Balderdash. More Tommy-toting, neo-con, democracy-spreading, petropolitical poppycock.
What our friend Tommy forgets in his NY Times op ed below is that his friends, Shrub and Vice, have been making big-time threats to a whole bunch of those oil-rich countries he talks about, which has motivated them to use their oil-rich clout as leverage against America.
And why not? We certainly bullied ourselves into their business without a proper invitation. Any recent correlation between the high price of oil and the slowing of democratization has more to do with our push-it-down-their-throat-tactics than the price of oil.
One would think that our super-dooper, war monger leaders would have thought of that, huh?
Or maybe that's the plan? World War III? Why else would Vice be publicly and hypocritically chastising President Putin (and every other foreign leader he can think of) at a time when we need international cooperation the most--unless he actually has another agenda in mind, like a nice, big, juicy world war.
The only other explanation for BushCo's continued arrogant, strong-arm tactics--when we are drowning in national debt and unending wars, and when we are witnessing an unprecedented Presidential assault on our constitution and freedoms--is incompetency or insanity or both, better known as "Business as Usual in Bush Land."
As Energy Prices Rise, It's All Downhill for Democracy
By Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times
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 Chávez, 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.
Photo credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
Technorati tags: Thomas Friedman, New York Times, Gas and Oil, Energy and Power, Bush, Cheney, neo-con, democracy, petropolitics, news, commentary, op ed
1 comment:
Thanks for your comments, Tryingtolearn. I agree in principle with much of what you say. Helping oppressed peoples throughout the world is a noble ambition. While our leaders profess to that aspiration, they are in fact operating on a very different agenda, which is at direct odds with "spreading democracy & freedom."
The real agenda of this administration is empire building for power and monetary gain. Their arrogant, hypocritical threats and unwillingness to engage in diplomacic and peaceful methods of bringing about change bear this out and belie their stated "freedom spreading" aims.
The Iraq war, a war built on lies, has not improved the lives and freedom of Iraqis. Their lives are worse now than when Sadaam ruled. The war was ill-conceived and has had a disastrous affect on the so-called "War on Terror." Our policies have had devastating affects on world stability. By snubbing and disrespecting our allies and "enemies" alike, the administration has slammed the door on achieving peace and freedom throughout the world.
I don't understand how you can be "proud of Cheney" for berating Putin for suppressing liberties (and essentially fanning the old Cold War flames), while BushCo has systematically suppressed our OWN freedoms and rights. This administration has zero credibility to make such statements. They have promoted rendition, torture, nuclear proliferation, domestic spying, suspension of habeas corpus, while claiming despotic powers to do whatever they want "in time of war." Since they have stated that this war has no end in sight, what does that mean for our balance of power? There is none. And without that, our democracy is dead.
What I am trying to say is that while I agree with your stated goals, they cannot be accomplished by the current administration due to their hypocrisy and lies.
What we need is leadership that understands diplomacy and leads by example, not threats. What we need is leadership that understands that lies do not beget allies. What we need is leadership that inspires others to act in their own people's best interests by showing how it will benefit them and helping them to do so. What we need is leadership that shows the world through our actions that we are honorable, admirable, and want to help.
What we have now is leadership greedy for power and monetary gain for themselves and their elite political supporters--at the expense of everyone else, Americans and the International community alike.
Though not all Americans yet understand the underlying BushCo agenda, the international community most certainly does. And that is why America cannot move forward on the honorable goals you state until we reject the current administration in favor of honest, pro-active leadership and policies at home and abroad, and, most importantly, until our actions are true to our words.
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