Throw the SUVs overboard!
President Bush has been far too timid about asking Americans for wartime sacrifices. He should start by calling on patriots to wean themselves from foreign oil.
By Jennifer Foote Sweeney
Nov. 14, 2001 | When he appeared in Atlanta on Friday to advise Americans on the ways in which their lives could be different in the wake of the terrorist attacks, President Bush might as well have pulled up a tiny chair and read "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." His simplistic plan for a civic war effort suggested a response so remedial that it was hard not to be insulted, as well as disappointed.
The president's exhortations, which added up to a kindly prescription worthy of Mister Rogers, overlooked the complexity of our trauma, ignored the need of many Americans to actively express their patriotism and failed to acknowledge the rare opportunity Bush now has to propose a national war effort that could tap our fear and anger in ways that cripple our enemies, unite hawks and doves and preserve the foundation -- freedom, independence, ingenuity, resolve -- of America's power.
The great abyss between the gravity of the nation's crisis and the banality of Bush's address brought to mind the 1863 dispatch of American diplomat Charles Francis Adams to blue-blood Earl Russell: "It would be superfluous in me to point out to your Lordship that this is war."
It would be sad, but not surprising, to find that President Bush is unaware of his blunder. But it is frustrating to consider the truth: The national war effort with the greatest potential impact and the most lasting effect demands the kind of change and commitment that Americans are ready for, but it is precisely the one that the president and many of his closest advisors are most loath to suggest. And their silence does not reflect a wish to protect us; it belies a need to protect themselves. Because the civilian war effort that makes the most sense threatens the economic serenity of oil companies and their supporters in public office: It is a campaign to reduce energy consumption, a war on just one drug -- fossil fuel -- that could have a geopolitical impact that even bombing cannot achieve.
We are familiar, of course, with this administration's ties to the energy industry: George W. Bush, like his father before him, was an oil man before he was a politician; Vice President Dick Cheney headed Halliburton, the world's largest oil services company, between stints as secretary of defense for George H.W. Bush and his work for George W. Bush; National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was on the board of directors for Chevron and even has an oil tanker named after her.
These ties also provide an explanation for this administration's attitude about energy conservation. We remember Vice President Cheney's rationale for an energy program, proposed in the spring, that called for more drilling and mining to combat an "energy crisis" that experts weren't sure existed. "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue," said Cheney at that time, "but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy." Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer backed him up with the suggestion that energy conservation threatened the "American way of life."
But now that the American way of life has been threatened and, in some ways, changed forever, it is appropriate to ask: Should the personal financial interests and ideological biases of our leaders continue to override the best interests of the nation? Energy conservation may not be the basis of an energy policy that continues to benefit the energy industry and automobile makers, but it would allow us to be independent from the leading suppliers of crude oil, whose relationship to us is at least partly responsible for the events of Sept. 11 and the war we are now engaged in.
In public debate about the C-word, it is inevitably argued that Americans, God bless them, will never be able to cure themselves of what is usually described as an "addiction" to oil. This pessimism isn't just expressed by those who deal the drug of choice. We often choose to describe (and demean) ourselves as a nation of energy junkies, unable to resist the gas stations on every corner, the appliances in every store, the just-because-we-can tendency to keep the lights on or the heat high.
Of course, the perpetuation of this cynicism makes it very easy to propose the construction of hundreds of new power plants, to expand nuclear energy, to drop out of the Kyoto Protocol to combat global warming, to reject plans to raise fuel efficiency standards on new cars and trucks, to propose oil drilling in an Alaska wildlife refuge. What is true for crack is true for energy: Someone always benefits from the addicts' weaknesses, chief among them their willingness to believe that there is no way out. Perhaps the only difference in this case is that the self-interested doomsayers are beyond the law.
But we are different now. Sadder, wiser, mad as hell. Not only have we had a crash course in geography, religion and bioterrorism, we have had numerous opportunities to crunch the scary numbers: America has less than 3 percent of the world's oil reserves, but Americans consume more than 25 percent of the world's oil. According to the American Petroleum Institute, our primary suppliers have most recently been Canada, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Mexico. OPEC countries sell us about 28 percent of our oil; Persian Gulf countries supply nearly 15 percent.
The implications of this arithmetic, above and beyond the fluctuation of gas prices, are painfully relevant: Oil revenues provide Gulf states with funding for the tools of war -- weapons, education and political influence. Moreover, the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, where they essentially function as security officers for the OPEC cartel, incites Muslim rage: Osama bin Laden specifically cited the presence of infidel troops near Islam's holiest shrines in his declaration of jihad against America.
The imbalance in the supply and demand equation produces a litany of geopolitical hard truths. We have become beggars, not choosers, and our vulnerability will only increase with our consumption of foreign oil, which the Department of Energy estimates will increase to about 66 percent by 2030.
Next page: In America's recent wars, civilians have not been asked to practice much self-denial