grip on.

Israel is behaving like it lost the Lebanon war and now needs to tear itself apart, limb by limb, with investigations and new elections. Clearly the Israeli Army’s logistics broke down, and clearly it was ill-prepared for a guerrilla war against Hezbollah. And clearly it is a sign of the health of Israel’s democracy that Israelis feel free to castigate their leadership.

Nevertheless, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert did a better job, under the circumstances, than he is being credited with, and, more important, the situation evolving in south Lebanon now has the potential to offer a whole new model for peacemaking.

Regarding Mr. Olmert, this war was not easy to manage, because it was about everything and nothing. There was absolutely no reason for the Hezbollah attack on July 12 across the U.N.-recognized Israel-Lebanon border, in which eight Israeli soldiers were killed and two abducted. In that sense, the war was about nothing.

But precisely because it was about nothing, it was also about everything. If Hezbollah could just attack Israel — unprovoked — claiming among its goals the liberation of Jerusalem, and using missiles provided by an Iranian regime that says Israel should be wiped off the map, then it was a war about everything. And Israel had to respond resolutely.

So, gauging the right response was intrinsically hard. In the end, Mr. Olmert bombarded Hezbollah’s infrastructure, and, tragically but inevitably, the homes of Hezbollah’s Shiite followers, among whom Hezbollah fighters were embedded.

The Israeli response was brutal, but it did send a deterrent message, which Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, received. As he put it in an interview on Lebanon’s NTV, “If I had known on July 11 ... that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”

Even he doesn’t think he won.

Give Nasrallah credit for honesty. What Arab leader has ever been so self-critical? Nasrallah was reacting to those Lebanese voices that said: Thanks for passing out $12,000 to families who lost homes in the fighting, but had you spent that money on schools and jobs, rather than a stupid war, we’d all be better off.

The fact that Condi Rice and the French foreign minister, working with the U.N., were able to secure an international peacekeeping force in south Lebanon is a potentially key achievement on two fronts. If the force works — still a big if — Hezbollah will not be able to directly attack Israel without getting embroiled in a conflict with 15,000 French, Italian, Indian and possibly Turkish peacekeepers. That is a big new strategic problem for Hezbollah, Iran and Syria. They can’t hit Israel now without harming their ties with the E.U.

More important, what have we learned in recent years? One, Israel’s occupations of the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon are unsustainable. And two, Lebanon and the Palestinians don’t have their act together enough yet to control border areas when Israel leaves — either by agreement (Oslo) or by just unilaterally withdrawing and throwing the keys over the fence. As a result, the peace process has not been “land for peace,” but “land for war.”

When Israel pulls out of Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank and wants quiet, it needs a reliable structure of authority on the other side, which, right now, neither Lebanon nor the Palestinians alone can provide.

The U.N./European force evolving in Lebanon may offer a new model. It’s not “land for peace,” or “land for war,” but what I’d call “land for NATO.” Israel withdraws and the border is secured by a force that is U.N. on the outside but NATO on the inside.

“The fact that it has a heavy European/NATO component makes it credible to Israel, and the fact that it has a U.N. umbrella makes it acceptable to the Arab world,” said the U.N. under secretary Shashi Tharoor, the dynamic Indian diplomat who is a finalist to succeed Kofi Annan as secretary general and who deserves U.S. endorsement.

The Europeans have to understand “that something very big is at stake in this force,” said the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. They have to prove that demilitarization in south Lebanon can give Israel security and Lebanon both sovereignty and an effective international partner to maintain order. If that happens, he added, “it could revive the chances for an eventual Palestinian-Israeli deal on the West Bank and Gaza.”

Yes, it’s a long shot, but maybe something good can actually come out of this good-for-nothing Lebanon war.

The Central Truth

2006-09-07T23:34:00.000-07:00

September 8, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
New York Times
The Central Truth
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

To listen to the latest Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld speeches, you’d think that our biggest problem in Iraq is a violent minority of “extremists,” defying the democratic will of the Iraqi people. And you’d think that our biggest problem at home is a misguided group of Democratic appeasers, who want to cut and run in the great totalitarian struggle of the 21st century.

I wish it were so. Unfortunately, we are in trouble in Iraq now not because of what the “fringes” there, or here, believe, but because of what the center in both places has been willing to tolerate or unwilling to change.

We have a “center problem.”

Let me explain: We are stalled in Iraq not because of something some fringe antiwar critics said, or did, but because of how the Bush team, the center of U.S. policy, approached Iraq from the start. While it told the public — correctly, in my view — that building one example of a tolerant, pluralistic, democratizing society in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world was really important in the broader war of ideas against violent radical Islam, the administration acted as though this would be easy and sacrifice-free.

Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld told us we are in the fight of our lives against a new Islamic fascism, and let’s have an unprecedented wartime tax cut and shrink our armed forces. They told us we are in the fight of our lives against a new Islamic fascism, but let’s send just enough troops to topple Saddam — and never control Iraq’s borders, its ammo dumps or its looters. They told us we are in the fight of our lives against a new Islamic fascism, but rather than bring Democrats and Republicans together in a national unity war coalition, let’s use the war as a wedge issue to embarrass Democrats, frighten voters and win elections. They told us we are in the fight of our lives against a new Islamic fascism — which is financed by our own oil purchases — but let’s not do one serious thing about ending our oil addiction.

Donald Rumsfeld demonizes war critics as “morally confused.” But it is the “moral confusion” at the heart of the Bush policy — a confusion between its important ends and insufficient means — that has hobbled us from the start. It truly, truly baffles me why a president who bet so much of his legacy on this project never gave it his best shot and tolerated so much incompetence. He summoned us to D-Day and gave us the moral equivalent of the invasion of Panama.

But there is not only a problem at the center of U.S. policy. We are also failing in Iraq because of what the Shiite and Sunni mainstreams — not the fringes — are tolerating. Democracy fails when centrist forces either won’t stand up to extremists or try to use their violence for their own purposes.

The short history of the Iraq war is that the Sunnis in Iraq, and in the nearby Arab states, refused to accept one man, one vote, because it meant bringing the Shiite majority to power in Iraq for the first time. The Sunni mainstream, not the minority, believes Shiites are lesser Muslims and must never be allowed to rule Sunnis. Early in the Iraq war a prominent Sunni Arab leader said to me privately, “Thomas, these Shiites, they are not real Muslims.”

For two years, the Shiite center in Iraq put up with the barbaric Sunni violence directed against its mosques and markets — violence the U.S. couldn’t stop because it didn’t have enough troops, and because the Sunni center inside and outside Iraq tacitly supported it.

But eventually the Shiites snapped, formed their own death squads, turned to Iran for military aid, and focused more on communal survival than on making Iraq’s democracy work. Today we have Shiite and Sunni parties in the cabinet, but with their own private militias — exactly like Lebanon during its civil war. So, where the Iraqi center stops and the violent fringes start is no longer clear.

The dominant struggle in Iraq today, writes the Iranian-American analyst Vali Nasr in his provocative new book, “The Shia Revival,” is not “the battle of liberty against oppression, but rather the age-old battle of the two halves of Islam, Shias and Sunnis. This is the conflict that Iraq has rekindled, and this is the conflict that will shape its future.”

Just staying the course will not contain it. But before we throw up our hands on Iraq, why not make one more big push to produce a more stable accord between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds over how to share power and oil revenues and demobilize militias. We still don’t have such an understanding at the center of Iraqi politics. It may not be possible, but without it, neither is a self-sustaining, unified Iraqi democracy.

War on Daddy's Dime

2006-08-17T20:11:00.000-07:00

August 18, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
War on Daddy’s Dime
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I’m not sure yet who’s the winner in the war between Hezbollah and Israel, but I know who’s the big loser: Iran’s taxpayers. What a bunch of suckers.

Isn’t it obvious? As soon as the reckless war he started was over, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, declared that Hezbollah would begin paying out cash to the thousands of Lebanese families whose homes were destroyed. “We will pay compensation, a certain amount of money for every family to rent for one year, plus buy furniture for those whose homes were totally destroyed,” said Nasrallah. “These number 15,000.”

Nasrallah also vowed that his organization would help rebuild damaged houses and businesses, promising those affected that they will “not need to ask anyone for money or wait in queues” to get relief funds. To paraphrase the All-State commercial, “You’re in good hands with Hezbollah.”

But wait — where will Hezbollah get some of the $3 billion-plus needed to rebuild Lebanon? Last time I checked, Hezbollah did not have any companies listed on the Nasdaq. The organization doesn’t manufacture anything. It doesn’t tax its followers. The answer, of course, is that Iran will dip into its oil income and ship cash to Nasrallah, so that he will not have to face the wrath of Lebanese for starting a war that reaped nothing but destruction.

Yes, thanks to $70-a-barrel oil you can have Katyusha rockets and butter at the same time. When oil money is so prevalent, why not? Hezbollah and Iran are like a couple of rich college students who rented Lebanon for the summer, as if it were a beach house. “C’mon, let’s smash up the place,” they said to themselves. “Who cares? Dad will pay!” The only thing Nasrallah didn’t say to Lebanese was, “Hey, keep the change.”

In the cold war, Russian taxpayers were the suckers who rebuilt Arab armies every time they got crushed by Israel. Now Iran’s citizens will foot the bill with their oil income — assuming the ayatollahs actually put their money where their mouth is. (Iran was always happy to spend money on Hezbollah rockets. Let’s see if it will pay for schools and clinics.)

This is why I am obsessed with bringing down the price of oil. Unless we take this issue seriously, we are never going to produce more transparent, accountable government in the Middle East. Just the opposite — we will witness even more reckless, unaccountable behavior like Nasrallah’s and Iran’s.

Been to Syria lately? Why do you think it can afford to shrug off U.S. sanctions? It also is not making microchips. It is, though, exporting about 200,000 barrels of oil a day, and that is what keeps a corrupt and antiquated regime in power. The Syrian regime subsidizes everything from diesel to bread. As in Iran, almost half of Syria’s people are teenagers, and without real economic reforms, widespread unemployment and unrest are just around the corner — but for now, oil money postpones the reckoning.

Ditto Iran. Iran is OPEC’s second-largest producer, selling the world about 2.4 million barrels of oil a day and earning the regime some $4 billion a month — the government’s main source of income. To buy public support, Iran’s regime subsidizes housing, gasoline, interest rates, flour and rice.

According to an Aug. 2 report on Bloomberg.com, “Iran spent $25 billion on subsidies last year, or more than half the $44.6 billion it collected through crude oil exports.” But Iran actually has to import more than one-third of its gasoline, because it can’t refine enough itself. This became so expensive the regime wanted to ration subsidized gas but feared a public backlash. No wonder. Bloomberg reported that subsidized gasoline in Iran is 34 cents a gallon.

Repressive governments like Iran’s and Syria’s use oil money to buy off their people and insulate themselves from the pressure of political and economic reform. When oil prices get high enough, they can even buy a monthlong war in Lebanon. Why not? It’s like a summer sale: “Now, this summer only: 34 cents-a-gallon gasoline and a war with the Jews and new living room furniture for Lebanese Shiites! Such a deal!”

If we could cut the price of crude in half, it would mean that all of Iran’s oil income would go to subsidies — which would be unsustainable and therefore a huge threat to the regime. It would also make Iran’s puppets, like Nasrallah, think three times about launching wars with Israel that might ravage Lebanon again.

Too bad we have a president who tells us we’re “addicted to oil” but won’t do anything about it. That sort of hypocrisy just makes Nasrallah’s day.

The Post-Post-Cold War

2006-05-26T19:42:00.000-07:00

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN (NYT) 746 words
Published: May 10, 2006

BUDAPEST - Being in Eastern Europe in the wake of Dick Cheney's warning to Russia against using its oil and gas exports as ''tools for intimidation and blackmail'' has been revealing. The Financial Times noted that some Russian media presented Mr. Cheney's remarks as echoing Winston Churchill's 1946 speech in Fulton, Mo., warning that an ''Iron Curtain'' was descending on Europe.

I actually don't think we're going back to the cold war. I think we're going forward. We're leaving the world we've been in -- the post-cold-war world -- and entering the post-post-cold-war world. Americans won't like the post-post-cold-war world, unless they get serious about energy.

The cold-war world was a bipolar world, stabilized by a nuclear balance between two superpowers. The post-cold-war world was, for Americans, a unipolar belle 閜oque, in which an American Hyperpower, as the French dubbed it, seemed to dominate the global scene, economically and strategically -- a scene characterized by a steady expansion of free markets and freely elected governments.

The post-post-cold war is a multipolar world, where U.S. power is being checked from every corner. China is rising as a power, thanks to hard work and high savings. Beyond China, though, other powers are rising thanks only to soaring oil prices -- powers that were on the decline in the post-cold war.

These are: Vladimir Putin's Russia, which is countering the U.S. on a variety of fronts; Hugo Ch醰ez's Venezuela, which is Castro's Cuba on steroids in the post-post-cold-war world, leading a new wave of nationalizations and anti-Americanism in Latin America; and, of course, Iran -- using its oil windfall to go nuclear. Yes, $70-a-barrel oil is making this post-post-cold-war world a multipolar world.

''It's the 'axis of oil,' '' says Michael Mandelbaum, author of ''The Case for Goliath.'' ''It is more lasting and more important than terrorism -- and we don't have any policy for it.''

Not only are others becoming more assertive: the U.S. has become less intimidating. With Americans bleeding in Iraq, with George Bush hugely unpopular in Europe and with the U.S. two-party system so warped it can't even respond to a crisis like energy, America is not as feared as it was.

''In 2002 and 2003 everyone was talking about the American 'Hyperpower,' '' said Eric Frey, editor of the Austrian daily Der Standard. ''No one these days is talking about overwhelming American power, and that has even added to the anti-Americanism. Because before you had resentment and respect, and now you have resentment and scorn.''

At the same time, the re-emergence of Russia has gotten the attention of Eastern Europe. Hungary gets more than half of its natural gas from Russia. Lately, some Hungarians have started to recall an old cold-war joke: After the Hungarian soccer team beat the Soviet team, the Kremlin sent Hungary's leaders a brief telegram that read: ''Congratulations on your victory. Stop. Oil stop. Gas stop.''

''If you had asked me five years ago, I would have told you the whole story is finished -- no more Russian bear,'' said Pal Reti, editor of HVG, the Hungarian economic magazine. ''They have so many problems themselves they would not have time to care about others' problems. But I've found that they have another set of priorities and they now have the muscle'' to act on them. Yes, Russia no longer has much of an army or any ideology, but it still has a lot of brutish instincts, and now it has the oil money to push them.

In the post-cold-war world, European integration and economic reform seemed irreversible and certain to make Europe into a world democratic power. But in the post-post-cold war, Europe can't unite on anything -- even on an energy policy -- so it is being pushed around by Russia.

''I am very pessimistic about Western Europe -- and that is new,'' remarked Lajos Bokros, a professor of economics at the Central European University in Budapest. Too many Western Europeans ''are not competitive enough'' and ''do not want to implement the reforms.'' Unless Europe chooses the high-growth Irish model, as opposed to the French, Italian and German models, Mr. Bokros added, ''the whole European region will decline further and become insignificant and irrelevant for this global game.''

For all these reasons, I don't miss the cold war, but I do miss the post-cold war. Because this post-post-cold-war world seems infinitely more messy, difficult to manage and full of way too many bad guys getting rich, not by building decent societies, but by simply drilling oil wells.

As Energy Prices Rise, It's All Downhill for Democracy

2006-05-26T19:40:00.000-07:00

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN (NYT) 794 words
Published: May 5, 2006

In case you haven't noticed, all the oil-rich bad guys seem to be having a fine and dandy time these days.
Iran, awash in oil money, thumbs its nose at U.N. demands for it to desist in its nuclear adventures and daily threatens to wipe Israel off the map. President Vladimir Putin of Russia, awash in oil money, jails his opponents at home and cozies up to America's opponents, like Iran and Hamas, abroad. Sudan, awash in oil money, ignores the world's pleas to halt its genocide in Darfur. Venezuela's president, Hugo Ch醰ez, awash in oil money, regularly tells America and his domestic opponents to take a hike.

And Nigeria, Uzbekistan, Angola, Saudi Arabia, Chad and Syria, all flush with oil or gas, are comfortably retreating from even baby steps of democratization.

There is a pattern here. Many people assumed that with the fall of the Berlin Wall, we were going to see an unstoppable wave of free elections and free markets slowly spread across the globe. For a decade that wave seemed, indeed, to be real and powerful.

But as the world has moved from an oil price range of $20 to $40 per barrel to a range of $40 to $70 a barrel, a very negative counterwave has arisen.

What I would call ''petro-ist'' states -- highly dependent on oil or gas for their G.D.P. and having either weak institutions or outright authoritarian systems -- have started asserting themselves. And they are weakening, for now at least, the global democratization trend.

Economists have long taught us about the negative effects that an overabundance of natural resources can have on political and economic reform in any country: the ''resource curse.'' But when it comes to oil, it seems that you can take this resource curse argument a step further: there appears to be a specific correlation between the price of oil and the pace of freedom.

I call it the ''First Law of Petropolitics,'' and it posits the following: The price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in petro-ist states.

According to the First Law of Petropolitics, the higher the price of global crude oil, the more erosion we see in petro-ist nations in the right to free speech, a free press, free elections, freedom of assembly, government transparency, an independent judiciary and the rule of law, and in the freedom to form independent political parties and nongovernmental organizations. Such erosion does not occur in healthy democracies with oil.

Conversely, according to the First Law of Petropolitics, the lower the price of oil, the more the petro-ist countries are forced to move toward a politics that is more transparent, more sensitive to opposition voices, more open to a broad set of interactions with the outside world and more focused on building the legal and educational structures that will maximize the ability of their citizens, both men and women, to compete, start new companies and attract investments from abroad. (For an elaboration of this argument, see the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine, www.foreignpolicy.com.)

Yes, many factors are involved in shaping the politics of a country. But is it an accident that when oil was $20 to $40 a barrel, Iran was calling for a ''dialogue of civilizations,'' and when it hit $70 a barrel, Iran was calling for the destruction of Israel?

When a barrel was $20 to $40, we had ''Putin I.'' That's when President Bush looked Mr. Putin in the eye in 2001 and said he'd found ''a sense of his soul.'' If Mr. Bush tried to get a sense of Mr. Putin's soul today -- the soul of ''Putin II,'' the Putin of $70-a-barrel oil -- he would see down there the huge Russian energy company Gazprom. Mr. Putin's regime has swallowed Gazprom, along with a variety of once-independent Russian media outlets and institutions.

While these increasingly bold petro-authoritarians don't represent the sort of strategic or ideological threat that communism once posed to the West, their impact on global politics is still quite corrosive. Some of the worst regimes now have more oil money than ever to do bad things for a long time -- and many decent, democratic countries have to kowtow to them to get oil and gas.

Given the inverse relationship between the price of oil and the pace of freedom in petro-ist states, any U.S. strategy for promoting democracy in these countries is doomed to fail unless it includes a credible plan for finding alternatives to oil and bringing down the global price of crude.

The price of oil should now be a daily preoccupation of the secretary of state, not just the secretary of energy. Today, you cannot be an effective democracy-promoting idealist without also being an effective energy-conscious environmentalist.

Let's (Third) Party

2006-05-03T02:24:00.001-07:00

May 3, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Let's (Third) Party
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

What would OPEC do if it wanted to keep America addicted to oil? That's easy. OPEC would urge the U.S. Congress to deal with the current spike in gasoline prices either by adopting the Republican proposal to give American drivers $100 each, so they could continue driving gas-guzzling cars and buy gasoline at the current $3.50 a gallon, or by adopting the Democrats' proposal for a 60-day lifting of the federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents a gallon. Either one would be fine with OPEC.
So, to summarize, we now have a Congress proposing to do exactly what our worst enemies would like us to do — subsidize our addiction to gasoline by breaking into our kids' piggybanks to make it easier for us to pay the prices demanded by our oil pushers, so that we will remain addicted and they will remain awash in dollars.
With a Congress like this, who needs Al Qaeda?
Seriously, there is something really disturbing about the utterly shameless, utterly over-the-top Republican pandering and Democratic point-scoring that have been masquerading as governing in response to this energy crisis. The Republicans are worse, because they control all the levers of power and could move the country if they proposed a serious energy policy — but won't.
"We used to say the system is broken because it won't respond until there is a crisis," said David Rothkopf, author of "Running the World," a history of U.S. foreign policy. But now it's really broken, "because the system can't even respond to a crisis!"
What to do? I'm hoping for a third party. The situation is ripe for one: America is facing a challenge as big as the cold war — how we satisfy our long-term energy needs, at reasonable prices, while decreasing our dependence on oil and the bad governments that export it — and neither major party will offer a solution, because it requires sacrifice today for gain tomorrow.
Combine a huge leadership vacuum on a huge issue with an Internet that has proved itself as an alternative platform for organizing, financing and energizing a political campaign outside the Washington establishment, and you have the makings of a credible third party.
I would not call it the "Green Party" — the name's been taken, and it connotes an agenda that is too narrow and liberal. Today's third party has to be big, strategic, centrist and forward-looking — something like the "American Renewal Party," something that frames the energy issue as critical to restoring American strength and wealth, not just conservation.
Energy really is key to American renewal — from stimulating more young people to study math and science, to bringing down the trade deficit by decreasing our dependence on imported oil, to bringing down the fiscal deficit by raising gasoline taxes, to improving U.S. competitiveness by making us leaders in clean technologies, to restoring U.S. global respect by leading the fight against climate change, to advancing democracy by finding alternatives to oil and thereby weakening some of the world's worst regimes, who are using their oil windfalls to halt the spread of freedom.
"There is an opportunity here for someone who will seize it," said Micah Sifry, author of "Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America." That someone would have to be a more emotionally stable and energy-focused Ross Perot type. Because, added Mr. Sifry, "if the issue of the day in 1991-1992 was the ballooning budget deficit that we were not dealing with, then the issue today we are not dealing with is the energy and environmental catastrophe that awaits the next generation. It is as much a mortgaging of our children's future as the deficit issue. It needs the right leader, though."
Like someone who will tell the truth: The only way Americans are ever going to enjoy relatively cheap gasoline again is if we raise the price now with a gasoline tax— and fix it at that higher level for several years — so investors know that it is not coming down, and therefore it makes economic sense for them to make the long-term investments in alternative, renewable sources of energy. That is the only way to break our oil addiction and ultimately bring down the price.
Yes, our system is rigged against third parties. Still, my gut says that some politician, someday soon, just to be different, just for the fun of it, will take a flier on telling Americans the truth. The right candidate with the right message on energy might be able to drive a bus right up the middle of the U.S. political scene today — lose the far left and the far right — and still maybe, just maybe, win a three-way election.

Gas Pump Geopolitics

2006-05-03T02:24:00.000-07:00

April 28, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Gas Pump Geopolitics
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
In recent days critics have accused President Bush and his new chief of staff of doing nothing more than shuffling around the deck chairs on the Titanic, as they shift, hire and fire senior White House officials while the president's popularity continues to plummet. Personally, I think that is a totally unfair charge — unfair to the captain of the Titanic.
After all, he knew where he was going. His lookouts just couldn't see the iceberg spar lurking beneath the surface in their path until it was too late. This administration, and its captain, have been staring the iceberg right in the face for years — it's called dependence on foreign crude oil. It has been totally visible, for miles and miles. And yet the Bush team has just kept sailing right into it, refusing to ask the American people to do anything hard to put America on a different energy course.
What is this iceberg staring us in the face? It is the fact that energy, broadly defined, has become the most important geostrategic and geoeconomic challenge of our time — much as the Soviet Union was during the cold war — for four reasons:
First, we are financing both sides in the war on terrorism: financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars, and Islamist radicals and states with our energy purchases.
Second, continued dependence on fossil fuels is going to bring on climate change so much faster in an age when millions of new consumers in India and China are driving cars and buying homes. And that's why renewable fuels and energy-efficient cars, buildings and appliances are going to be the biggest growth industry of the 21st century. The tougher the energy-efficiency standards we impose on our own companies, the more likely it is that they will dominate this new industry.
Third, because of the steady climb in oil prices, the seemingly unstoppable wave of free markets and free peoples that we thought was unleashed by the fall of the Berlin Wall is now being stymied by a counterwave of petro-authoritarian states — like Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Nigeria and Sudan — which now have more petro-dollars than ever to do the worst things for the longest time. They will poison the post-cold-war world unless we bring down the price of crude.
Fourth, we will never plant the seeds of democracy in Iraq and the wider Arab world if we don't also bring down the price of oil. These Arab oil regimes will not change unless they have to, and as long as oil prices are soaring they won't have to. Iraq will become just another Arab state that taps oil wells instead of developing its people.
The beginning of leadership for the president is to tell the American people the truth: This is not your parents' energy crisis. The price of oil is not soaring just because of greedy oil companies. It is soaring because of structural changes in the global energy market that could have vast consequences for America and the world if we do not respond in a comprehensive manner.
Toward that end, we need a tax on gasoline at the pump that will keep prices around $4 a gallon (still roughly $1 less than most Europeans pay), or we need a tax on vehicles that will make gas guzzlers prohibitively costly and hybrids and smaller cars enormously attractive. The sooner and the more we take the price of gasoline up — and keep it there — the sooner we can bring it down forever. If we want to make wind, solar and biomass more competitive, gasoline has to cost more, not less.
The president can start by pushing the bipartisan Fuel Choices for American Security Act, now wending its way through Congress. This bill would mandate that every car sold in America would not just have seat belts, but would also be flex-fuel capable so it could run on ethanol, methanol or gasoline. It would also pave the way for the rapid commercialization of plug-in hybrid vehicles, which would combine electricity and gasoline to get 100 miles out of every gallon of gasoline consumed.
Finally, the bill would offer Detroit loan guarantees for transforming its fleets in this direction. "We're going to have to bail out Detroit anyway, so let's at least get some public benefit," the energy expert Anne Korin said.
Yes, the president has wasted so much time, but if he finally rises to this challenge, Democrats — who should have taken the lead on this issue a long time ago — have got to work with him. If the Democrats shirk this energy challenge, as the Republicans have, I'm certain there is going to be a third party in the 2008 election. It is going to be called the Geo-Green Party, and it is going to win a lot of centrist voters. The next Ross Perot will be green.

Go West, Old Men

2006-05-03T02:23:00.000-07:00

EDITORIAL DESK
Go West, Old Men
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
(NYT) 757 words
Published: April 26, 2006

San Francisco - As any loyal N.F.L. fan knows, there is something called the ''West Coast offense'' -- a freewheeling style of play invented by Coach Bill Walsh. Watching the recent visit of China's president, Hu Jintao, left me wondering if America wouldn't benefit from a ''West Coast foreign policy.''
It was surely no accident that President Hu made his first stop in the U.S. in Washington State -- not Washington, D.C. -- to dine with Bill Gates, who gave him the ''state dinner'' that the Bush White House refused to extend. Why the Bush team was unwilling to host the Chinese president for a state dinner is beyond me. If I owed someone $1 trillion, I'd give him a state dinner. I'd also give him breakfast, lunch and Chinese takeout.
But, more important than the meal, why the rush visit? Are there any two leaders in the world with more to talk about than Presidents Bush and Hu? How about hammering out a joint position on Iran, since the only way that Iran is likely to back down on its nuclear arms program is if China stands up to it? How about forging a joint Manhattan Project on alternative energy between the U.S. and China, or a real plan to get Chinese consumers to spend more and Americans to save more to help balance our trade?
Since none of those issues got a meaningful airing, it's no wonder President Hu went to Seattle first. At least with Microsoft or Boeing, he can do deals. Washington, D.C., has nothing to talk to China about because it is unwilling to impose anything hard on itself and therefore cannot demand anything hard from China.
My only regret is that President Hu didn't go home via California -- a state that has demanded something hard of itself and therefore could demand something hard of China.
China and California have a lot to talk about. California's air pollution is increasingly made in China, and China's environmental solutions are increasingly made in California.
Here's how: Lately scientists have tracked pollutants from fossil-fuel-burning cars and factories in China all the way over to California, where they are transported via winds. On any given day, particulates in the smog choking big California cities can be traced to dust storms in China, which have been exacerbated by rapid deforestation there. (China is making our cheap goods at a steep environmental price.)
But while the Bush team is in no position to lecture China on the environment, California is. Thanks to the energy efficiency standards that California has imposed on its own power industry, buildings and appliances over the last 30 years -- and its increasing reliance on renewable energy sources -- California today consumes a little more than half as many kilowatt-hours of energy per capita each year as the rest of America. This has helped California avoid having to build a whole slew of power plants.
This summer the California Legislature can push ahead even further when it votes on the Global Warming Solutions Act, which would set a statewide cap on emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that cause global warming. The limits would be phased in by 2020 and require suppliers of electricity and fuels to dramatically reduce their use of fossil fuels through more efficiency and renewable energy -- so much so that the law, if passed, would probably spark a boom in green technologies in California and help California companies become leaders in this 21st-century industry.
''Our strategy is to put California in a leadership position and help the Chinese copy our regulations and incentives,'' said Bob Epstein, co-founder of a business-environmental coalition, Environmental Entrepreneurs.
We can't tell China not to use so much energy, especially given what energy gluttons Americans are. We can lead only by example. The Bush team, though, can't do that because it won't ask Americans to do anything hard on energy or the environment.
But California can. If China could be persuaded to follow California's model -- strong energy standards and supportive government policies to nurture the widespread deployment of clean technologies -- everyone could benefit, said Rob Watson, who heads the Natural Resources Defense Council's international energy programs. Imagine if China started making low-cost green appliances and cars the way it does cheap shoes and shirts?
So here's hoping that the next time China's president comes to America, he doesn't even bother to go to Washington, D.C. Why waste the gas? China's business is with America's West Coast foreign policy team, which can offer China's president inspiration, examples and dinner.

The Greenest Generation

2006-05-03T02:22:00.000-07:00

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN (NYT)
781 words
Published: April 21, 2006

I was visiting Williams College a few days ago and heard a student speaker there mention that at the end of the day, she had gone back to her dorm room to study and to ''do it in the dark.''
Hey, I thought, I'm not a prude, but did she have to be so explicit -- and in public, in front of parents no less?
Fortunately, I quickly discovered that ''doing it in the dark'' is not some new sexual escapade, but a new Williams energy-saving competition in honor of Earth Day. Student dorms, classrooms and campus buildings are pitted against one another to see who can save the most energy. Students are encouraged to turn off lights every time they leave a room, to unplug cellphone chargers when not in use, to take advantage of daylight to study or use precise task lighting at night (''Do it in the dark!''), and to change old light bulbs to compact fluorescents.
The Williams competition got me thinking. Why doesn't every college make it a goal to become carbon-neutral -- that is, reduce its net CO2 emissions to zero? This should be a national movement. After all, today's students will be profoundly affected by climate change, the coming energy wars and the rising danger of petro-authoritarian states, such as Iran. Yet on most campuses, the whole energy-climate question still seems to be a student hobby, not a crusade.
C'mon kids, wake up and smell the CO2! Everybody -- make your school do it in the dark! Take over your administration building, occupy your university president's office or storm in on the next meeting of your college's board of trustees until they agree to make your school carbon-neutral. (And while you're at it, ban gas-guzzling G.M. Hummers from your campus as well!)
It is not that hard. Start by measuring exactly how much energy your university is consuming and how much CO2 it is emitting, from its heating and cooling of buildings to its transport systems. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which can be downloaded from www.ghgprotocol.org, offers an internationally accepted way to measure greenhouse gas emissions.
Once you determine your university's total CO2 emissions, the next step, suggests Glenn Prickett, a senior vice president at Conservation International, should be to have ''your own graduate students in science and engineering develop their own comprehensive plan to reduce fossil fuel consumption.'' They can turn to more efficient lighting, heating and cooling; more hybrid vehicles; and better building design, including renewable energy technologies like solar panels.
After a college reduces its carbon emissions as much as possible, it can then develop a strategy for offsetting the greenhouses gases it is still putting into the atmosphere. To become carbon-neutral, you need to finance a project that will measurably reduce greenhouse gases, and it has to be a project that would not have happened if your school had not paid for it. That's how you get the credit.
You can pay to preserve rain forest land in the Amazon so trees there will not be burned, a major source of greenhouse gases, or plant forests in Africa that will absorb carbon, or sponsor a project to turn landfill gas into electricity. (G.M. does that!) In a partnership with Conservation International, the band Pearl Jam offset all the emissions from its last tour by paying to help communities preserve rain forest land in Madagascar. (That also helps reduce poverty and protect endangered wildlife.)
''Our offices are carbon-neutral,'' said Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute, which is ready to advise any campus on how to proceed: call (202) 729-7600. ''We worked through a broker and identified a school in Portland that needed to buy a new heating system because the old one was very inefficient and created a lot of greenhouse gas.'' The institute helped pay for the new system, the school saved money and reduced its emissions, and W.R.I. got the offset for its own emissions.
Al Gore eloquently argues that our parents' generation, the Greatest Generation, turned back the black tide of fascism. They fought the war and built the institutions that preserved peace and freedom for a lot of people on this planet. Today's young people, Mr. Gore argues, have a parallel task. Yes, he means you college students.
You need to become what the writer Dan Pink calls ''the Greenest Generation,'' and build the institutions, alliances and programs that will turn back the black tide of climate change and petro-authoritarianism, which, if unchecked, will surely poison your world and your future as much as fascism once threatened to do to your parents' world and future.
This is your challenge. Who will rise to it?

Iraq II or a Nuclear Iran?

2006-05-03T02:21:00.000-07:00

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN (NYT)
818 words
Published: April 19, 2006

If these are our only choices, which would you rather have: a nuclear-armed Iran or an attack on Iran's nuclear sites that is carried out and sold to the world by the Bush national security team, with Don Rumsfeld at the Pentagon's helm?
I'd rather live with a nuclear Iran.
While I know the right thing is to keep all our options open, I have zero confidence in this administration's ability to manage a complex military strike against Iran, let alone the military and diplomatic aftershocks.
As someone who believed -- and still believes -- in the importance of getting Iraq right, the level of incompetence that the Bush team has displayed in Iraq, and its refusal to acknowledge any mistakes or remove those who made them, make it impossible to support this administration in any offensive military action against Iran.
I look at the Bush national security officials much the way I look at drunken drivers. I just want to take away their foreign policy driver's licenses for the next three years. Sorry, boys and girls, you have to stay home now -- or take a taxi. Dial 1-800-NATO-CHARGE-A-RIDE. You will not be driving alone. Not with my car.
If ours were a parliamentary democracy, the entire Bush team would be out of office by now, and deservedly so. In Iraq, the president was supposed to lead, manage and hold subordinates accountable, and he did not. Condoleezza Rice was supposed to coordinate, and she did not. Donald Rumsfeld was supposed to listen, and he did not. But ours is not a parliamentary system, and while some may feel as if this administration's over, it isn't. So what to do? We can't just take a foreign policy timeout.
At a minimum, a change must be made at the Pentagon. Mr. Rumsfeld paints himself as a concerned secretary, ready to give our generals in Iraq whatever troops they ask for, but they just haven't asked. This is hogwash, but even if the generals didn't ask, the relevant question, Mr. Rumsfeld, is: What did you ask them?
What did you ask them when you saw the looting, when you saw Saddam's ammo dumps unguarded, when you saw that no one had control of the Iraq-Syria border and when you saw that Iraq was so insecure that militias were sprouting everywhere? What did you ask the generals? You didn't ask and you didn't tell, because you never wanted to send more troops. You actually thought we could just smash Saddam's regime and leave. Insane.
So if our choice is another Rummy-led operation on Iran or Iran's going nuclear and our deterring it through classic means, I prefer deterrence. A short diplomatic note to Iran's mullahs will suffice: ''Gentlemen, should you ever use a nuclear device, or dispense one to terrorists, we will destroy every one of your nuclear sites with tactical nuclear weapons. If there is any part of this sentence you don't understand, please contact us. Thank you.''
Do I wish there was a third way? Yes. But the only meaningful third way would be to challenge Iran to face-to-face negotiations about all the issues that divide us: Iraq, sanctions, nukes. Such diplomacy, though, would require two things.
First, the Bush team would have to make up its mind on something that has divided it for five years: Does it want a change of regime in Iran or a change of behavior? If it will settle only for regime change, then diplomacy has no chance. The Iranians will never negotiate, and our allies will be wary of working with us.
Second, if the Bush team is ready to live with a change in Iran's behavior, diplomacy has a chance -- but only if it has allies and a credible threat of force to make the Iranians negotiate seriously. The only way Iran will strike a grand bargain with the U.S. is if it thinks America has the support at home and abroad for a military option (or really severe sanctions.)
The main reason Mr. Rumsfeld should leave now is because we can't have a credible diplomatic or military option vis-à-vis Iran when so many people feel, as I do, that in a choice between another Rumsfeld-led confrontation and just letting Iran get nukes and living with it, we should opt for the latter.
It may be that learning to live with a nuclear Iran is the wisest thing under any circumstances. But it would be nice to have a choice. It would be nice to have the option of a diplomatic deal to end Iran's nuclear program -- but that will come only with a credible threat of force. Yet we will not have the support at home or abroad for that threat as long as Don Rumsfeld leads the Pentagon. No one in their right mind would follow this man into another confrontation -- and that is a real strategic liability.

The Hamas Dilemma

2006-04-12T20:11:00.000-07:00

April 12, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

It doesn't have a sexy name yet, like "The Six Day War," "Intifada III" or "Suez," but since Israel withdrew from Gaza, a quiet little war has been going on between Israelis and Palestinians. Maybe that's what we should call it: "The Quiet Little War." Or better yet, let's call it by its real name: Stupid.

Let's see, Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip, the Palestinians have a chance, not perfect, not ideal, but the best chance ever to build something decent of their own, without any Israeli occupation army breathing down their necks, and what are they doing? Mostly fighting each other and lobbing Qassam rockets into Israel, prompting increasingly iron-fisted Israeli retaliations.

Even the E.U. has decided to withhold aid money to the new Hamas-led Palestinian government, and when the Europeans get tough on the Palestinians, you know they really must be acting foolishly. The E.U. said it will not give the Hamas government direct aid or money for the salaries of Palestinian public employees as long as it refuses to abide by previous Palestinian decisions to recognize Israel and renounce violence.

What if Israel, the U.S. and the E.U. are right on principle, but that leads to an even bigger disaster in practice?

What do I mean? Let's start with the principle. Democracy is not just the act of winning a free election. It involves respect for the rule of law, constitutional restraints and decisions taken by previously elected parliaments. Both the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority and the P.L.O. recognized Israel's right to exist and, at least on paper, renounced the use of force. The Hamas government has rejected both. The only way Hamas can do that democratically is by holding a new referendum and asking Palestinians to reverse these established positions. But for Hamas to unilaterally reject the positions ratified by the previous Palestinian parliament is just an arbitrary exercise of power. It would be like President Bush tearing up the Panama Canal Treaty.

Also, a democratic government has to exercise a monopoly of force. Hamas can't ask the world to respect its democratic credentials if it, in turn, refuses to restrain Palestinian militants from attacking Israel from Gaza with rockets or suicide bombers. Hamas can't pretend it has no responsibility for "renegade" attacks on Israel by militias under its sovereign authority.
"A terrorist organization which came to power by procedural democracy cannot be equated with a democratic government," said the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. "Every day that passes without Hamas trying to stop this barrage of rockets on Israel or to recognize the international agreements by [the former Palestinian government] is undermining the legitimacy of Hamas's election." Democracy "is not a one-night stand," he added. "It is a marriage between government and people. That is why we call it a social contract. It can't just be arbitrarily changed by one side." In sum, the world does not have to respect Hamas as a democratic government, if Hamas does not respect these basic principles of democracy.

So let's just starve them of money until they come to their senses, right? But what if that leads to massive unemployment in the West Bank? Sure, it's Hamas's fault, but Israel will suffer the consequences of having a desperate Palestinian population on its doorstep. Or what if starving Hamas drives it deeper into an alliance with Iran to pay its bills? Can that be in Israel's interest?
As Nahum Barnea, one of Israel's leading columnists, pointed out to me, the Israeli public is in a "very pragmatic" mood when it comes to Hamas. Bibi Netanyahu focused the Likud campaign in the last election on heated charges that the Kadima Party was going to deal with Hamas, and he got creamed. Israeli voters rejected his message. The fact is, the four-year Hamas suicide campaign had a huge impact on the Israeli psyche. Israelis do not want to see it resumed. A majority of Israelis would negotiate with Hamas tomorrow if they were persuaded that Hamas would deliver a long-term cease-fire.

So, yes, in principle, Hamas doesn't deserve to be treated like a democratic government. But in practice, Hamas has something Israelis badly want: a cease-fire — not recognition. Israel chose to destroy Yasir Arafat's government and got Hamas. What if it destroys Hamas? What will it get then? I don't know, but the answer is not simple. Designing the right policy to deal with a democratically elected terrorist group that deserves to be spurned but has something you want is not in the textbooks.

Condi and Rummy

2006-04-12T20:05:00.000-07:00

April 7, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry when you read about the spat between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over whether the U.S. committed any "tactical" errors in the Iraq war.

In case you missed it, Secretary Rice told reporters in Britain last Friday that "I know we've made tactical errors, thousands of them I'm sure," but that the big strategic decision to take down Saddam Hussein will be seen by future historians as correct.

During a radio interview on WDAY in Fargo, N.D., on Tuesday, Mr. Rumsfeld responded: "I don't know what she was talking about, to be perfectly honest." Then Mr. Rumsfeld elaborated with a blast of incoherent nonsense about how you always need to change tactics in war: "If you had a static situation and you made a mistake in how you addressed the static situation, that would be one thing. What you have here is not a static situation, you have a dynamic situation with an enemy that thinks, uses their brain, constantly adjusts, and therefore our commanders have to constantly make tactical adjustments."

Where does one even begin? First of all, Secretary Rice is wrong that the Bush team's mistakes in Iraq were purely tactical. Under Mr. Rumsfeld's direction, it made a monumental strategic error in not deploying enough troops to control Iraq's borders and fill the security vacuum we created by bringing down Saddam — a vacuum that has since been filled by looters and scores of head-chopping sectarian militias and gangs.

Here is the brutal truth of where we are in Iraq today: After three years, more than $300 billion and thousands of U.S. and Iraqi casualties, we still do not have an Iraqi government or army that could hold together, without U.S. help. There is still no self-sustaining, democratizing Iraq. And even if we eventually get a national unity government there, it is not clear it will be able to reverse Iraq's slide into sectarianism and militias. No one even knows anymore whether Iraqis in uniform work for the state or a militia.

The other day, the Iraqi blogger Riverbend, who writes for Salon.com, told of watching Iraqi TV when an Arabic message scrolled across the screen: "The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians do not comply with the orders of the army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by [U.S.] coalition forces working in that area." Riverbend's translation: Many Iraqi security forces "are actually militias allied to religious and political parties."

As someone who believes in the importance of building a progressive politics in Iraq, in the heart of the Arab world, it pains me to say this, but we are in real trouble there.

Some critics dismiss the Iraq invasion as being all about oil. They are so wrong. It is so much crazier — and nobler — than that. This region has known only top-down monologues: colonial powers, then kings and dictators, always talking down to their people, backed by iron fists.
What we have been trying to bring about in Iraq is something unprecedented — the first ever bottom-up, horizontal dialogue between the constituent communities of an Arab state. What you are seeing in Iraq today is that horizontal dialogue, between Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis — communities who have never been allowed to forge their own social contract — so they wouldn't have to be ruled from the top down, with an iron fist.

If the Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds can forge their own social contract, democracy is possible in this part of the world. If they can't, then it's kings and dictators as far as the eye can see. And since it was decades of that sort of politics that produced the pathologies that produced 9/11, that would be very unfortunate.

Our job was to do one thing right: provide a secure environment so that Iraqis could have a reasonably rational, peaceful horizontal dialogue, which is difficult enough given their legacy of fear from the Saddam years. We failed to do that, largely because Mr. Rumsfeld, who was warned otherwise, refused to deploy sufficient forces. Mr. Rumsfeld made that decision because — if you read "Cobra II," the Michael Gordon-Bernard Trainor history of the Iraq war — he was more interested in transforming the Pentagon than in transforming Iraq. He was never ready to devote the unprecedented military resources to match the unprecedented Iraq mission. President Bush, Condi Rice, Dick Cheney all went along with him for the ride.

They tried to make history on the cheap. But you can't will the ends without willing the means. That is Strategic Theory 101, and ignoring it is not just some "tactical error."

Paul Krugman is on vacation.

High Fence And Big Gate

2006-04-12T20:03:00.000-07:00

EDITORIAL DESK

New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN (NYT) 792 words
Published: April 5, 2006

America today is struggling to find the right balance of policies on immigration. Personally, I favor a very high fence, with a very big gate.

So far, neither President Bush's proposal to allow the nation's millions of illegal immigrants to stay temporarily on work visas, nor the most hard-line G.O.P. counterproposal, which focuses only on border security, leaves me satisfied. We need a better blend of the two -- a blend that will keep America the world's greatest magnet for immigrants.

Why?

First, the world is flattening, and as a result more and more people around the globe have access to the same technological tools for innovation and entrepreneurship. In such a world, where innovation is concentrated really matters -- because that is where the best management, research and sales jobs will be located for any company.

Because of its deeply rooted culture of immigration, the U.S. has a huge advantage in such a world. If we are smart, we can still cream off the most first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world -- more than any other country -- and bring that talent to our shores to start companies and work in others.

We have gone from the Iron Age to the Industrial Age to the Information Age to the Talent Age, and countries that make it easy to draw in human talent will have a distinct advantage today.
Anybody out there try to become a Swiss citizen lately? It's not so easy -- and it's also not an accident that Switzerland's most famous product is the cuckoo clock.

Second, a steady flow of immigrants keeps a society flexible and competitive. In this flat world, more people than ever can leverage technology. So whatever can be done -- whatever today's technologies enable and empower -- will be done by someone, somewhere. The only question is whether it will be done by you or to you. The more open your society is to new people and ideas, the more things will be done by you, not to you.

We shouldn't just welcome educated immigrants, but laborers as well -- not only because we need manual laborers, but also because they bring an important energy. As the Indian-American entrepreneur Vivek Paul likes to say: ''The very act of leaving behind your own society is an intense motivator. Whether you are a doctor or a gardener, you are intensely motivated to succeed.''

We need that steady energy flow, especially with India and China exploding onto the world stage with huge pent-up aspirations. If you want to know what China and India feel like today, just take out a Champagne bottle, shake it for 10 minutes and then take off the cork. Don't get in the way of that cork. Immigrants keep that kind of energy flowing in America's veins.

An amnesty for the 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants already here is hardly ideal. It would reward illegal behavior. But since we are not going to deport them all, some version of the Arlen Specter bill seems like the right way to go: Illegal immigrants who were in the U.S. before Jan. 7, 2004, could apply for three-year guest-worker visas, each renewable one time if the applicant paid a $1,000 fine and passed a background check. After six years, if the immigrant learned sufficient English and paid another $1,000 fine and back taxes, he or she could start to apply for citizenship.

But because I strongly favor immigration, I also favor a high fence -- if not a physical one, then at least a tamperproof national ID card for every American, without which you could not get a legal job or access to government services. We will not sustain a majority in favor of flexible immigration if we can't control our borders.

Good fences make good immigration policy. Fences make people more secure and able to think through this issue more calmly. Porous borders empower only anti-immigrant demagogues, like the shameful CNN, which dumbs down the whole debate.

We also need to control the influx of immigrants because one byproduct of the flattening of the world is that many decent low-end factory jobs previously open to someone with only a high school degree or less are now disappearing. As Dan Pink notes in his book, ''A Whole New Mind,'' many of those jobs can now be done faster by a computer or cheaper by a Chinese worker. Therefore, we can't just endlessly expand our pool of manual labor without condemning people at that low end, particularly black men, to a future of declining wages or unemployment. That will have terrible social consequences.

For all these reasons, I weigh each immigration proposal with two questions: ''Does it offer a real fence? Does it offer a real gate?''

Iraq at the 11th Hour

2006-04-02T19:25:00.000-07:00

March 31, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The fate of the entire U.S. enterprise in Iraq now hangs in the balance, as the war has entered a dangerous new phase. It is the phase of barbaric identity-card violence between Sunnis and Shiites. In the late 1970's, I covered a similar moment in Lebanon, and the one thing I learned was this: Once this kind of venom gets unleashed — with members of each community literally beheading each other on the basis of their religious identities — it poisons everything. You enter a realm that is beyond politics, a realm where fear and revenge dominate everyone's thinking — and that is where Iraq is heading.

Jeffrey Gettleman reported last Sunday in this paper about Mohannad al-Azawi, a quiet Sunni pet shop owner in Baghdad who was abducted from his store and found murdered the next morning. His skin was covered with purple welts, and his face and legs had drill holes in them. His brother Hassan, the story noted, "carries the autopsy photos with him, along with a pistol. 'I cannot live without vengeance,' he said."

Once embedded, this cycle of fear and revenge is almost impossible to break. People conclude that the only thing that can protect them is a militia from their own sect, not the police or the army. Then these militias, which come to life to protect the neighborhood, take on a life of their own. They develop protection rackets, feel the thrill of power and, as that happens, start to do all they can to prevent the government from restoring its authority. Finally, as the BBC noted in a recent report from Baghdad, some Iraqi politicians are now concluding that "they can gain more power and influence from building on sectarian loyalties than from appeals for national unity." When politicians decide they can get ahead by appealing more to fear than to hope, national reconciliation goes up in smoke.

A Baghdad blogger, the Mesopotamian, quoted by AndrewSullivan.com, gave a vivid description of his neighborhood: "The confusion and conflict between the Americans, the army and the Ministry of Interior is producing a situation where the citizens don't know anymore whether the security personnel in the street are friends, enemies, terrorists or simply criminals and thieves. Everybody is wearing the same uniforms. Whole sections of the city have virtually fallen to gangs and terrorists, and this is especially true for the 'Sunni'-dominated neighborhoods. People and businesses are being robbed and the employees kidnapped en masse in broad daylight and with complete ease as though security forces are nonexistent, although we see them everywhere.

"I don't know anymore what can be done to rescue the situation. At least, those who are supposed to be in positions of responsibility should stop lying and painting a false picture. ... I regret sounding so pessimistic, but the alarm must be sounded. ... What is happening is Baghdad is something really awful."

Donald Rumsfeld's criminally negligent decision not to deploy enough troops in Iraq to begin with created this security vacuum. But the insecurity was compounded by the unique enemy that emerged to take advantage of that vacuum — Sunni Islamo-nihilists. These are a disparate collection of groups with one common agenda: America and its Iraqi allies must fail; they must not be allowed to build Iraq into a Western-style, democratizing society. When you are up against an enemy whose only goal is that you must fail, and which does not care about how much death and destruction it inflicts on its own people, let alone on others, it is extremely difficult to establish order.

The Iraqi Shiite community showed remarkable restraint in the face of the murderous provocations by these Islamo-nihilist gangs during the past three years. But that restraint is over. It's now clear that some Shiite militias are ready to match the Sunni nihilists, killing for killing. So the slide into a medieval barbarism has begun.

Do not believe any of the Bush team's happy talk. It doesn't matter if Iraq is quiet in the south and quiet in the north. If Baghdad, the heart of the country, is being ripped apart, then there is no Iraq — because there is no center.

There is only one hope for halting this slide and that is the formation — immediately — of a national unity government in Iraq, with Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds sharing power, and the deployment on the streets — immediately — of massive numbers of troops and police, both Iraqi and American, to prevent more of these tribal killings. If a national unity government is not formed soon, and if these identity-card murderers gain more momentum, any hope for building a decent Iraq will vanish.
It is five minutes to midnight.

Facts and Folly

2006-04-02T19:24:00.000-07:00

March 29, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I was leaving for a trip the other day and scooped up some reading material off my desk for the plane ride. I found myself holding three documents: one was the Bush administration's National Security Strategy for 2006; another was a new study by the Economic Strategy Institute entitled "America's Technology Future at Risk," about how America is falling behind the world in broadband. And the third was "Teaching at Risk," a new report by the Teaching Commission, headed by the former I.B.M. chairman Louis Gerstner Jr., about the urgent need to upgrade the quality and pay of America's K-12 teachers.

The contrast was striking. The Bush strategy paper presupposes that we are a rich country and always will be, and that the only issue is how we choose to exercise our power. But what the teaching and telecom studies tell us is that key pillars of U.S. power are eroding, and unless we start tending to them in a strategic way, we aren't going to be able to project power anywhere.
Because we've long been rich, there is an abiding faith that we always will be, and those who dare question that are labeled "defeatists." I wouldn't call Lou Gerstner a defeatist. He saved I.B.M. by acknowledging its weaknesses and making dramatic changes — beginning with scrapping I.B.M.'s arrogant assumption that because it was such a great company, it could do extraordinary things with average people. Mr. Gerstner understood that an extraordinary company could stay that way only if it had a critical mass of extraordinary people. This is the message of his Teaching Commission: We cannot remain an extraordinary country without a critical mass of extraordinary teachers.

"If teaching remains a second-rate profession, America's economy will be driven by second-rate skills," Mr. Gerstner says. "We can wake up today — or we can have a rude awakening sooner than we think."

The Teaching Commission notes that "our schools are only as good as their teachers," yet this "occupation that makes all others possible is eroding at its foundations." Top students are far less likely to go into teaching today; salaries are stagnant; nearly 50 percent of new teachers leave within five years. To remedy this, the commission calls for raising teachers' base pay, finding ways to reward the best teachers, raising standards for acquiring a teaching degree and testing would-be teachers, on the basis of national standards, to be certain they have mastered the subjects they will teach (theteachingcommission.org).

Meanwhile, the report by the Economic Strategy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, is equally harrowing. It notes that while the U.S. led the world in broadband Internet access in 2000, it has now fallen to 16th place. In 2000, 40 percent of the world's telecom equipment was produced in America. That share is now 21 percent and falling. The U.S. ranks 42nd for the percentage of people with cellphones.
In an age when connectivity means productivity, when communications infrastructure is at the heart of any innovation ecosystem, these things matter for job creation and growth. The lack of ultra-high-speed networks in the U.S. "makes it impossible for U.S.-based companies to enter key new business sectors" — one reason venture capitalists are moving their R.&D. start-ups to Asia, E.S.I. noted.

"The wealth and long-term economic growth of the United States," it added, "have long depended upon technological advancement as a means of competing with our foreign rivals. ... America's emphasis has always been on achieving such high levels of productivity that it could be the low-cost producer while still paying high wages." The study offers a variety of regulatory and investment prescriptions (econstrat.org).

It's not surprising that the Bush strategy paper is largely silent about these educational and technological deficits, as well as about the investment we need to make in alternative fuels to end our oil addiction. Because to acknowledge these deficits is to acknowledge that we have to spend money to fix them, and the radical Bush tax cuts make that impossible. It would be one thing if we were going into debt to solve these problems that affect our underlying national strength. But we are going into debt to buy low-interest houses and more stuff made in China.
We're like a family that is overdrawn at the bank just when the parents need to send their kid to college, buy a computer and a D.S.L. line, and replace a gas-guzzling furnace. Whatever "strategic plan" that family has for advancement, it won't get anywhere until it rebalances its books.

Worried About India's and China's Booms? So Are They

2006-03-26T20:34:00.000-08:00

March 24, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The more I cover foreign affairs, the more I wish I had studied education in college, because the more I travel, the more I find that the most heated debates in many countries are around education. And here's what's really funny — every country thinks it's behind.

Tony Blair has been fighting with his own party over permitting more innovative charter schools. Singapore is obsessed with improving its already world-leading math scores before others catch up. And America agonizes that its K-12 public schools badly need improvement in math and science. I was just in Mumbai attending the annual meeting of India's high-tech association, Nasscom, where many speakers worried aloud that Indian education wasn't nurturing enough "innovators."

Both India and China, which have mastered rote learning and have everyone else terrified about their growing armies of engineers, are wondering if too much math and science — unleavened by art, literature, music and humanities — aren't making Indira and Zhou dull kids and not good innovators. Very few global products have been spawned by India or China.

"We have no one going into the liberal arts and everyone going into engineering and M.B.A.'s," said Jerry Rao, chief executive of MphasiS, one of the top Indian outsourcing companies. "We're becoming a nation of aspiring programmers and salespeople. If we don't have enough people with the humanities, we will lose the [next generation of] V. S. Naipauls and Amartya Sens," he added, referring to the Indian author and the Indian economist, both Nobel laureates. "That is sad and dangerous."

Innovation is often a synthesis of art and science, and the best innovators often combine the two. The Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, in his compelling Stanford commencement address last year, recalled how he dropped out of college but stuck around campus and took a calligraphy course, where he learned about the artistry of great typography. "None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life," he recalled. "But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography."

Fifty years ago the Sanskrit scholar was respected in India, Mr. Rao noted, but today it is all about becoming an engineer, a programmer, an M.B.A. or a doctor. "More people will get Ph.D.'s [in the study of] Sanskrit in America this year than in India," Mr. Rao asserted, "and Sanskrit is the root of our culture!"

Why all this ed-anxiety today? Because computers, fiber-optic cable and the Internet have leveled the economic playing field, creating a global platform that more workers anywhere can now plug into and play on. Capital will now flow faster than ever to tap the most productive talent wherever it is located, so every country is scrambling to upgrade its human talent base. When everyone has access to the same technology platform, human talent, as the consultants John Hagel III and John Seely Brown wrote, is the "only sustainable edge."

Hence the concern I found in India that it must move quickly from business process outsourcing (B.P.O.) — running back rooms, answering phones or writing code for U.S. companies — into knowledge process outsourcing (K.P.O.): coming up with more original designs and products.
"We need to encourage more incubation of ideas ... to make innovation a national initiative," said Azim Premji, the chairman of Wipro, one of India's premier technology companies. "Are we as Indians creative? Going by our rich cultural heritage, we have no doubt some of the greatest art and literature. We need to bring the same spirit into our economic and business arena."
But to make that leap, Indian entrepreneurs say, will require a big change in the rigid, never-challenge-the-teacher Indian education system. "If we do not allow our students to ask why, but just keep on telling them how, then we are only going to get the transactional type of outsourcing, not the high-end things that require complex interactions and judgment to understand another person's needs," said Nirmala Sankaran, C.E.O. of HeyMath, an Indian-based education company. "We have a creative problem in this country."

My guess is that we're at the start of a global convergence in education: China and India will try to inspire more creativity in their students. America will get more rigorous in math and science. And this convergence will be a great spur to global growth and innovation. It's a win-win. But some will win more than others — and it will be those who get this balance right the fastest, in the most schools.

Dubai and Dunces

2006-03-21T17:41:00.000-08:00

March 15, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
When it came to the Dubai ports issue, the facts never really had a chance — not in this political season. Still, it's hard to imagine a more ignorant, bogus, xenophobic, reckless debate than the one indulged in by both Republicans and Democrats around this question of whether an Arab-owned company might oversee loading and unloading services in some U.S. ports. If you had any doubts before, have none now: 9/11 has made us stupid.
We don't need any more pre-9/11 commissions. We need a post-9/11 commission, one that looks at all the big and little things we are doing — from sanctioning torture to warrantless wiretaps to turning our embassies abroad into fortresses — that over time could eat away at the core DNA of America.
What is so crazy about the Dubai ports issue is that Dubai is precisely the sort of decent, modernizing model we should be trying to nurture in the Arab-Muslim world. But we've never really had an honest discussion about either the real problems out there or the real solutions, have we?
The real problem was recently spelled out by an Arab-American psychiatrist, Dr. Wafa Sultan, in a stunning interview with Al Jazeera. Speaking about the Arab-Muslim world, Dr. Sultan said: "The clash we are witnessing ... is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on the other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings."
The Jazeera host then asked: "I understand from your words that what is happening today is a clash between the culture of the West, and the backwardness and ignorance of the Muslims?"
Dr. Sultan: "Yes, that is what I mean."
Dr. Sultan voiced truths that many Muslims know: their civilization is, in many places, in turmoil, falling further and further behind the world in science, education, industry and innovation, while falling deeper and deeper into the grip of crackpot clerics, tin-pot dictators, violent mobs and madmen like bin Laden and Saddam.
President Bush keeps talking about Iraq and the Arab world as if democracy alone is the cure and all we need to do is get rid of a few bad apples. The problem is much deeper — we're dealing with a civilization that is still highly tribalized and is struggling with modernity. Mr. Bush was right in thinking it is important to help Iraq become a model where Arab Muslims could freely discuss their real problems, the ones identified by Dr. Sultan, and chart new courses. His crime was thinking it would be easy.
I don't know how Iraq will end, but I sure know that we aren't going to repeat the Iraq invasion elsewhere anytime soon. Yet the need for reform in this region still cries out. Is there another way? Yes — nurturing internally generated Arab models for evolutionary reform, and one of the best is Dubai, the Arab Singapore.
Dubai is not a democracy, and it is not without warts. But it is a bridge of decency that leads away from the failing civilization described by Dr. Sultan to a much more optimistic, open and self-confident society. Dubaians are building a future based on butter not guns, private property not caprice, services more than oil, and globally competitive companies, not terror networks. Dubai is about nurturing Arab dignity through success not suicide. As a result, its people want to embrace the future, not blow it up.
What's ironic is that if Democrats who hate the Bush war in Iraq actually had a peaceful alternative policy for promoting transformation in the Arab-Muslim world, it would be called "the Dubai policy": supporting internally driven Arab engines of change.
That's why Arab progressives are stunned by our behavior. As an Arab businessman friend said to me of the Dubai saga: "This deal has left a real bad taste in many mouths. I mean this was Dubai, for God's sake! You could not have a better friend and more of a symbol of globalization and openness. If they are a security danger to the U.S., then who is not?"
So whatever happens with the Iraq experiment — but especially if it fails — we need Dubai to succeed. Dubai is where we should want the Arab world to go. Unfortunately, we just told Dubai to go to hell.

America's Iran Policy: Iraq

2006-03-16T22:55:00.000-08:00

March 17, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
America's Iran Policy: Iraq
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The Bush White House issued its latest national security strategy doctrine yesterday, and it identifies Iran as the "single country" that poses the greatest danger to the U.S. today. The report, however, doesn't say what exactly we should do about Iran. But here's what I think: The most frightening, scary, terrifying thing we could do to Iran today — short of an outright attack — is to get out of Iraq.
The second most frightening, scary, terrifying thing we could do to Iran is to succeed in Iraq. The worst thing we could do, though, the thing that would make Iranians the happiest, is to continue bleeding in Iraq and baby-sitting a stalemate there. In sum, since we are not going to invade Iran, the best way we can influence it is by what we do in Iraq.
Let me explain: I am not in favor of withdrawing from Iraq now — not while there is still a chance for a decent outcome. But if we did pull out of Iraq, it would make life incredibly complicated for Tehran. There's a lot of cheap talk that Iran was the big winner from the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Don't be so sure. Hundreds of years of Mesopotamian history teach us that Arabs and Persians do not play well together.
Right now, the natural antipathy and competition between Iraqi Arabs and Iranian Persians — even though large numbers of both are Shiite Muslims — have been muted because of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Both sides can focus their anger on us.
But as soon as we leave — and you can bet the house and kids on this — the natural rivalry between Iraqi Arabs and Iranian Persians will surface. Culture, history and nationalism matter. Iran and Iraq did not fight a war for eight years by mistake, or just because Saddam was in power. Once America is out of Iraq, it will not be a winning political strategy for any Iraqi politician to be known as "pro-Iranian" or, even worse, as an instrument of Tehran's.
If we were out of Iraq today and Iran had to manage the chaos there, on its border, it would be a huge, energy-draining problem for Tehran. Iraqis, in case you haven't noticed, have a rather violent, independent streak. Anyone who thinks Iraq is some overripe fruit that will fall into Iran's lap as soon as we leave, and obediently stay there, doesn't know Iraq or Iran. Iraqi Arab Shiites did not wait for centuries to rule Iraq in order to turn it over to Iranian Persian Shiites. Not a chance.
In their superb, must-read, military history of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, "Cobra II," Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor explain why Saddam always wanted to keep the world in doubt about his W.M.D., even when his cupboard was bare: it was to deter Iran. Remember, Iraq and Iran each used poison gas against the other in their war. The last thing Saddam wanted was to let Iran know he was out of gas. Gordon and Trainor quote the Iraqi military intelligence director as telling U.S. interrogators after the war: "What did we think was going to happen with the coalition invasion? We were more interested in Turkey and Iran." All geopolitics is local.
Also, if the U.S. were out of Iraq and the U.S. attacked Iran's nuclear facilities with airstrikes, Iran would not be able to retaliate with its missiles against any large concentrations of U.S. military forces nearby. That, too, would give the U.S. a freer hand to deal with Iran's nuclear threat.
The only thing more frightening to the Iranians than the U.S. leaving Iraq, would be — and this is my preference — the U.S. succeeding in Iraq. Iraq has already held two elections in which anyone could run and vote. This stands in sharp contrast with the elections in Iran, where only conservatives approved by the ayatollahs can run. Iraq has a flourishing free press. Iran's insecure ayatollahs have shut down their critics.
The more Iraqi Shiites are empowered in a democratic Iraq, the more Iranian Shiites will ask why they don't have the same rights as the folks next door. Also, the major spiritual centers of Shiite Islam aren't in Iran, but in Iraq. The more the Iraqi Shiite religious centers are revived — with their particular Iraqi Shiite strain, represented by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, which says clerics should stay out of politics — the more the Iranian mullahs will see their influence diminished.
So getting out of Iraq would be a good anti-Iran strategy. Succeeding in Iraq would be even better. The one strategy that won't work for us, but would be ideal for Iran, would be for U.S. troops to remain in Iraq as bleeding sitting ducks, baby-sitting a stalemate and absorbing everyone's wrath — including the wrath that would naturally be directed at Tehran.
Paul Krugman is on vacation.

Friedman's globe full of fans

2006-03-16T22:52:00.000-08:00

The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com
Friedman's globe full of fans
Published March 17, 2006

If you're surprised that the first translation of Thomas L. Friedman's best-selling book "The World Is Flat" is in Arabic, don't be. The New York Times columnist has a wide circle of Arab admirers, which explains why Middle Eastern diplomats were effusive with praise at the Jordanian Embassy on Monday night as they gathered to meet the author, whose book makes the case that global trade and the Internet-driven communications boom of the past decade has not only revolutionized international business but crushed cultural barriers as well. "He gives us hope that there's now a great advantage for smaller countries," said the host, Jordanian Ambassador Karim Kawar, who first met and befriended Mr. Friedman after he published "The Lexus and the Olive Tree," a previous work that posits globalization as the major world force since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Between signings, Mr. Friedman noted that he was "just thrilled" to hear that of the 27 foreign editions of his book, "the first one sold was the Arab edition." In the Arab world, he added, "there's been more curiosity than controversy" over his writings, which in the past have defended the American invasion of Iraq. The 150 guests included Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Alphonso Jackson, Sen. Ted Stevens, Surgeon General Richard Carmona, Polish Ambassador Janusz Reiter, Omani Ambassador Hunaina Sultan Ahmed Al-Mughairy, District Mayor Anthony A. Williams, former protocol chief Selwa S. "Lucky" Roosevelt, Esther Coopersmith and newsman Chris Matthews (who called Mr. Friedman "brilliant"). It was clear from the start that certain guests were attending despite strong policy differences with the guest of honor. "Even though I might not see eye to eye [with him], as a diplomat, I'm known to be intolerably tolerant. I enjoy his articles," Palestinian National Authority Representative Afif Safieh said. "He's one of the few columnists in this town who are objective," Mr. Jackson added later. "That's all we ask. That's all the president asks." Mr. Friedman wrapped up the evening by revealing that he has identified another global trend: "a huge undertow of anxiety about education. Wherever he goes around the world, "everyone's talking about education, and everyone's thinking they're behind," he told the crowd before explaining that the concept for "The World Is Flat" occurred to him while he was shooting a Discovery Channel documentary on outsourcing in Bangalore, India. "While I'd been off covering the 9/11 wars, something had been happening, and I'd completely missed it," Mr. Friedman said, noting that the idea struck him most palpably when an Indian entrepreneur in Bangalore told him that "the global economic playing field is being leveled." The new transnational interconnectivity, in other words, is allowing once-marginalized countries to compete; geography is becoming nearly irrelevant. Mr. Friedman clearly is still excited by his revelation that an entrepreneur in Bangalore may have as good a shot at success as one in Baltimore. "We're going from a vertical world to a horizontal world," he said. "This is the mother of all transitions." -- Christina Ianzito

Letting India in the Club?

2006-03-08T12:14:00.000-08:00

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, March 8, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
India is a country that had me at hello. Call me biased, but I have a soft spot for countries of one billion people, speaking a hundred different languages and practicing a variety of religions, whose people hold regular free and fair elections and, despite massive poverty, still produce generations of doctors and engineers who help to make the world a more productive and peaceful place. Sure, as today's bombings in India illustrate, it has its problems — but it is not Iraq. It is a beacon of tolerance and stability.
So I applaud President Bush's desire to form a deeper partnership with India. There is only one thing I would not do for that cause: endorse — in its current form — the nuclear arms deal that the Bush team just cut with New Delhi. I am all for finding a creative way to bring India into the world's nuclear family. India deserves to be treated differently than Iran. But we can't do it in a way that could melt down the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and foster a nuclear arms race in South Asia.
What's the problem? India has never signed the N.P.T., which is the international legal framework that limited the world's nuclear club to the U.S., China, Russia, Britain and France. For decades, U.S. policy has been very consistent: we do not sell civilian nuclear technology to any country that has not signed the N.P.T. And since that included India, India could never buy reactors, even for its civilian power needs, from America.
But with India eager to buy U.S. nuclear technology, and the U.S. eager to build India into an economic and geostrategic counterweight to China, the Bush team wanted — rightly — to find a way to get India out of the corner it put itself in when it first set off a nuclear blast in 1974. Under the Bush-India deal, India would designate 14 of its 22 nuclear power reactors as "civilian," to be put under international safeguards, leaving the other 8 free from inspections and able to produce as much bomb-grade plutonium as India wanted. In return, U.S. companies would be able to sell India civilian-use nuclear reactors and technology.
This is a troubling deal for two reasons. First, it could only undermine the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Yes, I know, the Bush team doesn't believe in treaties and says the treaty isn't restraining the rogues anyway. But this treaty is the legal basis by which we have been able to build coalitions against the nuclear rogues to restrain them from spreading W.M.D. One of the key legal bases for isolating Saddam Hussein was that he'd violated the N.P.T., which Iraq had signed. The legal basis by which we are building a coalition against Iran's going nuclear is the N.P.T. Under the N.P.T., we board ships suspected of carrying W.M.D. Japan, Brazil and Argentina all chose to forgo nuclear weapons to gain access to foreign nuclear technology by abiding by the N.P.T. What are they going to think if India gets a free pass?
What should we have done? Bob Einhorn, who has worked on nonproliferation for every administration since Nixon's, has the right idea: Tell India that it can have this deal — provided it does something hard that would clearly reinforce the global nonproliferation regime. And that would be halting all production of weapons-grade material, thereby capping India's stockpile of nuclear bomb ingredients where it is. That could be a lever to get Pakistan to do the same. The fewer bomb-making materials around, the less likely it is for any to fall into the hands of terrorists.
"The Bush administration proposed such a production cutoff in negotiations, but dropped the idea when India balked," Mr. Einhorn said. "India says it is willing to adopt the same responsibilities and practices as the other nuclear powers. It so happens that the five original nuclear powers — U.S., U.K., France, Russia and China — have all stopped producing fissile material for weapons. If we are going to bring India into the club, it should do so as well."
India says it needs to keep producing nuclear material to have a more credible deterrent. I can't judge that. All I know is that we should not go ahead with this deal until India is ready to halt its production of weapons-grade material.
"The problem the Bush administration faces in selling the nuclear deal is not, as the president has said, that 'some people just don't want to change' or that they are focused on outdated concerns," Mr. Einhorn argued. "People are willing to change. They want to support the president's India initiative, even modify longstanding policies. But they want to do it in a way that also serves an objective that is hardly outdated: preventing nuclear proliferation."

Who's Afraid of a Gas Tax?

2006-03-02T08:48:00.000-08:00

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
My gut told me this was the case, but it's great to see it confirmed by the latest New York Times/CBS News poll: Americans not only know that our oil addiction is really bad for us, but they would be willing to accept a gasoline tax if some leader would just frame the stakes for the country the right way.
I am sure one reason President Bush suddenly chose to build his State of the Union address around ending our oil addiction and moving toward a renewable-energy future was because his private polling told him the same thing. But Mr. Bush simply occupied this ground rhetorically — before Democrats could get there — without actually offering a real solution.
The only real solution is raising our gasoline tax, which is a paltry 18.4 cents a gallon and has not been increased since 1993. Only if the total price of gasoline is brought into the $3.50-to-$4-per-gallon range — and kept there — will large numbers of Americans demand plug-in hybrid cars that run on biofuels like ethanol. When large numbers of Americans do that, U.S. automakers will move quickly down the innovation curve.
"Impossible," campaign consultants say. "A gasoline tax is political suicide." No, it all depends on how you frame it.
The poll reported yesterday found that 60 percent of those polled, including one-third of Republicans, disapproved of how Mr. Bush is handling our energy crisis. Only 27 percent approved. Most want real action — now. In the poll, 87 percent said Washington should require car manufacturers to produce more efficient cars.
Of course, when asked simply whether they'd favor a gasoline tax, 85 percent said no and only 12 percent said yes. But when the gas tax was framed as part of a national strategy to achieve energy security and climate security, pollsters got a very different answer. When the tax was presented as reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil, 55 percent favored it and 37 percent said no. And when asked about a gas tax that would help reduce global warming, even more respondents supported it — with 59 percent in favor and 34 percent opposed.
And that is without a single Democrat or Republican leading on this issue! Imagine if someone actually led?
Many Americans now understand: the Energy Question is the big strategic issue of our time, overtaking 9/11 and the war on terrorism. If a leader from either party would correctly frame the issue — that a gas tax is the single most important geostrategic move we could make today — a solid majority would support it.
Taking on this issue is the only hope the Bush team has for producing a legacy out of its remaining years. And it is the Democrats' only hope for taking on the Republicans with a big idea — rather than relying on G.O.P. scandals to win.
Sadly, both sides fear the other will smear them if they run on this issue. O.K., say you're running for Congress and you propose a gas tax, but your opponent denounces you as a wimpy, tree-hugging girlie-man, a tax-and-spender. What do you say back?
I'd say: "Oh, really? I guess you think it is smart, tough and patriotic for us to be financing both sides in the war on terrorism — the U.S. military with our tax dollars, and Al Qaeda, Iran and various hostile Islamist charities with our energy purchases.
"Now how patriotic is that? I guess you haven't noticed that today's global economic playing field has been leveled and that three billion new players from India, China and Russia have walked onto the field, buying new cars, homes and refrigerators. So if we don't break our addiction to crude oil, we're going to heat up this planet so much faster — enough to melt the North Pole and make Katrina look like a summer breeze.
"Now how smart is that? I guess you don't realize that because of this climate change and the rising cost of crude, green technologies are going to be the industry of the 21st century, and a gasoline tax is the surest way to make certain that our industries innovate faster and dominate innovation in green cars, homes and appliances.
"Finally, I guess you haven't noticed that the wave of democratization that seemed unstoppable after the fall of the Berlin Wall has run into a black counterwave of petro-authoritarianism. This black wave of oil-financed autocrats — Venezuela, Russia, Iran, Nigeria, Burma, Saudi Arabia — has all the money in the world now to turn back the democratic tide. And you think doing nothing to reverse that is patriotic? Shame on you, you unpatriotic wimp. Green is the new red, white and blue, pal. What color are you?"
That's what I'd say.
Maureen Dowd is on a book tour.

War of the Worlds

2006-03-02T08:47:00.000-08:00

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Since 9/11, whenever the Bush team has found itself in political trouble, it has played the national security card against Democrats. It has worked so well that Karl Rove, in a recent speech to the Republican National Committee, made it a campaign theme for 2006.
He said America today faces "a ruthless enemy" and therefore needs "a commander in chief and a Congress who understand the nature of the threat and the gravity of the moment America finds itself in. President Bush and the Republican Party do. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many Democrats."
Mr. Rove added: "Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview, and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview. That doesn't make them unpatriotic — not at all. But it does make them wrong — deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong."
I particularly like the line "that doesn't make them unpatriotic," when that was exactly the political slur Mr. Rove was trying to implant.
So I understand why Democrats were eager to turn the soft-on-terrorism card back on President Bush when it was revealed that P&O, the navigation company based in London — which has been managing the ports of New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia — had been bought by Dubai Ports World, a company owned by the Dubai monarchy in the United Arab Emirates, an Arab Gulf state, and that the Bush team had approved the Dubai takeover of the U.S. port operations.
I also understand why many Republicans are now running away from the administration. They know that if they don't distance themselves from Mr. Bush, some Democrats are going to play this very evocative, very visual "giving away our ports to the Arabs" card against them in the coming elections. Yes, you reap what you sow.
But while I have zero sympathy for the political mess in which the president now finds himself, I will not join this feeding frenzy. On the pure merits of this case, the president is right. The port deal should go ahead. Congress should focus on the N.S.A. wiretapping. Not this.
As a country, we must not go down this road of global ethnic profiling — looking for Arabs under our beds the way we once looked for commies. If we do — if America, the world's beacon of pluralism and tolerance, goes down that road — we will take the rest of the world with us. We will sow the wind and we will reap the whirlwind.
If there were a real security issue here, I'd join the critics. But the security argument is bogus and, I would add, borderline racist. Many U.S. ports are run today by foreign companies, but the U.S. Coast Guard still controls all aspects of port security, entry and exits; the U.S. Customs Service is still in charge of inspecting the containers; and U.S. longshoremen still handle the cargos.
The port operator simply oversees the coming and going of ships, making sure they are properly loaded and offloaded in the most cost-effective manner. As my colleague David E. Sanger reported: "Among the many problems at American ports, said Stephen E. Flynn, a retired Coast Guard commander who is an expert on port security at the Council on Foreign Relations, 'who owns the management contract ranks near the very bottom.' "
What ranks much higher for me is the terrible trend emerging in the world today: Sunnis attacking Shiite mosques in Iraq, and vice versa. Danish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, and violent Muslim protests, including Muslims killing Christians in Nigeria and then Christians killing Muslims. And today's Washington Post story about how some overzealous, security-obsessed U.S. consul in India has created a huge diplomatic flap — on the eve of Mr. Bush's first visit to India — by denying one of India's most respected scientists a visa to America on the grounds that his knowledge of chemistry might be a threat. The U.S. embassy in New Delhi has apologized.
My point is simple: the world is drifting dangerously toward a widespread religious and sectarian cleavage — the likes of which we have not seen for a long, long time. The only country with the power to stem this toxic trend is America.
People across the world still look to our example of pluralism, which is like no other. If we go Dark Ages, if we go down the road of pitchfork-wielding xenophobes, then the whole world will go Dark Ages.
There is a poison loose today, and America — America at its best — is the only antidote. That's why it is critical that we stand by our principles of free trade and welcome the world to do business in our land, as long as there is no security threat. If we start exporting fear instead of hope, we are going to import everyone else's fears right back. That is not a world you want for your kids.

Empty Pockets, Angry Minds

2006-03-02T08:45:00.000-08:00

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN (NYT) 803 wordsPublished: February 22, 2006MUMBAI, India - I have no doubt that the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad have caused real offense to many Muslims. I'm glad my newspaper didn't publish them. But there is something in the worldwide Muslim reaction to these cartoons that is excessive, and suggests that something else is at work in this story. It's time we talked about it.
To understand this Danish affair, you can't just read Samuel Huntington's classic, ''The Clash of Civilizations.'' You also need to read Karl Marx, because this explosion of Muslim rage is not just about some Western insult. It's also about an Eastern failure. It is about the failure of many Muslim countries to build economies that prepare young people for modernity -- and all the insult, humiliation and frustration that has produced.
Today's world has become so wired together, so flattened, that you can't avoid seeing just where you stand on the planet -- just where the caravan is and just how far ahead or behind you are. In this flat world you get your humiliation fiber-optically, at 56K or via broadband, whether you're in the Muslim suburbs of Paris or Kabul. Today, Muslim youth are enraged by cartoons in Denmark. Earlier, it was a Newsweek story about a desecrated Koran. Why? When you're already feeling left behind, even the tiniest insult from afar goes to the very core of your being -- because your skin is so thin.
India is the second-largest Muslim country in the world, but the cartoon protests here, unlike those in Pakistan, have been largely peaceful. One reason for the difference is surely that Indian Muslims are empowered and live in a flourishing democracy. India's richest man is a Muslim software entrepreneur. But so many young Arabs and Muslims live in nations that have deprived them of any chance to realize their full potential.
The Middle East Media Research Institute, called Memri, just published an analysis of the latest employment figures issued by the U.N.'s International Labor Office. The I.L.O. study, Memri reported, found that ''the Middle East and North Africa stand out as the region with the highest rate of unemployment in the world'': 13.2 percent. That is worse than in sub-Saharan Africa.
While G.D.P. in the Middle East-North Africa region registered an annual increase of 5.5 percent from 1993 to 2003, productivity, the measure of how efficiently these resources were used, increased by only about 0.1 percent annually -- better than only one region, sub-Saharan Africa.
The Arab world is the only area in the world where productivity did not increase with G.D.P. growth. That's because so much of the G.D.P. growth in this region was driven by oil revenues, not by educating workers to do new things with new technologies.
Nearly 60 percent of the Arab world is under the age of 25. With limited job growth to absorb them, the I.L.O. estimates, the region is spinning out about 500,000 more unemployed people each year. At a time when India and China are focused on getting their children to be more scientific, innovative thinkers, educational standards in much of the Muslim world -- particularly when it comes to science and critical inquiry -- are not keeping pace.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, a professor of nuclear physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, bluntly wrote the following in Global Agenda 2006, the journal of the recent Davos World Economic Forum:
''Pakistan's public (and all but a handful of private) universities are intellectual rubble, their degrees of little consequence. According to the Pakistan Council for Science and Technology, Pakistanis have succeeded in registering only eight patents internationally in 57 years.
''[Today] you seldom encounter a Muslim name in scientific journals. Muslim contributions to pure and applied science -- measured in terms of discoveries, publications, patents and processes -- are marginal. The harsh truth is that science and Islam parted ways many centuries ago. In a nutshell, the Muslim experience consists of a golden age of science from the ninth to the 14th centuries, subsequent collapse, modest rebirth in the 19th century, and a profound reversal from science and modernity, beginning in the last decades of the 20th century. This reversal appears, if anything, to be gaining speed.''
No wonder so many young people in this part of the world are unprepared, and therefore easily enraged, as they encounter modernity. And no wonder backward religious leaders and dictators in places like Syria and Iran -- who have miserably failed their youth -- are so quick to turn their young people's anger against an insulting cartoon and away from themselves and the rot they have wrought.

Let Hamas Sink or Swim on Its Own

2006-02-20T08:41:00.000-08:00

New York Times
February 17, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

RAMALLAH

What do you do when good things happen to bad people?

That is the key question raised by the stunning election of a Hamas majority in the Palestinian Parliament, which will be sworn in Saturday. This moment has the potential to open some new, intriguing possibilities for a long-term settlement, or truce, in Israeli-Palestinian relations. And it has the potential to produce utter chaos. We're juggling grenades here, so please, everyone, no sudden movements.

And no illusions, either: Hamas is responsible for unspeakable suicidal violence against Israeli civilians. Israel would be fully justified in saying that the only correct policy toward Hamas today is a fight to the death.

But would that be smart right now? If Israel truly wants to get rid of Hamas, or at least see it disarmed, the only people who can do that effectively are the Palestinians. They have voted
Hamas in — in a fair election that President Bush insisted should take place.

If Hamas is going to fail now in leading the Palestinian Authority, it is crucial that it be seen to fail on its own — because it can't transform itself from a terror group into a ruling body delivering peace, security and good government for Palestinians — not because Israel and the U.S. never gave it a chance.

"Any minute that it is evident to the Palestinian public that Hamas is being forced to fail will guarantee that any future elections will only produce another Hamas victory," said the Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki.

And by the way, if Hamas is forced to fail, who is to say that the Palestinians will ever be able to hold another election? You could have prolonged turmoil.

For that reason, Mr. Shikaki argued, both Israel and the U.S. should remain open to the idea of Hamas's becoming part of a Palestinian national unity government under the current president, Mahmoud Abbas — a Fatah moderate who embraces peace with Israel.

"We want to provide Hamas a [Palestinian] context within which to begin to moderate its views — without being forced to do so by the West and Israel," Mr. Shikaki said. If Hamas is going to change, it will change only if it is forced to confront the reality that it can get so much more for Palestinians by negotiating with Israel than by fighting Israel.

Every poll shows that the main reasons Hamas won were that Palestinians wanted more security, less corruption and better governance — not an Islamic state.

Hamas officials are signaling that they know they will have to confront this clash between their ideology and what Palestinians need today. As a West Bank Hamas spokesman, Farhat Assad, remarked to me in Ramallah: "Like others, we understand that politics is not based on principles only. But it is also based on interests."

Who knows whether any of this is true. But Israel has an enormous interest in testing Hamas's ability to evolve. Because if Hamas keeps to the current cease-fire, focuses on better governance and begins to tacitly, but not formally, support a negotiating process with Israel, the benefit to Israel would be enormous.

For the first time, the whole "Palestinian street," Hamas and Fatah, would be represented in the negotiations, making any agreement with Israel so much more legitimate.

As the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi noted, "Israelis used to say that one inch given by [Ariel] Sharon's Likud was worth a kilometer given by Labor. We now have a similar situation with the Palestinians. ... Any agreement by Hamas is worth a lot more than a much more agreeable agreement by people who can't deliver."

Israel was obsessed with getting the P.L.O. to renounce its charter, but in the end, that did not affect Yasir Arafat's real behavior one whit. That's why, regardless of the conditions Israel lays down for allowing funds to flow to a Hamas-led government or negotiating with it, Israel needs to ask itself this: What would impress Israelis most — if Hamas recognized the Jewish state today and sang Hatikva, the Israeli national anthem, or if it maintained the cease-fire and the negotiating process?

I think if Hamas recognized Israel today, as some in Israel demand, no Israelis would trust a word. Why would they? The only way Israelis will trust any such Hamas words is if they follow a change in Hamas deeds on the ground — not precede it.

So it is critical that Israel, the U.S. and the Palestinians not get themselves up in a tree right now over words. There is nothing Hamas could say today that would reassure Israelis, but there is a lot it could do on the ground that would have a huge impact over time. That — for now — is where the test should be.

Paul Krugman is on vacation.

The Weapon of Democracy

2006-02-20T08:39:00.000-08:00

New York Times
February 15, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

RAMALLAH, West Bank

I decided that before writing about Hamas's win in the Palestinian legislative elections, I had to talk to people in the West Bank first. I am so glad I did. Everything is now clear to me: What a mess!

The new Hamas parliamentarians will be sworn in on Saturday, and nobody knows what will happen next. Fourteen of the new Palestinian lawmakers are in Israeli jails, including 10 from Hamas. That's more than 10 percent of the whole Parliament.

About the only thing that is clear to me is the radical mood of both Israeli and Palestinian voters. Consider this: Israel is holding its national election on March 28, and the rightist Likud party, led by Bibi Netanyahu, opened its campaign with ads accusing the centrist Kadima Party, led by Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, of planning to pull Israel back to the 1967 borders. The Likud quickly backed off that line, however, when it realized that so many Israeli voters today liked the idea of pulling back to near the 1967 borders that some may have thought the ad was taken out by Kadima — instead of being an attack on Kadima by Likud.

Yossi Beilin, who heads the leftist Meretz Party, opened his campaign with an ad that says: "Beilin Will Divide Jerusalem." Again, if you'd seen that ad a decade ago, you'd have thought it was a wicked libel. Today it's a campaign promise! After the failed peace process and the Hamas suicide-bombing campaign, many Israelis just want total separation from Palestinians — and a barrier.

"Ideologically, Israelis have never been more dovish," said Ari Shavit, an essayist for the Haaretz newspaper. "But that dovishness is based on the condition that there is a partner we can trust. If so, people are ready to give back everything. The overwhelming majority is now for a two-state solution. But we have become sensible at the very moment that Palestinians have lost their senses."

The Palestinians have thrown out Yasir Arafat's old Fatah Party in favor of Hamas, which wants to eliminate Israel and erect an Islamic state in all of Palestine. So just when Israel's majority comes around to two states, Mr. Shavit added, the Palestinians elect a party that favors only one.

Or have they? It's obvious that the ruling Fatah Party and its allies, led by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, ran an incomprehensibly stupid campaign. There was no discipline, so in many districts Fatah and its secular-nationalist allies ran four candidates, while Hamas always ran only one. So Fatah votes got divided, and Hamas ones didn't.

The result, the pollster Khalil Shikaki said, is that "Hamas won only 44 percent of the popular vote, but got 56 percent of the seats. Fatah and its allies won 56 percent of the popular vote, but only 43 percent of the seats."

Hamas was clearly elected to provide clean government and order. But it was also elected because its suicide campaign was seen as decisive in getting Israel out of Gaza, thereby bringing Palestinians a measure of dignity, which Fatah failed to do.

Israel, with U.S. backing, says it will cut off all its dealings and financial flows to a Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority — unless Hamas renounces violence, recognizes Israel and accepts all the P.L.O.-Israel accords. Some Israelis anticipate that a cash-starved Hamas-led government will lead to chaos, and that Mr. Abbas will then be able to call new elections.
I don't think it will be so simple.

The sense I got from Hamas officials here is that Hamas will be low-key and patient, trying to rule as long as possible without money from abroad, working on improving Palestinian governance and hoping that Palestinian society will remain steadfast — and that the Arab world and Europe will somehow intervene to keep Israel and the U.S. from depriving Hamas of its legitimate mandate.

As Farhat Assad, the local Hamas spokesman, remarked: "I thank the United States that they have given us this weapon of democracy. But there is no way to retreat now. It's not possible for the U.S. and the world to turn its back on an elected democracy."

But Hamas will have its hands full managing the West Bank, where it doesn't have as many people or arms as Fatah. As the Israeli strategist Gidi Grinstein put it, Hamas "is like a snake that swallowed an elephant." It has a lot to digest before it can move sharply in any direction.
Hisham Abdullah, the West Bank A.F.P. reporter, told me that when he went into Ramallah's main bookstore the other day and asked what was selling, the owner said he'd noticed Hamas people buying Dale Carnegie books on management. ...

Driving Toward Middle East Nukes in Our S.U.V.'s

2006-02-10T10:13:00.000-08:00

New York Times
February 10, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
LONDON

The world stands today at a very dangerous dividing line. It is the dividing line between the post-cold-war world, which we have known since 1989 — one of expanding democracy and free markets — and a post-post-cold-war world, which is unknown but almost certain to be a much less stable, prosperous and benign place.

I believe the questions that will determine whether we enter the post-post-cold-war world will come down to two: how India, China and Russia deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions, and how the West, particularly America, deals with $60-a-barrel oil.

Let me explain: if Iran develops a nuclear bomb, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and possibly other Sunni Arab states are bound to follow. The Sunni Arabs can overlook Israel's bomb, but they will never stand for the Persian Shiites having a bomb and them not. That's about brothers with a centuries-old rivalry. And if the Arab world starts to go nuclear, then you will see the crumbling of the whole global nuclear nonproliferation regime.

A world with so many nuclear powers, particularly in its primary oil-producing region, could only be a more dangerous and unstable place, compared with the post-cold-war world. Imagine Iran with $60-a-barrel oil to make all the mischief it wants, and a nuclear weapon to shield it from any retaliation. Indeed, if you want to know what the post-post-cold-war world would sound like, listen to Iran's poisonous president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He was quoted in The Guardian of London the other day as saying: "Our enemies cannot do a damn thing. We do not need you at all. But you are in need of the Iranian nation."

I'm convinced that the only countries capable of getting Iran to back down — through diplomacy — are China, India and Russia. Europe is too weak, and America has already used every economic sanction it can on Iran. China, India and Russia have been great beneficiaries of the post-cold-war order, and the trade, economic development and exports it has made possible. That order was largely shaped and safeguarded by the United States, with China, India and Russia often getting a free ride.

But that order will continue only if China, India and Russia get over their reluctance to get too close to America and become real stakeholders in maintaining this post-cold-war world.
I want to share power and responsibility with them — starting with the three of them, which represent half of humanity, looking Iran in the eye and telling its leadership that they will join in any and all U.N. sanctions if Iran tries to build an A-bomb. That would get Tehran's attention.
As for America, its leadership task has shifted. If the Bush team continues to let Dick Cheney set its oil policy — one that will keep America dependent on crude oil — the post-cold-war democracy movement that was unleashed by the fall of the Berlin Wall will be either aborted, diluted or reversed. If regimes like those in Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Burma, Sudan and Nigeria have the benefit of 10 years of $60-a-barrel oil, whatever democratic tide President Bush thinks he is unleashing will be stymied. The worst regimes in the world will have the most power to support the most regressive political and religious trends.

I don't approve of the Danish newspaper cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad. Yes, you can see much worse in the Arab-Muslim press on any day. But why should the West get into that gutter? What I approve of even less are the blatant efforts to intimidate the world media that have printed these cartoons — an intimidation effort cynically fueled by Iran, Syria and its theocratic allies. What do you think will happen after a few more years of $60-a-barrel oil? You will see a radical arc from Iran to Syria to Hezbollah to Hamas — all financed by Iran — intimidating every moderate in the Muslim world.

A British official recalled for me that in 1946, the British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, remarked, "Give me 100,000 tons of coal and I will give you a foreign policy." What he meant was, Give me the energy source to heat the homes and run the businesses of Europe, and I will give you a rebuilt Europe.

Well, I say, Give me even $30-a-barrel oil and I will give you an Iranian regime that is a lot less smug — an Iran that will need to be tied into the world much more in order to create real jobs for its exploding population.

That's why we need an urgent national effort, starting with a gasoline tax, to move the U.S. economy onto a path of more fuel-efficient cars and renewable energy. If we do it, everyone will follow.

If we don't, then say hello to the post-post-cold-war world and say goodbye to the post-cold-war world. It was fun while it lasted.

No More Mr. Tough Guy

2006-02-08T08:58:00.000-08:00

New York Times
February 8, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I've always thought Dick Cheney took national security seriously. I don't anymore. It seems that Mr. Cheney is so convinced that we have no choice but to be dependent on crude oil, so convinced that conservation is just some silly liberal hobby, that he will never seriously summon the country to kick its oil habit, never summon it to do anything great.

Indeed, he seems determined to be a drag on any serious effort to make America energy-independent. He presents all this as a tough-guy "realist" view of the world. But it's actually an ignorant and naïve view — one that underestimates what Americans can do, and totally misses how the energy question has overtaken Iraq as the most important issue in U.S. foreign policy. If he persists, Mr. Cheney is going to ensure that the Bush team squanders its last three years — and a lot more years for the country.

Listen to Mr. Cheney's answer when the conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham asked him how he reacted to my urgings for a gasoline tax to push all Americans to drive energy-saving vehicles and make us energy-independent — now.

"Well, I don't agree with that," Mr. Cheney said. "I think — the president and I believe very deeply that, obviously, the government has got a role to play here in terms of supporting research into new technologies and encouraging the development of new methods of generating energy. ... But we also are big believers in the market, and that we need to be careful about having government come in, for example, and tell people how to live their lives. ... This notion that we have to 'impose pain,' some kind of government mandate, I think we would resist. The marketplace does work out there."

What is he talking about? The global oil market is anything but free. It's controlled by the world's largest cartel — OPEC — which sets output, and thereby prices, according to the needs of some of the worst regimes in the world. By doing nothing, we are letting their needs determine the price and their treasuries reap all the profits.

Also, why does Mr. Cheney have no problem influencing the market by lowering taxes to get consumers to spend, but he rejects raising gasoline taxes to get consumers to save energy — a fundamental national interest.

Don't take it from me. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard, who recently retired as chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 3 about his New Year's resolutions: "Everyone hates taxes, but the government needs to fund its operations, and some taxes can actually do some good in the process. I will tell the American people that a higher tax on gasoline is better at encouraging conservation than are heavy-handed [mileage standards]. It would not only encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient cars, but it would encourage them to drive less."

Mr. Cheney, we are told, is a "tough guy." Really? Well, how tough is this: We have a small gasoline tax, but Europe and Japan tax their gasoline by $2 and $3 a gallon, or more. They use those taxes to build schools, highways and national health care for their citizens. But they spend very little on defense compared with us.

So who protects their oil supplies from the Middle East? U.S. taxpayers. We spend nearly $600 billion a year on defense, a large chunk in the Persian Gulf. But how do we pay for that without a gas tax? Income taxes and Social Security. Yes, we tax our incomes and raid our children's Social Security fund so Europeans and Japanese can comfortably import their oil from the gulf, impose big gas taxes on it at their pumps and then use that income for their own domestic needs. And because they have high gas taxes, they also beat Detroit at making more fuel-efficient cars. Now how tough is that?

Finally, if Mr. Cheney believes so much in markets, why did the 2005 energy act contain about $2 billion in tax breaks for oil companies? Why does his administration permit a 54-cents-a-gallon tax on imported ethanol — fuel made from sugar or corn — so Brazilian sugar exports won't compete with American sugar? Yes, we tax imported ethanol from Brazil, but we don't tax imported oil from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or Russia.

"Everyone says we need a new Marshall Plan," said Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign policy expert and the author of "The Case for Goliath." "We have a Marshall Plan. It's our energy policy. It's a Marshall plan for terrorists and dictators."

How tough is it, Mr. Cheney, to will the ends — an end to America's oil addiction — but not will the means: a gasoline tax? It's not very tough, it's not very smart, and it's going to end badly for us.

Will Pigs Fly?

2006-02-03T16:07:00.000-08:00

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Well, it wasn't exactly Nixon to China. But it wasn't bean bag either. I'd say the president's State of the Union speech, when it came to calling for an end to our oil addiction and a real push to improve our educational competitiveness, was more like Nixon goes to New Mexico. It was an important change in direction and tone — but still a long way from China, a long way from a definitive change in policy and implementation.
Oh, come on, Friedman, get real! The president throws a few paragraphs your way and you go all weak in the knees. Show some spine, man! You need to trash this thing. You know these guys are not serious. This is a president who once called for putting a man on Mars and then just dropped it. You assumed they were going to do the Iraq war right — remember? Look where that got you, you moron. You should have listened to your wife!
Yeah, I know all that. But here's what else I know: Mr. Bush is going to be president for the next three years. We do not have three years to lose — not on climate change, energy efficiency or improving math/science education. I am not going to sit around for the next three years just trashing these guys and praying that some Democrat gets elected and does all the right things. We don't have time, you moron!
I heard the president use language about the necessity of breaking our oil addiction through innovation on renewable technologies — without mentioning drilling in Alaska — which I've never heard before. When the president changes language on an issue like this — in a sustained manner (and we still have to see if it will be sustained), the whole country and bureaucracy start to talk differently.
All you talk about is talk. How do we lock in some action?
One way is to write your senator and congressman and tell them to support the Vehicle and Fuel Choices for American Security Act. Already supported by key Republicans and Democrats, this draft bill aims to reduce oil consumption by 2.5 million barrels a day by 2015 and 7 m.b.d. by 2025 — much more than the president's proposal. The bill offers ailing U.S. automakers loan guarantees and other incentives on the condition that they use the money to retool their assembly lines to sharply increase their production of flex-fuel cars, which run on any combination of alcohol and gasoline, as well as hybrid and plug-in hybrid cars and trucks.
The bill is a way to save large amounts of oil quickly, bail out Detroit today before it goes totally bust tomorrow and give Americans real fuel choices. "If you want to send your dollars to the worst regimes in the Middle East, use gasoline — if you want to send your dollars to the best farms and communities in the Middle West, then use alcohol made from the agricultural resources we grow at home," said the energy expert Gal Luft.
The technology we need to make a huge reduction in our gasoline consumption is already here, hybrid cars that run on flex-fuels. No great breakthrough is required. What's needed are more buyers. While enticing Detroit to make these more fuel-efficient vehicles is a good idea, we also need a gasoline tax to entice every consumer to buy one. The president rejects a gasoline tax. He's wrong. He can't end our oil addiction unless he ends his tax-cutting addiction.
Good luck, pal. These guys never connect the dots. The president doesn't see that his global democracy-promotion agenda is going to be stymied unless America leads the world away from oil. We are heading into an era we've never seen before: $50- to $60-a-barrel oil for a long time. Five years of that will strengthen the worst regimes and worst corruption trends across the globe, and everyone is just going to coddle these oil regimes to get their crude.
You're right: addicts never tell the truth to their pushers. So here's my bottom line: I'm glad the president is changing his rhetoric on energy and says he is changing his funding priorities. It makes for a great headline. But he has to go much further if he wants to make a great difference. There's no pain-free solution. Remember how President Kennedy ended his May 25, 1961, State of the Union speech calling for a moon shot? He said: "I have not asked for a single program which did not cause one or all Americans some inconvenience, or some hardship, or some sacrifice."
Pigs will fly before Bush says that.
You may be right. And if he fails to carry through with this energy initiative, I'll be the first to rip him for it. In the meantime, I prefer to give him a new reputation to live up to. You never know. ... And by the way, pal, you got a better horse to ride right now?

Will Pigs Fly?

2006-02-03T15:50:00.000-08:00

New York Times
February 3, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Well, it wasn't exactly Nixon to China. But it wasn't bean bag either. I'd say the president's State of the Union speech, when it came to calling for an end to our oil addiction and a real push to improve our educational competitiveness, was more like Nixon goes to New Mexico. It was an important change in direction and tone — but still a long way from China, a long way from a definitive change in policy and implementation.

Oh, come on, Friedman, get real! The president throws a few paragraphs your way and you go all weak in the knees. Show some spine, man! You need to trash this thing. You know these guys are not serious. This is a president who once called for putting a man on Mars and then just dropped it. You assumed they were going to do the Iraq war right — remember? Look where that got you, you moron. You should have listened to your wife!

Yeah, I know all that. But here's what else I know: Mr. Bush is going to be president for the next three years. We do not have three years to lose — not on climate change, energy efficiency or improving math/science education. I am not going to sit around for the next three years just trashing these guys and praying that some Democrat gets elected and does all the right things. We don't have time, you moron!

I heard the president use language about the necessity of breaking our oil addiction through innovation on renewable technologies — without mentioning drilling in Alaska — which I've never heard before. When the president changes language on an issue like this — in a sustained manner (and we still have to see if it will be sustained), the whole country and bureaucracy start to talk differently.

All you talk about is talk. How do we lock in some action?

One way is to write your senator and congressman and tell them to support the Vehicle and Fuel Choices for American Security Act. Already supported by key Republicans and Democrats, this draft bill aims to reduce oil consumption by 2.5 million barrels a day by 2015 and 7 m.b.d. by 2025 — much more than the president's proposal. The bill offers ailing U.S. automakers loan guarantees and other incentives on the condition that they use the money to retool their assembly lines to sharply increase their production of flex-fuel cars, which run on any combination of alcohol and gasoline, as well as hybrid and plug-in hybrid cars and trucks.

The bill is a way to save large amounts of oil quickly, bail out Detroit today before it goes totally bust tomorrow and give Americans real fuel choices. "If you want to send your dollars to the worst regimes in the Middle East, use gasoline — if you want to send your dollars to the best farms and communities in the Middle West, then use alcohol made from the agricultural resources we grow at home," said the energy expert Gal Luft.

The technology we need to make a huge reduction in our gasoline consumption is already here, hybrid cars that run on flex-fuels. No great breakthrough is required. What's needed are more buyers. While enticing Detroit to make these more fuel-efficient vehicles is a good idea, we also need a gasoline tax to entice every consumer to buy one. The president rejects a gasoline tax. He's wrong. He can't end our oil addiction unless he ends his tax-cutting addiction.

Good luck, pal. These guys never connect the dots. The president doesn't see that his global democracy-promotion agenda is going to be stymied unless America leads the world away from oil. We are heading into an era we've never seen before: $50- to $60-a-barrel oil for a long time. Five years of that will strengthen the worst regimes and worst corruption trends across the globe, and everyone is just going to coddle these oil regimes to get their crude.

You're right: addicts never tell the truth to their pushers. So here's my bottom line: I'm glad the president is changing his rhetoric on energy and says he is changing his funding priorities. It makes for a great headline. But he has to go much further if he wants to make a great difference. There's no pain-free solution. Remember how President Kennedy ended his May 25, 1961, State of the Union speech calling for a moon shot? He said: "I have not asked for a single program which did not cause one or all Americans some inconvenience, or some hardship, or some sacrifice."

Pigs will fly before Bush says that.

You may be right. And if he fails to carry through with this energy initiative, I'll be the first to rip him for it. In the meantime, I prefer to give him a new reputation to live up to. You never know. ... And by the way, pal, you got a better horse to ride right now?

Transcript of Thomas L. Friedman on Today show

2006-02-02T14:33:00.000-08:00

Profile: Close Up; America's addiction to oil; Thomas Friedman, author of "The World is Flat" and New York Times columnist, discusses America's dependency on oil
1600 words
2 February 2006
NBC News: Today
English
(c) Copyright 2006, NBC Universal Inc. All Rights Reserved.

KATIE COURIC, co-host:

On CLOSE UP this morning, America's addiction to oil. There's no 12-step program, but President Bush, a former oil man himself, said during the State of the Union address that the United States needs to cut way back on its use of oil. Here's NBC's Anne Thompson.

ANNE THOMPSON reporting:
Oil has long been the life's blood of our economy, and now the president has moved it to the top of the political agenda.

President GEORGE W. BUSH: We have serious problem. America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.

THOMPSON: An idea that's seeped into our popular culture in the Oscar-nominated movie "Syriana."

(Clip from "Syriana")

THOMPSON: How dependent are we? Consider this: Americans alone consume a quarter of the world's oil supply, some 21 million barrels a day, most of it going to driving, and 60 percent of that oil comes from other countries.

The top suppliers to the US are Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. President Bush wants to reduce oil from the Middle East where we get about one-fifth of our imports. The idea of cutting back on foreign oil has been around since the days of Richard Nixon.

President RICHARD NIXON: (From file footage) By the end of this decade, we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs.

THOMPSON: Yet the amount of imported oil has doubled. Why are we so dependent?

Mr. DANIEL YERGIN (NBC News Oil Analyst): The reason we use so much oil is because it's cheap, convenient, widely available and fits the kind of lifestyle and nation that we've created.

THOMPSON: But a gallon of gasoline is more expensive--44 cents more than a year ago. And oil companies are cashing in, ExxonMobile earning a record $36.1 billion profit last year. The industry insists it's not gouging.

Mr. RED CAVENEY (American Petroleum Institute): Profits are large because you must be large to make the huge investments necessary to be in the oil and gas business. But when you look at them on the cents-per-dollar return, we're at about the all-industry average.

THOMPSON: Fed up with high prices, more and more drivers are buying hybrids--vehicles with gasoline engines and electric motors. And there are new ideas coming down the road: an ethanol-fueled hybrid from Ford, and General Motors announced Wednesday it will build a two-mode hybrid transmission for full-sized SUVs in Baltimore, finding ways to help America withdraw from its oil addiction. For TODAY, Anne Thompson, NBC News, New York.

MATT LAUER, co-host:

Thomas Friedman is a New York Times foreign affairs columnist and author of "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century." He says US oil consumption is indirectly helping to finance radical Islam.
Tom Friedman, good morning.

Mr. THOMAS FRIEDMAN (New York Times Foreign Affairs Columnist): Good morning, Matt, good to be with you.

LAUER: Good to see you.
Listen, we know why we consume a lot of oil, why we're addicted. We like our cars, we like to air-condition our homes in the summer, we like to turn up the thermostat in the winter, and we don't like to make sacrifices. But what are the political reasons for this dependence on foreign oil?

Mr. FRIEDMAN: Well, Matt, it's not an accident that there is no functioning democracy in the Arab world today other than one country, Lebanon, which happens to be the one Arab country that doesn't have any oil and never did. Because when these governments have oil, whether they're led by kings or dictator, what that means is the king or dictator doesn't have to really tap his people, men and women, doesn't have to create a society that will bring the energy entrepreneurial talent of his people into the fore. All he has to do is tap an oil well.

LAUER: As a matter of fact, you wrote about that yesterday in your column. Let me read about this, the spread of democracy and reform and how it's impacted by oil. Here's what you said. "People change when they have to, not when we tell them to. If you just remove the dictators and don't also bring down the price of oil, you end up with Iraq, with mullah dictators replacing military dictators and using the same oil wealth to keep their people quiet and themselves in power. Only when oil is back down to $20 a barrel will the transition from Saddam to Jefferson not get stuck in Kohmeini Land."

Mr. FRIEDMAN: Well, that's exactly right. I mean, ask yourself this, Matt: Why did the transition in East Asia--say in countries like Taiwan and South Korea--go very quickly from military governments into a real functioning democracies? Because these countries didn't have a drop of oil. The leaders of these countries couldn't just capture an oil tap and stay in power. What happened in Iran was just the opposite. The shah fell, the mullahs came in and they got solidified there...

LAUER: Well...

Mr. FRIEDMAN: ...because they were able to basically tap the oil strength.

LAUER: So--so your message, I guess, to the average viewer and average consumer, Tom, is this: OK, if you keep consuming oil at the rate you're consuming it, you know what it's going to do to you personally. You're going to pay $3 a gallon for gasoline, you're going to pay $500 to heat your home every month. But what you're saying is, `But you also bear some responsibility for the rise of radical Islam'?

Mr. FRIEDMAN: Yeah. Well, basically what I'm saying, Matt, is this: This is not your grandfather's energy crisis for four reasons. Number one, we're in a war with people who are now fueled by our energy purchases. We're funding both sides in the war on terrorism. Second, the world is flat and three billion new players--India, China, the former Soviet empire--came onto the playing field with their own version of the American dream: a house, a car, a toaster. That's going to send energy demands through the roof. Because of that, number three, green technologies are going to be the technologies of the 21st century.

LAUER: Right.

Mr. FRIEDMAN: We--we want our country to lead them. And four is basically, if we don't turn back this energy tide, I think the whole democratization wave we've set forth after the fall of the win--Berlin Wall is going to run into a black wave of crude oil that's really going to undermine that whole democracy movement.

LAUER: All right let--let--let me talk about this spread of democracy. We've recently seen elections. The Palestinian elections did not turn out the way the US wanted them to with Hamas carrying the banner and winning the day. So Condoleezza Rice basically came out and said, `Nobody saw this coming.' Should we have seen it coming?

Mr. FRIEDMAN: Well, you know, I think Hamas didn't see it coming, in fairness. They seem to be the most unprepared to take over now, and I think they've got a big problem. Because, you know, Hamas has got to depend on Israel for certain tax returns--tax receipts it gets every month--50, $60 million.

LAUER: Right.

Mr. FRIEDMAN: Who's going to call the Israelis? Who's going to call the Israelis? `We need the tax money. We have water problems. We have electricity issues. We have worker issues.' So, I think this is going to be a really interesting dilemma.

LAUER: And...

Mr. FRIEDMAN: You know, but, Matt, there's nothing like the burden of responsibility to start to soften people's political hard edges.

LAUER: And quickly, there's an interesting article in the upcoming Esquire magazine, where they basically talk to political people, military people, and they ask them what were they saying about the war in Iraq before it started and what are they saying now, and you're included. Let me read you what you said then.

"Iraq is a black box that has been sealed shut since Saddam came to dominate Iraqi politics in the late 1960s. Therefore, one needs to have a great deal of humility when it comes to predicting what sorts of bats and demons may fly out if the US and its allies remove the lid." You went on to say, that there's--"there are envelopes inside of that box that will tell the US whether it won the Arab Germany or the Arab Yugoslavia." Here we are four years later, three and a half years later, did we get the Arab Yugoslavia?

Mr. FRIEDMAN: Not clear yet, Matt. You know, in order to answer that question properly we had to provide a measure of security, and we still haven't established that measure of security. So Iraqis themselves can tell us `Is this the Yugoslavia; is this the Arab Germany?

LAUER: Tom Fr--Friedman, always nice to talk to you.

Mr. FRIEDMAN: Thanks so much.

LAUER: It's 16 after the hour. Here's Katie.

KATIE COURIC, co-host:
Matt, thank you.

Addicted to Oil

2006-02-02T08:47:00.000-08:00

New York Times
February 1, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

So far the democracy wave the Bush team has helped to unleash in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11 has brought to power hard-line Islamic fundamentalists in Iraq, Palestine and Iran, and paved the way for a record showing by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. If we keep this up, in a few years Muslim clerics will be in power from Morocco to the border of India. God bless America.

But is this all America's doing? Not really. It's actually the product of 50 years of petrolism — or petroleum-based politics — in the Arab-Muslim world. The Bush team's fault was believing that it could change that — that it could break the Middle East's addiction to authoritarianism without also breaking America's addiction to oil. That's the illusion here. In the Arab world, oil and authoritarianism are inextricably linked.

How so? Let's start with Iron Rule No. 1 of Arab-Muslim political life today: You cannot go from Saddam to Jefferson without going through Khomeini — without going through a phase of mosque-led politics.

Why? Because once you sweep away the dictator or king at the top of any Middle East state, you go into free fall until you hit the mosque — as the U.S. discovered in Iraq. There is nothing between the ruling palace and the mosque. The secular autocratic regimes, like those in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Iraq, never allowed anything to grow under their feet. They never allowed the emergence of any truly independent judiciary, media, progressive secular parties or civil society groups — from women's organizations to trade associations.

The mosque became an alternative power center because it was the only place the government's iron fist could not fully penetrate. As such, it became a place where people were able to associate freely, incubate local leaders and generate a shared opposition ideology.

That is why the minute any of these Arab countries hold free and fair elections, the Islamists burst ahead. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood won 20 percent of the seats; Hamas went from nowhere to a governing majority. In both societies the ruling secular parties — the N.D.P. in the case of Egypt and Fatah in the case of Palestine — were spurned as corrupt appendages of the authoritarian state, which they were.

Why are there not more independent, secular, progressive opposition parties running in these places? Because the Arab leaders won't allow them to sprout. They prefer that the only choice their people have is between the state parties and religious extremists, so as to always make the authoritarian state look indispensable. When Ayman Nour, a liberal independent in Egypt, ran against President Hosni Mubarak, he was thrown in prison as soon as the election was over. Thanks for playing "Democracy" — now go to jail.

It is not this way everywhere. In East Asia, when the military regimes in countries like Taiwan and South Korea broke up, these countries quickly moved toward civilian democracies. Why? Because they had vibrant free markets, with independent economic centers of power, and no oil. Whoever ruled had to nurture a society that would empower its men and women to get educated and start companies to compete globally, because that was the only way they could thrive.

In the Arab-Muslim world, however, the mullah dictators in Iran and the secular dictators elsewhere have been able to sustain themselves in power much longer, without ever empowering their people, without ever allowing progressive parties to emerge, because they had oil or its equivalent — massive foreign aid.

Hence Iron Rule No. 2: Removing authoritarian leaders in the Arab-Muslim world, either by revolution, invasion or election, is necessary for the emergence of stable democracies there — but it is not sufficient. The only way the new leaders will allow for real political parties, institutions, free press, competitive free markets and proper education — a civil society — is if we also bring down the price of oil and make internal reform the only way for these societies to sustain themselves. People change when they have to, not when we tell them to.

If you just remove the dictators, and don't also bring down the price of oil, you end up with Iran — with mullah dictators replacing military dictators and using the same oil wealth to keep their people quiet and themselves in power. Only when oil is back down to $20 a barrel will the transition from Saddam to Jefferson not get stuck in "Khomeini Land."

In the Middle East, oil and democracy do not mix. It's not an accident that the Arab world's first and only true democracy — Lebanon — never had a drop of oil.

Prez Bush taking Policy Advice from Tom L. Friedman?

2006-01-31T14:04:00.000-08:00

From the Drudge Report:

STATE OF THE UNION PREVIEW: President Bush to say 'America is addicted to oil'...

State of the Union

2006-01-27T08:42:00.000-08:00

New York Times
January 27, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

On Tuesday President Bush will deliver his State of the Union address and map out priorities for his last three years. The direction in which America needs to go is obvious: toward energy independence. If Mr. Bush steps up to that challenge, this speech could be a new beginning for his presidency. If he doesn't, you can stick a fork in this administration. It will be done — because it will have abdicated leadership on the biggest issue of our day. Here's the speech I'll be listening for:

My fellow Americans, on May 25, 1961, President Kennedy gave an extraordinary State of the Union address in which he called on the nation to marshal all of its resources to put a man on the Moon. By setting that lofty goal, Kennedy was trying to summon all of our industrial and scientific talent, and a willingness to sacrifice financially, to catch up with the Soviet Union, which had overtaken America in the field of large rocket engines.

"While we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first," Kennedy said, "we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last."

I come to you this evening with a similar challenge. President Kennedy was worried about the threat that communism posed to our way of life. I am here to tell you that if we don't move away from our dependence on oil and shift to renewable fuels, it will change our way of life for the worse — and soon — much, much more than communism ever could have. Making this transition is the calling of our era.

Why? First, we are in a war with a violent strain of Middle East Islam that is indirectly financed by our consumption of oil. Second, with millions of Indians and Chinese buying cars and homes as they join the great global middle class, we must quickly move away from burning fossil fuels or we're going to create enough global warming to melt the North Pole. Because of that, green cars, homes, offices, appliances, designs and renewable energies will be the biggest growth industry of the 21st century. If we don't dominate that industry, China, India, Japan or Europe surely will.

But to lead, we must impose the highest energy-efficiency standards on our own automakers and other industries so we force them to be the most innovative. I want to inspire girls and boys across America to study math, science and engineering to help our nation achieve green energy independence. President Kennedy said, Let's put a man on the Moon. I say, Let's make oil obsolete.

Finally, my call for spreading democracy will never be achieved if some of the worst regimes on the planet — Iran, Sudan, Venezuela — have so much oil money they can misbehave and ignore the world, and if the rest of us — Europe, America, China and India — are forever coddling them to get access to their crude.

With all of this in mind, I am sending Congress the Bush Energy Freedom Act. It is based on ideas first offered by the energy expert Philip Verleger and it argues the following:

Transportation accounts for most of our oil consumption. And many Americans have purchased big cars and S.U.V.'s, expecting gasoline to remain cheap. That is no longer the case. Therefore, I propose creating a government agency that will buy up any gas-guzzling car or truck in America at the original new or used price, and crush it. This national buy-back program will be financed by a $2-a-gallon gasoline tax that will be phased in by 10 cents a month beginning in 2008 — so people know what is coming and start buying fuel-efficient cars right now.

By removing so many gas guzzlers, we will quickly reduce our oil consumption and create a huge demand for new energy-efficient cars from Detroit, which will rescue our auto industry. We have to do something drastic. The Harley-Davidson motorcycle company is worth more today than General Motors! But by sharply raising the gasoline tax, we'll also make sure that Detroit shifts its fleet to energy-saving plug-in hybrids and hydrogen- and ethanol-fueled vehicles, which will force Detroit to out-innovate Toyota. And by generating so much income from a gasoline tax, we will be able to give gas-tax rebates to lower-income folks and have plenty left over to pay for new investment in education and scientific research.

Impossible? Read my lips: Nothing is impossible when Americans put their hearts and minds to it.

One last thing: I have accepted the resignation of Vice President Dick Cheney, who felt he could not be a salesman for the Energy Freedom Act. I am nominating Jeffrey Immelt — the C.E.O. of General Electric, who has focused G.E.'s innovation around "eco-imagination" — as Mr. Cheney's replacement.

Good night, and God bless America.

Osama at the Kit Kat Club

2006-01-25T13:43:00.000-08:00

New York Times
January 25, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Reading about the latest tapes by Osama bin Laden and his sidekick Ayman al-Zawahiri, my gut reaction is that they sound like a couple of burned-out rock stars who keep recycling their greatest hits in hopes of catching on one last time as the lounge duo in some Las Vegas hotel. "Now Appearing at Caesars Palace, It's the Monkees! And at the Aladdin, Ayman and Osama!"

I will confess, though, that the fact that bin Laden could recommend a book in his latest video and then watch that book break into the top 10 on Amazon.com within just a few days suggests that while he may not have much of a future as a terrorist, he could do a book club gig. When I checked Amazon, two of the top 10 books were recommended by Oprah, and one was recommended by Osama. Now that's juice. I started to imagine bin Laden sitting in his cave in Pakistan and suddenly receiving all these books from publishers and agents.

If I seem to be taking all this a tad lightly, it is because I am certain that bin Laden is hurting right now. What made bin Laden such a unique threat were three things: the fact that he had taken over a whole country, Afghanistan, where he could freely recruit and train forces and move around money; the fact that he controlled a political movement, the Taliban; and, most important, the fact that many Arabs and Muslims looked up to him and Al Qaeda as forces who were standing up to America.

But today bin Laden does not have Afghanistan, he does not have the Taliban, and while he still has some following, I don't think so many Arabs and Muslims are naming their sons "Osama" anymore.

Because anyone who has paid attention to recent events in Iraq, Indonesia, Sharm el Sheik, Afghanistan and Jordan knows that Al Qaeda has killed many more innocent Muslims than innocent Americans - and not just Shiite Muslims. And it has killed them at marketplaces, mosques, weddings and funerals. Qaeda murders have also exacted a huge toll on tourism in places like Egypt and Indonesia, killing jobs as well.

The best indications of how much this has hurt bin Laden in the Arab-Muslim world are the recent attacks on Al Qaeda by important Islamist voices, including some leaders of the powerful Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. On Jan. 7, after Zawahiri lambasted Muslim Brothers as U.S. stooges for taking part in Egypt's parliamentary elections, A.F.P. reported the following from Cairo:

"Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood responded Saturday to Al Qaeda's accusations of complicity with Washington by charging that the Islamist violence advocated by Osama bin Laden's network was counterproductive." A Brotherhood spokesman, Issam al-Aryan, asked, "What results have his resort to violence yielded?"

Such open criticism "coming from the Muslim Brotherhood, which has a significant presence in Egypt and beyond, is quite telling," said Ibrahim Karawan, director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. "It shows that Al Qaeda's actions have cost them. They have created enemies in the West and in the Arab world." Indeed, Iraqi Sunni nationalists in Ramadi recently declared war on local Qaeda militants after bin Laden forces killed 80 people in Ramadi in an attack on police recruits on Jan. 5.

But while I am certain bin Laden is losing, I still don't feel that we are "winning," that we are really making progress in democratizing political life in the Arab-Muslim world. States and politics there are still dominated by military and intelligence services.

There is still no viable, free space for a vibrant civil society to emerge. Few independent political parties, newspapers or nongovernmental organizations have sprouted. Look at Egypt: President Hosni Mubarak holds elections, the Muslim Brotherhood wins a record number of seats, and the most liberal politician who dared to run against Mr. Mubarak gets thrown in jail. It's hard to call that progress.

The other reason it is hard to feel that we are winning is that America, and particularly President Bush, are still radioactive - widely disliked. Therefore, there are not a lot of Arab progressives who want to be seen publicly embracing Americans or their agenda.

Iraq and Afghanistan, I still hope, may turn out to be exceptions, but even if they are, it is hard to believe their example will spread at a time when oil is $67 a barrel. The military-intelligence systems that dominate political life in the Arab East are only growing richer, bigger and stronger - thanks to petrodollars.

No, not much grows in a garden watered by oil.

Tom Friedman: The Oprah Winfrey Interview Transcript

2006-01-25T10:38:00.000-08:00

Interview: What Should You Be Worried About?; guests Peter Bergen, Dr. Walid Phares, and Thomas Friedman discuss terrorism threats around the world

23 January 2006
The Oprah Winfrey Show

HOST: Oprah Winfrey
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Ellen Rakieten
WHAT SHOULD YOU BE WORRIED ABOUT?

OPRAH WINFREY: And all new two-part OPRAH special report. A new message from bin Laden, threats, warnings, should we be worried? We ask the experts.
What was that like, looking Osama bin Laden in the eye?
Critical information you do not see on the news.
Do you think another attack is inevitable?
Suicide bombers, nuclear weapons.

He believes that there are at least 200 potential suicide bombers in the United States.
What should you be worried about? Why you can't just tune out anymore, next.
Today, experts are going to help us understand what in the world is going on. If you watch the news, you are bombarded with so much stuff, you probably feel like I do, it's hard to know what's real, what's not. Well, our experts today are going to help us sort it out--sort out all the noise.

First, recent polls reveal that terrorism is among the top issues that worry most Americans. CNN's terrorism expert, Peter Bergen, has spent his career tracking terrorists.
He has stood face to face with some of the deadliest terrorists on the planet. CNN's Peter Bergen has risked his life traveling to countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen to interview those who want to destroy America. In 1997, after being blindfolded and driven five hours to a secret location in Afghanistan, Peter found himself in a hut with Osama bin Laden. And just three days ago, Osama bin Laden released a new tape claiming "Attacks against America are in the planning stages and you will see them in the heart of your land. It is only a matter of time."

Mr. PETER BERGEN (Terrorism Expert): The most important message of this tape is that Osama bin Laden is alive and well, he wants to show that he's in the game, that he's still a force to be reckoned with.
WINFREY: Bin Laden also offered a long term truce.
Mr. BERGEN: In sort of Islamic law, you're supposed to warn people before you attack them. So this is slightly ominous. I don't think the offer is really meant sincerely necessarily, because at the same time that he's offering this truce on the tape, he's saying, `We're planning to attack you.'
WINFREY: And how serious does Peter think this latest threat is?
Mr. BERGEN: All threats from bin Laden are serious. We've had a number of warnings from bin Laden in the past, I mean not least of which is we interviewed him for CNN in 1997 and he said, `We're going to attack the United States.' Unfortunately, not enough people took him seriously at the time.
WINFREY: What was that like, looking Osama bin Laden in the eye?
Mr. BERGEN: You know, he struck me as a very intelligent guy.
WINFREY: Uh-huh.
Mr. BERGEN: Very well-informed. He wasn't a warm and fuzzy human being, let's say.
WINFREY: How old is he? I--because some pictures he looks old, some he's saved and not shaved.
Mr. BERGEN: I think he's 49 today.
WINFREY: OK.
Mr. BERGEN: He was very serious. The people around him treated him sort of like a god.
WINFREY: Mm-hmm.
Mr. BERGEN: They--you know, he said, `We're going to declare war on the United States.' At the back of my mind, I thought to myself, `We're sitting in a mud hut in the middle of the night in Afghanistan, how do you attack the United States?' And, of course, within four years we had 9/11.
WINFREY: Yes, you had the answer.
Mr. BERGEN: Yeah.
WINFREY: Where do you think he is now? What's the latest?
Mr. BERGEN: Well, I think he's in Pakistan.
WINFREY: Mm-hmm.
Mr. BERGEN: Which is a bit like saying he's west of the Mississippi, I mean it's a big country.
WINFREY: Yeah. Yeah.
Mr. BERGEN: And, you know, we haven't got particularly good information about his whereabouts, he's not making obvious errors, he's not talking on his cell phone or satellite phone, he--the people around him are not--not motivated by money, I don't think anybody's going to drop a dime on him. He's a human being, human beings make mistakes. Eventually, we will--we will find him, but it could--it's already four years after 9/11, this could be, you know, many years more. This is a guy who doesn't take vaca--vacations or weekends, you know, he's a full-time terrorist, and he wants to destroy the United States. If he could, he would.
WINFREY: And do you think another attack is inevitable?
Mr. BERGEN: Yes. I mean, we've been attacked already in this country; in the first Trade Center attack, you know, terrorists bombed the--the Trade Center in '93, then 9/11 itself. By the law of averages, we will be attacked again. You know, what form of attack it will be, when it'll be I can't tell you, but al-Qaeda is not going to suddenly decide one day, `Oh, the United States is so great.'
WINFREY: Mm-hmm.
Mr. BERGEN: You know, this is a group that is dedicated to trying to, you know, attack us and destroy us.
WINFREY: Do you think that, as Americans, we have lost sight of 9/11?
Mr. BERGEN: I think to some degree. Look, Americans have many virtues, but patience is not usually one of them.
WINFREY: Yes.
Mr. BERGEN: And our enemies are incredibly patient.
WINFREY: Mm-hmm.
Mr. BERGEN: I mean, for them, this is generational warfare. For some--for us, we think about this year, maybe the next election cycle. These guys are thinking in--in terms of, you know, 100 years of battling against us.
WINFREY: Mm.
Mr. BERGEN: And so, you know, I think we--there will be another attack, it might be a decade from now, it could be a year from now, it could be two decades from now. Certainly al-Qaeda has been very damaged since 9/11, their ability to do a 9/11 has gone down significantly.
WINFREY: And by 9/11, you mean airplanes specifically, or something to that degree?
Mr. BERGEN: I think something to that degree. You know, the kinds of attacks they've been doing recently; in London, they killed 56 people...
WINFREY: Yeah.
Mr. BERGEN: ...in Madrid, they killed 191 people. So the group remains, you know, pretty virulent, but the organization took a big hit post-9/11, al-Qaeda.
WINFREY: And is that because of things that we have done...
Mr. BERGEN: Yeah.
WINFREY: ...that make America more secure?
Mr. BERGEN: I think so. I mean, al-Qaeda means a base in Arabic; they lost their base in Afghanistan, they had a good thing going in Afghanistan, thousands of people were being trained there. We're in a very different posture. You may remember Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber...
WINFREY: Yeah.
Mr. BERGEN: ...who tried to bomb the American Airlines flight between Paris and Miami. You know, the passengers on the plane wrestled him to the ground. The people in this audience or people watching this show are much more aware of people behaving suspiciously, and I think that has helped us. Certainly the government has done some things to improve our safety.
WINFREY: Yeah. Where are we most vulnerable, though, you think, still?
Mr. BERGEN: We only check 2 percent of our cargo that comes into this country. That's, you know, you can imagine somebody putting some kind of nuclear device in a, you know, in a container. We--you know, planes remain very vulnerable to rocket-propelled grenades. We've seen an attempt by al-Qaeda to bring down an Israeli passenger jet. The counter measures for that would be very expensive. I imagine one day at some point somebody will bring down a passenger plane with a rocket-propelled grenade. And then we'll do the expensive thing of doing the counter measures after that, because it's human nature to really close the barn door after the--the horse has left the barn.
WINFREY: Mm-hmm. And I understand you're concerned about a recent terrorist incident that--that--that happened in California.
Mr. BERGEN: One of the great unsung stories, I think, post-9/11--the American Muslim community has basically rejected al-Qaeda and its ideology, but there are some people who have not, and there's a group of guys who got radicalized in prison, and they live in Modesto, California. They're--it is alleged they were planning to attack US military bases, they had weapons, they had a plan, they were going to attack synagogues, and this seems to me like a pretty serious, you know, domestic terrorist cell. And I'm also concerned about people getting radicalized in Europe and coming over here. You know, we had an amazing case of a female suicide bomber in Iraq. She was Belgian. Just in November. Now, she and her husband went to conduct a suicide operation in Iraq--they could have just as easily come here to try and conduct some kind of operation here. They're traveling on European passports, they don't have criminal records. I think in the future you can imagine attack conducted in the United States by somebody who was a woman, unbelievably.
WINFREY: Mm-hmm. And so when you have access to all of this information, you sat with Osama bin Laden, do you--are you able to carry on your life in a normal way, or do you wake up in the morning going, `I'm scared'?
Mr. BERGEN: I live 10 blocks from the White House.
WINFREY: OK. Yeah.
Mr. BERGEN: So, you know, so I'm, like, the target, you know?
WINFREY: Yeah.
Mr. BERGEN: If the bomb goes off, my house will go with it. I think we have to be proportionate in our responses.
WINFREY: Yes.
Mr. BERGEN: And obviously, you know, I was in Washington when 9/11 happened, I saw the--you know, I was--and I knew it was bin Laden the moment the second plane hit.
WINFREY: You did?
Mr. BERGEN: I--oh, I'd been thinking about this guy every day for four years before the attack, and I knew it was him.
WINFREY: Yeah.
Mr. BERGEN: I wake up, like most people, and, you know, go and have a cup of coffee and don't worry about the end of the world. However, we seemed to have, I think, created quite a lot of people who don't like us, because--partly because of the Iraq war. If you look at the level of anti-American sentiment around the Muslim world, it's incredibly high.
WINFREY: Mm-hmm.
Mr. BERGEN: Bin Laden has higher favorability ratings in Pakistan than President Bush has in the United States right now.
WINFREY: Wow.
Mr. BERGEN: I mean, he's scoring 65 percent.
WINFREY: You said by the time the second plane hit, because everyone one else was still like, `Oh, my God, is it really'--oh, this isn't--this isn't just a plane hitting the--the building, it is something else that was going on. But why did you know?
Mr. BERGEN: I was extremely concerned in the summer of 2001 an attack was going to happen.
WINFREY: You were?
Mr. BERGEN: I mean--yeah. I mean, I was telling my friends and telling journalists I know that either an attack--it seemed to be imminent. So much information was flooding in about their--about their desire to attack us around the world--it was very hard for me to conceive it would be happening in the United States. But as soon as the second plane hit, I remembered that bin Laden had been training pilots inside the United States, it was already out there. Bin Laden bought a jet in the United States in 1992, which he flew to Sudan--or his people flew to Sudan. You know, so he'd had this strong interest in American aviation long before 9/11. Who had the capability and who had the intent? The only people that had the capability and the intent were al-Qaeda. And, you know, they--so I knew that it was bin Laden as soon as the second plane hit.
WINFREY: We'll be right back.
When we come back, an expert in terrorism explains why he feels the latest tape proves Osama bin Laden is scared. That's next.
(Announcements)
WINFREY: Dr. Walid Phares is a professor of Middle East studies, and he is an expert on terrorism.
Dr. Phares listened to the latest audiotape released by Osama bin Laden and says it is one of the most significant statements al-Qaeda has ever released.
Dr. WALID PHARES (Terrorism and Middle East Expert): This recent tape by Osama bin Laden shows us also that they are in trouble. It shows the world that the jihadists of al-Qaeda are concerned because of what's happening in the Middle East. Elections in Afghanistan, elections in Iraq, many people in Iran, the youth and women, are now opposing the views of al-Qaeda. What al-Qaeda is concerned about is the more that freedom will grow, the more they will be isolated.
WINFREY: And what about that truce he offered?
Dr. PHARES: They're losing in the Middle East. There was enough time to prepare his troops in the region, to prepare--to reach out to the cell within the West, within the United States. So this is not even a truce, not even a cease-fire, it's a trick.
WINFREY: Dr. Phares says there already are terrorists inside our country, waiting to attack.
Dr. PHARES: Remember, in his speech he said, `We will strike you when we will be ready.' This message, in fact, is to the operatives and the jihadists inside the United States. The most conservative number would be about 200 terrorists. It means, `Strike when you are ready.'
WINFREY: Why are you saying that? At least 200.
Dr. PHARES: First statistic for 19 men who perpetrated 9/11: sustain a presence. They should have support. Many among them said before they had support in the United States, you times that by five. Plus, within four years, how many minds have been recruited by al-Qaeda? Because we are making arrests, we are dismantling cells. But the factories that produces those minds, meaning this indoctrination, and is on and on, both within the United States and also overseas. An estimate of 200 potential individual terrorists means that they will at some point in time either receive instructions from al-Qaeda or second principle is to feel that they are ready to engage in a second wave of attacks.
WINFREY: OK. So this show is about what we should be concerned about. What worries you most?
Dr. PHARES: Al-Qaeda learned from the past. So we expect them coming through the planes, they're not going to come through the planes. I mean, they're not going to come and do the same scenario. They will think of other venues. They will think of combined venues. One of the combined venues would be everything we've seen so far. We had a case of somebody who was willing to do a dirty bomb, a case of potential sniper, case of potential attacking areas where we don't have concerns, civil society, schools, etc. Imagine if one day years from now all of that combined would be done at the same time, same day, to bring down the national security and national economy of the United States. This is the day we have to be prepared for.
WINFREY: Well, this whole idea that we have as a country in general been more concerned about ourselves than the rest of the world is part of what feeds this anti-American spirit around world.
Dr. PHARES: Well, first of all, with regard to terrorists, they do study us very, very well. I go on the chat rooms, the Web sites, and, oh, boy, they know more about America than many Americans knows about our own land is number one.
WINFREY: Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. PHARES: Number two, anti-Americanism, yes, is in reaction to what we do. But there is somebody out there telling them that what we do is against them.
WINFREY: Yes.
Dr. PHARES: So there are teachers out there, there are people who are indoctrinating--you know, you have Web sites, you have TV programs, you have all sorts of networks that are forcing the minds to interpret anything we do as aimed against--let's say the Muslim world, the Arab world. But this is changing. Many young people in Iran and Iraq and Kuwait and Lebanon see these revolutions and are changing their mind with regard to America. We need to do a better job in educating our...
WINFREY: Changing their minds for the positive or the negative?
Dr. PHARES: I think it's for the positive.
WINFREY: Really?
Dr. PHARES: I know that those who hate America, maybe this is against the stream that we hear always in the media, are always hating America. I mean, this is not something new. They are more active. We see them on the screens. They are more active in terms of showing the world that they hate America. It's ideological. But you have more people who understand that democracy is important. They are on the rise. They don't have the freedom to express it.
WINFREY: Well, recently, world leaders addressed today's biggest global issues at a conference in New York. This group of big thinkers discussed--were there to discuss what Americans should be most worried about. Here is what Newsweek international editor Fareed Zakaria said:
Mr. FAREED ZAKARIA (Editor, Newsweek International) We are the most powerful country in the world. We have hundreds of thousands of troops occupying some countries, providing security guarantees to others, guarding sea lanes, and others. We are the lender of last resort for countries, we are the market of last resort for countries all over the world. We have this huge impact. But we're not terribly interested in the rest of the world. We sit on top of it, but we don't know much about it. That challenge for America is going to be a huge challenge for the world. Because if we can get more engaged with the world, it will have one set of outcomes for the world. But if we don't, we find that the only way we know how to engage with the world is through our military, it's going to have a very different set of outcomes for the world.
If you don't get informed, your job is going to be affected by trends that you don't understand. Your job is going to be affected by forces you don't understand. Your children's future is going to be affected by forces that you don't understand.
WINFREY: We'll be right back.
Coming up, how close are the terrorists to getting nuclear weapons? What experts say you need to know.
(Announcements)
Mr. TED TURNER (Businessman and Philanthropist): I think the most dangerous thing is the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the United States and the other--the other nuclear countries. There are only eight that we know of at the current time. And I think we need total nuclear disarmament as--as quickly as possible to avoid either an accident or a madman getting control of one of the buttons that would cause the extinction of humanity if those arsenals went off.
WINFREY: That was business mogul Ted Turner talking about what worries him most.
What should we be worried about? Well, just days ago, US State Department counterterrorism official Henry Crumpton was quoted as saying, "I rate the probability of terror groups using weapons of mass destruction as very high. It's just a matter of time." That was his quote. CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen and terrorism expert Dr. Walid Phares are here.
How close, Peter, do you think is al-Qaeda to obtaining a nuclear weapon?
Mr. BERGEN: Al-Qaeda certainly had a strong interest in acquiring nuclear materials. They a weapons of mass destruction program. They made it abundantly clear that they had weapons, they would use them against us. Luckily, their research in this area is pretty amateur.
WINFREY: Mm-hmm.
Mr. BERGEN: And they probably were scammed by people selling them stuff that was claimed to be nuclear materials, but was really radioactive waste. So--I mean, the good news is they are no--I don't think they're anywhere close. The bad news is these kinds of groups seek to acquire these weapons, and eventually they will. A crude nuclear weapon--the designs are out there. You don't--you don't--you know, you have bright physics graduates who probably now how to put together the bomb. The hard thing is how do you--getting--acquiring the raw materials for the bomb. This is not a trivial problem. And as Ted Turner said in that piece we just saw, I mean, securing the--the loose nukes, as they're known in Russia, the kinds of nuclear materials that can make a bomb is really one of the most vital things we can be doing for our own national security. Because if those got into the hands of terrorists, that would be a big problem.
WINFREY: Kinda. Yeah.
Mr. BERGEN: Indeed.
WINFREY: Why do you think we haven't been attacked?
Mr. BERGEN: I think--you know, I think the American Muslim community has rejected this ideology. I disagree--I'm going to disagree slightly with my friend, Dr. Walid. I don't think there are a lot of American sleeper cells. You know, compare the situation in Europe where you really have a lot of very angry young Muslim men who are doing attacks in Britain and doing attacks in Spain, doing attacks in Belgium. We just don't have that here, thank God. Which is not to say it won't happen. But I--and also, our posture is different, the government is--has done things to make us safer, and the public is much more conscious of the problem. So these are some of the reasons. Eventually we will be attacked, by the law of averages. But I think that the problem is much more profound in Europe than it is in the United States. And when I say that it's not just a European problem, Europeans can come into this country very easily, you know, we have something called a visa waiver program where you don't have to have a sit-down interview with an embassy official to get a visa.
WINFREY: Mm-hmm.
Mr. BERGEN: And so, you know, we're likely to be attacked by somebody with a European passport, I think. That's quite possible. Somebody...
WINFREY: Not by the suicide bombers who are already here?
Mr. BERGEN: Yes, I think is the short answer. People--generally, the attackers have come from the outside. They weren't sleeper cells.
WINFREY: Mm-hmm.
You obviously disagree?
Dr. PHARES: I sort of have a different take. I don't think the suicide bomber is a profession, people become suicide bombers. Suicide bombing is a way for somebody to become a jihadist, somebody who hates America, or receives instruction to attack America. I feel that the real dangerous we are facing in the United States is not the first wave. It's not the Muhammad Atta and--the 19 first pioneers, but of the second generation of people who are born and raised here, who emigrated very early, and who have been indoctrinated by radical thinkers, radical clerics. And the case of Great Britain is very clear. That is what concerns me in the future, because we have no legal way to detect that. We have no intelligence way to detect that.
WINFREY: Well, we're joined now by Thomas Friedman. He is a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times and has covered the Middle East for more than 20 years.
When Tom first heard of bin Laden's latest tape, he says he thought it was a good sign.
Mr. THOMAS FRIEDMAN (Pulitzer Prize Winning Author and Journalist): I think that it will be interpreted on the Arab street as a sign of weakness. Because after all, he said, `I'm ready to accept a cease-fire.' This is not the bin Laden that they have come to know and, in some cases, respect. You think you're winning, embracing the cease-fire is not the first thing on your mind.
WINFREY: Tom says Osama bin Laden's message is also an attempt to divide Americans.
Mr. FRIEDMAN: What bin Laden is after ultimately is an American withdrawal before completing any kind of democratization process in Iraq or Afghanistan. If that happens, he wins. He sees the way to do that as encouraging those voices in the United States who want to get out. He's hoping to stoke up some debate here. People say, `Look, we can leave. He wants a cease-fire.'
WINFREY: Thomas Friedman, author of the best-selling book "The World is Flat," has been on The New York Times best-seller list now for more than 40 weeks. I recommend it to anybody who wants to know what's going on in the world and how we are globally positioned as a country.
And so you believe an attack is inevitable?
Mr. FRIEDMAN: I believe to the extent that al-Qaeda has a leadership and an intelligence and a strategy. Their focus is to defeat us in the heart of their world. They are throwing everything they can in defeating us in Iraq. Because, after all, they don't want to rule Nevada, they want to rule Saudi Arabia and Syria and Lebanon.
WINFREY: Right. Right, right, right.
Mr. FRIEDMAN: And they know the resonance they will get if they can defeat America in the heart of their world would be enormous. I think the most dangerous and vulnerable time for us, Oprah, is if--is if we actually start to defeat them in collaboration with other Arabs and Muslims. Because then I think they will throw an enormous amount of assets into trying to do something spectacular in this country to disguise their defeat in the heart of their world.
WINFREY: Really? Are you saying our--yes, you just said that. Our success in Iraq will bring us defeat in some way here?
Mr. FRIEDMAN: I'm not saying defeat, but I think that what it will do is prompt them to want to throw the real--the hail Mary--the hail Muhammad pass, OK...
WINFREY: Yes.
Mr. FRIEDMAN: ...where they try to do something so spectacular that it will disguise what will be a fundamental and strategic defeat in their world. That's what I think is the most dangerous moment for us.
WINFREY: Do you agree?
Dr. PHARES: Yes. It's inescapable. It's going to take time to produce in the civil societies of these areas enough democratic forces to shrink the terror. But meanwhile, the--the danger, the time danger, is now, between now and seven, six, eight years to come. What bin Laden said on Aljazeera in November of 2001 is very important, they all look at the future. He said the next army is the 12- to 16-year-old. Who is going to reach the next generation is going to make or break the world on terror or the war with al-Qaeda.
WINFREY: I remember before we even went to war, we were doing the show IS WAR THE ONLY ANSWER? with you, Tom Friedman, and you were saying that America must be prepared to create sustainability and to be in for the long haul.
Mr. FRIEDMAN: You know, Oprah, the two questions I've had about the Iraq war--I have two huge questions.
WINFREY: Yes.
Mr. FRIEDMAN: One is to--if I could ask two people a question, it would be this. To Saddam Hussein, I would ask, `What were you thinking?'
WINFREY: Yes.
Mr. FRIEDMAN: I mean, `Wasn't it obvious what was going to happen? You had a nice corrupt little tyranny going, your boys were driving BMWs. What were you thinking? If you had no WMDs, why didn't you make that utterly transparent?' And to George Bush, I would like to ask, `What were you thinking? You have staked your whole presidency on this invasion and democratization project in Iraq. Why would you let Donald Rumsfeld put in just enough troops to lose?
WINFREY: Yeah.
Mr. FRIEDMAN: If my presidency were riding on this, I would--I would have emptied the kitchen cabinet and made every effort to secure the environment in Iraq to increase my chances of succeeding. And those two questions really bedevil me to this day.
WINFREY: And a lot of people. And a lot of people.
I was asking Peter whether or not he'd walked around with a sense of fear. You who know so much about these issues, do you?
Mr. FRIEDMAN: No.
WINFREY: No.
Mr. FRIEDMAN: I'm going golfing, basically. I--my motto is leave the cave dwelling to bin Laden, all right? Because I'm not going to let them, OK, imprison me. I mean, I'm not...
WINFREY: Because that is exactly what they want. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mr. FRIEDMAN: I mean, why--you know, why are we so worried about this, Oprah? We're worried about it because what these people are attacking is actually the essential feature that keeps our society what it is, which is trust. I mean, you trusted when I came in today I'm not wearing a bomb-laden vest. I trusted when I met Walid that his shoes didn't have an explosive in them. What these people are doing is they're taking instruments from our daily life, the backpack, the car, the shoe, the cell phone, and they're turning them into weapons, OK? And in doing that, what they are forcing us to do is take trust out of our open society. And that's why it is so dangerous and that's why we have to talk about it.
WINFREY: That's why it's called--well, that's why it's called terrorism.
Mr. FRIEDMAN: Exactly.
WINFREY: Yeah. Because it creates a sense of terror. People live with that.
But you say, Dr. Phares, that the best weapon is ordinary--is the ordinary citizen.
Dr. PHARES: Absolutely. Peter just mentioned it. A huge example. Shoe bomber. Imagine the shoe bomber before 9/11. He would be fixing his shoe, and if you look at him, you'd be sued. That was before 9/11. After 9/11, he is trying to do something--not the FBI, not the agency, the passengers were on top of him.
WINFREY: Yes. And if--and if the people hadn't done that, we perhaps would have never known what had happened to that plane.
Dr. PHARES: Absolutely. Absolutely.
WINFREY: If that plane had gone down.
Dr. PHARES: And to add one more thing. To live in courage--this is what basically shrinks terrorism. Because if they know that we are in fear, they will increase. The more we are educated, the less freedom the terrorists have--have in our own society.
Mr. FRIEDMAN: You know, Oprah, I was in Israel. We happened to come upon a scene immediately after a suicide bombing. It was at a bus stop near Tel Aviv outside an army base. And there's something I remember the Israeli officer in charge telling me. He said, `Mr. Friedman, you come here tomorrow morning, you will never know this happened.'
WINFREY: Really?
Mr. FRIEDMAN: `This bus stop will be completely rebuilt. The road will be clean.' And the message to the terrorists was, `If you think you're changing our way of life, guess again. You're dead, and we're still living.'
WINFREY: Wow. We'll be right back.
Coming up, Senator Hillary Clinton on what she believes is the greatest threat to our planet. But first, her husband, former President Bill Clinton, on what he thinks we should all be worried about.
President BILL CLINTON (Former President of the United States): In the short run, you should be worried about foreign policy challenges, will North Korea or Iran become nuclear powers, will biological weapons get out, will terror again strike within the United States or in the UK or our allies? But over the long run, you should worry about building a world that's coming together instead of coming apart. And that starts with America. We need to have an economic strategy that makes us more secure and independent of foreign oil sources and builds a clean energy future and good new jobs. We need to become citizens of the world in a positive way. I mean, we should all say, `OK, I'm going to support good things for my country, but whatever I can afford, I'm going to help somebody half-way around the world.' Just like I did in the tsunami and just like they did for us in Katrina. We need to behave that way all the time. We have to understand we are all bound up together. We are going up or down together, whether we like it or not. So it might as well be up.
(Announcements)
Senator HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON (Democrat, New York): Well, right now the greatest threat to world peace is intolerance cloaked in religion. It's people who believe that their religious views are the only right ones. And therefore, any means that is available to them, including flying planes into towers or planting bombs in subways where people are minding their own business on their way to work, that somehow they are permitted to do that because they are acting in the name of a religion that gives them the justification to wreak havoc and violence.
I think we have to be open to the feelings and opinions and views of other people. Not that we are going to give up what we believe, but in the complex world in which we live, we have to recognize that not everybody will see the world the same way. Despite the challenges we face right now, it is such an exciting time to be a woman in America. But to those who whom much is given, much is expected. And so as American women, I think we have a special obligation to vote. Let your voice be heard. A citizen always wins, because you have participated. And to make our communities safer, better places for children to grow up in.
WINFREY: Thank you, Senator Hillary Clinton. The interviews you're seeing with world leaders came from the Clinton Global Initiative Conference, which I thought was a great conference back in September. Recent polls show that the war in Iraq is the number one issue for Americans, according to the CNN Gallup poll conducted on January 6th through the 8th. Fifty percent think the war was a mistake, 47 percent say that it was the right thing to do, and 3 percent had no opinion.
CNN's Michael Holmes took to the streets of Baghdad to give us a brief history lesson and to find out what some Iraqis are now thinking.
Mr. MICHAEL HOLMES (CNN International Anchor): Hello, Oprah. I'm Michael Holmes, CNN international correspondent, reporting to you from Baghdad.
The US may have been surprised to discover just how complex this region is. Remember, Iraq is a country only created after World War I, carved out of ancient Mesopotamia. You know, by invading Iraq, the US has found itself a player in and referee to some age-old conflicts. And now a new conflict, the insurgency, spawned by the war and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Under Saddam, a Sunni Muslim, the Sunni minority ran things. In the new Iraq, the Shiite majority is largely in charge. and angry, unemployed young Sunni men vent their frustration with terror attacks on the new government and the American invaders. Bombings and assassination attempts occur almost daily.
More than 2200 Americans have died so far in this war, who knows how many Iraqis; by some estimates, 100,000 or more. There has been some progress in Iraq since the invasion in March of 2003: no Saddam, a fledgling democracy, some economic gains, peace and stability in certain regions. Golden moments like the saving of baby Nor, the infant born with spina bifida discovered in a raid on her home by American troops and sent by those very same troops to America for life-saving surgery.
Mr. IMNAD ABDUL KARIM (Businessman): (Through translator) Life in Iraq became better than under the previous era, because now we have freedom and democracy.
Mr. HOLMES: Much has wrong, too. There are thousands of baby Nors without a patron to save them. Rampant unemployment, black marketing rampant, too, as is kidnapping for politics and profit. Millions still live without basic services like electricity.
Ms. WASSEN FYSAL (Employee): (Through translator) The situation in Iraq is worse than before. No freedom, no security, no literacy, no water, no gasoline. Simply put, this situation became worse.
Mr. HOLMES: And on top of everything else, the insurgency.
Mr. HUSSAM HAMID (Security Guard): My biggest concern is the security in the country. I hope we are going to be secure. That's my biggest concern.
Mr. HOLMES: Still, on the streets you can find some optimism.
Mr. HAMID: General: the economy is good, economy is good. And people, I guess, will be happier than before, in terms of freedom, speech and freedom.
Mr. HOLMES: Oprah, I have been here half a dozen times or so now. Many of my colleagues of course more often than that. It used to be that we could walk the streets of Baghdad, travel around, with precautions, of course. But, you know, these days, even just leaving your living quarters is quite literally taking your life into your hands. Back to you.
WINFREY: Well, thank you for doing that report for us.
Tom, you've been there five times to Iraq in the, what, last three years?
Mr. FRIEDMAN: Yeah.
WINFREY: Yeah. And you say we're approaching the end game? What is--do you believe that?
Mr. FRIEDMAN: Yeah. What I believe, Oprah, is that in the light of the elections we have just held, we're going to get really the most authentic Iraqi government that's ever existed before. And I believe the key question in Iraq right now, Oprah, it's two questions: what kind of majority do the Shiites want to be, they're the overwhelming majority, and what kind of minority do the Sunnis want to be?
WINFREY: Yeah.
Mr. FRIEDMAN: If the Shiites of Iraq, who will dominate the next government, want to be a generous, inclusive majority, and one has to say, to their benefit and the benefit of their spiritual leader, Ayatollah Sistani, they have behaved remarkably in the face of what has really been a murderous campaign directed against them by the Sunni insurgents. If they choose to be that kind of majority, I think there's a chance, a good chance, or better chance, that we're going to get a decent government in Iraq.
If the Sunnis choose to be a minority ready to ask for everything they're due in Iraq but nothing more, then I think we also have a chance of having the right kind of majority and the right minority. If the Sunnis, by contrast, choose to be like the Palestinians, spend 100 years trying to reverse history, basically, in Iraq and restore their minority rule, then obviously we're going to get a very different outcome. And so, really, that's what I'm--I'm watching. But I do believe the next six to nine months as they form this new Ira--Iraqi government is going to tell us. And I think that we're going to know after six to nine months whether this project has any chance of succeeding. In which case, I think the American people as a whole will want to play it out or whether it really is a fool's errand.
WINFREY: OK.
Next, CNN's Christiane Amanpour with a special report for us from another place in the world. You need to know about it. We'll be back.
(Announcements)
WINFREY: We're asking what in the world is going on, and what should we be worried about? Lately, Iran is topping the list of escalating situations, making frightening headlines. Here is the latest from CNN's Christiane Amanpour, reporting for us from Iran.
Ms. CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR (CNN Chief International Correspondent): Hi, Oprah. This is Christiane Amanpour in Teheran.
Iran and the United States have been locked in a stormy relationship for most of the last 30 years. Ties were severed when Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew America's ally the Shah in 1979. Khomeini's supporters then held American hostages at the US embassy in Teheran for more than a year. The relationship warmed slightly when a new reformist president was elected in 1997. And through an exclusive interview on CNN, he apologized for Iran taking those hostages. But Iran's hard-line conservatives stopped any move towards restoring diplomatic relations with the US, and they also stopped the move towards more freedom, democracy, and women's rights inside Iran, despite the wishes of Iran's very young population. And now relations are at an all-time low as Iran vows to continue what it calls a peaceful nuclear program, which the West suspects could be a pretext for developing nuclear weapons. The United States and its allies are talking about sending Iran to the Security Council, perhaps incurring sanctions. Iran says that any sanctions could drive up the price of oil. Christiane Amanpour, CNN, Teheran.
WINFREY: So what should we be worried about with Iran?
Mr. BERGEN: With Iran? Well, I mean, I--you know, clearly, I think--it seems to me that Iran seems pretty intent on making nuclear weapons.
WINFREY: Yeah.
Mr. BERGEN: We may not have a huge amount of leverage over them. I mean, the president is somebody who, by his--by his own account, wants to abolish the state of Israel. He's not somebody you can negotiate with, I don't think. And I don't think we're going to invade another country in that--in that part of the world. I don't think we have the troops or the--or the motivations to do that. I think that they may well become a nuclear power without us being able to do too much about that.
WINFREY: And what happens if Iran gets a bomb, Dr. Phares?
Dr. PHARES: Well, the Iranian regime wants it, the nuclear power. It has said so since the '80s--that regime. But at the same time, Oprah, within Iran, the young and the younger are thinking otherwise. They have been demonstrating. Demonstrations by the students for the last five years. It's the fear of their own people in public and the fear of what they see in the neighborhood.
WINFREY: Yeah.
Dr. PHARES: Afghanistan's elections, Iraq's elections, Beirut demonstrations. All of that prompted the regime basically to go faster in building up this bomb so that they would become the local North Korea in the Middle East. `This is my people. Nobody touch it. I have a deterrent force.' And then nothing could help the Iranian people against that regime. That's that take, basically.
WINFREY: We'll be right back. But first, a really smart guy, global economist Jeffrey Sachs, on what we should be worried about. Take a look.
Mr. JEFFREY SACHS (Global Economist): I think that fear is by far the--the biggest risk factor on the planet. The idea is that, `I don't want to cooperate with that country, they're out to get us.' And this idea that it's us vs. them and that we are without any means of solving it, we're just in direct conflict with some other part of the world. Whether it's religious divide or ethnic divide or geographical divide or the divide of rich and poor. It's the fear that conflict is inevitable. That's actually the biggest risk we face, because violence and conflict with others can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe it's going to happen, they'll believe it's going to happen, everybody gets absolutely into hostilities, and sure enough, what everybody feared does happen.
WINFREY: Coming up, Queen Rania of Jordan tell us what she think is the planet's biggest problem.
(Announcements)
Her Majesty QUEEN RANIA AL ABDULLAH (Queen of Jordan): I find that there is one overarching problem that is fundamental, and that's common through all of the issues that we're facing today, and that is the hope gap. The gap between people who feel if they work hard, they have a chance of bettering their lives, and those who actually feel that they are just condemned to a life of needlessness and hopelessness. A person who's hurting half-way around the globe, his pain is eventually going to affect me. I think it fosters a great deal of anger and--and hatred and makes these people who feel that way more vulnerable to extremist views. They are easy to influence because they feel that they have nothing to live for and, therefore, nothing to lose. It's not enough to just tell people that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and it's not enough just to show them the light, we have to help them find their way towards that light, and I feel that education is a very powerful enabling tool.
WINFREY: That was Queen Rania of Jordan. I thank you.
Do you agree, Tom, with what she was saying?
Mr. FRIEDMAN: Oh, no question. I--I believe so much of what we're up against in that part of the world, which manifests itself in terrorism is a whole young generation unable to achieve their aspirations, basically. And I think that feeds a lot of the humiliation and frustration that is really at the root of this terrorism.
WINFREY: Wow. We'll be right back.
(Announcements)
WINFREY: I just whispered to Peter as we were watching--I mean, he was saying that the estimate for Iraqi deaths is, you know, may be 100,000. And I was saying that when I arrive--or you all may know this, too--you arrive in any foreign country, you turn on CNN, you hear the death toll for the Iraqis and for the Americans and for the Brits and everything, but in this country we are not informed about what is happening to the Iraqis. Why?
Mr. BERGEN: Well, I mean, you know, the estimates of Iraqi deaths, civilian deaths, as a result of the war is a low of let's say 25,000, up to 100,000. I--personally, I think it's nearer 25,000. But we have--obviously, there are a lot of Iraqis civilians that have died in this...
WINFREY: Right.
Mr. BERGEN: ...and this is one of the reasons that we're not liked. And that's a message that, you know, perhaps is not well understood here in this country.
WINFREY: That a lot of civilians are dying?
Mr. BERGEN: And that may increase, because as we withdraw troops, we're going to rely more on aerial power and there's going to be more bombing.
WINFREY: But, you know--but the question is--it's so interesting to me, I said, `Did everybody just agree that they were not--did all of the news media just agree that they're not to tell us that story?'
Mr. BERGEN: The Washington Post has a--has a--every time it says the, you know, 2,000-plus US soldiers have died, it also notes how many Iraqi civilians have died. So some American media outlets do this. But I think it's more common elsewhere.
WINFREY: More common elsewhere. Yeah.
We were talking earlier about--when we were listening to Senator Hillary Clinton talk about all of us extending ourselves. It's about us being more accepting. I know you wrote the "The World is Flat" because you understand that. And what do you mean by "The World is Flat"?
Mr. FRIEDMAN: Well, what I mean, Oprah, is--basically in the last 15 years, there was a revolution thanks to three technological things that kind of came together. The first was the personal computer.
WINFREY: Right.
Mr. FRIEDMAN: The second revolution was the Internet. And the third revolution, it was a quiet revolution, was in software. Those three things came together and, when they did, they flattened the world. They allowed more people in more places in more ways on more days to connect, collaborate, and compete more directly with all of our kids and ourselves than ever before.
WINFREY: We'll be back.
(Announcements)
WINFREY: Thank you, Dr. Walid Phares. His book is "Future Jihad." Peter Bergen's book is "The Osama bin Laden I Know." He's one of the few people who did know. And, of course "The World is Flat." Thank you, Thomas Friedman, author of the best-selling book "The World is Flat."
I hope you will tune in tomorrow and prepare to have your eyes opened in a huge way. I urge you to watch tomorrow's show. It might be one of the most important shows we've ever done. That's tomorrow.
Bye, everybody.

Buying a Mobile Phone in China

2006-01-25T08:05:00.000-08:00

The experience was rather interesting. When you go to buy a phone in the U.S., you go to the mall kiosk or the Verizon store in the strip mall or wherever. You pick out your phone and your plan (you may get it free depending on the length of your contract), you take your phone and away you go.

You can visit a kiosk in a mall here or go to China Mobile but that's not where most shop for phones, nor is the process the same. :)

I went to get Anne a mobile phone yesterday. We went to a mall where the phones ran from $US100 to US$1,000. In China, you don't usually buy your phone with a plan. You just buy the phone, so you don't get the discounts/free phones that you do in the US. After deciding that the phones were way too expensive, we went to where many buy there phones.

The building was basically like a mall with many stories, but there were stalls where many sold the same products -- printers, computers, iPods, cameras, etc. etc. Each "store" hawked their wares and you bargain on the price (except at the Apple store which isn't like the fancy ones in the U.S.).

We finally found the Nokia "store" - it's the most trusted brand in China. All the "store" clerks recommend them. Motorola isn't perceived to be good quality in Shanghai. Panasonic, Sony, Phillips and LG are also here but Nokia rules the phone market perception battle.

The phones (including LG, et al) were all in a glass case and you could pick them out. They didn't list features. Just the price. All the boxes are in Chinese so you can't tell what features the phone has, you have to look very closely to determine whether it's dual or tri-band GSM (for use in the states too), etc.

When you pick a phone, they don't go in the back or under the glass to pick out a box. They take the box off the big pile of boxes behind the counter or they rummage through the pile till they find the box with the type of phone you want. Because nothing is sealed, you tend to have a hard time telling if something is new/used, fake or real.

After they bring over the box and take out the phone, you take the sim card out of your current phone (the sim actually contains your address book and the phone # for your phone and is stored under the battery) and pop it in the phone to test its features and start making/receiving calls. If you don't have a sim card - more on these later - you use the clerks sim card. If you only speak English, you also have to have them change the menu so it's in English, otherwise you have no clue what you're getting.

If you like the phone, you begin to barter on price. Don't worry. The "store" within three feet has the same phone and they listen to see when you'll come over to them so they can steal the sale. If you don't like the phone or want to try another, you pop out the sim and start over.

After an hour of this, I finally found two phones (an upgrade for me since the one the company gave me was five years old and one for Anne).that included a radio which an American has no need for in China. You occasionally here US music on the radio, but not often. The gentleman want 1700 RMB each for two Nokia phones. Using an int'l credit card, costs you an additional five percent that the "store" charges you and then you add the three percent currency conversion fee that Visa and the banks charge. ugh.

When we weren't happy with his price, we walked five feet to another vendor who beat his price by 300 RMB/phone (almost US$37/phone). An extra Nokia battery was 50 RMB (US$6.25).

Oh yeah. I almost forgot.

During the bartering, out of the blue, a scream went up. It wasn't an angry scream but rather a feminine scream. Why? Because a mouse had come out of the wall in this flea market like mall and was walking near one of the display cases. I'm not sure what happened to the mouse but the women responded just like women do in the U.S.

But, while I now had a phone for Anne, I had no sim card and no service plan.

In China, almost all mobile phones are pre-paid plans because credit histories really don't exist here. If you actually want a phone plan (xx minutes for XX RMB/mo), you have to provide a good deal of documentation -- a business license from where you work, a photocopy of your passport and some other document. After all the paperwork, Anne now has a 360 minute/mo. plan for 60 RMB (US$7.50). Her Verizon plan for roughly the same amount of time cost $39.99/mo. in DE. Text messages here are .02 RMB/message or 50 messages for 1 RMB (US$0.125 cents). Anne shouldn't really need all the minutes since her calling options in China are limited. :) We were able to get a sim card from the same store for 50 RMB. This card goes with you from phone to phone and it's what keeps provides your number portabilty.

For those that care, Apple computer products are the same price here. Laptops seemed to be comparable in price if not slightly cheaper. Most of the products that exist in the U.S. are here. The phones technology isn't as advanced because 3G hasn't made it's way to China yet, but you can still get an mp3 player, camera, etc. etc. on your phone if you want it, you just only get a phone that works in China.

The New 'Sputnik' Challenges: They All Run on Oil

2006-01-20T18:37:00.000-08:00

New York Times
January 20, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Detroit

I came to Detroit looking for the hottest new American cars. Instead, I found Sputnik.

You remember Sputnik - the little satellite the Soviets launched in 1957. The Eisenhower administration was so stunned it put the U.S. into a crash program to train more scientists and engineers so America could catch up with the Russians in the space race.

Well, for anyone paying attention, our generation's Sputnik showed up at the annual Detroit auto show this week. It's not a satellite. It's a car. It's called the Geely 7151 CK sedan. It seats a family of five, gets good mileage and will cost around $10,000 when it goes on sale in 2008.
It's made in China.

That doesn't get your attention? Well, there's another Sputnik that just went up: Iran. It's going to make a nuclear bomb, no matter what the U.N. or U.S. says, because at $60-a-barrel oil, Tehran's mullahs are rich enough to buy off or tell off the rest of the world. That doesn't worry you? Well, there's a quieter Sputnik orbiting Earth. It's called climate change - a k a Katrina and melting glaciers.

What am I saying here? I am saying that our era doesn't have a single Sputnik to grab our attention and crystallize the threat to our security and way of life in one little steel ball - the way our parents' era did. But that doesn't mean such threats don't exist. They do, and they have a single common denominator: the way we use and consume energy today, particularly oil.

Friends, we are in the midst of an energy crisis - but this is not your grandfather's energy crisis. No, this is something so much bigger, for four reasons.

First, we are in a war against a radical, violent stream of Islam that is fueled and funded by our own energy purchases. We are financing both sides in the war on terrorism: the U.S. Army with our tax dollars, and Islamist charities, madrasas and terrorist organizations through our oil purchases.

Second, the world has gotten flat, and three billion new players from India, China and the former Soviet Union just walked onto the field with their version of the American dream: a house, a car, a toaster and a refrigerator. If we don't quickly move to renewable alternatives to fossil fuels, we will warm up, smoke up and choke up this planet far faster than at any time in the history of the world. Katrina will look like a day at the beach.

Third, because of the above, green energy-saving technologies and designs - for cars, planes, homes, appliances or office buildings - will be one of the biggest industries of the 21st century. Tell your kids. China is already rushing down this path because it can't breathe and can't grow if it doesn't reduce its energy consumption. Will we dominate the green industry, or will we all be driving cars from China, Japan and Europe?

Finally, if we continue to depend on oil, we are going to undermine the whole democratic trend that was unleashed by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because oil will remain at $60 a barrel and will fuel the worst regimes in the world - like Iran - to do the worst things for the world. Indeed, this $60-a-barrel boom in the hands of criminal regimes, and just plain criminals, will, if sustained, pose a bigger threat to democracies than communism or Islamism. It will be a black tide that turns back the democratic wave everywhere, including in Iraq.

The one thing we can do now to cope with all four of these trends is to create a tax that fixes the pump price at $3.50 to $4 a gallon - no matter where the OPEC price goes. Because if consumers know that the price of oil is never coming down, they will change their behavior. And when consumers change their behavior in a big way, G.M., Ford and DaimlerChrysler will change their cars in a big way, and it is cars and trucks that consume a vast majority of the world's oil.

The more Detroit goes green, the faster it will be propelled down the innovation curve, making it more likely that Detroit - and not Toyota or Honda or the Chinese - will dominate the green technologies of the 21st century. A permanent gasoline tax will also make solar, wind and biofuels so competitive with oil that it will drive their innovations as well.

George Bush may think he is preserving the American way of life by rejecting a gasoline tax. But if he does not act now - starting with his State of the Union speech - he will be seen as the man who presided over the decline of our way of life. He will be the American president who ignored the Sputniks of our day.

A Green Dream in Texas

2006-01-19T14:55:00.000-08:00

January 18, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Richardson, Tex.

When it comes to energy and the American people, George Bush and Dick Cheney are guilty of the soft bigotry of low expectations.

No one has lower expectations for the American people than a vice president who thinks "conservation" is simply a personal virtue, not a national security imperative, and a president who can barely choke out the word.

But Americans are starting to lead themselves. The most impressive project I've seen is by Texas Instruments, which is building a "green" chip factory here in Richardson, near Dallas. T.I. is keeping 1,000 high-tech jobs in Texas by building its newest facility - to make wafers used in semiconductors - in a cost-saving, hyper-efficient green manner.

T.I. always wanted to keep its newest wafer factory near Dallas so it would be near its design center and ideas could flow back and forth. But China, Taiwan and Singapore were all tempting alternatives, offering low wages, subsidies and tax breaks. So the T.I. leadership laid down a challenge: T.I. could locate its new wafer factory in Richardson, if the T.I. design team and community leaders could find a way to build it for $180 million less than its last Dallas factory, erected in the late 1990's. That would make its cost-per-wafer competitive with any overseas plant's.

Although the T.I. engineers initially thought it impossible, they pulled it off. Previous chip factories had three floors because of the complicated cooling and manufacturing process involved in making wafers. The T.I. design team came up with a way to build the Richardson factory with just two floors - a huge savings in mass and energy. T.I. also contacted Amory Lovins, the green designer who heads the Rocky Mountain Institute, and asked him to help it design other parts of the plant in a way that would lower its resource consumption, which, over the life of a plant, can exceed construction outlays.

Together, T.I. engineers and Mr. Lovins's team designed big water pipes with fewer elbows, which reduced friction loss and let them use smaller pumps that save energy. Various passive solar innovations were built in, including roofs that use a white reflective coating to reduce heat. These, together with innovations in how air is circulated, cooled and recovered naturally, reduced total heat so much that T.I. was able to get rid of one huge industrial air-conditioner. Almost all of the waste from the building construction is being recycled. The urinals are all waterless.

"Green building is not necessarily about producing your own power with windmills and solar panels. It's about addressing the consumption side with really creative design and engineering to eliminate waste and reduce energy usage - it's the next industrial revolution," said Paul Westbrook, who oversees sustainable design for T.I. and helped turn T.I. leaders on to green building by taking them to his solar-powered home. "Green building added some cost, but over all we built a green building for 30 percent less per square foot than our previous conventional facility." This is expected to cut utility costs by 20 percent and water usage by 35 percent.
To entice T.I. to build again in the Dallas area, the University of Texas, the State Legislature and private sources put up $300 million for a 10-year effort to improve science and engineering studies at the University of Texas in Dallas, so T.I. will have plenty of educated workers.
"We are proud to prove on a global basis that you can [be] green and energy-sensitive and reduce costs and increase profits," said Shaunna Sowell, T.I.'s vice president for worldwide facilities. America can keep good manufacturing jobs, she added, "but we cannot do it the same way we've been doing it. We have to do it differently. ... I think you do first have to set an impossible goal. Amazing things happen when people claim responsibility for creating the impossible."

They sure do. In 1961, when President Kennedy called for putting a man on the moon, he didn't know how - but his vision was so compelling, his expectations of the American people so high, that they drove the moon shot well after he died. The Bush-Cheney team should be inspiring our generation's moon shot: energy independence. But so far all they've challenged Americans to do is accept a tax cut.

So hats off to the leaders of T.I. Thanks to their vision, Dallas - not China - has the newest T.I. wafer plant, a new investment in education and a great example of how a green factory can be efficient and profitable and can create good American jobs in the 21st century.

Energy guzzling is for defeatists. Real Americans - and real Texans - build green.

The Axis of Order?

2006-01-19T14:53:00.000-08:00

January 13, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Last September, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick gave a speech to the National Committee on United States-China Relations in which he repeatedly urged China to become a responsible "stakeholder" in the international system. It turns out that there is no word in Chinese for "stakeholder," and the initial Chinese reaction was puzzlement and reaching for a dictionary. Did Mr. Zoellick mean "steak holder?" After all, he was speaking at a dinner. Maybe this was some Texas slang for telling China it had to buy more U.S. beef? Well, eventually the Chinese got a correct interpretation.

At the time, I thought Mr. Zoellick was raising an important point, but I now believe it is an urgent point. Why? Because Iran is determined to build a nuclear bomb, and the only nations with the clout to stop it - by diplomatic means - are China, Russia and India. Let's hope they act, because if Iran goes nuclear, the international order that has evolved since the cold war ended could unravel.

Iran decided this week to defy the U.S., Europe and the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency - by removing the I.A.E.A. seals at three Iranian nuclear sites - so Tehran can resume uranium enrichment, a key step in making a bomb.

The I.A.E.A. seals were put in place two and a half years ago, after the U.N. agency found that Iran was in breach of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Iran could have been referred to the Security Council then for sanctions. But instead, in return for keeping the seals on Iran's facilities, the Europeans tried to negotiate an end to the crisis.

Why has this now become a stakeholder test for China, Russia and India? Because if the Iranian mullahs - who are now awash in petro-dollars - know one thing, it is how to read power and weakness. The Iranians know that the U.S. has already put all the sanctions on Iran that it can. They seriously doubt that the Europeans will ever impose sanctions. And - this is the key - even if the Security Council censures Iran, and Europe miraculously joins the U.S. in imposing sanctions, the Iranians assume that China, Russia and India (that's half the world) will never follow.

Iran will back down only if China, Russia and India make it clear that they are not only willing to let Iran's case be taken up by the Security Council - a step sought by the U.S. and Europe - but that they will also join in stringent economic sanctions. Western threats, which Iran's radical president dismissed with the back of his hand yesterday as some little "fuss," are no longer credible.

Communist Russia and China opposed the U.S. during the cold war, and socialist India was neutral. But since the end of the cold war, all three countries have embraced capitalism and become huge players - and beneficiaries - in today's global economy, with Russia providing oil and gas, China manufacturing and India software. All three now have a huge stake in the stability of the international system.

But these countries have basically been cruising along as free riders on a stable international order, which has been maintained largely by the U.S., with help from the E.U., NATO and Japan. Both Russia and China have actually used their clout at times to protect international bad actors - like Iran, Sudan and North Korea - out of a narrow economic self-interest and a kind of residual third-world, gotta-counter-the-Americans reflex.

But if Iran defies the U.N. and goes nuclear, it will give an already nasty regime a shield behind which to make even more trouble - from Iraq to Israel and Europe. It would also be likely to lead to the end of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to a possible military strike against Iran by Israel or America - which would surely disrupt the Persian Gulf oil supplies that India and China depend upon - and to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. The Sunni Arabs may tolerate the Jews' having a bomb, but not the Shiite Persians' having one.

The Arabs would want their own bomb. And Russia would have an unstable, nuclear-armed Iran on its border.

In fairness, India, China and Russia have taken small steps to defuse the crisis and signal Iran that they don't approve of its actions and may let it be hauled before the Security Council.
That helped keep Iran on the fence - for a while. But now Iran has gotten off the fence, and so must Russia, China and India. For their own sakes, if not ours, these emerging big three have got to become the Axis of Order. The old cops on the beat can't deal with the Axis of Evil alone anymore. Pay attention to how this one ends, folks. The structure of the whole post-cold-war world is at stake.

Paul Krugman is on vacation.

Wanted: An Arab Sharon

2006-01-19T14:50:00.000-08:00

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN (NYT) 857 words

Published: January 11, 2006

Ariel Sharon's sudden stroke, which has removed him from Israeli politics, has triggered a tidal wave of speculation about who will be his Israeli successor: Ehud Olmert? Bibi Netanyahu? Shimon Peres? So much about the future for Israeli-Arab peace, we are told, rides on that question. But as I think about the post-Sharon Middle East, I find myself asking a different question: Is there an Arab successor to Mr. Sharon? Or, better yet, is there an Arab Sharon?
Even asking such a question may seem incendiary. After all, Ariel Sharon made his name as Israel's most ruthless Arab fighter and unrestrained settlement builder. For many years, that was ''Sharonism.'' So one could easily say that there are many ''Arab Sharons'': the Arab leaders who have made their names by ruthlessly resisting Israel.

Had Mr. Sharon passed from the scene several years ago, before becoming prime minister, his epitaph would have read: ''Israel's most brutal Arab fighter, settlement-builder and hard-liner'' -- period.

But you can't write his biography without his term as prime minister, which has been his finest and wisest hour. There are not many 77-year-old leaders who not only acknowledge that one of their greatest projects in political life was wrong and posed a dire threat to the future of their people, but then also risk their remaining lives and political careers to reverse it. That, too, must now be called ''Sharonism.''

So when I ask whether there is an Arab Sharon, I am really asking whether among the Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese and Saudis -- the key Middle East nations that have still not reconciled with Israel -- there are leaders who are also ready to acknowledge that their lifelong efforts to keep their societies in a state of hostility against Israel, and to demand the right of return of Palestinian refugees to Israel, has been a huge waste and, if not reversed, poses a dire threat to the future of their own societies?

I raise this question with no illusions about Mr. Sharon. The Haaretz newspaper editorialist Gideon Levy summed him up best: ''The belated enthusiasm for Sharon is enthusiasm for a clever leader who tried toward the end of his life to extricate himself somehow from situations that a wise leader would never have gotten into in the first place. The old Sharon was one who led the country into the most superfluous and harmful of Israel's wars, the Lebanon War, and would not even raise his hand in favor of the peace agreement with Jordan.'' He was also most responsible for building a network of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza that became an unsustainable burden.

So Ariel Sharon the prime minister had a lot of problems to clean up from Ariel Sharon the defense minister and agriculture minister. Indeed, when Mr. Sharon was asked why he'd reversed himself and uprooted the Jewish settlements in Gaza and a few in the West Bank, he famously referred to the prime minister's chair: ''You see things from here that you don't see from there.'' He could finally see that overbuilding settlements imperiled Israel's Jewish and democratic character. So he promptly destroyed the very right-wing party he'd built -- Likud -- to spread those settlements.
Leadership is not what you do to the other side. That's always easy. It is what you say to your own. Looking your own people in the eye and saying, in deeds if not words, ''I was wrong. We have to reverse course'' -- now, that's leadership.

But Mr. Sharon's change of heart will end this conflict only if there is among Israel's remaining Arab foes an Arab Sharon (another Anwar Sadat or King Hussein) ready to act the same. Yasir Arafat and Hafez al-Assad of Syria were never ready to definitively look their peoples in the eye and tell them the campaign to destroy Israel was over. The old Arafat and the old Assad were just like the young Arafat and the young Assad. No matter how high they rose, they could not see any further for their people.

Mr. Sharon's legacy will be a mixed one. Arafat's and Assad's will be pure -- pure mediocrity, and both of their nations are now paying the price.

Mr. Sharon is gone from the scene, but because of the new Israeli center he built, ''he left Israel capable of making a decision on the future of the West Bank,'' said the Middle East analyst Stephen P. Cohen. Assad and Arafat are gone, and because they never built ''a new center or pathway to a new future, both their nations are now in turmoil after they are gone.''

I don't know who will succeed Mr. Sharon. I only know that it will be much easier for Israel's next leader to carry out the positive side of his legacy -- if a few more Arab Sharons show up in the neighborhood.

The New Red, White and Blue

2006-01-06T09:18:00.000-08:00

January 6, 2006

New York Times
Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

As we enter 2006, we find ourselves in trouble, at home and abroad. We are in trouble because we are led by defeatists - wimps, actually.

What's so disturbing about President Bush and Dick Cheney is that they talk tough about the necessity of invading Iraq, torturing terror suspects and engaging in domestic spying - all to defend our way of life and promote democracy around the globe.

But when it comes to what is actually the most important issue in U.S. foreign and domestic policy today - making ourselves energy efficient and independent, and environmentally green - they ridicule it as something only liberals, tree-huggers and sissies believe is possible or necessary.

Sorry, but being green, focusing the nation on greater energy efficiency and conservation, is not some girlie-man issue. It is actually the most tough-minded, geostrategic, pro-growth and patriotic thing we can do. Living green is not for sissies. Sticking with oil, and basically saying that a country that can double the speed of microchips every 18 months is somehow incapable of innovating its way to energy independence - that is for sissies, defeatists and people who are ready to see American values eroded at home and abroad.

Living green is not just a "personal virtue," as Mr. Cheney says. It's a national security imperative.

The biggest threat to America and its values today is not communism, authoritarianism or Islamism. It's petrolism. Petrolism is my term for the corrupting, antidemocratic governing practices - in oil states from Russia to Nigeria and Iran - that result from a long run of $60-a-barrel oil. Petrolism is the politics of using oil income to buy off one's citizens with subsidies and government jobs, using oil and gas exports to intimidate or buy off one's enemies, and using oil profits to build up one's internal security forces and army to keep oneself ensconced in power, without any transparency or checks and balances.

When a nation's leaders can practice petrolism, they never have to tap their people's energy and creativity; they simply have to tap an oil well. And therefore politics in a petrolist state is not about building a society or an educational system that maximizes its people's ability to innovate, export and compete. It is simply about who controls the oil tap.

In petrolist states like Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Sudan, people get rich by being in government and sucking the treasury dry - so they never want to cede power. In non-petrolist states, like Taiwan, Singapore and Korea, people get rich by staying outside government and building real businesses.

Our energy gluttony fosters and strengthens various kinds of petrolist regimes. It emboldens authoritarian petrolism in Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Sudan and Central Asia. It empowers Islamist petrolism in Sudan, Iran and Saudi Arabia. It even helps sustain communism in Castro's Cuba, which survives today in part thanks to cheap oil from Venezuela. Most of these petrolist regimes would have collapsed long ago, having proved utterly incapable of delivering a modern future for their people, but they have been saved by our energy excesses.

No matter what happens in Iraq, we cannot dry up the swamps of authoritarianism and violent Islamism in the Middle East without also drying up our consumption of oil - thereby bringing down the price of crude. A democratization policy in the Middle East without a different energy policy at home is a waste of time, money and, most important, the lives of our young people.
That's because there is a huge difference in what these bad regimes can do with $20-a-barrel oil compared with the current $60-a-barrel oil. It is no accident that the reform era in Russia under Boris Yeltsin, and in Iran under Mohammad Khatami, coincided with low oil prices. When prices soared again, petrolist authoritarians in both societies reasserted themselves.

We need a president and a Congress with the guts not just to invade Iraq, but to also impose a gasoline tax and inspire conservation at home. That takes a real energy policy with long-term incentives for renewable energy - wind, solar, biofuels - rather than the welfare-for-oil-companies-and-special-interests that masqueraded last year as an energy bill.

Enough of this Bush-Cheney nonsense that conservation, energy efficiency and environmentalism are some hobby we can't afford. I can't think of anything more cowardly or un-American. Real patriots, real advocates of spreading democracy around the world, live green.

Green is the new red, white and blue.

Paul Krugman is on vacation.

Social Insecurity Crisis

2006-01-04T10:09:00.000-08:00

New York Times
January 4, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The year 2006 is just four days old, but I'm already prepared to nominate the natural resource of the year, the one that will have the most decisive impact on international relations - and that is undoubtedly oil.

Look at all the global trends involving oil (or gas) today, and they are all bad: the former leader of Germany gets voted out of office and goes to work for the president of Russia, running a pipeline company owned by Russia. The oil-for-food scandal tarnishes the U.N. The president of Iran, feeling so emboldened by the billions of dollars flowing into his country thanks to $60-a-barrel oil, engages in repeated rants about how the Holocaust was a myth. Vladimir Putin's oil-fueled government in Russia steadily erodes civil liberties at home, while using its energy clout abroad to try to punish Ukraine and to deflect U.N. pressure on Syria for its murderous campaign against Lebanese democrats and on Iran for its work to develop a nuclear bomb. I could go on. Do you have all day?

If you look at these trends, three things come to mind: They are all negative, they are all going to get worse with another year of $60-a-barrel oil, and the only force on the planet with the will and the way to neutralize their worst effects is America.

But here's the rub: America's refusal to have a serious energy policy makes these problems only more severe, and its refusal to have a serious entitlement policy - reforming Social Security and Medicare before they totally devour the U.S. budget - is only going to sap America's ability to play the global governing role that is so necessary for world stability.

To put it another way, our energy gluttony is strengthening the worst forces in the world and our entitlement gluttony is going to weaken our capacity to deal with those forces. As the Johns Hopkins University foreign affairs specialist Michael Mandelbaum puts it: "The greatest threat to America's role in the world today is not China. It's Medicare."

In a smart and original new book, "The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's Government in the 21st Century," Mr. Mandelbaum argues that while U.S. foreign policy is hardly perfect, it is America - through its vast military deployments, diplomatic engagements and vital role in buttressing the global economy and its rules - that provides the basic governance that keeps the world stable and on a decent track.

Most countries in the world like this situation, he contends. They like it because they know that the U.S. is not a predatory power, so they are not afraid of the order it provides. They like it because this global order is helpful to every country in the world, but the cost of it is borne largely by U.S. taxpayers. And they like it because they can criticize the U.S. and still enjoy all the benefits it provides.

The best evidence for all this, Mr. Mandelbaum notes, is the fact that no military coalition has ever formed to counter America's global governing role - as happened with other hegemonic powers in history.

In Mr. Mandelbaum's view, America "is not the lion of the international system, terrorizing and preying on smaller, weaker animals in order to survive itself. It is, rather, the elephant, which supports a wide variety of other creatures - smaller mammals, birds and insects - by generating nourishment for them as it goes about the business of feeding itself."

No other country could play this crucial stabilizing role. But its continuation depends on "American taxpayers' being willing to keep paying for it," Mr. Mandelbaum said - and that gets us back to our runaway entitlements.

USA Today recently quoted David Walker, the U.S. comptroller general, as saying we are about to be hit by "a demographic tsunami" that will "never recede." The baby boomers total 77 million, and their first wave turns 60 this year. Unless we trim the Medicare and Social Security benefits promised to these boomers, the paper noted, America's "national debt will grow more than $3 trillion through 2010, to $11.2 trillion. ... The interest alone would cost $561 billion in 2010, the same as the Pentagon [budget]."

The same as the Pentagon's! So either Social Security and Medicare shrink or the Pentagon shrinks - because higher taxes seem to be out of the question for now. If history is any guide, Americans will prefer Social Security and Medicare over paying to make the world safe for China, India, Russia and Iran to pursue their interests.

If so, the world may soon test out one of the most important theses of Mr. Mandelbaum's book: that the greatest threat to global stability is "not too much American power, but too little."

A Shah With a Turban

2005-12-28T13:21:00.000-08:00

New York Times
December 23, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
A Shah With a Turban
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I'd like to thank Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for his observation that the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews was just a "myth." You just don't see world leaders expressing themselves so honestly anymore - not about the Holocaust, but about their own anti-Semitism and the real character of their regimes.

But since Iran's president has raised the subject of "myths," why stop with the Holocaust? Let's talk about Iran. Let's start with the myth that Iran is an Islamic "democracy" and that Ahmadinejad was democratically elected.

Sure he was elected - after all the Iranian reformers had their newspapers shut down, and parties and candidates were banned by the unelected clerics who really run the show in Tehran. Sorry, Ahmadinejad, they don't serve steak at vegetarian restaurants, they don't allow bikinis at nudist colonies, and they don't call it "democracy" when you ban your most popular rivals from running. So you are nothing more than a shah with a turban and a few crooked ballot boxes sprinkled around.

And speaking of myths, here's another one: that Iran's clerics have any popularity with the broad cross-section of Iranian youth.

This week, Ahmadinejad exposed that myth himself when he banned all Western music on Iran's state radio and TV stations. Whenever a regime has to ban certain music or literature, it means it has lost its hold on its young people. It can't trust them to make the "right" judgments on their own. The state must do it for them. If Ahmadinejad's vision for Iran is so compelling, why does he have to ban Beethoven and the Beatles?

And before we leave this subject of myths, let me add one more: the myth that anyone would pay a whit of attention to the bigoted slurs of Iran's president if his country were not sitting on a dome of oil and gas. Iran has an energetic and educated population, but the ability of Iranians to innovate and realize their full potential has been stunted ever since the Iranian revolution. Iran's most famous exports today, other than oil, are carpets and pistachios - the same as they were in 1979, when the clerics took over.

Sad. Iran's youth are as talented as young Indians and Chinese, but they have no chance to show it. Iran has been reduced to selling its natural resources to India and China - so Chinese and Indian youth can invent the future, while Iran's young people are trapped in the past.
No wonder Ahmadinejad, like some court jester, tries to distract young Iranians from his failings by bellowing anti-Jewish diatribes and banning rock 'n' roll.

What is a fact is the danger someone like Ahmadinejad would pose if his country developed a nuclear weapon. But that is where things are heading. Iran today has so much oil money to sprinkle around Europe, it doesn't worry for a second that the Europeans would ever impose real sanctions on Tehran for refusing to open its nuclear program.

"The West has lost its leverage," notes Gal Luft, an energy expert at the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. Europe is addicted to Iran's oil and to Iran's purchases of European goods. At the same time, the Iranian regime has been very clever at petro-diplomacy.
After the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, "the Iranians knew they needed an insurance policy," Mr. Luft added, "so they did two things: they concentrated on developing a bomb and went out and struck gas deals with one-third of humanity - India and China," the world's two fastest-growing energy consumers. So it is highly unlikely that China would ever allow the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran.

The whole world seems to be getting bought off these days by oil. Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, just became chairman of a Russian-German gas pipeline project - controlled by the Russian government - that he championed while in office. The man just stepped down as the leader of Germany and now he's working for the Russians! I guess Jack Abramoff was not available.

The word from the White House is that President Bush is trying to figure out a theme for his State of the Union speech and for his next three years. Mr. President, what more has to happen - how many more Katrinas, how much more reckless behavior by Iran, how many more allies bought off by petro-dollars - before you realize that there is only one thing to do for the next three years: lead America and the world in an all-out push to conserve energy, reduce dependence on oil and develop alternatives?

Because three more years of $60-a-barrel oil will undermine everything good in the world that the U.S. wants to do - and that's no myth.

FRIEDMAN IS BACK!!!

2005-12-21T17:38:00.000-08:00

The Measure of Success

2005-12-21T17:35:00.000-08:00

New York Times
December 21, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I would like to propose a ban - a ban on Bush administration officials measuring our success in Iraq by the number of Iraqi soldiers we have "trained." I propose this ban because it is an utterly misleading metric, and if we become addicted to it we are going to make some even bigger mistakes in Iraq than we already have.

The issue is not how many Iraqi soldiers there are in Iraq. The issue is how many Iraqi citizens there are in Iraq. Without more Iraqi citizens, there will never be enough Iraqi soldiers.
This incessant Bush babble about training the Iraqi Army is so much wasted breath. After all, who is training the insurgents? Nobody, as far as we know - yet they have proved to be a smart, adaptable and lethal fighting force. Because in war, motivation always matters more than training. The insurgents know who they are and what they are fighting for. I think who they are is horrendous and what they are fighting for is apartheid - the right of Iraq's Sunni minority to rule permanently over the country's Shiite and Kurdish majority. But they have the will, and therefore they have the way.

The Iraqi Army will be effective only if it has a will to go along with the way we are training it. And the Iraqi Army will have the will to fight only if its soldiers have a government they believe in and are motivated to defend. And that brings us back to citizenship.

It is terrific that Iraqis just had another free and fair election and that some 11 million people voted. Americans should be proud that we helped to bring that about in a region that has so rarely experienced any sort of democratic politics.

But what's still unclear is this: Who and what were Iraqis voting for? Were they voting for Kurdish sectarian leaders, who they hope will gradually split Kurdistan off from Iraq? Were they voting for pro-Iranian Shiite clerics, who they hope will carve out a Shiite theocratic zone between Basra and Baghdad? Were they voting for Sunni tribal leaders, who they hope will restore the Sunnis to their "rightful" place - ruling everyone else? Or, were they voting for a unified Iraq and for politicians whom they expect to compromise and rewrite the Constitution into a broadly accepted national compact?

If they were voting for Iraqi sects, then it means that there are no Iraqi citizens - only Shiites, Kurds, Sunnis etc., trapped together inside Iraq's artificial borders. If, however, they were voting for a unified Iraq and Iraqi leaders who will make that happen, we still have a chance for a decent outcome.

Because if there are Iraqi citizens, and national leaders, then we have partners for the kind of Iraq we hope to see built. In that case, we must stay the course. If there are no Iraqi citizens, or not enough, then we have no real partners and staying the course will never produce the self-sustaining Iraq we want.

President Bush talks about Iraq as if it were a given that there is a single Iraqi aspiration for exactly the kind of pluralistic democracy America would like to see built in Iraq, and that the only variable is whether we stay long enough to see it through. I wish that were so - our job would be easy. But it is not so. It still is not clear what is the will of the Iraqi people. In the wake of this election, though, we are about to find out.

Everything now rides on what kind of majority the Iraqi Shiites want to be and what kind of minority the Sunnis want to be. Will the Shiites prove to be magnanimous in victory and rewrite the Constitution in a way that decent Sunnis, who want to be citizens of a unified Iraq, can accept? Will the Sunnis agree to accept their fair share of Iraq's oil revenue and government posts - and nothing more?

My own visits to Iraq have left me convinced that beneath all the tribalism, there is a sense of Iraqi citizenship and national identity eager to come out. But it will take more security, and many more Iraqi leaders animated by national reconciliation, for it to emerge in a sustained way.

Unlike many on the left, I'm not convinced that this will never happen and that all of this has been for naught. Unlike many on the right, I'm not convinced that it will inevitably happen if we just stay the course long enough. The only thing I am certain of is that in the wake of this election, Iraq will be what Iraqis make of it - and the next six months will tell us a lot. I remain guardedly hopeful.

How will you know if things are going well? Easy. The Iraqi Army will suddenly become effective without U.S. guidance. It will know how to fight, because it will know what - and whom - it is fighting for.

Spencer Gifts CEO About Friedman Candidacy: "you have my vote!"

2005-12-06T11:43:00.000-08:00

Finally Steven Silverstein, CEO of shopping-mall stalwart Spencer Gifts, blurted out what must have been on the minds of several around the table: "I understand from what you've said today that you are running for President. You have my vote."

Thomas L. Friedman on Vacation

2005-12-05T08:35:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the Tom Friedman for President Blog! We will continue to bring you all the latest Tom Friedman columns when he returns from his vacation in January.

Until then, please continue to check www.tomfriedman2008.blogspot.com for updates and other new content.

Tom Friedman Post Regarding Month-Long Book Leave

2005-11-28T15:37:00.000-08:00

Nov. 18, 2005
The Real U.S. Failure in Iraq

I am going to be on book leave for a month, beginning on Thanksgiving. And since I probably won’t be able to get to this point before I leave, let me do it in a blog for those of you who have found your way here.

I totally concur with my own paper’s Nov. 15 editorial denunciation of the Bush administration for indeed hyping the pre-war W.M.D. intelligence on Iraq, despite the president’s insistence otherwise. As our editorial noted, the public and Congress were never really exposed to the doubts about some of the intelligence that the C.I.A. and others were sharing with the administration.

That said, I never believed that Iraq possessed any W.M.D. that threatened us. I did not know whether it had W.M.D. or not. My view was simply whatever it had was easily deterable and therefore not a threat to America. That was why I never based my own support for the war on W.M.D., as noted in an earlier blog. I urged the administration before the war not to take the country into a major conflict in Iraq “on the wings of a lie.’’ I believed the administration had to level with people. There was a legitimate reason to remove Saddam, but it was not W.M.D. For me it was always about P.M.D. – people of mass destruction that are produced by the distorted and pathological politics of the Arab-Muslim world today, which has been well detailed in the three Arab Human Development reports issued by UNDP [United Nations Development Program]. These P.M.D. are the real threat to open societies.

Because of that, I think the debate today about W.M.D. intelligence, while not irrelevant, is also not the most important issue. The real intelligence failure in Iraq is about what was hiding in plain sight. That is what the entire intelligence community missed. And the real performance failure in Iraq, one that I consider criminally negligent, is also hiding in plain sight. Let me explain:

The most profound intelligence failure in Iraq is how broken Iraqi society really was after eight years of the Iran-Iraq war, the hammering of Gulf War I, a decade of U.N.-imposed sanctions and then Gulf War II. By the time the U.S. army rolled into Baghdad we had defeated the Flintstones. The country of Iraq and its society had been thoroughly atomized. That is why Dick Cheney never found anyone there throwing flowers at us.

The most important intelligence question we should be asking today is not “Where have all the W.M.D. gone?’’ but rather “Where have all the flowers gone?’’ The Iraq the U.S. Army found when it finally reached Baghdad was not the largely secular, middle class, modernizing society that the Iraqi exiles who had not lived there for decades promised the Bush team. What the U.S. Army found was a society that not only had been crushed by the burdens of living for so long under war and then sanctions, but also a society that had been exposed to a good deal of religious indoctrination in the decade of the 1990’s, as Saddam lost even more of his legitimacy and tried to compensate by adopting a more religious patina. There was a steady influx of Wahhabi influence from Saudi Arabia into Iraqi Sunni communities during the 1990’s, and pro-Iranian Shiism into the Shiite communities.

Therefore, to my mind, the most important intelligence failure is: How did the C.I.A. miss what was really going on inside Iraqi society on the eve of the war. Because it was that societal breakdown, and the failure to understand it, that has made Iraq so difficult to rebuild – not impossible, but much more difficult than what the administration was prepared for or had prepared the American people for.

And that gets to real performance failure that we should be focusing on today – and investigating – the total lack of planning for the post-war reconstruction of Iraq. That lack of planning has been detailed in the outstanding books by George Packer, "The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq," and Larry Diamond, "Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq." I consider this lack of planning criminal in its negligence. I believe that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should have been fired a long time ago, and his inattention to the details of rebuilding Iraq fully exposed. The lesson should have been sent to every future Defense Secretary: Do not get this country into a war without adequate post-war planning. In Rumsfeld’s case there was virtually none. It is shameful. People died because of what he did not do.

In sum, it is the misreading of the real, broken nature of Iraqi society that was the key intelligence failure and it was the near total lack of post-war planning which was the key performance failure. Those are the issues bedeviling us today as we try to do the really important thing – partner with Iraqis to change the context in Iraq so it will not be another failed Arab state producing people of mass destruction.

The amazing thing is that despite all the administration’s inexcusable missteps, a decent outcome is still not impossible in Iraq. The odds are still long, but while Washington is now in a mudslinging match over who lost Iraq, all the factions in Iraq are forming parties to contest the December 15 election – including the Sunnis – and there is a decent chance that what will emerge from that election is a coalition government of Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites that will have a chance – a chance – to be the first legitimate and most capable government ever produced in Iraq.

Watch that space.

George Bush's Third Term

2005-11-23T08:34:00.000-08:00

New York Times
November 23, 2005

Op-Ed Columnist
George Bush's Third Term

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

President George W. Bush has just entered his third term. That's right. He's a three-term president. His first term was from 2001 to 2004, and it was dominated by 9/11, which Mr. Bush skillfully used to take a hard-right Republican agenda on taxes and war with Iraq, which was going nowhere on 9/10, and drive it into a 9/12 world.

His second term was very brief. It lasted from his re-election in November 2004 until Election Day 2005. This was an utterly wasted term. It was dominated by an attempt to privatize Social Security, which the country rejected, political scandals involving I. Lewis Libby Jr., Tom DeLay and Bill Frist, a ham-fisted response to Katrina and a mishandling of the Iraq war to such a degree that many Democrats and Republicans have begun to vote "no confidence" in the Bush-Cheney war performance. If ours were a parliamentary system, Mr. Bush would have had to resign by now.
S
o now begins Mr. Bush's third term. What will he do with it? The last time Mr. Bush hit rock bottom - then from too much drinking - he found God and turned his life around. Now that he has hit rock bottom again - this time from drinking in too much Karl Rove - the question is whether he can find America and turn his presidency around.

When I watch Mr. Bush these days, though, he looks to me like a man who wishes that we had a 28th amendment to the Constitution - called "Can I Go Now?" He looks like someone who would prefer to pack up and go back to his Texas ranch. It's not just that he doesn't seem to be having any fun. It's that he seems to be totally out of ideas relevant to the nation's future.

Since there is no such clause, Mr. Bush has two choices. One is to continue governing as though he's still running against John McCain in South Carolina. That means pushing a hard-right strategy based on dividing the country to get the 50.1 percent he needs to push through more tax cuts, while ignoring our real problems: the deficit, health care, energy, climate change and Iraq. More slash-and-burn politics like that will be a disaster.

Indeed, at a time when a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible and we are at the most important political moment in Baghdad - the first national election based on an Iraqi-written constitution - it was appalling to watch Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney using their bully pulpits to act like two Rove attack dogs, accusing Democrats of being less than patriotic on Iraq.

For two men who have fought this war without deploying enough troops, always putting politics before policy, without any plans for the morning after and never punishing any member of their team for rank incompetence to then accuse others of lacking seriousness on Iraq is disgusting. Yes, we need to stay the course for now in Iraq, but we can't stay the course alone or divided.

That's the point.

We are about to produce the most legitimate government ever in the Arab world, and the Bush-Cheney team - instead of acknowledging its errors on W.M.D., seeking forgiveness and urging the country to unite behind the important effort to defeat the jihadist madness in Iraq - does what? It starts slinging mud at Democrats on Iraq. Sure, some Democrats goaded them with reckless remarks - but they are not in power. Where are the adults? We can't afford this nonsense, while also ignoring our energy crisis, the deficit, health care, climate change and Social Security.

"We are entering the era of hard choices for the United States - an era in which we can't always count on three Asian countries writing us checks to compensate for our failure to prepare for a hurricane or properly conduct a war," said David Rothkopf, author of "Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power."

"If President Bush doesn't rise to this challenge, our children and grandchildren will look at the burden he has placed on their shoulders and see this moment as the hinge between the American Century and the Chinese Century. George W. Bush may well be seen as the president who, by refusing to address these urgent questions when they needed to be addressed, invited America's decline."

Truly, I hope Mr. Bush rises to the challenge. We do not have three years to waste. To do that, though, Mr. Bush would need to become a very different third-term president, with a much more centrist agenda and style. If he does, he still has time to be a bridge to the future. If he doesn't, the resources he will have squandered and the size of the problems he will have ignored will put him in the running for one of our worst presidents ever.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

2005-11-18T10:11:00.000-08:00

New York Times
November 18, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

JERUSALEM

In October 2000, as the second Palestinian intifada was exploding, I was visiting Jerusalem and arrived at the King David Hotel late at night. As I wrote at the time, the place was utterly deserted. The lobby lights were out. The clerk was sleeping on a couch, and I was reduced to shouting into the darkness in one of the world's great hotels: "Hello. Is anybody home?" The hotel's owner joked back then that the violence had so damaged his hotel business that "we're stealing towels from our guests."

Well, what a difference a cease-fire makes. In the wake of Yasir Arafat's death, the election of Mahmoud Abbas as his successor and the Israeli pullout from Gaza, Jerusalem hotels are again packed. I couldn't help but notice on a stroll around Jerusalem that the famous Cafe Hillel, which I had last visited an hour after it had been blown up by a suicide bomber in September 2003, was beautifully rebuilt.

Where am I going with this? I've always said that in the Middle East, hope is a weed. Give it just a drop of water, a tiny opening and a splash of sunshine, and it will sprout through any crack in the rubble of war.

The best sign of that is the surprise election of Amir Peretz to head Israel's Labor Party. He beat the longtime Labor leader Shimon Peres (a good man) in a party vote last week. Amir Peretz is no weed, but his ability to suddenly sprout up at this time tells you a lot about the mood of cautious optimism here.

Why? Because Amir Peretz is a Moroccan-born Jew in a country that has never elected a non-European Jew as prime minister, even though Jews from Arab, Muslim and Asian lands make up half of Israel. Because Mr. Peretz rose inside the Labor Party not by commanding troops in war or holding a big national security job - the career path of previous prime ministers - but by commanding workers on strike as head of the country's biggest labor federation. Because Mr. Peretz is an unabashed land-for-peace dove at a time when the country is being led by its biggest hawk, Ariel Sharon. And finally, because Mr. Peretz is a modern social democrat, with real socialist roots in an age when the rock stars of Israel are its young, rich high-tech stars, and even the Labor Party is dominated by liberal business executives.

As a former Likud minister, Dan Meridor, said to me, "If the Labor Party were to actually represent the workers again - that would be a revolution!"

Such an anti-establishment politician could only emerge, and have a chance to win the prime ministership (new elections were announced yesterday for sometime before the end of March), at a time when Israelis feel they can relax a little bit and focus much more on work than war.
And there is a lot to focus on, said Sever Plocker, Yediot's top economics writer: "Israel is one of the most unequal societies in the world. Twenty-five percent of Israelis live below the poverty line - one-third of all Israeli children. We have the highest rate of poverty among people 65 and older in the Western world. Those are terrible numbers."

Many of the business elites within Labor, Mr. Plocker said, are ready to back Mr. Peretz because they know that "capitalism in Israel has lost its human face" and that if something is not done about that, Israel "is heading for a social explosion."

No sooner was Mr. Peretz elected head of Labor than Prime Minister Sharon started talking about poverty. Mr. Sharon knows that an Oriental Jew, running on poverty and social issues, could cut deep into his traditional constituency - under the right conditions.

And that is the question: Will the right conditions prevail for Mr. Peretz to actually win? The deal just brokered by Condoleezza Rice that will open Gaza's borders to the world for trade and labor is really the key. If this deal proceeds, and Gaza is open, it has a chance to become more like Dubai and less like Mogadishu.

If that happens, and only if that happens, the peace process will move forward toward a two-state solution, including the West Bank. And the more that is resolved, the more likely it is that Israelis will consider voting - for the first time - for a social democrat rather than a security hawk. "That would constitute one of the most important earthquakes ever in Israeli politics," said the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi.

And the more that happens, the more tourists will go to Israel and steal the hotel towels - and not the other way around. Beware, though. Betting on such prolonged calm is never a good bet here. I'd still bring an extra towel when you come - just in case.

'Why Us?' Sunni Arabs Should Ask, 'Why Anyone?'

2005-11-16T09:36:00.000-08:00

New York Times
November 16, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

JERUSALEM

We've been so bombarded with news of terrorism lately that we don't even notice anymore when a fundamental line has been crossed. The period of the last few weeks has been one of those times. At the start of the Muslim holy month, Ramadan, a Sunni Muslim suicide bomber walked into a mosque in Hilla, Iraq, and blew himself up in the middle of a funeral. Just after the close of Ramadan, a Sunni Muslim suicide bomber walked into the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman, Jordan, and blew himself up in the middle of a wedding reception.

Terrorists willing to blow themselves up at funerals and weddings of their own faith are individuals who have become completely disconnected from humanity. They feel no moral restraints. And this is the real problem in the Sunni Muslim world today: there is no controlling moral authority. Any event can be a target: funerals, weddings, anything. Maybe next week the jihadists will blow up a maternity ward.

Yes, there is a civil war going on in the Sunni Muslim world today, a civil war between jihadist fundamentalists on one side and a generally moderate majority on the other. There's just one problem - only one side is really fighting this civil war: the jihadists.

The Sunni Muslim majority has been largely passive. Oh, yes, the Sunni Arab regimes arrest these jihadists when they can, but the Sunni regimes and the religious establishments they control rarely attack the underlying intolerant Islamist ideas these jihadists propagate, namely that Christians, Jews, Shiites and Hindus are inferior to Sunni Muslims and can be attacked. How many fatwas - religious edicts - have been issued condemning the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has already murdered hundreds of Shiite Muslims and others? Not many.

It was heartening to see Jordanians take to the streets to condemn the triple suicide bombings in their capital by the Zarqawi terrorists. That's rare. And King Abdullah of Jordan has been one of the few Arab leaders actually willing to take on the jihadists on the ideological and religious level, sponsoring an intra-Muslim dialogue for just that purpose. But it was dispiriting to listen to other Jordanian and Arab voices saying Israelis were behind the attacks in Amman, or telling the bombers: if you want to bomb someone, bomb the "occupiers" - code for Americans and Israelis. Why us?

But here's the protest call the world needs to hear from the Sunni Arab street: "Why anyone?"
Suicide bombing is an abomination. It is sick. You cannot build a healthy state from suicide bombers. Imagine what your national museum would look like: "Here's Ahmed - he blew up 52 Muslims at a wedding." "Here's Muhammad - he blew up 25 Shiites at a funeral."

So why don't more people in the Sunni world speak out against the Sunni Arabs doing this? In part, it's because feelings of powerlessness and humiliation are rife in Sunni Arab society, so there is some grudging respect for suicide bombers who are ready to give their lives to resist outsiders or the authoritarian regimes that Arabs blame for keeping them down.

It's also because the Sunni silent majority isn't all that upset when suicide bombers blow up Jews, Christians or Shiite civilians. The Saudi press often extols such suicide bombers as "martyrs" or "the resistance."

Since their societies tolerated such barbarism against civilians when it was used against others, the Sunni terrorists apparently figured it was just fine to use such tactics against their Sunni foes, too. I am sure Zarqawi is mystified today by the protests against him in Jordan. He must be asking, What's the fuss? After all, no one protested recently when Muslim suicide bombers butchered Shiites in Iraq or Ahmedis in Pakistan or Christian tourists in Indonesia or Jews in Israel or Hindus in New Delhi.

The Sunni world would do well to reread the famous words by the Rev. Martin Niemöller, a German pastor imprisoned in World War II: "First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me."

A civilization that does not delegitimize suicide bombing against any innocent civilian is itself committing suicide. And that is exactly what the Sunni Muslim world is doing when it does not consistently teach its children that suicide bombing against civilians is always wrong - and that all who engage in it do not go to heaven, but straight to hell.

Thou Shalt Not Destroy the Center

2005-11-11T14:12:00.000-08:00

November 11, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
New York Times

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Dear God in Heaven: Forgive me my sins, for I have been to China and I have had bad thoughts. Forgive me, Heavenly Father, for I have cast an envious eye on the authoritarian Chinese political system, where leaders can, and do, just order that problems be solved. For instance, Shanghai's deputy mayor told me that as his city became more polluted, the government simply moved thousands of small manufacturers out of Shanghai to clean up the air.

Forgive me, Heavenly Father, because I know that China's political system is hardly ideal - not even close - and is not one that I would ever want to emulate in my own country. But at this time, when democracies, like India and America, seem incapable of making hard decisions, I cannot help but feel a tinge of jealousy at China's ability to be serious about its problems and actually do things that are tough and require taking things away from people. Dear Lord, please accept my expression of remorse for harboring such feelings. Amen.

Well, you get the point. At a time when we are busy lecturing others about the need to adopt democratic systems, ours and many others seem to be hopelessly gridlocked - with neither the left nor the right able to generate a mandate to tackle hard problems. And it is the yawning gap between the huge problems our country faces today - Social Security reform, health care, education, climate change, energy - and the tiny, fragile mandates that our democracy seems able to generate to address these problems that is really worrying.

Why is this happening? Clearly, the way voting districts have been gerrymandered in America, thanks to the Voting Rights Act and Tom DeLay-like political manipulations, is a big part of the problem. As a result of this gerrymandering, only a small fraction of the seats in the U.S. Congress and state legislatures are really contested anymore. Therefore, few candidates have to build cross-party coalitions around the middle.

Most seats are now reserved for one party or the other. And when that happens, it means that in each of these districts the real election is the primary, where Democrats run against Democrats and Republicans against Republicans. And when that happens, it produces candidates who appeal only to their party's base - so we end up with a Congress paralyzed between the far left and far right.

Add to this the fragmentation of the media, with the rising power of bloggers and podcasters, and the decline in authority of traditional centrist institutions - including this newspaper - and you have what the Foreign Policy magazine editor Moisés Naím rightly calls "the age of diffusion."

"Show me a democratically elected government today anywhere in the world with a popular mandate rooted in a landslide victory - there aren't many," said Mr. Naím, whose smart new book, "Illicit," is an absolute must-read about how small illicit players, using the tools of globalization, are now able to act very big on the world stage, weakening nations and the power of executives across the globe. "Everywhere you look in this age of diffusion, you see these veto centers emerging, which can derail, contain or stop any initiative. That is why so few governments today are able to generate a strong unifying mandate."

This is a real dilemma because a vast majority of Americans are just center-left or center-right. Many surely feel disenfranchised by today's far-left, far-right Congress. Moreover, the solutions to our biggest problems - especially Social Security and health care - can be found only in compromises between the center-left and center-right. This is doubly true today, when the real solutions require Washington to take stuff away from people, not give them more.

But our politics no longer rewards good behavior. Ronald Reagan, the most overrated president in U.S. history, lowered taxes and raised government spending, triggering a huge spike in the deficit. But because he did it with a sunny smile and it happened to coincide with the decline of the Soviet Union, he is remembered as a Great Man. The senior George Bush raised taxes and helped pave the way for the prosperity of the 1990's. He also managed the actual collapse of the Soviet Union without a shot being fired, using unsmiling but deft diplomacy. Yet the elder Bush is somehow remembered - including, it seems, by his own son - as a failed president.

Add it all up and you can see that we have put ourselves in a position where only a total blow-out crisis in our system will generate enough authority for a democratic government to do the right things.
Let us pray.

How to Look at China

2005-11-09T08:46:00.000-08:00

The New York Times
November 9, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Tiger Leaping Gorge, China

My friend Nayan Chanda, the editor of YaleGlobal magazine and a longtime reporter in Asia, recently shared with me a conversation he'd had with an Asian diplomat regarding India and China: India, he said, always looks as if it is boiling on the surface, but underneath it is very stable because of a 50-year-old democratic foundation. China looks very stable on the surface, but underneath it is actually boiling - an overheated economy under a tightly sealed political lid.

There is a lot to that, but what's most interesting is where China is boiling today. Ever since the student uprising in 1989, we in America have tended to look at China through the prism of Tiananmen, thinking that the main drama there is a struggle pitting freedom-seeking students and intellectuals against a hard-line Communist Party. There is still truth in that perspective, but it is not the most revealing lens through which to look at China anymore. A lot of those Tiananmen students have gotten M.B.A.'s, dropped out of politics and gone to work for multinationals.

Today, the most relevant fault line in China is Tiger Leaping Gorge, a spectacular geological site in Western China along the Yangtze River, and one of the deepest gorges in the world. With its thunderous rushing waters cutting through mountains, it is certainly one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. I visited there with my camera, but I also visited with some local villagers with my notebook.

These farmers are angry that plans are being made to dam the Yangtze River, flood Tiger Leaping Gorge and force the relocation of thousands of farmers and villagers. And they are getting vocal, learning about their legal options and pressing local officials to reconsider how the dam will be built. Getting political is not a hobby for these farmers. It is a necessity.

And similar dramas of necessity are being played out all over the Chinese countryside today by villagers who know that they are not fully participating in China's economic growth, but are being told that if they want to, they must accept dams or factories that will destroy their environment.

They don't like this deal, but China's rigid political system leaves these farmers, who are still the majority in China today, with few legal options for fighting it. That helps explain why China's official media reported that in 1993 some 10,000 incidents of social unrest took place in China. Last year there were 74,000.

This is the political lens to watch China through today. How China's ruling Communist Party manages the environmental, social, economic and political tensions converging on such places as Tiger Leaping Gorge - not Tiananmen Square - will be the most important story determining China's near-term political stability.

Listen to China's deputy minister of the environment, Pan Yue, in his stunning March 7 interview with Der Spiegel: "Our raw materials are scarce, we don't have enough land, and our population is constantly growing. Currently, there are 1.3 billion people living in China; that's twice as many as 50 years ago. In 2020, there will be 1.5 billion people in China. Cities are growing, but desert areas are expanding at the same time; habitable and usable land has been halved over the past 50 years. ... [China's G.D.P. miracle] will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace. ... Half of the water in our seven largest rivers is completely useless. ... One-third of the urban population is breathing polluted air. ...

"We are convinced that a prospering economy automatically goes hand in hand with political stability. And I think that's a major blunder. ... If the gap between the poor and the rich widens, then regions within China and the society as a whole will become unstable. If our democracy and our legal system lag behind the overall economic development, various groups in the population won't be able to protect their own interests."

The drama of Tiger Leaping Gorge is not as easy to follow as a single man standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen. It involves the complex interactions among the Chinese countryside, the N.G.O.'s and local organizations working there, the developers looking to build there, and a still heavy-handed Communist Party.

But somewhere in this swirl of forces is where China's future stability is going to be shaped - or not. No wonder China's leaders have made building a "harmonious society" central to their next five-year plan. Wish them well, because how they do will affect everything from the air you breathe to the clothes you wear and the interest on your mortgage.

Maureen Dowd is on a book tour.

From Gunpowder to the Next Big Bang

2005-11-04T09:40:00.000-08:00

November 4, 2005
Op-Ed Contributor
New York Times

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

BEIJING

There is a techie adage that goes like this: In China or Japan the nail that stands up gets hammered, while in Silicon Valley the nail that stands up drives a Ferrari and has stock options. Underlying that adage is a certain American confidence that whatever we lack in preparing our kids with strong fundamentals in math and science, we make up for by encouraging our best students to be independent, creative thinkers.

There is a lot of truth to that. Even the Chinese will tell you that they've been good at making the next new thing, and copying the next new thing, but not imagining the next new thing. That may be about to change. Confident that its best K-12 students will usually outperform America's in math and science, China is focusing on how to transform its classrooms so students become more innovative.

"Although we are enjoying a very fast growth of our economy, we own very little intellectual property," Wu Qidi, China's vice minister of education, told me. "We are so proud of China's four great inventions [in the past]: the compass, paper-making, printing and gunpowder. But in the following centuries we did not keep up that pace of invention. Those inventions fully prove what the Chinese people are capable of doing - so why not now? We need to get back to that nature." Nurturing more "creative thinking and entrepreneurship are the exact issues we are putting attention to today." But this bumps head-on against Chinese culture and politics, which still emphasize conformity.

But for how much longer? Check out Microsoft Research Asia, the research center Bill Gates set up in Beijing to draw on Chinese brainpower. In 1998, Microsoft gave IQ tests to some 2,000 top Chinese engineers and scientists and hired 20. Today it has 200 full-time Chinese researchers. Harry Shum, a Carnegie Mellon-trained computer engineer who runs the lab, has a very clear view of what Chinese innovators can do, given the right environment. The Siggraph convention is the premier global conference for computer graphics and interactive technologies. At Siggraph 2005, 98 papers were published from research institutes all over the world.
Nine of them - almost 10 percent - came from Microsoft's Chinese research center, beating out

M.I.T. and Stanford. Dr. Shum said: "In 1999 we had one paper published. In 2000, we had one. In 2001, we had two. In 2002, we had four. In 2003 we had three. In 2004, we had five, and this year we are very lucky to have nine." Do you see a pattern?

In addition, Microsoft Beijing has contributed more than 100 new technologies for current Microsoft products - from the Xbox to Windows. That's a huge leap in seven years, although, outside the hothouses like Microsoft, China still has a way to go.

Dr. Shum said: "A Chinese journalist once asked me, 'Harry, tell me honestly, what is the difference between China and the U.S.? How far is China behind?' I joked, 'Well, you know, the difference between China high-tech and American high-tech is only three months - if you don't count creativity.' When I was a student in China 20 years ago, we didn't even know what was happening in the U.S. Now, anytime an M.I.T. guy puts up something on the Internet, students in China can absorb it in three months.

"But could someone here create it? That is a whole other issue. I learned mostly about how to do research right at Carnegie Mellon. ... Before you create anything new, you need to understand what is already there. Once you have this foundation, being creative can be trainable. China is building that foundation. So very soon, in 10 or 20 years, you will see a flood of top-quality research papers from China."

Once more original ideas emerge, though, China will need more venture capital and the rule of law to get them to market. "Some aspects of Chinese culture did not encourage independent thinking," Dr. Shum said. "But with venture capital coming into this country, it will definitely inspire a new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs. I will be teaching a class at Tsinghua University next year on how to do technology-based ventures. ... You have technology in Chinese universities, but people don't know what to do with it - how to marketize it."

A few of his young Chinese inventors demonstrated their new products for me. I noticed that several of them had little granite trophies lined up on their shelves. I asked one of them, who had seven or eight blocks on her shelf, "What are those?" She said the researchers got them from Microsoft every time they invented something that got patented.

How do you say "Ferrari" in Chinese?

China's Little Green Book

2005-11-02T09:25:00.000-08:00

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
November 2, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist

BEIJING

There are only about 60 gold-standard green buildings in the world - that is, buildings certified by the U.S. Green Building Council as having been made with the materials and systems that best reduce waste, emissions and energy use. One of those buildings is in Beijing - China's Ministry of Science and Technology, at 55 Yuyuantan Nanlu Street.

I toured it the other day with Robert Watson from the Natural Resources Defense Council, who advised China in designing the building. What struck me most was how much stuff in China's greenest building was labeled "Made in China."

Get used to it. In China, conservation is not a "personal virtue," as Dick Cheney would say. Today it is a necessity. It was so polluted in Beijing the other day you could not make out buildings six blocks away. That's the bad news. Here's the good news: China's leaders and business community know it. They know that as China grows more prosperous, and more Chinese buy homes and cars, it must urgently adopt green technologies; otherwise, it will destroy its environment and its people. Green technology will decide whether China continues on its current growth path or chokes itself to death. So green innovation is starting to mushroom in China.

And what's the U.S. doing as green technology is emerging as the most important industry of the 21st century? Let's see: the Bush team is telling our manufacturers they don't have to improve auto mileage standards or appliance efficiency, is looking to ease regulations on oil refiners and is rejecting a gas tax that would help shift America to hybrid vehicles.

We should be doing just the opposite: creating more pressures and incentives so our companies will innovate and dominate the next great industry. You think China is cleaning our clock now with cheap clothing? Wait a decade, when we'll have to import our green technology from Beijing, just as we have to import hybrid motors today from Japan.

Green China will be much more challenging than Red China. Look around the nine-story Ministry of Science and Technology building. Yes, a lot of cool things here are from Europe, and some are from the U.S.

But what about the porous pavement bricks, made of fly ash, a byproduct of coal combustion that allows storm water to flow through and be reabsorbed into the Beijing aquifer? Made in China. The photovoltaic panels that provide 10 percent of the building's electricity from sunlight? Made in China. The solar hot water system? Made in China. The soil substitute in the building's roof garden that is 75 percent lighter than regular dirt and holds three to four times more water per cubic foot? Made in China. The concrete building blocks filled with insulating foam that keeps you warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer? Made in China, by a U.S.-owned company. The water-free urinals? Made for the China market by a U.S.-owned company.
Jack Perkowski, who runs Asimco Technologies, the huge China-based auto parts maker, told me where this is heading: "As China moves from the second-largest market to the first in autos ... the industry here will have to come up with transport that is more affordable, fuel-efficient and environmentally sound."

As green technologies get adopted here and gain scale - Mr. Perkowski cited a Chinese auto company now rushing to develop a green diesel engine for passenger cars - the Chinese will set the standards for the world.

"So they will become technology exporters rather than importers," he said. And because of the unique needs of China and the fact that it will become the biggest market for any product, the Chinese will "innovate at their affordability level." Once they come up with low-cost solutions that work inside China, they will take them global at China prices.

The China Daily reported that China's 11th five-year plan, which starts soon, includes a program to sharply reduce China's energy usage per unit of G.D.P. by 2010. "To hit the target, a huge business potential will be open to investors," Zhou Dadi, director of China's top energy research institute, told a forum held by the paper.

"China is growing three times as fast as we are," Mr. Watson said, "[so] a lot of innovation is going to happen here, and once it is introduced [on the low-cost China platform] it is going to spread a lot faster. ... We are not the only source of innovation on the planet. The Japanese and Europeans are here in a big way, and they are giving their stuff away. ...

"We deserve to lose. We are clutching our past with these tremulous hands, and everyone else is vigorously grasping the future."

2005-10-28T17:09:00.000-07:00

Green Dreams in Shangri-La

2005-10-28T10:56:00.000-07:00

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Shangri-La County, China
I came to Shangri-La and I met the Buddha.

Well, not the Buddha, but one of the "living Buddhas" designated by the Buddhist hierarchy as spiritual leaders throughout this Tibetan region of China, and not the mythic Shangri-La of "Lost Horizon," but this lush western China countryside near the border with Burma that has renamed itself Shangri-La to attract more tourists.

But don't underestimate this Shangri-La. Its spectacular wetlands, pine forests and mountains (this is where your rhododendrons originally came from) make up one of the 34 biodiversity hot spots designated worldwide by Conservation International as places with large numbers of unique plant and animal species threatened by human development - which, once lost, may never come back.

And that's why I came here. Because Shangri-La County is a microcosm of the biggest challenge facing China. Put simply: if development doesn't come to Shangri-La and other rural areas, the divide between haves and have-nots will widen and destabilize China. But if the wrong development comes here, it will add to global warming and ravage the rural environment where many of China's indigenous cultures and species are nested.

Yes, China must get its smoke-belching factories out of the coastal cities because they are making the cities unlivable, but if it just pushes them into the countryside, they will destroy way too much of China's farmland, and the natural areas that are the home of things like Tibetan culture.

The living Buddha, Ang Weng, is right in the middle of this drama, trying to promote a higher living standard for his people - without destroying the "sacred forests" essential to Tibetan spirituality. The living Buddha wears a sunny smile and a cowboy hat. His wife, who makes a mean butter tea, a traditional Tibetan drink, translated from his Tibetan dialect into Chinese for my translator.

He got right to the point: "The human brain is moving much faster into the modern world than the environment, and this fast move is having an impact on the environment. Build this and build that, and you lose the environment."

The good, and surprising, news I found in Shangri-La was how much the poor villagers here were coming up with their own green growth solutions. For instance, the 39 families in the village of Hamugu have bundled their savings to build a lodge for ecotourists drawn by the wetlands. "We just need a Web site," the manager told me. A local botanist has built Shangri-La Alpine Botanic Garden, which employs two dozen people and shares profits with the local village.
It also has the finest public toilet I've ever used, a solar-powered composting toilet with an automated plastic green seat cover - in the middle of nowhere! It was labeled "The Lavatory of Environmental Protection of the Travel."

A U.S. multinational, 3M, is financing the restoration of the local forests to reduce climate change and protect the watersheds. And the old log-and-mud town of Zhongdian here is a Disneyland-like traditional Tibetan village, with hot-pot restaurants that attract droves of Chinese tourists.

"All the basic elements of a network solution to safeguard environment and culture are here," said Lu Zhi, Conservation International's director in China and my traveling companion. (My wife's a C.I. board member.) "But the challenge is how do you organize this business-N.G.O.-government network more effectively so you can provide ecofriendly alternatives to industrial development that could be replicated in the rest of rural China."

Not only would this be enormously important for China's environment, but it could also be a model for other developing countries. What we don't want is for China to protect its own environment and then strip everyone else's in the developing world by importing their forests and minerals.

"For 30 years, the business of development has been Americans and Europeans lecturing poor countries about how they need to do things differently," said Glenn Prickett, a senior vice president with Conservation International. "What we hope to see here is a new paradigm, where China, itself a developing country, offers a new model of sustainable development to other developing countries."

I sure hope so. We all need China to start assuming an environmental leadership role commensurate with its impact on the world. Imagine a day when China is sharing its own approaches to environmentally and culturally sustainable development with other developing countries - not just pursuing them for its resources.
Now that would be a great leap forward.