If the goal is US respect in the world, why would a presidential candidate pursuing it treat an important part of the world with deliberate disrespect?
In his July 29 speech accepting the Democratic party's presidential nomination, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) promised to make the US "respected in the world" yet "finally and forever independent of Mideast oil." He trumpeted the "need to rebuild our alliances so we can get the terrorists before they get us" yet insulted a longstanding and similarly threatened ally, not to mention creative Americans, with this applause line: "I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation—not the Saudi royal family."
These are the words of someone who dislikes the Middle East in general and Saudi Arabia in particular—or someone seeking votes from Americans who do.
Selling, consuming
It's unbecoming of Americans to disparage countries in the Middle East for selling great quantities of a substance they consume in great quantities. People who use oil at high rates should know enough to resist the independence seduction, which plies more US industry gatherings than political conventions. Yet few Americans appreciate the scale and ramifications of their energy appetite.
Absent economic sacrifice no one wants to make, the US will not become independent of oil from the Middle East (OGJ, July 26, 2004, p. 17). Even if it imported no oil from the region at all, the country would not be economically independent of Middle Eastern oil. Promises to the contrary—including those made on behalf of righ-teous pursuits like conservation, domestic drilling, and development of renewable energy—ignore reality and distort policy choices.
Something beyond ignorance and opportunism is at work in appeals for independence from Middle Eastern oil. It's a palpable antipathy in the US toward the Middle East and its inhabitants. Some of this reflects aggravation by terrorist attacks of latent US wariness toward distant and different cultures. Some of it, too, is a natural response to revelations since Sept. 11, 2001, about enmity long festering in the Middle East toward other peoples, especially Americans.
Politically, these regrettable divisions call for diplomacy, not truculence. Yet calls from US politicians for US independence from Middle Eastern oil are as truculent as they are economically senseless.
Americans still bristle when they remember the 1973-74 embargo by Arab oil producers on sales to the US and Netherlands. They must understand that deliberate US cessation of oil purchases from disfavored producers, in the Middle East or anywhere else, would be just as hostile.
And US politicians should realize that, in the current environment, Middle Eastern governments no longer dismiss their utterances about oil independence as campaign bluster. The Saudi government reacted with understandable anger to the way Kerry's acceptance speech leveraged energy ambitions off the craving for independence.
"Saudi bashing," a Saudi embassy official in Washington, DC, told Reuters News Service, "is not an energy policy." Saudis and other Middle Easterners must find especially troubling a speech that calls on the US both to seek respect from the world yet to sever economic ties with their part of it.
Now, with the US at war with Middle Eastern terrorists, is no time to lose sight of crucial distinctions. The enemy is terrorism and those who practice it, not the Middle East or Middle Easterners.
How terrorists win
If a substantial number of Americans ever come to view the conflict as between themselves and whole regions and whole ethnic and religious groups, the terrorists win. The reverse is just as true. The ever-suspicious people of the Middle East must never have sound reason to conclude that US military and intelligence forays in their region are directed at them generally and not just at the few fanatics among them committed to killing Americans. Yet what are Middle Easterners to think when talk about "independence from Middle Eastern oil" emerges so readily and meets so little resistance in American political rhetoric?
The Middle East is as much a part of the world as Britain, France, or Canada. The US needs relations with Middle Eastern countries as much as it does with the others. There's nothing wrong with that. And the reasons go far beyond oil.